Update from Lemmy after the Reddit blackout
join-lemmy.org
join-lemmy.org
Love this! This is the true spirit of FOSS software, and I hope more projects adopt this ethos.
Don't like how it works? Stop complaining and fork it. Don't like how it's being operated? Stop complaining and host your own instance!
1. Use the RSS client of your choice
2. Go to a master list of all federated Lemmy communities e.g. https://lemmy.world/communities/listing_type/All/page/1
3. Click through to any community on any instance that looks interesting and add its RSS feed to your client.
I don't know precisely what the future of Lemmy will be, I wish them well because they've produced a cool piece of software which is more open than Reddit and puts RSS front and center. But for the time being I simply have some Lemmy feeds right next to the old.reddit.com feeds in my RSS reader, pure win for me as a user. My universe grew and I don't have to have a horse in anyone's race. This is why we RSS.
Less than a sentence per instance, but it's enough to get a decent sense of what instances you're interested in exploring more.
Then again, I have hacker news in my RSS feed and get a link to both the article and comment thread. That's how I'm now able to reply to your comment. Not sure if Lemmy (or reddit) support this out of the box as well.
He doesn't, he's opposing users to contributors to the software in a response to the forking comment. Users do like/comment
> That's how I'm now able to reply to your comment.
No, you're able to reply using a separate app
The problem RSS solves is it prevents your whole world being captured by a particular community, instance, server, platform, company, whatever. Half the Internet is having an existential crisis over the Reddit implosion. RSS users aren't - we're kind of shrugging our shoulders and saying, well that's one of 10 places we get community, info, whatever, sure it's a big one but if it vanished overnight (which it sort of did) 85% of my feed would still be there.
Reddit, Lemmies, blogs, podcasts, Mastodon instances, weird alt Tube sites, the Chans, the Tildes, SDF, probably more - contrary to recent HN posts about how all the web feels "samey" now, it's a big 'net out there these days. It's merely a question of the company you keep. If you only ate at chain restaurants, you'd feel that food has gotten pretty lame too.
Until it does it's not an alternative to SOCIAL networks
> If you decide you care enough about a given community
What if I don't have time to evaluate the whole community and just decide that I care enough about a given piece of content and want to add my very valuable contribution by upvoting?
> whole world being captured by a particular community, instance, server...
This is a nonexisting problem since there are many of those, so
> one of 10 places we get community, info ... 85% of my feed would still be there
this comparison doesn't make sense, if you only used Reddit for 15% of you news/ consumption, didn't care about it (didn't have any social capital there etc.) or other users, you'd also not have any existential crisis regardless of whether you used RSS or something else to read Reddit/other sources
I get what you’re saying butI think this doesn’t matter quite as much as it does with Twitter, Facebook, etc.
Plenty of us preferred when Reddit was less like a modern social media network (mostly the pitfalls) and are more than happy just lurking. I don’t need an online status light. I don’t want some weird “snoovatar” NFT nonsense. I want /r/videography so I can continue to learn about my craft. An RSS feed sounds great and I’m kind of annoyed at myself for no thinking of it already lol.
I like tools that do one thing well. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unix_philosophy
It's well documented that 95% of users are lurkers. 95% of the time I'm lurking, too. That's why following multiple communities across multiple platforms is useful. For the frequent times when we all lurk.
> It's well documented that 95% of users are lurkers
then you wouldn't mind citing a source? Though bear in mind that in this context lurker is a social media platform user who: a) reads but b) never interacts (no likes, no shares, no comments, no posts, no messages, no games etc.)
You say this when I’m talking to you through my RSS reader’s built-in browser. That seems pretty social to me.
I’ve done the same with Reddit, and if Lemmy is truly as RSS-filled as this thread has led me to understand then the same is possible via Lemmy.
Just because you don’t understand something doesn’t mean it “fails”.
I also suggest using Invidious for getting YT RSS feeds, its incredibly simple and a much cleaner (and more private) experience all around.
There's money to be made in constantly ringing the outrage bell.
