If the developers of Apolo and the rest added seamless support for fediverse. Maybe with a function to sync your stuff across reddit, twitter and these new places.
So basically, you will continue using your favourite app and don't really notice that the "backend" has changed
They're kind-of falling into the trap that a lot of Bitcoin proponents have. Decentralization is great for limiting the control of a single entity. A centralized service is still much more usable.
The approach you suggest is, I believe, the answer. Provide a service that makes it all seem like one thing. The user doesn't have to know unless the centralizer misbehaves, but if that happens the decentralized back end would allow people to go elsewhere, In-turn the ability to go elsewhere keeps the centralizer honest.
The same could maybe be done with Bitcoin. Perhaps one day, after all of the hype and snake-oil fades away there might be entities that do a similar service hiding the back-end. We'd probably call them Banks.
There is a key difference with Bitcoin though, which in attempts to be completely flat and under no single entity’s control.
In contrast, Federated systems like lenmy/mastodon are connected islands, each under some person or organisation’s control (and moderation).
Bitcoin is massively wasteful of energy due to its design, and hopelessly limited in terms of capacity and scalability. It puts itself beyond the reach of law enforcement and any requirement to conform to societal norms.
The Fediverse has challenges too, but the fundamental difference is it’s not trying to replace trust in people with an algorithm.
For chat-like services I am hosting my own Matrix server with all the bridges to WhatsApp, Signal, Discourse, Slack, Telegram, etc. the UX is not perfect yet but it works well enough that I to 95% don't open the original apps/websites anymore.
Add jmp.chat in the mix (sms, mms, group mms) and literally every chat network I use is covered by a server and network that I control, with a variety of clients. I expect eventually jmp.chat will bridge SIP invites and I'll have legacy phone call support for the 12 phone calls I make/recieve a year.
Matrix is somehow absent in all of these federation conversations. Maybe because it's quietly ... working in spite of all the noise that federated platforms are untenable. (See my other comment for how Matrix's federation is resilient to home server outages, etc. Federation FTW)
Absolutely the bridges are a thing. Facebook Messenger is aggressive about kicking users that are using Facebook's app, Google Chat isn't amaaazing about the sign-in flow currently, and Signal was deeply unhappy with me last I tried (possibly due to using a VoIP number), but overall, my chats follow me everywhere.
Regardless of whether I grab my Pinephone or BlackBerry (whichever is charged), all my messages just follow along with a single sign on. It's fantastic :)
> A centralized service is still much more usable.
There are some tweaks and modifications that can make the decentralized nature of these services still appear centralized.
Specific to lemmy adding the ability to categorize communities and sort by said categories (ala multireddits) would go a long way.
Additionally adding some type of search in the sidebar to find other like communities would help.
There’s already some bookmarked etc that will modify URLs to format them to your instance correctly. I would bet this gets committed to the core UI app at some point.
Making sign ups easier would go a long way too. Some of the drama with bigger instances defederating will help sort this out. I wouldn’t be shocked if there’s a proxies sign up service that will randomly put you on an instance once most of the above is sorted.
Finally, being able to transfer your account will be huge.
Keep in mind some of these services are brand new (ie: Kbin) And others are seeing very rapid growth that’s helping them mature quickly (ie: lemmy).
People are decentralizing because it gets damn expensive to run more than 100,000+ users (or so) on a single server that is owned by a hobbyist / part-time sysadmin.
By decentralizing, it becomes possible to run your own community of 10k to 100k people. Which is plenty large enough for most people's purposes. 100k active monthly users is going to be far larger than most subreddits.
Even large subreddits, like /r/hardware, only had ~10,000 monthly active users or so, if I remember the sidebar statistics. So you can run your own instance today on bog-standard servers using one of these OSS software packages.
> People are decentralizing because it gets damn expensive to run more than 100,000+ users (or so) on a single server that is owned by a hobbyist / part-time sysadmin.
Is it? If only a tint percentage of the userbase would donate some negligible amount, it can run indefinitely. Computers are insanely cheap compared to the possible value they can produce. Also, if they wouldn’t put random websocket connections for no good reason than it would scale much better (khm, lemmy)
This is really revisionist. I have never ever heard pro-decentralization people argue that centralization is too expensive. No, the argument is focused on power.
