Using Lemmy from my existing Mastodon | Hacker News Reader

Using Lemmy from my existing Mastodon

vijayprema.com

75 pointsfavourable36 comments

Lemmy has been able to mostly replace Reddit for me. It’s much smaller right now but in my experience I do find enough interesting things there to hold my attention.

I would love better integration between Lemmy and Mastodon so that I can consume Mastodon content as well.

For those looking on from the sidelines, the Fediverse is much realer than any other alternative social network I’ve ever looked into. It has rough edges vis-a-vis posting but Lemmy is very usable for passive viewers / commenters and I would 100% recommend it to anyone sophisticated enough to have used a third-party reddit app, especially with the Voyager for Lemmy PWA.

Would agree. I am VERY torn on Lemmy. Its functional, I even run my own instance. But the distaste from the creators jamming of their politics into it, and much of the politics on there, make it really hard to promote or support.

> But the distaste from the creators jamming of their politics into i

I don't understand. Are you saying the developers aren't allowed to have public political views? Their instance – lemmy.ml, doesn't even accept signups.

I disagree with their views, but I don't see where the politics are being jammed in (actually, the only place I've seen it so far is people complaining about their politics)...

The main thing I see is lemmygrad.ml alts posting stuff, but agreed, nothing from the creators. Afaik lemmy.ml is even defederated from their lemmygrad instance

It always brings some distaste to use things by those I disagree with. Some disagreements are minor and as a liberal (in the classical sense, not the so called liberal political party which have nothing to do with term) I can accept them as disagreement of opinion is good.

However some are very dangerous - any support, even the most indirect supports things that are against my interests and can destroy the very tolerance I want. Thus while I want to support people's right to say racist things, people actually saying such things makes the world worse. The creators of Lemmy have crossed the line - their stated beliefs are so opposed to mine that any support they get for their ideas - even the ones that seem harmless - I have to oppose as well lest they get more traction on their awful ideas by proxy in some way.

That is such a weak argument. No, using a software made by someone you don't agree with does not require you to subscribe to their ideology. It is not indicative of support of any kind.

It's getting tiring this extreme concern about being "guilty by association". Yeah, the Lemmy devs can make good, useful software. Yes, the Lemmy devs are idiots. The same thing can be said about Richard Stallman and Emacs. I can hold more than two opinions about a person, and I can tell when someone deserves credit or not.

I use a lot of services from people I disagree with. However eventually some disagreements go far enough that I start rejecting otherwise good things because I don't want them to have support.

This is why countries sanction others even though they lose good things.

You are not a country. The amount of interconnections between countries is a lot smaller than between people participating in the Fediverse. Sanctions are already ineffective for behavior-changing at the country level, at personal level it is not only completely ineffective but ends up creating more of the behavior you want to avoid by forcing the "sanctioned" to find support only in those that share the exact same values. It is a recipe for exclusion, polarization and extremism.

The Christian teaching of "hate the sin, love the sinner" is the best approach here. Showing support for what the lemmy devs are doing while showing how despicable are their beliefs and stating where are your differences will always work better than creating an insurmountable wall between you and them.

Well. It’s in their documents/history.

https://join-lemmy.org/docs/users/07-history-of-lemmy.html

It’s also in their github. They actively suppress statements in their instance and communities, some of which are the largest/most active on the subject.

They use the pictures of communist/authoritarian leaders in their profile pics and profile headers etc.

So it’s very in your face, both in the instance and on GitHub.

There’s plenty more, I’ve linked it in previous comments in my profile if you care to look.

So…

1. It makes me VERY hesitant to reccomend this software as a result. It’s very in your face and anyone that looks into it will absolutely see the links.

2. It makes me very hesitant to contribute for the same reasons.

3. They aren’t just communists. They are actively in support of authoritarian regimes and in active denial of genocide.

So it’s not just politics to me. I have friends and family from some of these communist regimes that risked life and limb to escape. Both from Cuba and post Soviet regimes, ANd the thumb of China witb some family from Vietnam. So yeah, it’s not just “views” to everyone.

EDIT: More context: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36731097

> There’s plenty more, I’ve linked it in previous comments in my profile if you care to look.