Remember Jordan Peterson talking about building a censorship-free Patreon[0]? That was 5 years ago. Never went through with it obviously, because Patreon is just one of many things that carnival barkers "content creators" can make hay with. Tomorrow, it'll probably be a Disney movie.
[0] https://www.businessinsider.com/jordan-peterson-says-hell-la...
Still the numbers are low, and what users will find is something different from what they used to, but I think the more diverse landscape will push a change in how people use internet to connect each other and to content, beyond reddit/lemmy/etc kind of usage.
Which ironically was a service that centralised consumption of RSS, something that was designed to be decentralised.
It was alarming to watch adoption of Google Reader simply because it was more convenient than running one's own RSS client.
Beginning of this year they told devs: we’re not gonna mess with the API situation anytime soon. And then they did, but he: it makes sense and I’m sure the pricing will be reasonable.
Then the last three months happened. I’ve rarely seen goodwill burned so quickly.
Just the past few days I was troubleshooting some Linux issues with my new installation and 90% of the useful search results I found were from reddit. If global text search is not implemented on the fediverse, then it's just gonna be useful for twitter like content, not reddit content.
As long as those issues persist (and the post title is likely a hard one), Reddit will always have an advantage since it's built to be more SEO friendly.
> Links are not crawlable
> To appear in search results, crawlers need access to your app.
Without that resolved, it really doesn't matter.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33546937
https://www.reddit.com/r/Mastodon/comments/131amhl/why_are_s...
That’s incredibly lower than I expected…
Some (eg me) will just stop using Reddit. I didn't need an alternative, I needed a reason to stop. The blackout gave me that.
They’ve made such a trash product, that’s so unpleasant to use, it’s more like escape than quit.
You forget the third category of people, the ones who'll just mostly stop using Reddit without seeking a 1-to-1 alternative.
For example, I've been using third party apps for years but I downloaded the official app because I honestly don't care about the client I use for a particular site.
[1]: they've already removed i.reddit earlier this year, I don't expect old.reddit to make it to 2024.
Can you give a source for that? I see this claim repeated but upon examination it seems to be a complete lie. Happy to be proven wrong.
Normally I have ~75 new subscribers per day and less than 5 unsubscribes per day.
Just prior to the strike, the subscribers dropped to ~35.
At the start of the strike, unsubscribes went up to ~10 while new subscribers went up to ~100.
During the strike, the number of new subscribers went up to ~175. Other subs with a similar topics (and the big one) had gone private during that time.
I'm back to ~75 new subscribers per day.
As to old vs other... page views per day for the past 30 days (very spiky) and the previous 30 days
Past 30 days | Previous 30 days
Client Low High | Low High
old.reddit: ~35 ~100 | ~25 ~75
new.reddit: ~200 ~900 | ~200 ~400
Mobile web: ~100 ~300 | ~100 ~150
Android client: ~1000 ~2000 | ~1000 ~1500
iOS client: ~2000 ~6000 | ~2000 ~3000
Total: ~2500 ~9500 | ~3000 ~5000
Old.reddit... yea, it doesn't have the numbers at all, though I'll note that most people using the sub appear to be people browsing on their phone as even new.reddit isn't that much higher than old.reddit stats.
I'm gonna say though, that for a sub that is for "regular people" - the most prolific users aren't 3rd party apps or old.reddit. At least not with with the people who browse this sub.
Now, for a tech oriented very low traffic sub... (and looking at its stats, it went way up during the strike since the high traffic ones closed from less than 500 page views to about 1500). Normally it gets a subscriber a day with 5 new subscribers being a significant growth... there were 55 new subscribers during the strike.
Past 7 days | Previous 30 days
Client Low High | Low High
old.reddit: ~25 ~75 | ~10 ~60
new.reddit: ~400 ~600 | ~75 ~475
Mobile web: ~150 ~250 | ~30 ~150
Android client: ~125 ~350 | ~25 ~100
iOS client: ~400 ~700 | ~25 ~250
Total: ~1000 ~1500 | ~175 ~1000
The API appears/is believed to to show up under mobile web as the bucket - along with people still using the mobile web client. The page served to a browser pretending to be an iPhone is doing calls against the newish gql.reddit.com APIs.