$10/month to $1000/month is something that can be afforded by various hobbyists. There are limitations to what small money can accomplish, but these limitations are far larger than people may expect.
Running your own https://blah.foobar.com community is about what you can accomplish with your two hands.
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No one can make a "Reddit clone" by themselves, and its impossible to expect a $10/server to handle any kind of realistic traffic. But if you're just aiming for a boutique instance for your guildmates in WoW to hang out (and maybe federate over to a few niche Lemmy-instances like https://programming.dev), that's well within the budget of small hobbyist weekend project.
I think what would be better would be a centralized identifier that is ratified and federated and approved by the federated systems.
(This could be a plausible use of blockchain).
If they would incorporate that, then you could have the same identity regardless of what decentralized server you were on.
Perhaps that would be a useful tool. Federated Centralization. Recreate the utility of FB/ Twitter / Google sign on without giving your data to tech conglomerates. You could even make it so that each site shares a unique sign in key so that you are the only person with the information of the main key and that would make it harder to trace back user info to the defederated central server system.
Back when I first heard about gnu social (the predecessor to Mastodon), there were 2 apps for Android that worked with both Twitter and ActivityPub.
AndStatus and Twidere.
It was seamless, the only way you could tell something was federated was by looking at the domain name on the user handle, other than this there was little to no difference.
The creator of RedReader, the (AFAIK) only Android Reddit client that will stay available (presumably at least for a bit) outlined some thoughts along the lines of potential future fediverse/other platform support here:
The real answer is that Apollo should be like a modern reddit-ized RSS reader. Each subreddit should be self-hosted on their own one-click cloud VM deployment. "Subscribing" to a subreddit on Apollo should connect the user's client to auto-pull feeds from the "self-hosted" server. The servers themselves should get hands-off auto-updates for security patches/etc in the same way that any end-user desktop or mobile app gets updates.
That gives each subreddit total control over moderation. It gives users total control over what subreddits they want to see on their feed. It eliminates the decentralized/federated pain.
Anyone wanna build this with me? Email newrssreddit@protonmail.com
Your description sounds to me practically exactly to what lemmy and /kbin do. If you want to host a subreddit (community) you have to set up a server to be able to host that community. On that community you have full controll over moderation, etc. And then people can subscribe to that community if they want to and read about it either in their app or the frontend of their own instance.
I don't see what the difference is. There's no reason that the user facing UX couldn't be identical.
What's the difference between me.hitting subscribe and my client now checking two networks vs hitting subscribe and it telling my instance to follow another.
Again, I'm annoyed Matrix is absent here. Not only can I trivially join rooms hosted on other servers, rooms can be given aliases on multiple home servers which means the rooms remain available even if the originating HS is unavailable.
Matrix is a functional, growing, good federated network that really should be talked about more. There are even fledgling forum implementations built on top, it's just a different UX, similar to ActivityPub interop.
If you could put together some kind of aggregator that gets around the defederation problem that would be amazing. Lemmy is owned and run by tankies who are extremely happy to defed anyone who doesn’t support their world view.
Which instance are you talking about? Lemmygrad, for example, matches that description, but lemmy.ml does not. The software project doesn't (afaik) have any bearing on ideology or defederation.
Using the phrase “world view” has become a direct indicator of bigotry, misogyny, fascism, and other mindsets that are a real threat to basic human rights. I suggest finding a new euphemism.
The concept of a world view has always been core to the zeitgeist, and one of the primary ways people differentiate their general view on things as shaped by the circumstances of their upbringing, experiences and daily life.
I hold the world view of a liberal, atheistic, environmentalist and consequentialist informed by a religious conservative upbringing that I managed to escape and decades in tech.
The concept of having a world view is not offensive, and to claim that it’s a direct indicator of the negative connotations you list is rather odd.
We all have a world view whether we call it that or not, and the subsets of bad behavior you describe do not hold a monopoly on the concept.
This is exactly what I want. Basically a new evolution of RSS that is bidirectional for user engagement.
