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Comment by cryptoegorophy | Hacker News Reader

Any good alternative? I like hacker news for now that it still got some comments worth reading and interesting articles

Lemmy is still significantly lower user count but honestly I prefer the community at the moment. Everything feels small and jovial. At least for the 12 comments I've posted thus far. I'm running my own, which makes it easy to federate out to pretty much anything and worry less about overload as I'm not really pushing for users.

Thus far, it's definitely felt like a very viable replacement for reddit for the communities I have found.

The current de-federation stuff is already bringing out extreme toxicity and personal attacks.

Why is this bad? Isn't it represantitive of real life? There's no such thing as a safe space, only a strong mind.

> Everything feels small and jovial.

From the comment I replied to. People getting up in their arms and attacking others for no good reason does not seem very jovial. It seems dumb, childish, and immature, which yes, is what I expect from a random sampling of people.

I don’t want safe spaces, I simply prefer to surround myself with people not being idiots and assholes, it makes life far more relaxing.

How is this representative of real life? Like where do you live where people are toxic to you to your face and harass you, honest to god I don’t really see that in my life at least. It’s pretty clear that people behave differently when given anonymity, shouldn’t we try to “emulate real life” at least in the way we interact with each other on the daily?

It happens. I know someone who was called a dictator, fascist, silencer and worse by his coworkers for the sin of asking people to take political discussions to a different slack channel than the engineering team's main one. I know a few other people who work there, and can confirm it isn't just him; the place is just plain toxic.

Imagine his surprise when he was basically pushed out of the company in less than a year.

I'd normally say "good for him, he dodged a bullet, he's not going to be hurt by fallout once the company gets so rotten inside it collapses on itself". Unfortunately, this is not an isolated trend; if it keeps up, we'll see a whole generation of people with minds filled with hate, and I'm not sure the society can survive it undamaged.

As soon as he found that this behavior was condoned by management there, he should have started looking for a new job. Obviously, he's not a "cultural fit" for that company.

There are a lot of really crappy companies out there with toxic cultures; don't stick around in one if you don't have to.

> called a dictator, fascist, silencer and worse by his coworkers

That company's HR department must be fascinating

> to take political discussions

I'm really curious what you're considering "political discussions" here, and if it includes "please stop using ethnic slurs in git commit messages" or something like that

Ah yes. There's no such thing as a safe party, which is why I always wear my stab vest and helmet to my mom's Thanksgiving dinner.

You might want to look up this thing called "civilization", where we've been creating safe spaces for the last 5,000 years. Maybe it's just a passing fad, but I'm hopeful for it.

> we've been creating safe spaces for the last 5,000 years

Seriously? If you look into history books or even recent news articles, you'll quickly find out that safety is a rare privilege.

> You might want to look up this thing called "civilization"

How about this thing called "inequality and oppression?"

Well, GP seems to have edited their comment to flip its meaning 180°; earlier, IIRC (don't have a cached copy up) they were advocating for establishment of "safe spaces" of the kind that people who use term "safe spaces" establish - which for everyone else are more like digital equivalent of Lebensraum[0].

[0] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lebensraum

Uh, no, I did no such thing.

I meant mozman's reply to your comment, not your comment.

And I'm absolutely in agreement with yours - I've seen this playing out on Mastodon first-hand. The federated model, as implemented by Fediverse, turns out to be extremely vulnerable to bullies.

(Kind of like a bunch of independent, friendly villages end up being vulnerable to a smart warlord. It's arguably a big part of what historically drove creation of countries and empires.)

FWIW, I’ve only seen that version of their comment, so if they edited it, it was very quickly.

I did not edit anything.

HM is heavily moderated but there's still plenty of toxicity - it just requires more energy and cleverness to emit.

In real life, people who harass or assault get sued or otherwise. We have built spaces for XYZ set of people for thousands of years. If you can't behave with some civility, go live in the forest and away from society.

There's a lot of irony in expressing what you did in one of the most heavily moderated forums.

Eternal september

Their hardcoded scunthorphe filter blocks very common word in non English languages, such as the French words for late, delay, and firewood. The lead dev insists, rudely and vehemently, that those who have a problem with it are fascists.

This hasn't been the case for quite a time https://github.com/LemmyNet/lemmy/issues/1773

The filter has been able to be deactivated and changed by instance owners for at least a year.

Is there something like a 'Lemmy frontpage' yet?

As in a view/site that aggregates top posts across Lemmy instances?

You can select "All" (instead of "Local") on any Lemmy instance. You will then get a list of accumulated posts from some federated instances as well. The list is sortable by the usual properties. The details on how this works in detail and which posts are shown elude my right now, but the functionality is there.

I'd like to know also, the community manager returns stuff with like 5 comments.