My understanding is that 3P apps used to be their own explicitly tracked category with a android/iOS split but then get mixed into the regular android/iOS categories with the first party client.
https://www.reddit.com/r/modnews/comments/11k9rv0/announcing...
Most of the active users are non-power users who are flummoxed at why mods have shut down their favorite subreddits. They are complaining in droves. Lots of long-winded Facebook boomer-style rants about how they read the subreddit with their kids and they need it back up to entertain them.
Some subs are protesting the spez moderator removal threat by changing the topic of the sub entirely.
Meanwhile, most of the content producers seem to have fled the site and latest high quality serious content is a week old at this point.
I don’t see how Reddit recovers from this without losing a great deal of value for their shareholders. I’m expecting Huffman to resign based on how much he has damaged their monetization potential with advertisers.
This is what drives the most eyeballs to ads though. Reddit simply wants to be like Instagram with memes, not an actual text-based discussion forum.
This is likely to dissuade folks who are in it for the right reasons and want to do a good job with good tooling and proper care and power hungry weirdos who now know that if they disagree with the Admins, the Admins have shown they can weather any storm and don't care if any user, even powerful mods, disagree with them.
I'm not sure why anyone would decide to be a mod at this point. Before this month, it was a chance to run your own corner of the internet, for better or worse. Now it's been made very clear who actually runs the show, and that those people could not care any less about you.
Antagonizing a large swathe of your volunteer-base of active mods all at once and then replacing them with new mods who seem fine with that antagonistic behavior is not going to select for the same group of people.
I highly doubt this, most content producers explicitly can't post their content because their subs are restricted or private, eg AskHistorians.
> I don’t see how Reddit recovers from this without losing a great deal of value for their shareholders. I’m expecting Huffman to resign based on how much he has damaged their monetization potential with advertisers.
No, this is great for shareholders as it explicitly removes users using apps that are not able to show Reddit ads.
As for your Facebook analogy, I don’t buy it. Every young person I know (less than 45 yo) both in US and India maybe logs into FB once a month to see if someone in their extended life got married or bit the bullet. That’s it. The 3 billion number seems to be some clever accounting to me. I agree that between instagram and WhatsApp they have covered most people however, but not by just Facebook. And I’d argue that’s not necessarily because they alienated their users actively anyway. Not like Reddit is doing now.
(Again, moderators do not own the subreddits, they can't unilaterally close it. I mean, they can, but they can't be surprised if they lose mod rights. The funny thing is that they are all reopening now that they might actually lose their little fiefdom. Random readers being affected didn't matter to them, but once there was even a hint that they could lose their online janitor status they quickly caved in. Very very selfless)
This is one of these places where the concept of "ownership" falls apart, at least in the monolithic ownership. A community consists of users, mods, and the platform operator. As soon as one of these components defects, the community is destroyed. So really the community as an entity can only exist when all three sides cooperate, which makes the question of who owns it somewhere between unhelpful and nonsensical.
N accounts for N interests I have. Doesn't work for me.
Reddit had subs. With one acocunt, I could sub to any number of interests. Twitter is flat. Again, I can get content from all areas of interest fron one account.
Heck, you can even follow Lemmy communities from a Mastodon server, or a Calckey instance, since they all talk ActivityPub.
Edit: ahh, I just noticed I misread the parent post, as they are talking about Mastodon, not Lemmy.
Of course my comment also largely applies to Mastodon, save that you follow people instead of whole communities.
Yes, that means you really have to build a good followed list to get the most out of it.
You can't get the "what's the buzz on the other one?" from viewing the home, local, or federated views.
Additionally, the discoverability of your content on one server depends on it getting followed and people watching the federated feed rather than local or home feeds (and when people on the site are following other sites, your content is difficult to be discovered).
The federated feed is a firehose that goes too fast for discovery.
The local feed is domain/subject/theme appropriate and where most people likely browse content.
