reddit refugee

here to stay

  • 1 Post
  • 47 Comments
Joined 1 year ago
cake
Cake day: June 11th, 2023

help-circle



  • why would I want to keep in contact with the “head in the sand” people

    Forget contacts. Imagine Meta has

    • poured way more developing hours in their fork than the FOSS community ever could
    • the most effective and easy to use mod tools
    • the best search tools for finding communities, topics and everything else (by a margin)
    • free instance hosting
    • every major wish list feature implemented
    • a working feed with endless content you actually find interesting
    • a vibrant community for every niche interest you might have
    • advanced development so much that it feels a couple versions ahead

    The more money they throw at this, the more people will feel tempted to join or at least try their service. It offers objective benefits. It would feel like using lemmy 0.09 when others already enjoy 0.18.


  • There’s nothing wrong with Lemmy’s user interface design.

    The first step is a UX disaster: https://join-lemmy.org/

    Only 2 clicks / pages down the road you can start registering an account, and you don’t see what the experience might be before that. Instead, you’re being presented tech talk about servers.

    You might argue it’s not actually lemmy but just the landing page. I argue, it’s so good at being a scarecrow, most people visiting lemmy haven’t seen anything else except for that page.


    The inner lemmy is pretty fine, I agree. Some parts are still confusing. For example, most people will not figure out they can search for content from within a specific community by carefully configuring the drop downs in the general search form. Most will look for the search directly attached to the community.



  • I’m worried this will not be enough in the long run.

    Imagine Meta provides more original content, a higher user base, more engagement, more activity. That alone would make it interesting for many other users, further increasing their relative attractivity.

    Additionally, they could invest in the codebase, and implement some of the community’s dream features, some nice mod tools, search engine discoverability and whatnot. On a fork which lives on their instances, of course. Services which work if you federate with them.

    They have the resources to rase the stakes higher and higher. The incentives are objective, real, advantages for users, communitites, mods and admins. Isn’t it only a question of time / stake height until significant parts of the fediverse choose to cooperate for various reasons?


  • If they have any ability to post to the Fediverse or to track things they’ll do it all over again.

    They have that ability, and always will have. They can create as many accounts as they like on as many instances as they like, or run as many instances as they like themselves, use incentivized individuals, or employees, or bots, or any combination of all of the above. No one can stop them, maybe even no one can spot them.

    The only thing which is holding them back right now is lemmy/kbin still being too insignificant. If the network continues to grow, more and more big corps will see it as a market and an opportunity, and they will have plenty of ways to interact with it.


  • relatively homogenous

    Some may be surprised by the cultural diversity this rather small country packs:

    It has four main linguistic and cultural regions: German, French, Italian and Romansh. Although most Swiss are German-speaking, national identity is fairly cohesive, being rooted in a common historical background, shared values such as federalism and direct democracy,[15][page needed] and Alpine symbolism.[16][17] Swiss identity transcends language, ethnicity, and religion, leading to Switzerland being described as a Willensnation (“nation of volition”) rather than a nation state.[18]

    Due to its linguistic diversity, Switzerland is known by multiple native names: Schweiz [ˈʃvaɪts] (German);[f][g] Suisse [sɥis(ə)] (French); Svizzera [ˈzvittsera] (Italian); and Svizra [ˈʒviːtsrɐ, ˈʒviːtsʁɐ] (Romansh).[h] On coins and stamps, the Latin name, Confoederatio Helvetica — frequently shortened to “Helvetia” — is used instead of the spoken languages.

    I also think the local traditions differentiating down to single villages are more important and alive than in other countries.

    But yes, “national identity is fairly cohesive”, maybe you meant that.



  • It would be possible to do this study without contamination by using completely unknown and newly-released songs

    When writing songs, I always wondered if that genius idea is actually just something I heard 10 years ago, but don’t remember consciously. Similarly, I wonder if I like a catchy tune because it is catchy in itself, or because it reminds me of something which I cannot recall consciously right now.

    Sometimes, I had these moments later when the dots connect, sometimes not. With what confidence could I conclude something is new and original?

    I guess that’s just another task for future AI.


    • Some of the biggest communities like r/pics, r/aww, and r/GIF decided to post John Oliver pictures and GIFs. In a tweet, Oliver approved this move.
    • In the case of r/aww, the community is also allowed to post pictures of Chiijohn.
    • r/iPhone decided to post pictures celebrating “dashing” Tim Cook.
    • r/Shitposting banned posts with the letter k.
    • r/Wellthatsucks is now a subreddit about vacuum cleaners.
    • r/Nofans is now a passive PC cooler subreddit.
    • r/Interestingasfuck removed a lot of all rules apart from asking members to not break site-wide rules.
    • r/Memes is allowing only Medieval / Landed Gentry memes. This is in response to Huffman’s “Landed Gentry” comment about protesting subreddits.
    • r/PokemonGo is now allowing pictures of John Oliver, Pikachu, or Spark.
    • r/Horny is now a “Christian Minecraft server.”
    • r/Steam members are posting about actual steam.
    • r/HarryPotter is now referring to Huffman as Voldemort.
    • Some subreddits such as r/Showerthoughts are determining close days for the community.

    Glorious.




  • You’re right, situations can occur. But it’s not a permanent thing. People can make another new account on an instance which they deem suitable after they have familiarized themselves with lemmy by spending some days or weeks in it. Expecting a bloody newcomer to choose a good instance isn’t so far from random choice anyways.

    Also tbh, I have little to no interactions with people from my instance. I subscribe to topics I care for regardless of where they are hosted. People like me would hardly notice they share a server with nazis, as each would flock to different communities.



  • I think it’s foolish to point to the trends from the last week and try to draw conclusions about the future, as this is clearly an extraordinary circumstance.

    Yes, for sure. Maybe we simply have different standards about truthful statements. I did not mean to imply lemmy could grow like that forever. I just pointed out that it does in a moment when you said it could not, that’s all.


  • We’re mostly on the same page. reddit will continue to exist (although time will tell in which state).

    I got hung up on the statement “It won’t get more users if it continues to be difficult to use”, because it is evidently false, unnuanced. I still want lemmy to implement these features, as it would help growth (and mostly, the individual users) even further.


  • if they closed registrations on those instances, lots of the new users would end up confused, and go post on reddit that lemmy isn’t allowing new registrations.

    I think anyways the registration process should be dumbed down. Simple version:

    • User sees no instances or servers during registration
    • When they click on ‘register’, a random instance (which allows new registrations) is chosen
    • There is a small link ‘advanced options’ which allows users to see and choose instances

    This would balance the load between instances and make it much easier for newcomers to join.

    I realize we were talking about slightly different views. You had a scenario in mind where people try to join a specific instance (for example because someone promoted that specific instance somewhere else), I was talking about https://join-lemmy.org/


  • Compare it to e-mail. If you want to switch provider you have to backup and restore your emails if you want to.

    When moving to another mail provider, I can forward mails going to the old address to the new one.

    When moving to another lemmy account (technically creating an unconnected second one), I have no way to be notified of replies to posts or comments I made with the old account.

    There are a couple other use cases where the comparison doesn’t really hold. My hopes are on Moving user profile to a new instance #1985, but it probably won’t be implemented any time soon.