Lemmy also isn't blocked as a social networking site at my work. I assume its the same elsewhere

It's going to sound dumb, but honestly? I filled an rss reader up with some of the best sources I could think of, and am actually really enjoying just quietly taking the world in again, instead of trying to come up with my latest snarky Reddit-friendly quip.

Do you have your best source list?

News: Chicago Tribune (a certain browser with a certain addition bypasses the subscription shakedown), New York Times, Washington Post, the Associated Press, Reuters, the BBC.

Tech: Hacker News, Tech Crunch, The Verge.

Music: Pitchfork.

MMA: MMA Fighting, Bloody Elbow.

Plants: Epic Gardening and Indoor Gardening, with plans to add some carnivorous plant forums.

an rss feed of quantum-related rss feeds: https://entangled.cloud

I've actually been wanting to do this, but I don't personally know a lot of good sources that still use RSS. Would love to see your feed list.

News: Chicago Tribune (a certain browser with a certain addition bypasses the subscription shakedown), New York Times, Washington Post, the Associated Press, Reuters, the BBC.

Tech: Hacker News, Tech Crunch, The Verge.

Music: Pitchfork.

MMA: MMA Fighting, Bloody Elbow.

Plants: Epic Gardening and Indoor Gardening, with plans to add some carnivorous plant forums.

Still looking for more stuff. It honestly feels strangely better absorbing without commenting.

You can use emails to rss services as sources. I do that for everyone that asks for my email to keep me “updated”.

Yeah I did that too when Twitter died, shout-out to the fantastic NetNewsWire on mac.

But here's the thing, reading within your own walled garden doesn't expose you to radically new ideas as much. The rss only approach lacks the discovery aspect of social media. Now that Reddit is dying too I'm pretty much down to Mastodon and HN for finding interesting novel stuff.

It's difficult to curate that list for me, I want high-quality blogs as well as news. But having ~100 feeds, ~20 of which being "news" each with ~20 posts per day, meant at least 2 hours per day catching up. I quit cold turkey last autumn but want to reinstate it, except with only the folks that post once per day or less.

What I find helps is going through each category as the mood hits me. If I looked at my one main feed, I would almost be overwhelmed.

I do miss the discussion in some cases. I'm an NFL fan in the UK so I don't have a lot of other NFL fans around me. /r/nfl and /r/greenbaypackers were both great for providing me with a community of people I could discuss stuff with, in addition to the news aggregation thing. When the blackout started and I considered what I really got from Reddit, /r/nfl was the only thing really.

Mind sharing?

News: Chicago Tribune (a certain browser with a certain addition bypasses the subscription shakedown), New York Times, Washington Post, the Associated Press, Reuters, the BBC.

Tech: Hacker News, Tech Crunch, The Verge.

Music: Pitchfork.

MMA: MMA Fighting, Bloody Elbow.

Plants: Epic Gardening and Indoor Gardening, with plans to add some carnivorous plant forums.

I liked kbin.social a lot. It's a little rough around the edges, and doesn't have a ton of users, but I found that that's actually very ok. It reminds me of Reddit 10 years ago. Nowadays every thread in Reddit is either stupid memes and the same predictable jokes over and over, or some fanatical social wars stuff. Kbin looks like a place where you can actually have a conversation again, without being banned or destroyed for disagreeing even if done rationally and politely. I hope it survives its technical challenges.

Lemmy: https://join-lemmy.org/

Are these servers like subreddits, or more like email providers?

Is there a "see all, interact with all, no restrictions" lemmy server?

Help! :)

That's kind of the thing about the fediverse: that's basically not possible. Any instance that doesn't engage in some blocking will probably be blocked for what it doesn't block. You could, of course, run your own instance, but obviously that's its own can of worms.

So... It's tricky.

edit: also, sites like joinmastodon USUALLY just completely exclude anything too controversial, for pretty obvious reasons. Dunno about join-lemmy but I'd bet on it.

> Any instance that doesn't engage in some blocking will probably be blocked for what it doesn't block.

So if I'm understanding correctly, it's a platform that encourages peer pressure and bullying? Or am I misunderstanding?

Yes. That's exactly how it played out with Mastodon.

It's basically run by infantile people.

You know what made Reddit popular? Share ability. How the hell am I going to send a link to the Lemmy verse or whatever to my brother in law?

It's on the web, so you can send links the regular way.

Either right-click a post, copy link, paste into brother-in-law chat.

Or open a post, copy the browser's address bar, paste into brother-in-law chat.

E.g. https://beehaw.org/post/529329

> Any instance that doesn't engage in some blocking will probably be blocked for what it doesn't block

Yikes.. damn. I haven't really jumped in to the fediverse yet, but I've been excited about its potential. But this sounds incredibly toxic. Basically it sounds like we've gone from having to conform to the corporation's rules, to having to conform to the center of the venn diagram or else you get shut off. Am I misunderstanding?

> having to conform to the center of the venn diagram or else you get shut off

There's no shutting off. The instances that are blocked still work.