Users can subscribe to whatever forum they want as long as it supports the new RSS standard. They can engage with the forums in their aggregator of choice or on the forum site directly if they want.
I’ve been preaching the same. I don’t care where I connect to as long as I have the information. It reminds me a lot to pidgin. As long as there’s a good incentive between the content servers and the UI’s, this could work.
I suppose, but really what you need to achieve that is not the app-developers modifying their apps, what you need is some bridge that exposes a reddit API on top of lemmy (or the fediverse in general).
In theory anyone could build and run such a bridge, but I'm not sure if anyone has a strong incentive to make one.
Unfortunately Christian Selig, creator of Apollo, doesn't seem very interested in doing this. I guess he just wants to move on to something else entirely.
with regard to (A)GPL, I don't know how/if this issue ever got resolved, but Apple has been scared of (at least) GPL3 and also GPL2, and (separately) the provisions of those licenses require you to provide for downloads of the source, but the Apple app store does not provide for that, so it's been a grey area sort of from both directions
Lemmy has the same issue as Mastodon: what instance do I join?
When looking at the "migrate from Reddit" page the two obvious ones are lemmy.world and beehaw.org. But now they don't federate with each other, so it's down to more special-interest and smaller instances where it's not really clear what some of the rules might be, just to be able to see posts from both of these bigger instances.
The comparison is always made to picking a place for your email where Gmail/Yahoo/Hotmail were all "the same", but that's not really true for federated social networks. There's quite a bit more mod actions that could significantly influence your reach or experience with the wider fediverse.
The answer is "both of them". Pick a client that makes it the easiest to connect to separate instances on separate accounts, then choose the same-ish username.
Federation is, fundamentally, an anti-feature that exists solely to create liabilities for the end user as, by design, it empowers people who should not be empowered to destroy your social graph arbitrarily (the "not sharing my ban list is bannable" problem plagues the Fediverse).
This is not something the people writing the documentation understand (or worse, the above is a feature for them), but the correct way to use the service is to engage atomically under multiple different identities rather than be caught in the fallout of petty admin slapfights, just like signing up for a bunch of different phpBB forums was before the rise of Digg/Reddit.
> The answer is "both of them". Pick a client that makes it the easiest to connect to separate instances on separate accounts, then choose the same-ish username.
That actually reveals even more complexity: having to understand what federation is, researching and experimenting with clients, how to find different communities across the fediverse. Each added complexity cuts how many people would be willing to make the switch
> Federation is, fundamentally, an anti-feature that exists solely to create liabilities for the end user as, by design, it empowers people who should not be empowered to destroy your social graph arbitrarily.
My Twitter-using friends have complained that their feeds have become a ghost town and has lost most of its utility as a social network in the past year. Part of the reason why people were so upset at Reddit is because of justified fears that it's going down the exact same path. I have seen countless people myopically and unjustly banned from most major social media sites. How are these things anything other than a destruction of a social graph?
The thing is, this kind of vitriol isn't uncommon, and I've been trying to rack my brain trying to figure out what would cause such a reaction. Is it a misguided feeling of patronizing empathy for end-users? A distaste for the tech-enthusiast types that champion them? Or is it distasteful from a business POV since it is antithetical to walled gardens?
I can't verify this is true, but I've seen stuff pop up on Lemmy that Reddit accounts are getting banned for promoting Lemmy/Kbin/etc. Being resistant to unseen administrators destroying your social graph is literally a selling point of federation.
>Being resistant to unseen administrators destroying your social graph is literally a selling point of federation.
And that "selling point" is grossly inaccurate. (Unless you make a separate account everywhere, which obviously defeats the entire point of federation.)
ActivityPub implementations all suffer from the same "you're pre-emptively banned from subreddit X because you commented in subreddit Y" problem that Reddit currently has, but with cascading effect across half the network.
Good for admin egos and power trips, bad for long-term usability and stability from the end user's perspective. As things of this nature have always been.
For now my own solution has been to spin up my own Mastodon, PeerTube and Lemmy instance, and because I'm such a small one person instance I don't bother anyone and therefor nobody defederated me yet.
