A nice place to discuss rumors, happenings, innovations, and challenges in the technology sphere. We also welcome discussions on the intersections of technology and society. If it’s technological news or discussion of technology, it probably belongs here.
Remember the overriding ethos on Beehaw: Be(e) Nice. Each user you encounter here is a person, and should be treated with kindness (even if they’re wrong, or use a Linux distro you don’t like). Personal attacks will not be tolerated.
Subcommunities on Beehaw:
This community's icon was made by Aaron Schneider, under the CC-BY-NC-SA 4.0 license.
I love it. I love how I don't usually have to deal with "right-wing" extremists. They're usually contained to lemmy.grab, but I suppose one or two might break containment every now and then.
Still, a hell of lot better then seeing their bullshit as the first comment on a new post. :|
I like it so far. It is pretty convoluted how you subscribe to communities across instances. I figured it out eventually, but I am seeing the question pop up all over the place across lemmy.
People say using the Android app makes that easier, but it needs to be solved in the webapp first and foremost.
I also have major concerns about scalability. Folks are calling out for the community to grow, but the servers are already struggling. Lemmy is built ontop of Rust which is an incredibly performant language. Lemmy.world also just migrated to a new, more beefy server. Why are there still scaling issues? I’m naive to the inner-workings of Lemmy, and I’m not saying this in a negative way, I just don’t know enough about the architecture. I am a software engineer though and know a lot of infrastructure and scaling, so these are the types of questions that pop into my head when I see my posts hanging infinitely (but are there on refresh.) Am curious to also know what the long-term storage requirements are for a Lemmy instance. If I were to self-host my own instance for example, what do I expect to need at the 1 month mark? 6 month mark? In terms of storage requirements. How big does the postgres db get?
Overall I am liking the new system and am bullish on Lemmy’s future. As with any sort of hyper growth, there are pains and I’m it’ll all get sorted with time. Nothing like a good forcing function such as a reddit exodus to show a light on any weak spots :)
He was the best frontman motörhead ever had
I like it so far. The web interface is pretty solid and Jerboa is serviceable, though missing some features that I would call crucial to the experience. I can't fault the developers at all though, as it's like two dude to my knowledge. The reddit API thing convinced me to run my own instance for friends.
I'm hopeful lemmy takes off and sees a larger adoption as well, I think that putting the internet back in the hands of individuals is super important as there has been way too much aggregation of services for like the past decade IMO.
The relative difficulty to sign up will be a deterrent to most people. Every other social network has you up in seconds. This needs to be streamlined.
I'm missing some o the features, hoping they will come in time.
Honestly, I kind of hate it, but since Reddit is unusable, considering all the subs that have gone dark (presumably permanently).
I'll be honest. I don't like the Fediverse concept - the fatal flaw of decentralized systems is that sometimes centralized systems are great. Basically, reddit was ONE BBS style forum for everything, which was the killer convenience. Similarly Twitter was the ONE microblogging platform for everybody, which was the killer convenience.
Because the moment anybody can operate a service, everyone does.
Right now, I need to buy a car, I can't find a good Lemmy community to get advice from. Searching for 'cars' in all federated communities returns:
Fuck [email protected] - 3.41K subscribers
[email protected] - 104 subscribers
Fuck [email protected] - 56 subscribers
Self Driving Cars - 19 subscribers
[email protected] - 11 subscribers
Electric [email protected] - 4 subscribers
RC [email protected] - 4 subscribers
[email protected] - 3 subscribers
Fuck [email protected] - 2 subscribers
[email protected] - 1 subscriber
Leave aside for a moment that "Fuck Cars" has 34x more subscribers than the biggest Cars community - there are two different "Fuck Cars" communities, and three different "Cars" communities. It's great that you have subscriber numbers, but there's no definitive place to find out information on cars. Reddit's CEO is right that Reddit was organized like a landed-gentry where a first-come-first-serve approach to the most popular forums was done, but that landed-gentry system solved this problem, whatever new problems it may have introduced.
