How is lemmy going to avoid the fate of the last reddit alternative (voat)? Voat attracted the communities banned from reddit, e.g the worst of the worst: jailbait, creepshots, beatingwomen, etc. The users most interested in an alternative to reddit are on average, the exact wrong type of user to help with the growth of a healthy community. I don't see any information on how being "federated" solves the hard problem of toxic communities, especially given that is the userbase it will attract.
I have to say, at the very least, the UI is a breath of fresh air compared to new Reddit. New Reddit is just...I can't quite put my finger on it, but it just feels awful to look at.
One thing that stands out to me is lemmy has public modlogs[1], this is a great feature in my opinion. Something that should be more common.<p>Quite a few people on reddit are frustrated by how opaque moderation is, but looking at the meta community of power users that seems to mod the bigger subs, I doubt the devs will ever copy this feature.<p>[1]: <a href="https://dev.lemmy.ml/modlog" rel="nofollow">https://dev.lemmy.ml/modlog</a>
We have something similar to this, Aether. <a href="https://getaether.net" rel="nofollow">https://getaether.net</a>. (code at github.com/nehbit/aether)<p>Always glad to see more eyeballs on the space, so I wish then the best. Here are a few differences I can see at the first glance:<p>- Aether is decentralised (as in torrent) this appears to be federated. That means Aether truly has no servers and every user is a peer, while federated means there are smaller ‘Reddits’ as servers that talk to each other.<p>- By proxy that means we can’t really have a web app unfortunately (working on it by the way of running a daemon on a raspberry pi) and they can - we need a native app running on your machine and seeding context to the network.<p>- By another proxy, this means Aether avoids the issue of having a ‘middle management’ in the form of the ownership of your home server that federated networks have. You are the home server, so no one can control what you see. We call this user sovereignty<p>- In Aether we have elections which elect mods based on popular vote and you control who is a mod, precisely because the ‘social compiler’ runs on your machine and allows you to compile it however you want. Two people with two different mod lists for the same community can see drastically different communities<p>- We have a mod audit log and have had it for a while - everyone’s mod actions are visible to everyone (this I think they also have)<p>- Lastly, we have made the decision to not monetise Aether itself and create a team communication app called Aether Pro, and monetise that. This creates a ‘Chinese wall’ between where we make our money and the P2P network, which means it’s a shield against drifting towards trying to make money from a social network. The code bases are separate but similar, so that also means work done on the Pro helps Aether as well. We have gotten some funding for the Pro, and we consider the P2P version a ‘marketing / goodwill expense’ in the context of that funding. That aligns us towards making sure Aether is long-term viable, well maintained and monetisation-free.<p>In contrast I think they’ve gotten money to work directly on this, which has both good and more hazardous sides. In summary, we opted for a long term structure that has less moral hazard (in my opinion, of course), in favour of a more stable app without a need for monetisation that has fewer, more stable releases.<p>For context, here's how a recent thread looks on my Aether client: <a href="https://i.imgur.com/45tXQEO.png" rel="nofollow">https://i.imgur.com/45tXQEO.png</a>
Sorry, don't like the name. Also, when you say a reddit alternative, to me it gives the impression that the redditor culture will remain so why would I sacrifice the content rich reddit for a new platform? Federation doesn't mean much to me as a user that justs wants [social]entertainment and news (and commentary on them).<p>There's only one thing that can change my mind a little: if you guarantee email is not and will never be required to sign up or use a feature. Edit: if you think this is irrelevant, consider how both reddit (until recently) and HN didn't require email for signup, also the majority lurker population and importance of lurker-> user conversion. If email is your hill to die on, it will also be mine and I hope a majority of lurkers' hill to die on against you.<p>As a techie I support federated and decentralized systems but as a user, how the platorm is architected is irrelevant, my experience is all I care about. Also,how will it monetize? Ads? If so I will stay with reddit. Non-crypto payment? Yeah, crappy reddit is better.
Neat, but the big test for a discussion platform like this is what happens when they get big enough to matter, to get the attention of journalists looking for a scoop.<p>It's easy to slide by with haphazard (or no) moderation when you're small. Discussion extremists (trolls, bigots, and the like) are less attracted to smaller platforms; they'd prefer bigger ones, if any would take them.<p>I'm curious what will happen with the central listing of communities if a particularly vile community gains popularity. If there's a community unapologetically dedicated to, say, neo-nazism, and they like to do things like praise Hitler or discuss ways they can kill racial minorities, do they still get listed? How will others feel about that?