It's like email. If cheapviagrapillz.com is identified as sending a substantial amount of spam, they will be blacklisted. Their server still works, they can still send emails, but many servers will not accept those emails.

Each server (AKA "Instance") is kind of like an email provider, or like a bunch of individual Reddit websites. On Lemmy a "Community" is their version of a subreddit. Each server/instance hosts its own communities, but if you have an account on one server, you can still subscribe, read and post on off-server communities.

Each server is a piece of the federation. Some Instances do not federate with all other instances though. I'm not sure if there are any instances that access every other instance.

I'm not sure about lemmy, but I know that on other fediverse projects like Mastodon there were some servers that were completely unmoderated, filled with terrible content and were defederated by most other instances. Most decent people don't want to see that stuff on their feed.

> some servers that were completely unmoderated, filled with terrible content and were defederated by most other instances. Most decent people don't want to see that stuff on their feed.

Why not solve that by blocking them yourself, instead of forcing everyone else to block them?

From a user point of view that would do just fine. Maybe server owners might not want to be associated with those instances for potential legal issues.

Some servers admins have also defederated from certain instances because they were receiving increased trolling/spam from certain instances and it was too much work to moderate with the current number of mods they had.

Thanks, I'd read about Lemmy in various threads on here and finally decided to check it out.

Unfortunately, it seems to be down right now.

There's https://squabbles.io

It's not federated, but the UI is okay for now than the other alternatives that I've seen. It's ran by 1 dev who has quickly been adding features and listening to user feedback. It's also nearing 16,000 users and a few users are developing some mobile apps for it.

Not that I know of. I keep poking around all the ones that pop up here, some of which are nicely made but still small, and I've been contemplating joining a Lemmy instance or starting one with some friends.

Hacker News is till great though the more I get exposed to the whole ActivityPub fediverse thing the more I wish it wasn't disconnected. I was in a read only HN app earlier today and wanted to post a comment to HN and instantly wished I could post a link into jerboa's search and have Hacker News available as a community.

The technology is getting there. The problem is the communities need time to grow. Star Trek fans have made a real effort. The bulk of reddit content is lowest common denominator shit and those consumers want everything handed to them fully formed. They aren't going to deal with server instability and submit bug reports and try and build new communities. They will delete Apollo and install the Reddit official app.

Lemmy! I've been checking it out lately and people are moving popular subreddits to Lemmy's servers. It's a bit confusing at first but once you get it, it works like email. And it's... fantastic!

But I'll wait for this protest to die down to see its "real" value. Most of the posts now are about the protest and migration from Reddit. Things are on fire now.

kbin.social is really great. It’s the most active Lemmy instance and it connects with Lemmy and Mastodon so you’ve got both networks built in. The UX is, I feel, better than instances which use the Lemmy front end. The mobile site is actually functional. Sadly no app yet.

Of course the networks are much smaller than Reddit, but the conversations are much more qualitative. I honestly prefer it. Less soon scrolling.

Surprisingly no one has mentioned Tildes.net yet. It's something in between reddit and hackernews. Requires an invite to register, though they are quite easy to find.

How? I've been anonymously lurking on Tildes for months, haven't seen an opportunity. I'm even a Patreon subscriber!

I got one today by writing to someone on r/redditalternatives mentioning it. Would offer you one, but can’t yet send invites.

be careful for what you wish for. 4chan went from both good and bad at the same time to overwhelmingly bad, eclipsing and later drowning the good due to reddit's initial purge of problematic communities implicitly encouraging them to migrate to communities like 4chan. Reddit fostered and encouraged these communities (it is said that spez was a mod for jailbait subreddit) in the initial days when its aim was to become the website with most active users/content. You really don't want reddit users here.

Supposedly Spez was made a mod of that subreddit by a troll who exploited a bug/feature that allowed you to make anyone a mod of your subreddit. However reddit did host that community for years (Spez claimed the creep mods were helpful in flagging cp throughout the site), and it's ironic you mention "problematic" communities migrating to 4chan in the same context, since 4chan takes a much harsher stance on the sexualization of minors than reddit. KiwiFarms even more so.

> You really don't want reddit users here

No one wants reddit users.

>Supposedly Spez was made a mod of that subreddit by a troll who exploited a bug/feature that allowed you to make anyone a mod of your subreddit.

I stand corrected then. It's been seen many times in the last few weeks in many places.

> since 4chan takes a much harsher stance on the sexualization of minors than reddit.

While true, the time I was around there, the time of gaia online/SA/4chan (2005 to 09) it was also something that people joked about. There was even a popular character called pedobear that was often used as the butt of jokes for those who sexualized minors. Though reddit was a later phenomenon, and reddit was an order of magnitude worse, it wasn't like sexualization of minors was looked at as a crime at 4chan by everyone. There were some free speech absolutists who claimed to be against it, but were against taking it down.

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