Not the person you were responding to but I went through your comments and all I did was waste my time. Really. I don't like wasting my time. I'm too old for that.

I did note a the picture on lemmy.ml but not much else. Some passive comments from the developer about wealth inequality among 100s of comments related to lemmy development.

The only link you provided (history of lemmy) has statements like:

"silicon valley surveillance-capitalist machine that commodifies users to sell ads and paid flairs, and propagandizes pro-US interests above all." (I don't think he's wrong about this)

"rise in anti-China posts that have hit Reddit lately, and along with that comes anti-chinese racism, which Reddit tacitly encourages." (As he continues, he seems so much more concerned about the actual racism and hate crimes).

I'm done here...

>Not the person you were responding to but I went through your comments and all I did was waste my time. Really. I don't like wasting my time. I'm too old for that.

Heres my comment with context link. I was on mobile, cant always just dig things up for those that dont really want to dig in.

https://lemmy.world/comment/311745

It is 5 comments ago in my profile, and the last topic on Lemmy

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36376373#36380333

Also some more 7 comments down in my profile.

Heres the direct link to the discussion: https://lemmyonline.com/comment/17761

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36376373#36376989

Do with it what you will. O

Building, or using, Mastodon or Lemmy rather than big tech owned centralised communication social media is in itself a major political stand of course.

Why?

Depends on how you define politics.

Some people think about politics in terms of power relationships, in which case ActivityPub is a statement about user agency/ownership. Some people take those same power dynamics and look at ActivityPub as a statement about decentralization/centralization. Some people (not all but some) view ActivityPub as a statement about monetization and Capitalism more broadly, esp about the privatization of communication/data.

I'm not going to say everyone using ActivityPub is making a political statement[0], but a lot of people using ActivityPub are pretty consciously making at statement that I think could reasonably be described as political. Worth remembering in these conversations that a nontrivial number of people view even just making a choice to use Open Source software over proprietary software even in situations where proprietary alternatives might be more polished as a political statement on its own. I think ActivityPub is easier to view through a political lens than Open Source software in general is, so it's not surprising to me that an even larger portion of its users would look at it that way.

----

[0]: Although some people do define politics so broadly that they might say that.

So far still it didn't replaced it for me. All the subs I was participating, lurking around didn't become that much active or even moved to fediverse. Mastodon for third time, doesn't seem that much active or perhaps it's because I prefer to post instead of interacting - no idea.

What I find interesting is that tildes seems to become one giant discussion space in AMA style. And local kbin instance unsurprisingly being used by people who pushed their agendas and/or straightforwardly spammed for money in local subreddit.

Hey, put your mastodon profile in your bio!

Voyager (wefef) is such an amazing example of what a PWA can be.

Some of the communities have really blown up, lots of 3d printer folk out there.

I think it's interesting that Apple's original idea for iPhone apps was exactly this. Only when jailbreakers made custom apps possible, Apple decided to introduce the app store and turn it into a great success for them, developers and users.

Imagine that web apps had taken off. We'd have such a different ecosystem of apps. Possibly nothing OS specific, except when using device specific features.

You should look into kbin. It is trying to bridge the threadiverse with mastodon.

I have been using Lemmy for a few weeks now. I was sceptical before I signed up but I have to say I generally enjoy it a lot and it is a good replacement for Reddit for the most part. I am mostly using it to follow communities related to tech-related things like programming, FOSS, selfhosting, etc.

Positives:

- The communities I frequent are surprisingly active, with plenty of links being posted and a good pace of discussion. Lots of non-Lemmy-related content as well which is great.

- Discussion is generally of a pretty high standard so far.

- The tankie stuff seems pretty self-contained, or at least, has not spread to the communities I follow.

- The platform itself is developing at a very quick pace. At first both the web UI and the app I use (Jerboa) were very buggy but there are new updates every few days and each one fixes a lot of issues.

Some negatives:

- Stability of instances has been an issue. Early on, one of the largest instances (BeeHaw) defederated from two others, meaning that users on any three of the instances would be cut off from a lot of content. So I went with one called VLemmy.net. All went well for a week or two until VLemmy completely disappeared of the face of the internet one night. To this day it's not back up and no one really knows what happened to it. Around the same time, an XSS exploit was found that affected a number of major instances, causing some of them to go down temporarily. All of this is just growing pains but it felt fairly chaotic for a bit.

