this post was submitted on 04 Jul 2023
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I honestly expected after the API changes rolled out that the backlash on Reddit would stop but I'm glad to see the shenanigans continue.
Same, as much as I hope lemmy succeeds, I simultaneously hope that the API changes get reversed. Good job to those fighting for this over there
I am afraid the two might be mutually exclusive. Lemmy is like old Reddit and still on early adopters. We get more and more newcomers only because Reddit is going downhill.
Though it's not like it matters to most of us if they do reverse course. I already deleted everything on my Reddit account. It's all gone permanently.
I think Lemmy's biggest challenges are server stability, increased complexity to use (most don't understand things like instances), and low awareness from others. I only learned about it a day or two ago. Signed up out of curiosity.
But if Lemmy gets even more popular then the various popular instances are going to be stressed. It looks unstable to newcomers who go back to Reddit.
I signed up for lemmy.world originally, constantly had Gateway errors. Lemm.ee seems more stable due to lower traffic.
But others may not be able to recognize that. Even if they did, might not want to create new accounts for several instances and go back to starting from 0.
Lemmy.world just finished pushing significant stability and performance improvements to the Lemmy codebase and to their own server, and from what I've heard it's lead to significant improvements. I agree that Lemmy is unstable, but it's also beta software undergoing rapid improvement, and I'm optimistic on where it will be by the end of the year.
I feel like most of the problem would be physical hardware. Costly servers that would need to be able to meet Lemmy's growing demands.
I'm not sure how much optimization from the software side can be done to reduce resource requirements. There's certainly things that can be done to improve user experience though.
Agreed. Also joined Lemmy a couple days ago and don't yet fully understand how everything works. I'm hoping that lemmy apps add features to make it easier for people who aren't very tech-savvy, like automatically assigning people to a general purpose instance (one that isn't too full preferably) unless they wish to choose a specific one.
Another thing is that I believe links to posts are somehow instance specific and you have to "convert" them to point to your instance's version of said post, or something like that, in order to see comments and interact. That seems clunky and should probably be made easier somehow, maybe apps could automatically convert links? Or maybe there is a way to make links instance-agnostic from the get go.
Just some things I've noticed in my time here. Very much enjoying the experience though!
One aspect I'd love (and is apparently in the works) is swapping instances while keeping your history. A migration tool of sorts. Would help.
Still the roughness is sorta endearing in its own way. But I don't think it'd be endearing to most people.
At this point even if the API changes are reversed I’m don’t with Reddit.
I'm liking Lemmy a lot. I rolled my own instance so performance is great. The only issue is delayed federation of new posts, but comments seem to go through instantly.
How long of a delay? Do you known if the delay is on your end, taking a while to load from every other instance, or from the other ones being slow to "tell" yours about new posts?
I think the delay is due to syncing historic backlog on the community. Not 100% sure though.
On my instance it says that some communities are fully synced so it looks like there is zero delay. So long as lemmy.world or lemmy.ml are working on their end.
I believe the failed Twitter-to-Mastodon exodus made spez and his yesmen cocky. I hope they underestimated how much more tech savvy the average redditor is - especially the nexus poster, who keep the community afloat.
I think they overestimated how much engagement the average reditter provides. Most people are consuming content, but not contributing any or posting comments or clicking ads or anything. 90% of engagement is driven by like 20% of users or some shit like that.
I suspect twitter is similar. But a difference between Reddit and twitter is how easily power users can migrate.
On twitter, you follow people. Power users were often cautious cause they didn't want to lose their followers and non power users wanted to be where the power users are.
But on Reddit, you follow communities. For power users, there's few direct followers to lose and for non power users, as long as there's enough content, it doesn't matter much who created it.
Another important difference is that reddit concepts map better onto lemmy than twitter onto mastodon. Additionally, one important aspect of twitter is the proximity to journalists, celebrities and politicians. Reddit doesn't really have that (except for /r/iama).
To be fair, Mastodon is still growing and it's much easier to use now than a year ago. Reddit didn't uproot Digg overnight.
I personally have left for Mastodon and never looked back. Ivory is making it so easy and beautiful. But I’m not following sassy quipsters, c-tier celebrities and outrage farmers, so I’m not really anything that stayed on Twitter. But a lot of these “nexus posters” haven’t done the switch and/or had done it but returned to Twitter.
Indeed, which of course communicates a fundamental misunderstanding about how people use Reddit vs. Twitter. On Twitter/Mastodon people primarily follow other users, so Twitter remains dominant due to the large number of celebrities, influencers, and politicians that use it. On Reddit/Lemmy, people follow communities, and as such as long as both are active a given community on Lemmy is just as good as a community on Reddit. This also of course impacts federation. With individual user federation discovery can be challenging and small instances will have relatively barren all feeds, but with community federation even instances with a few dozen users will federate with enough communities to fill the all feed. Reddit was also famous for the multitude of very nice features implemented by third party developers, all of which they just ejected, which means now those nice features will be available to Lemmy users. Apps are capable of abstracting and improving the user experience by suggesting instances to sign up to and presenting a unified feed of all of the instance feeds that the app has connected to, making everything feel far more connected. In a way I'm grateful to u/spez, his awfulness as a CEO pushed people here and made a lot of this possible.
Eh. They_were_ until about 4(?) years ago. I noticed there was a big shift when all of a sudden nobody cared about spelling and grammar mistakes anymore, and Reddit itself started changing to be more average-person minded. But in the beginning absolutely yes, that's why the format was the way it was
No, I figured this would go on a lot longer than just the blackout. There has been a lot of built up resentment in the mod community that the admins never really addressed. Now that the admins ripped away most mod tools, a lot of mods are pissed.
I hope they can manage to tank reddit's IPO
This has exposed the incompatibility of a company wanting to make $$$$, when it relies on volunteers. Mods aren't eager to do unpaid work just so spez can get rich.