Comment by ChrisArchitect | Hacker News Reader

Comment by ChrisArchitect | Hacker News Reader

I wholly appreciated the openness to accepting bot accounts, migrated some projects from twitter there during the big exoduses in the last couple years. And while it worked for bot purposes, fun to tinker with etc...(not unlike twitter tbf) it was just some server in space a blip in the fediverse and traction and lack of proper network effects for accounts meant it wasn't much use.

I'm not hot on the fediverse in general, and this just sours me on it a bit more. A bunch of dedicated admins keeping instances going, basically running hobby servers/websites like it was the 90s/early 00s, is never gonna work for the kind fo scale services grow to these days. I know not everything requires scale and lots of ppl are happy existing in their little silos, but that's just it, they're silos. Might as well be back on seperate forums for our seperate interests again. When you want the power of a mix of accounts/networks/interests everything balloons and can't be run with funds and larger centralization. Sigh. It's a tough one and has yet to be solved in full, with any existing approaches all sort of half-solutions. Maybe that's the way forwards in general (an internet of islands) but it sucks to have things going up and down and having to migrate around the net (with or without our own data) like nomads.

> When you want the power of a mix of accounts/networks/interests everything balloons and can't be run with funds and larger centralization.

I don't really get the appeal of this. Different topics/interests often demand different moderation and forum features. Trying to shove everything into the lowest common denominator of social media results in things like people posting essays as screenshots of Apple Notes.

The only obvious benefit I see of this kind of large scale centralization is for marketing. And that's not a benefit to me as a user.

The benefit of a centralized forum like Reddit, for a user like me, is the ability to use one account for everything (i.e. easy to join new forums) and the ability to have everything on one algorithmic or chronological feed.

Traditional forums can solve the former by using social sign-ins, and the latter by having RSS. However, support for either of this is inconsistent, so it's usually easier to just use subreddits.

Finally, money. Forums cost money to host, while subreddits don't.

Lemmy works like that more or less. You can subscribe to communities on other instances and interact with them.

True, I've forgotten that's the whole purpose of federation: to create a unified home feed.

But then the Fediverse unfortunately runs up with the classic issue of network effects. For me personally, my Unified Home Feed of Reddit has more relevant content to me than my Unified Home Feed of Lemmy. And it seems it'll stay that way since Reddit's communities have thousands or millions more subscribers in general.

So, sticking to Reddit is easier. This isn't helped by the admin wars on the Fediverse which introduce messy and silent breaks in the network, often requiring multiple accounts to view everything you're interested in.

To the Fediverse's credit, their network is a lot wider so it still has some uses, that is, hosting communities banned on Reddit. But I'm not sure if some of the more "normal" subreddits have much incentive to move over.

Those are real and well understood benefits, and they're the reason Reddit won. The costs of moving a community from a forum to Reddit are nowadays mostly understood as well, unfortunately they weren't as obvious back then.

Hmh, that's a drawback to me. I like to have different accounts for different things and keep them more or less strictly separated. I use two subreddits and each has its own account.

On average I'd say account creation has become harder because everybody and her child tries to shunt you into some social sign-in but it still is not difficult to make accounts. "Modern" password managers make it a breeze to juggle many accounts, and frankly, what Netscape Navigator could do almost 30 years ago was already enough for that.

Same goes for forums. phpbb [1] can run on any LAMP potato and you get a whole boatload of potatoes for 2 EUR/month at Hetzner. I don't know what HN requires, but I guess it's not much more. The hard part of forums are the people needed to keep order and Reddit is not helping there, quite the opposite.

Sorry, I notice I'm grumpy.

[1] https://www.phpbb.com/

That's fair. Don't worry, you didn't sound grumpy to me :)

I do acknowledge that there's a big benefit of having different accounts: different personalities! You don't have all your social eggs in one basket, so to speak.

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