> the "not sharing my ban list is bannable" problem plagues the Fediverse
i had to google around a bit to figure out what you meant by that. do you mean "server A blocks server B, you run server C and want to federate with B but if you do then A will block you too"? if so, that's not "empowering people to destroy your social graph", indeed, from A's point of view it's the only way they can contain a potential infection by posts from B. but as an end user you could easily have accounts on both A and B, and a client that merged them, you just can't use your server C to join A and B into the same graph when A does not want to be connected to B.
Is it weird that I don't really mind the splintering? Have massive social networks really been a net positive for society? It seems like, depending on how they're moderated, they'll end up in some local maxima of rage baiting and trolling (Twitter, Facebook four years ago) or a super sanitized dumb feed of cutesy content (TikTok, Facebook now, and soon Reddit). You always get defenders of these networks that say if you do X/Y/Z and not A/B/C, then you'll get value out of them.
My X, Y, and Z formula for Reddit over the last couple of years has been to ignore the larger communities and focus only on interesting niche content. I think that's how a lot of other people use it, for the long tail of actually interesting content. And hell, I don't think you need the massive network effects of the larger social networks to make that work.
Global-reach social networks have been good for very narrow niche interest discussion. If I have a question about Civilization 4 or roguelike game development, it's nice that I can post somewhere that's likely to be seen by a large fraction of the world's devotees of those subjects. When Reddit burns down that won't be true anymore.
I'll give you that Reddit has certainly made it easier for those communities to organize and form. I don't think it's true that it's the only place that those communities will ever form on the internet. Theirs nothing special about Reddit, Digg was a thing before Reddit, and forums before that.
Our computers are all still connected, web browser and web servers exist. With software like Lemmy, it's become super easy to stand up a place for people to connect. People that like Civilization will find each other without Reddit.
>the two obvious ones are lemmy.world and beehaw.org. But now they don't federate with each other
doesn't that make it essentially the same decision as if you were joining any other non-federated web service? on what criteria did you decide to sign up for facebook vs twitter? or reddit vs digg?
kbin.social federates with Lemmy.world and Beehaw.org. So... if you really care about getting to both servers, why not kbin.social?
Or lemmy.one?
> The comparison is always made to picking a place for your email where Gmail/Yahoo/Hotmail were all "the same", but that's not really true for federated social networks. There's quite a bit more mod actions that could significantly influence your reach or experience with the wider fediverse.
Not much different from USENET, really. Individual administrators could cut you off back then, though in practice it rarely happened outside of the pornographic / piracy groups.
Indeed, I could very well argue that federation solves the porn issue rather nicely. Just defederate from NSFW instances if you have a professional instance. No sweat, no one will blame you for banning porn on your server.
Tumbler, Twitter, and Reddit are all struggling with the porn question. It brings in a ton of eyeballs so they want it, but it kills advertisements and makes the site look unprofessional.
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Beehaw.org is just doing their own thing. They really want a very tightly organized community. Its not in their best interests to open up yet (not until Mastodon-like moderation tools come into existence in the Lemmy-verse).
I wouldn't pay much attention to the drama. Beehaw.org may have been 2nd largest before this week started, but with only 12k users, they're much much smaller than the other servers now (including Lemmy.world and kbin.social). That's fine, they don't want to grow too quickly and that's their right to slow things down to the pace the admins / moderators are comfortable with. (Much like how Lobste.rs wants a tightly bound community as well).
You can't make your own communities in Beehaw.org (only the admins can make new subreddits). So its not what 90% of people want anyway IMO.
You could join some other instance, and then subscribe to communities on both beehaw/lemmy.world as well as any other ones that spark your interest right? Kinda like email. Or, if so inclined, host your own? I think most of them take a blocklist approach instead of an allowlist approach
Yup. You can join any of the dozens of medium-sized, unassuming instances and not have to worry about defederation at all. It's only the tall poppies that get reaped (i.e.: very large instances & instances with controversial stances).
Unless you want to interact with some specific people - it doesn't really matter that much. Sure, you'll miss some posts, but did you actually read every single one of them before? I'm honestly enjoying the quieter mastodon experience with some reactions not being fully replicated. It's nice to slow down and not experience a constant firehose. If something's really important in your community, it will get duplicated in a way you see it.