So sad, nobody remembers Imzy, the "nice reddit" founded by Dan McComas. It really was nice, had highly varied, friendly communities and a pleasant UI. Couldn't get traction, apparently.<p><a href="https://nymag.com/intelligencer/2017/05/imzy-the-nice-reddit-alternative-is-shutting-down.html" rel="nofollow">https://nymag.com/intelligencer/2017/05/imzy-the-nice-reddit...</a>
Not a good sign when the website doesn't load: <a href="https://i.imgur.com/Us1mwrD.jpg" rel="nofollow">https://i.imgur.com/Us1mwrD.jpg</a>
I’m hopeful something good will come of this. I wrote this about LinkedIn but most of it could easily apply to a Reddit alternative, I love HN but would love to see a broader platform that didnt become cancerous. <a href="https://blog.eutopian.io/building-a-better-linkedin/" rel="nofollow">https://blog.eutopian.io/building-a-better-linkedin/</a>
I think simply having a Reddit clone run by a non profit (or owned by the members themselves) would go a long way in promoting freedom and fixing the issues.<p>I guess use a people solution instead of a technical one.
I'd like a "reddit" that wasn't a confusing mess to navigate on a browser on my phone and wasn't always trying to get me to use the app. It could do worse than take lessons from the design of HN.
A separate HN clone for each subreddit.
> JavaScript is required for this page.<p>Yeah, I'm out. That was a problem with the federated reddit-alike notabug.io too. It was just one giant javascript application, not html. And doing "pre-rendering" of the javascript on the host machine made the VPS costs too much to be tenable for people to federate.
How is this going to avoid becoming like Voat?<p>Reddit already has competitors. It is just that they are cesspools as the only people who have a strong reason to leave reddit are those reddit has banned.
Is it possible to make fonts smaller to resemble old.reddit.com? My perception field is vastly larger than the amount of text displayed (i.e. my brain can search for keywords without actually consciously focusing on them).
There is huge need for such an application.<p>Hope that it becomes moderately successful. If it becomes too successful, it will become victim of it's success like Reddit.
The fact that Reddit is an echo-chamber is one reason I never joined, & never will, but there are some communities that would be useful like the android & kustom subreddits, the former of which already exists on Lemmy. I'm only holding off with Lemmy because they don't (yet at least) have a privacy policy, which to me is essential especially considering the nature of the site. The fact that they didn't at least put up some sort of template of a privacy policy before the site was ever available to the public when that's a common part of any site that provides accounts, as a way of informing you how they will handle the data you give them, is very troubling to me.
I tried few Reddit alternatives, most of them had the same problem: They attract many people who got banned from Reddit.<p>A good solution will be to not allow (at least at the first few years) to open a sub around politics.
So many noob mistakes in the UI and I haven't even started using the site proper.<p>I see a link "Create Community", this takes me to a form where I get to create a community. I spend time naming and describing this community, and then click the Submit button. At this point it decides to tell me that I need to use lowercase for the community name.<p>So I fix that and hit Submit again. At this point I'm told I have to create an account first. WTF, why didn't you tell me earlier? If I leave this page to create an account, will you preserve what I've filled into this form for when I get back? Why didn't you just add the necessary username/password fields to this form at the same time you showed me the error?<p>Anyway, so I click on the link that says Login/Signup and get a popup that says "Are you sure you want to leave?" Now I have to click again to remove this popup. Another wasted click and +1 to the "annoyed" meter. See above for how this could have been avoided by just adding the login/signup forms to the form I just filled out to reduce friction.<p>Anyway, so I create an account. And it turns out the site forgot everything I'd done before that. Why ask me questions (make me fill out a "Create community" form) if you're going to immediately forget all my answers?<p>Absolutely no respect for the users time. Why would you do that when your very existence depends on attracting more users?
member.cash is an interesting Reddit alternative. Not federated, but all the content is on a blockchain, so comments/users can't be censored, but users can filter them.
This has ActivityPub (AP) support on its roadmap. I wrote a well-received[0] argument that AP could be the future: <a href="https://kyefox.com/2020/04/09/activitypub-could-be-the-future/" rel="nofollow">https://kyefox.com/2020/04/09/activitypub-could-be-the-futur...</a><p>I softened on it a little over the years since, but I think that was just the dearth of new things coming out that ran on it. Now I'm starting to think that was just a reflection of the fact that the obvious, low-hanging fruit was handled (write.as/Pixelfed/PeerTube/Mastodon) and the next round will take a while as people who got on later get ideas and develop them into something like, for example, Lemmy.<p>[0] <a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22864029" rel="nofollow">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22864029</a>
The Reddit redesign made Reddit ridiculously unusable. Also like the web in general the more users it got the horrible it became. The stardard of content fell through the floor. The stanard of comments did the same. It went from be a pretty free market liberal types to angry left wing reactionaries over the course of a few years. It felt like the users got younger and younger until one day I saw a pic bunch of high school students egged on by their teachers holding a "socialism now" banner, this was front page.