Now, you could look for a technological solution to solve this problem: For example, you could have a centralized server for all federated Lemmies, some sort of "lemmyhub.com"
We'd all have to agree on it. People could set up alternatives, but we'd all have to basically coalesce and say: Yes, this is the thing we want. Maybe it'd use blockchain, I don't know. Point is, it's centralized and easy to find information. It would work "just like Reddit" where you would have ONE authentication/authorization that works seamlessly across all instances (the current system is anything but seamless), and there would be ONE key/value combo for keyword. So, instead of going to [email protected] & [email protected] & Cars & lemmy.world, you just go to cars.lemmyhub.com.
If you want to post, you just use your lemmyhub account and your post appears on the "default" community. You can still post on individual lemmies by going to the individual lemmy page as well, or by specifying which of your Lemmy instance accounts you want to post as.
Here's the problem with the merging all the cars communities together, though: There is nothing to prevent someone from creating [email protected] and spamming the community with bile or trolling. Lemmyhub could operate a blocklist for troll and hate communities and instances, but once you're doing that, you're making editorial decisions. And forget all the nasty ethics problems around "what's free speech/what's hate speech?" "what's acceptable to view/what's not?", you have legal liability problems if anything slips through the cracks.
Reddit wasn't perfect, and certainly they could have been more proactive with shutting down hate speech, and more speedy with shutting down illegal content, but by and large reddit worked. Reddit's authoritarian approach worked because it was mostly benevolent -- right up until the point that it wasn't.
So I don't think Lemmy can technologically make it's way out of the situation.
I think what needs to happen is a solution like the Wikipedia foundation; we establish a non-profit designed to create a centralized server which may choose or not choose to incorporate Lemmy instances. It runs on donations, not advertising, and it's not designed to maximize profit, only to keep the servers running. It would borrow heavily from the Wikipedia model in organization and structure.
Because I'll be honest - Lemmy and Mastodon are okay, but there's really nothing in them improving on the old Newsgroups system of the late 80s and 1990s. Reddit captured the market for forum discussions because it was simply a better solution, there's nothing in Lemmy that makes it better - for the user - than Reddit.
Should we then abandon Lemmy and go back to Reddit? No, of course not. Reddit, if anything shows us that eventually all authoritarian systems, no matter how benevolent they start, always eventually turn tyrannical, and can do so on a whim, and once they do so, it is impossible to get back to benevolence.
But I've been a redditor for 15 years - I predated subreddits, if you can believe that. And I'm not finding the things I used to go to Reddit for here on Lemmy - information, expert and informed discussion, and niche topics. Maybe that's an adoption problem that will be solved with scale (and I hope it is), but right now, I feel like my luxury Bently sedan got totaled and I'm driving a 20 year old Honda Civic with manual transmission. By all means I'm grateful for the tent, but I still miss my Bentley
Hey Chris. Seeing more and more people from my Mastodon feed here :)
I'm very impressed by Lemmy. Some of the communities like Beehaw have been excellent, even before the recent Reddit API-apocalypse. Self-hosting has been a bit challenging compared to the more mature (I guess) Mastodon but I hope to get it sorted out soon.
Well, I have some exciting news. I spoke with the #SpaceHost team today, and we might be able to provide fully managed hosting for Lemmy and Kbin communities soon. In fact, before all other server types.
I'm easing into it. With more usage, more content, more users, and more updates, it'll be like I never knew Reddit. Growing pains, whatever you want to call it, just makes me happy to be part of a new adventure for sharing and consuming content.
I'm no UX/UI expert, but I hope Lemmy makes it easier to filter content on the main page, collapse comments, and find specific subcommunities and users.
Feels a bit broken tbh. I'm currently on dbzer0 instance and I couldn't post in the community I created. Wonder what's happeneing. Did I get shadowbanned?
Even though it was twitter that spurred me joining the fediverse all of those years ago, I was more of a reddit user than I ever was a twitter user, which is why it was one of the first things I came looking for when I joined the fediverse.
We spun up lemmy.blahaj.zone around 6 months ago so that I could scratch that itch, but it always lacked enough traffic to really do the job.
However now? The amazing growth and huge burst of activity? It's honestly shifted my perspective on what the future of the fediverse might be. I find myself really active on lemmy (and kbin before they had to go behind the Cloudflare CDN), even moreso than I was on the microblogging fediverse, because of its topic centric view.