- Whenever I look at the "All" listing rather than just my subscribed communities, it's like 90% memes, which I don't love. Maybe Reddit was like that too and I just never went to /r/all.

- A lot of non-technical communities I followed on Reddit don't seem to have established over there yet or are very small and inactive.

All in all I'm pleasantly surprised with Lemmy. I still visit Reddit occasionally but my usage of it has dropped significantly and honestly over time I can see myself leaving it altogether.

> - Whenever I look at the "All" listing rather than just my subscribed communities, it's like 90% memes, which I don't love. Maybe Reddit was like that too and I just never went to /r/all.

This is kinda by design, one popular community can outweigh hundreds of others, but there's a PR open to fix it.

https://github.com/LemmyNet/lemmy/pull/3378

Care to share the communities you are following? I've subscribed to a bunch on programming.dev, but they've been too quiet.

Regarding stability: consider joining a commercial instance? [0]

[0] https://communick.news (sign up via communick.com and the first 250 people will get free access forever, after that it will be $8/year.

Some of the ones I frequent often are:

- fediverse @ lemmy.world (about the Fediverse so a lot of meta-content)

- selfhosted @ lemmy.world

- archlinux @ lemmy.ml

- books @ lemmy.ml

- linux @ lemmy.ml

- asklemmy @ lemmy.ml

- fossdroid @ social.fossware.space (FOSS Android apps)

- technology @ beehaw.org

- python @ programming.dev

There are drawbacks to the fact that each instance can have its own Linux community (for example) - it can be hard to know where is "the" place to go. Generally I just go to the /communities page on an instance, select "All" and then go from the top (which I believe is generally the more active communities) down, subscribing to the ones that interest me.

Thank your for the recommendations. I think I've browsed/subscribed through all of them except /c/books and /c/fossdroid. The other ones you mentioned are actually becoming too popular for my liking: there are some good things there, but overall they were starting to dominate my front-page too much so I decided to unsub them for now.

I know that the devs are working in a new sorting algorithm, so that might help.

In the meantime, may I interest you on https://communick.news/c/emacs ? :)

Not who you asked, but maybe also interesting:

- !coffee@lemmy.world

- !snoocalypse@lemmy.ml (if you want to follow the demise of reddit from a distance)

- !thenetherlands@feddit.nl (not interesting if you don't speak Dutch/care about the country, but I mention it because it's surprisingly active for such a small country).

Didn't realize Lemmy uses ActivityPub too. Does it make sense to subscribe to a Lemmy thread in Mastodon? Or use it to DM a Lemmy user? Is there a concept of shared message inbox or such?

not really. you can create posts from mastodon but following people and groups needs work

How so? I assumed all AP posts would work across

One cool side-effect is that existing mastodon bots (like remind bots) work seamlessly. Just ping them as normal and they will reply.

I just tried sending DM from Mastodon account to my Lemmy one, it didn't work.

That's really odd. Why would it not

Is there a Lemmy (or AP groups) to NNTP bridge existing nowadays? I really like some of the communities I see on there, and I’d like to subscribe and post to them from Thunderbird.

I noticed someone posted on Lemmy the other day how easy vote manipulation is. I wonder if the reddit style model is sustainable on federated platforms.

The "manipulation" only exists now because the vote-counting algorithms are rudimentary, but unlike reddit, they are completely transparent. Every upvote/downvote is registered in the instance and relayed to the instances.

This means that we can have, e.g, vote-ranking algorithms that are a lot smarter: we can have votes that boost everything vote by someone N-degrees of your friend network, or de-boosted if a upvoting ring is detected, or ignored if the account is less than X days old, etc.

To add to that, the ActivityPub protocol or the ActivityStreams vocabulary says nothing about limiting the amount of times an account can Like/Dislike a comment or submission.

I tried this for a while on my personal server and had to stop following Lemmy communities because the load was just too much (ActivityPub is just too chatty).

Reply on news.ycombinator.com