Your content would only show up in the local feed of the other if someone on that other one boosted it which implies that they discovered it on the other instance and followed your account there.
If you post something math related on the programming instance, the only way for it to show up in the local feed of the math instance is for someone to boost it there. Short of having someone boosting everything that you want to say on the other topic on the other instance, it might be less friction to maintain multiple accounts.
That's not the way that it "should" work, but that's the way that people are using it. The "town square" of the local feed is where interesting things happen.
Speaking for myself, early on I used the local and federated feeds to find interesting people to follow, but once my followed list was built up, I found I rarely spent time in those feeds.
Personally, I'd say if folks are using Mastodon in the way you're describing, they'd be better off using Lemmy or kbin, which are centered around communities containing topics, as then you can just follow those communities rather than following individual people.
When people migrated off of Twitter, and mastodon.social wasn't accepting new registrations, and "taking over" a random one was seen as impolite, someone stood up an instance and said "hey, we're over here" and local will be encouraged to have mostly energy related information.
If you were following two different hashtags on twitter, and they're now two different mastodon instances, to have a similar experience you need to be able to follow local on each and push content to either such that it shows up in local on the proper one.
With the way that mastodon is organized, that's not an option and the way to get to that similar experience is to have an account in each.
Would Lemmy or kbin have been a better choice for such? Maybe. However, for a twitter like experience, they aren't a proper substitute.
I want interesting content from all of my interest areas no matter if I follow a person or not.
You elaborated it fully.
But not Mastodon.
I want to be able to follow whole instances and get content delivered to my feed no matter who posts it- whether followed by me or not.
In Lemmy, you can follow other communities. In FB, groups, in Reddit- subs.
But with Mastodon- you can only follow people and not whole instances.
That's why it didn't stick to me.
So long as you're on a well-maintained instance (one that responds reasonably quickly and appropriately to abuse reports), you can interact with ("federate") with any person or group on any other well-behaved instance.
(The full reality is ... slightly ... more complicated, but generally, where you are doesn't have much impact on whom you interact with).
I do agree that the focus on interest-specific instances is cumbersome, and probably a poor choice. That is, it affects a small minority of instances and Fediverse participants, and there are instances whose focus is actually a core of the local community --- @ColinWright's Mathstodon and Jerry Bell's infosec.exchange, for example).
Otherwise, join a general-interest instance, or one that corresponds with one of (or your primary) interest(s).
In Reddit, you can sub to r/math and r/programming with a single account and have content appear on your feed.
In Mastodon, I need to explicitly follow accounts from other instances and get the content they post, or repost.
This is very bad to me.
In FB there are groups, in Twitter, you just follow people, in Reddit there are subs. And entire different instants for different communities? Nah I simply don't like it.
I want to be able to follow whole _instances_ rather than follow people from instances.
(PS: I do understand federation, and have merged code PRs in multiple fediverse-related repos.)
You know best what you want to see on your home feed. No algorithms or ads to waste your time. Follow anyone across any Mastodon server from a single account and receive their posts in chronological order, and make your corner of the internet a little more like you.
This doesn't mean that someone couldn't create an algorithmic Fediverse server, which would ingest a large number of feeds and then specifically surface particular posts and/or profiles to people. It's just that that's not the present project's philosophy, and you'd probably find any such instance defederated by most other instances.
There are a few ways you can follow topical rather than profile-based content, and several others may be emerging.
- Mastodon has recently enabled subscribing to hashtags. So long as others are tagging content reliably, you can see discussion on a specific topic, either in its own stream (as a pinned Hashtag) or within your Home stream.
- There are several group-based services, with gup.pe (<https://a.gup.pe/>) which allow people to subscribe to a feed on a specific theme or topic. You follow the group, and post specific topics to that group --- the overall function is much like a mailing list. Chirp.social and Qoto are similar services.