I wonder if end-user apps will eventually solve this.
Conceptually, rather than server admins choosing what's federated, users will have several/many accounts and they will choose what they want, and under the hood that will be enabled VIA whichever server/account they have accesses that community.
I honestly don't care about the whole API drama, but I've been looking to get off reddit for awhile now. I switched over to Lemmy and committed to a week of usage. It's rough around the edges but it works. I'm in. Haven't been back to reddit and don't plan to.
I too find Lenny rough around the edges. My concern is that it looks like it was built by developers for developers. Is it attractive enough to your average non technical Reddit user just looking for a few memes or whatever? I’m not so sure
It's a shame reddit went this way, but quitting reddit has been amazing for my productivity. It's great to not be feeling like the entire day whizzed past without being able to make as much headway on hobbies as I'd have liked. One of these days I'll get around to setting up a lemmy or kbin node for my friends (assuming that our existing misskey node can't talk to kbin/lemmy).
Yeah I've switched to Lemmy too. Signed up for "Behaw" and "Lemmy.world" because the main instance has some controversy attached to it. It was just slightly more difficult to get started, but the user experience so far has been pretty close to Reddit when using the "mlem" app on iOS. It's early days still, bugs need to be worked out, but I've not been back to Reddit since switching, it's good enough.
It's only a matter of time before someone comes along and make an easy client that integrates multiple instances together into a seamless experience.
Regardless of which instance you specifically join, you can subscribe to all three of these communities to follow & participate in their discussions. Here's an instance browser to help you decide where you want to make your account: https://lemmyverse.net/
It generally doesn't matter which instance you sign up on, but here's a few guidelines if you just want maximum access with minimum hassle. This information isn't really particularly necessary, but it may help alleviate the choice paralysis if you happen to be anything like me:
- Don't sign up for Hexbear -- it's a non-federated instance, so accounts there can't browse outside content.
- Try to avoid joining the largest instances (5k+ users) -- large instances are more likely to be blocked by others for various reasons (e.g.: lemmy.world & sh.itjust.works are blocked by beehaw.org)
- Try to avoid joining instances which specifically advertise themselves as catering to contentious or risque content (e.g.: lemmynsfw.com, burggit.moe, lemmygrad.ml) -- pretty self-explanatory why admins tend to like blocking these, I think!
- Try to avoid joining small (<1k users) and/or joke instances -- if your home-instance goes down, your account & comments will disappear with it, so choose something that looks like it has some staying power. This will also help streamline your onboarding experience because bigger instances are generally more strongly connected to everything else in the threadiverse.
- Still stumped? I can happily recommend my home-instance: https://lemmy.sdf.org -- not too big, not too small, highly innocuous content, and a long history of hosting robust fediverse servers.
"I haven't touched any of your pesky, problematic internets. I go to clubs, enjoy traveling and hang out with girls. I don't think much is changing at all."
To you. My ironic quote shows how your words look to people who value decentralization. I hope that it could help you better understand another point of view.
I think you're overvaluing your attempted refutation of their belief, which is a plainly stated "I didn't even try it" with no further elaboration on why they'd be wrong.
Personally, for Lemmy to take over reddit, I wouldn't be surprised if takes two additional future PR distasters for the final digg-style mass exodus to happen.
> which is a plainly stated "I didn't even try it" with no further elaboration on why they'd be wrong.
The parent of this thread is the exact same, except stated in positive terms towards the subject. But you are here faulting only me for that. Will you ask the same of the parent of this thread to elaborate? Why did you not ask the parent of this thread to elaborate before?
I started an account on SDF's Lemmy instance today. Got a 3 letter name and I trust them to keep it alive for the long haul :) I haven't missed Reddit all day. The only reason I went there was to see if any subs I frequent had an official announcement of moving. Finding niche communities is pretty simple and they're mostly healthy. It was a tad confusing at first but, once I picked an instance to join, it only took a few minutes to figure out how to navigate it. My biggest hurtle was not knowing about the "All" button at the top, they should do more to emphasize that. IMO it should be the default.