"This is an Antifa instance" stickied on the front page by an admin no less.
If I wanted a politicized cesspool reddit-clone I would just use Voat.
Fail to see the point.
There is also <a href="https://notabug.io/" rel="nofollow">https://notabug.io/</a> for anyone looking into decentralized reddit alternatives.
I'm convinced that implementing so-called "free speech" sites in public doesn't work. Real free speech happens in closed networks, invite only. The only downside is those take more time to grow.
Another poorly crafted SPA app. Click on a post then go back and it jumps to the top on its own. Sometimes there is just a blank screen. Please make it a simple MVC app without JavaScript BS.
I currently use this to host <a href="https://emulator.news/" rel="nofollow">https://emulator.news/</a> the docker support is on point :D
For anyone looking at this type of web application, I believe dev.to has similar functionality and licensing, but also has a mobile app on both iOS and android.
Please, allow non-ws connection or fall back when it fails and stick to that alternative. When behind proxy/in VPN, I'm not able to use your website.
I wonder why the developers of Lemmy decided to perform all the content requests via WebSocket instead of HTTP.<p>Is there anyone out there who can answer this?
I think Lemmy needs to address this before it will get any wide acceptance: <a href="https://github.com/LemmyNet/lemmy/pull/816" rel="nofollow">https://github.com/LemmyNet/lemmy/pull/816</a>
The problem with Reddit isn’t the technology. I mean, yes open source is good, and I want more of that. Even Android is a good thing even if only one company actively contributes to it. At least when you hit a bug or don’t understand how something works, you can go read the code. But the problem with Reddit is community management, and re-writing it won’t solve that.<p>Reddit has been a mostly free for all in terms of moderation, and it is explicitly set up to allow thought bubbles, which gives rise to communities that dox activists, that incite violence, that promote conspiracy theories, etc. I love Reddit’s good parts and really detest its bad parts. Problem is that you can only solve that with strong application of content guidelines, or by not even pretending to be a good place a la 4chan. There is no model as far as I’ve seen, not even an academic one, that allows for mostly moderation free or self-moderated content while also not prominently featuring at least one neo-Nazi group using it to communicate and coordinate.
Love the name, love Motorhead. Here's a Lemmy quote:
"Apparently people don't like the truth, but I do like it; I like it because it upsets a lot of people. "
I think it tries to solve a problem reddit doesn't have. Reddit has a content parity problem, by making content distributed just makes the community stops growing.<p>A new reddit alternative should think what makes Reddit useful in the first place. A community drive social bookmarking. Today's Internet have large volume of info hidden behind paywalls and walled gardens, something like Thread Reader App could replace Reddit from ground zero.
I'm a fan of <a href="https://tildes.net/" rel="nofollow">https://tildes.net/</a> - created by an ex-reddit employee (creator of AutoModerator)
As an non-American, Reddit is in general, awful.<p>It's all "Trump, Trump, Trump" and tolerates anti-white sentiment. Actual conversations are rare, it seems to mostly be impressionable young people trying to out-do each other in taking offence to things and being angry.<p>It seems you can't block subreddits like r/politics without making an account.<p>/r/cpp has some good stuff sometimes.<p>What would a reddit alternative bring? More of the same? No thanks.
A federated reddit system needs ways to lock down user accounts. That it’s basically 4chan in terms of anonymity gives too much of an open door to extremists and trolls. I don’t see any difference between this and voat except the assumption of goodwill rather than being centered around right wing extremism.
I hope that this will democratise political discourse. At the moment, people having opposing view to the main stream opinion are having exceedingly difficult time sharing their content.<p>Reddit's main fault is their willingness to participate in politically motivated banning. I'm talking about the fate of The_Donald. (There are also other examples.) Reddit first persecuted and then effectively banned The_Donald because, in my opinion, Reddit is run by people who hate president Trump.<p>It's important to understand that the hate is not something that will go away after Trump but it will be replaced by hate for the next guy. It's driven by political tribalism, not Trump.<p>As basically all social media platforms are doing the exactly same thing as Reddit, we are not in a good place. We really can't allow our political discourse and views to be dictated by a handful of group thinking denizens of Silicon Valley blinded by political tribalism.
So, on my first and last visit to "Lemmy" I observed the admin "nutomic" providing the world with his political philosophy:<p><i>Any platform that emphasises “free speech” will be full of fascists sooner or later</i><p>No, I don't want to have anything to do with a website controlled by an unusually foolish five year old.