- There's an upcoming roadmap feature for MAS-15 labeled "Groups" though I' don't know what functionality is included under that. <https://joinmastodon.org/roadmap> There's at least one open issue (<https://github.com/mastodon/mastodon/issues/139>) which ... has some discussion, and points to an essay on the topic: <https://raphael-jolivet.name/en/blog/groups-in-mastodon-and-...>. (I've included some information from that above, and recommend reading it.)
But algorithmically-selected content is simply not what Mastodon is about. If that's your desire, find a service which provides that.
I found other services. People didn't like that.
Also, what about kbin numbers? How many have stopped using Reddit, but didn't switch networks?
This one number doesn't mean much since Lemmy isn't Reddit's only problem.
They'll open it and find the app they have doesn't work, maybe install the official one but find it's different from their experience before, and just use it less.
Instead they'll go to other places - the ones they were already going to before - more, Discord, YouTube, TikTok, etc. Hacker News for programmers, etc.
Twitter is different - I followed 5-10 people I really cared about, and I followed them to Mastodon. The issue with Reddit is there were no single people I really cared about on Reddit that I could follow to Kbin or Lemmy. Cocktail Reddit closed, and I'm sure there's some equivalent on Kbin or Lemmy, but at this point, I just assume it's worse, and honestly, I wasn't contributing to it myself on Reddit, so I'm just waiting it out to see if that community reforms somewhere.
The value of Reddit was that you'd just run into domain experts. Roasters from well known coffee shops would pop in with advice on r/coffee. Bartenders at prestigious bars I'd been to would sometimes post recipes on r/cocktails. World-class award winning folks would post their trees to r/bonsai. At this point, I assume those people now just all have their own independent Instagram pages they're posting to instead, but I have no way to find them, so I'll just live without.
In some ways, the best Reddits were a community aggregator for niche communities. It was an easy place to get a link to the official patch notes for a game as well as the youtube video links for the major community members who were explaining it. It was all content that existed other places, but it was the easy place to find it all together. I can do that work for myself, and I'll do it for some of the interests, but it was nice to not have to.
Getting to that point takes time, and it takes dedicated amateurs keeping the community growing, engaged, and excited in the meantime to get it to the point where it's big enough that bigger names care to jump in.
Just to put things in perspective, I mod’s a sub with 20k subscribers. I literally took 5 mod actions in the years that I was a mod. There just isn’t enough activity.
27k is great for Lemmy, but it’s not enough to change their trajectory.
Here we are on HN, and HN isn't nearly as big as Reddit either but still a valuable platform, significantly better than r/technology. More users doesn't equal better content.
I don't know about you, but my web searches have been severely hamstrung by the blackout, so it looks like a lot of subs are still taking it seriously. There is so much content that is now gone and inaccessible, Reddit's bounce rate on Google has to be through the roof.
It's not that the blackout isn't serious, it's that Lemmy isn't yet a viable alternative for most people.
27k isn't yet there. If I had to guess, I'd say maybe 200k is where you need to get to. You need niche topics of interest to say, 5% of the population to get communities of at least 10 active people who will post, comment and curate. If only 10% of people do that, you have to have a user base such that 0.5% of it can sustain an interesting content.
However it isn't uniform, so perhaps 27k is already enough for the very largest communities to get off the ground.
I'm sure some communities are going to find footing on, but it's not going to be enough to get the masses to move over.
EDIT: someone posted below some stats showing it's at least roughly counting all instances. Quite surprising though I wonder if it's lagging a bit. Also keep in mind, for a good amount of time during the blackout they were down or had registration closed.
Tell you what, go find a subreddit like r/nba which has been locked down for days and find the thread where mods are reopening the subreddit.
See what the mood is among the users.
People here and moderators there have GREATLY misread the mood of the people on the platform.
Even worse, in many subreddits, the moderators were still posting to their own subs and forgot to clean up after themselves.
That's quite shocking. I run a push notification service and have ~25k daily active users, and it runs on a single 2 core machine with 2 GB RAM. I'm not saying that it's easy to run a service for so many users, but the largest of the Lemmy instance has ~3k users. That's super small, and a lot smaller than expected.