Thanks for the heads up, I totally blanked on signing up through SDF. I have other accounts through them, hoping to use them for a Lemmy homebase as well.
I was initially confused by the Jerboa Android app, and felt like I wasn't going to like the threadiverse. (Which is a great portmanteau BTW)
But then I tried beehaw.org on a desktop web browser and everything clicked. The non-mobile UX is much better, in my opinion, than mobile currently is.
Being able to block certain people or communities makes the idle browsing experience much nicer for me.
I'm hoping that some of the better reddit 3rd party app developers will make something for the threadiverse because I think it's sorely needed.
It's still very early days though. Communities still need more tools to deal with bad actors. However I'm really impressed with how the chaos has begun to organize and evolve.
The same devs who work on the Lemmy core and UI, also do Jerboa on the side. It's not their focus and given the sudden influx of users they likely won't have a lot of time to devote to it. https://beehaw.org/c/jerboa@lemmy.ml
Yesterday I recorded a video called "Introduction to Fediverse Reddit alternatives: Lemmy, /kbin" in which I explain the Threadiverse a bit and show how it works in practice: https://tube.jeena.net/w/1PPQUhpzxiESV6xuKjeQav
Really impressed with how clean and fast the interfaces of all these are. Even more so than old.Reddit
Haven’t quite worked out whether beginners should join an existing instance or create their own though. Own one man instance seems safer but that presumably limits interactions
I think this is phenomenal. I do not find the internet for Lemmy.ml accessible though yet -- for some reason whenever I visit the instance I signed up for it shows the same stories: https://sh.itjust.works. This CPP article has been there for days and it is a total red herring.
I'm just starting today but Top Day All seems most like r/all. I added it to my RSS reader and there's a lot of the same stories posted on both. I added new, hot and active to my reader to see how they update. Active seems usable. Hot is way too noisy.
Not everything has to be ActivityPub. If you want to recreate Reddit, the protocol already exists: It’s called NNTP, and it’s already federated and there’s a variety of software out there for running sites from individual to Internet-scale.
I wonder how non-federated options (e.g. web forums) compare to federated options (e.g. ActivityPub (somewhat, since it’s not globally federated like NNTP), NNTP).
Federation seems to come with disadvantages such as inefficiency and additional bad places for moderation to occur (e.g. if you’re on A, talking to someone from B, through the sublemmy on C, all 3 servers’ moderators can interfere. For web forums, that’s not the case, as only C (the web forum’s moderators) can interfere, whom you probably already trust).
It does have an advantage: not needing to sign up to multiple web forums, but that can be solved with other methods such as IndieAuth or by allowing anonymous posting.
The biggest advantage of ActivityPub, NNTP, etc. over any web forum is that you do not have to go to a bunch of different places in a browser and use a bunch of different UIs under a bunch of different identities for something that is fundamentally not all that different from email.
Other than modern encryption, NNTP is perfectly usable on hardware that’s multiple decades old: Basically any 32-bit system with memory in the single-digit megabytes can run a newsreader, even a graphical one. I suspect the same is true for ActivityPub. And while that can be true for web forums, it almost never is, and mostly for aesthetic reasons.
Any of these alternatives that have an active Anime and/or Manga community? The few links I've seen suggest "not so much", but I'm not certain I'm looking at the right things.
+1 if they also have a Photography community (why yes, I am a multitude) :-)
I was honestly baffled at how terrible Lemmy’s (default?) UI is.. it really does open a websocket for absolutely zero reason to each user, back navigation is completely broken, and it is just plain.. slow, things loading with huge delays and moving existing content around.
Compare it to Tildes, which is just a godsent, comparatively. (Subjectively saying, it is better as a whole, but the objective difference in the UI/UX is just huge)
I only tried it briefly, but Kbin has a microblog tab where people can just post comments.
Also if you look at the "/instances" list on a Lemmy instance they at least federate with Mastadon (as well as Kbin) instances, although I've not seen that exposed in the interface at all.
If the developers of Apolo and the rest added seamless support for fediverse. Maybe with a function to sync your stuff across reddit, twitter and these new places.
So basically, you will continue using your favourite app and don't really notice that the "backend" has changed