I think the future of the fediverse might be one in which microblogging is "a" fediverse feature instead of the spotlight feature.
i like it and can totally abandon reddit for it assuming people continue to show up and like all my tiny little niche communities pop up. I do feel like it's a bit confusing at first as far as finding communities and connecting to them all so some work there would probably go a long way.
basically when there is a community for stock tank pools specifically and has 2,000 subscribers we're in the money lol
I dislike the idea of multiple communities for the same topic spread across multiple instances. Sure, you can subscribe to multiple communities, but that's just extra overhead. I'm hopeful reddit backs down after the protest (as unlikely as it may be), but either way I will probably go back to using it regardless. Social media is about content, and unless there is a dramatic shift away from reddit being the content hub that it currently is, nothing else will be as useful.
You may be interested to hear that the concept of binding together multiple communities is currently under official consideration (Github #818).
There's also a feature under consideration for post tagging (Github #317). Something like that would allow for browsing relevant posts originating from any combination of independent communities.
It seems fine. Basically like reddit before it got all corprate
I'm trying to like it, but it's hard. It doesn't quite scratch the doom scrolling itch like Reddit did. I'm using Jerboa and it's missing a lot of features that I relied heavily on with Relay. Ultimately I'm just going to have to adapt though because it looks like Reddit isn't backing down and I'm not going to use the official app.
In good news, I always hated my Reddit username so it's nice to finally get to change it lol.
I love it! I'm looking around the fediverse and the options are impressive.
I've moved from Twitter to Mastodon and Reddit to Lemmy and am so far loving both. Even though they're taking a bit to get used to they're mostly pretty straight forward and familiar feeling in how they work. I will definitely miss certain subreddits but many of them are already here in some form or in the process of moving over. I really love the distributed model that is not at the behest of a single corporate entity or billionaire.
Google Power Delete Suite. Don't leave your content there for them to use.
Not to rain on anyone's parade but I'd be shocked in reddit hard deletes comments given how valuable that data is.
Having to make a new account because I wanted to see NSFW on another instance was kind of a mood killer. Not sure how that could be done better but I really don't want to be making other accounts.
It's a bit rough around the edges,but it does the job and so far I haven't missed reddit at all.
i like the community but
I'm leaving behind reddit after 10 years of on and off use, in the last 5 years almost constant use. I'm happy because I feel rhus platform seems really great , I really like the layout and stye of it all. I hope to understand it better going forward
So far it's not too bad. I'm still not sure I really understand the whole fediverse thing, but it'll make sense with a bit more usage I'm sure.
I very much like the oldschool feel, and the fact that we have more control over our communities without having some admins with ultimate power.
So far there has been a bit of a learning curve. Still trying to learn how to find communities and navigate everything. Hopefully the more people that join the greater the content that will be available.
As for the experience, I wish there were more options for customizing the look apart from dark/light. Options like font size, etc.
The fediverse? Meh. Beehaw? Loving it
I like it a lot. Left Reddit on Sunday, tried Tildes, then found Lemmy and have been here since.
Also using Jerboa. I like it well enough. It feels a bit like Reddit but also reminds me of being on the Internet back in the late 90s - not sure why it gives me that feeling though. Maybe because it's new to me and not the most streamlined, and it's still growing.
Anyway it's great here! Enjoying interacting and watching things grow.
Technically, things need a bit of polish. In particular, I’m talking about the website being unavailable, and today I experienced the joys of the page reloading as I was typing a comment. Fun!
Still, those problems are dwarfed by the quality of the community and the conversations that are had. I’d much rather put up with a few glitches than go back to the idiocy I’d gotten used to. Lemmy all the way!
One thing that I'm looking for is to see where (if?) the moderation teams of existing subreddits migrate over to Lemmy/Kbin and if the Reddit userbase migrate as well and become the de-facto communities on subjects.
I guess that's part of the community aspect that Reddit harboured with the moderators - that they infer and define the culture and dynamics of their particular subreddit - and if I have the choice of three or four fediverse communities on the same topic, I can maintain some continuity by joining the one maintained by the ex-Reddit mods.
It's like leaving infant school and going to high school - amongst the hundreds of strangers, it'd be good to see a few familiar faces.