I suppose one can look not just at the absolute numbers right now (or whenever those stats are from) but at the gradient and extrapolate forward.
If they can sustain anything like that rate of signups for even a week or two they'll start to hit interesting numbers.
Or maybe I just hate all change and want it to look more like old.reddit.com...
HN could learn a bit from it (at least make the collapse button a slightly bigger target for mobile)
And the vote arrows! People downvote when they wanted to upvote and vice-versa.
I can't quite understand what the obsession with narrow layouts is these days. It's not like most of these sites don't have separate mobile layouts. Are they really just lazy about design and can't be bothered testing reflow of their text?
Content first on landing page.
Not "what's an instance?"
For some of my future projects, I'm even considering not accepting anything but docs and bugfix contributions at all due to the amount of work it takes.
Patches welcome = "It's free software; don't act like you're a paying customer."
My guess is people who angrily retort "rtfm" are not the best at actually writing manuals.
> The amount of times I've been told "Read the manual" and then the link to the manual was down,
Patches accepted for fixing links so you can read the fucking manual.
> or the manual was out of date,
This is deb-old-doc list, the mailing list for archiving vintage manuals. To discuss out-of-date manuals in current versions of Debian you must subscribe to deb-doc-old
> or the manual was so disorganized I couldn't find what I was looking for far outnumbers the times a manual was useful.
Did you file a bug report?
> My guess is people who angrily retort "rtfm" are not the best at actually writing manuals.
It's possible. On the other hand: you don't exist. Go away.
How'd I do? :)
Are you willing to pay? No? Are you willing to do the work? No? Then you're just being an annoyance.
You aren't entitled to anyone else's effort. No matter how little effort you think it will be. (Hint, your estimates are almost certainly off, generally by orders of magnitude.)
Personally, I welcome feature requests and bug reports as long as effort is put into communicating them properly. I thank the reporter, give them pointers, and encourage other people to contribute the feature/fix. If I have time I fix it myself.
But if you act like I work for you in the report, you'll get the same measure of respect in return.
Tangentially, the time you spend learning the project will make you a better contributor. You'll be able to contribute more quickly next time. Now the project has two people that can implement the requested change in 30 minutes.
Please put in that time for projects you care about and help maintain them.
As for your claim that I'm being belittling, I'm really not. I'm just telling you how this works in the real world.
The one who is being belittling here is you, with your assumption that someone else should do what you want because they have developed skills and expertise that you haven't. But nobody else owes you their time and energy. You can pay them in money, you can pay them in showing such courtesy so that they want to do it, or you can pay by spending the effort to learn to do the work yourself. Assuming you can get it for free because you throw around words like "silly" is you dismissing the rights of others as unimportant. All that I'm doing is pointing that fact out to you.
Meanwhile, there are grandmas out there that still talk about “hearing from the grandkids through [their] AOL”.
[0]: https://www.cnbc.com/2021/05/03/aol-1point5-million-people-s...
There's one of the major milestones in the evolution of a social media network right there.
Congratulations! (?)
Nope, theyre communists that supported genocide.
> Regarding development, we are happy to collaborate with anyone who is willing to put in the work, regardless of politics.
That's new. I guess they've grown as people.
Anyway, I'm very happy to see use of Lemmy exploding at the expense of Reddit, and am personally a very satisfied Lemmy user. I'm glad to see it exist, like I've said before, we all have our own reasons to want to see this thing become reality. I wish those two the best and hope to see them complete this difficult project and create something truly compelling.
Show me where they have supported genocide.
Sorry what?
Well, except for when you program the software that way.
https://github.com/LemmyNet/lemmy/issues/1224#issuecomment-7...
Good software is continuously improved. Criticizing the authors for an arguably wrong design decision they've corrected years ago is vengeful and petty. It's no different than the viral rumors spread by the Mastodon thread TFA mentions. This is abhorrent behavior that has no place in the open source community.
https://github.com/LemmyNet/lemmy/blob/main/RELEASES.md#lemm...
Don't preach to me something you don't do. It's reserved for... nobody gets to do it to me actually.