I was with Reddit for 12 years and bounced between Rif and Apollo, I am sad I am losing both
Think of it as fortuitous timing. Reddit is the old internet. Lemmy is the new world. You are one of its early movers. Come fill this place.
Hehe, the actual “old internet” resembles the fediverse of today, it’s what we thought the internet was supposed to be back then. Once corporations found the internet, we got the bullshit we have today.
I’m still a little concerned what happens once instances start getting real traffic though.
Same, but I am optimistic that decentralization will lead to better options for dealing with the problems as they happen.
Might be unpolished, but at least it is ours.
More instances will need to spin up. People aren’t used to having choice so it’ll confuse them at first. Same thing with Linux distributions, people aren’t used to having choice so they don’t know how to go about comparing what’s on offer. They’ll accept making choices at the food market, but are too confused when it comes to OS’s and social media, lol.
It’s bold of you to assume that I can handle choices at the food market. I am paralyzed by the prospect of choosing between twelve different kinds of sandwich bread. [/s… mostly]
My issue with picking an instance was less that it was confusing and more that I could tell there was going to be a certain amount of internal culture in any instance I picked, and I didn’t know how to interpret that until I spent some time browsing. Everyone says it doesn’t matter if you follow/participate in your local communities, which is true, but it’s still nice when you can.
Too true.
On the plus side, many spurned app-developers seem to be checking out Lemmy and kbin as well.
History repeats itself. The fediverse is going to go downhill too once it gets big enough for corporations to notice it. Enjoy it while it lasts.
Except the code is open source, no matter how many corps invade the Fediverse, there will always be an option.
Sure, but it’ll be the same story all over again. The big platform will be ruined and the alternative option will be smaller and therefore not as good (since user base directly contributes to quality when it comes to community-based platforms; it’s the users who post all the content, so fewer users = less content).
There’s something to be said for smaller communities, if you are looking for connection rather than just raw content. If you really prefer a larger community, that’s fair, but I don’t think everyone is going to feel the need to hop onto a commercial instance just because it’s bigger. I used to like some really tiny forums back in the day, and I don’t think they would have been better if they had been bigger. They were fine just as they were.
Eh, don’t be so sure.
Email is often drawn as something similar to the fediverse. … but if you’ve ever tried to run a small Mailserver, you’ll quickly find that “the big corps” have created a walled garden that’ll keep the “small fish” out.
It’s all based on what the big players view as your “reputation”. This is based on proprietary metrics (usually how many emails you send), but your reputation will determine if the email is delivered or not.
You can find more information here.
… but the point is that one big corps consolidate and reach the size (in terms of traffic/content) like Hotmail, Gmail, yahoo, etc - they will not hesitate to squeeze out the smaller fediverse fish to force them into paying to use the bigger pond.
Sadly … this is just business as usual.
And users will facilitate that process by glomming on to certain instances thinking that it matters to which they belong
Well if instances keep defederating each other, it does matter. Plus there’s the question of stability. Sure, you could make your account on some tiny niche instance, but what if the guy running it decides he’s had enough and terminates it? What happens to your account, your post history?
If you care about your account and your post history, you’re free to run you own instance. People are also working on mechanisms to sync community subscriptions between accounts, which would at least help the UX navigating multiple accounts. Lemmy also has an API that I’m sure users will be looking to create services to backup your content as well, if something like that doesn’t already exist.
As for defederation, I’m only aware of these major reasons and all of them are legitimate:
- Nazis
- NSFL/CP
- Sourcing illegal content (illegal from the defederating hosts side, and this really lends to the above two as well)
- Growing pains as Lemmy explodes with new users
The only thing a giant corporation could do is muddy the waters, but people who care about the future of Lemmy are working to prevent that https://wedistribute.org/2023/06/fedipact-blocking-meta/
I’ve been pondering this very reason. It’s compelling for me to make my own instance so I have my own little slice of fediverse to call my own, and have access to the greater picture of it too.
JOIN MY WEBRING!
Maybe the Fediverse’s logo should be a little animated gif a of a construction worker.
This page best view with: Netscape Navigator 3.0!
“Webring”… good lord, that takes me back. :)
We should call the fediverse Webrings 2.0
“Old Internet” - I like it!
The old internet was great. I had a lot of fun with the local bbs, irc, and telnet talkers. It was a simpler time.
Reddit became part of the shitty second season / crappy sequel era of the internet.
Also, can we not call the fediverse “Lemmy”? It’s.a disservice to what we all are vying for here and sets us up to land right back into the same bullshit.
Reddit is the old internet.
Ehhh.
I’d timeline it something like this:
Interaction was on non-Web-based systems, mostly distributed
This was mostly pre-2000s and tended to go into decline in the 1990s or 2000s as Web-based platforms focusing on ease of use picked up users. Many of these were distributed.
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Usenet (decline as a discussion forum dating to maybe late 1990s, though lots of pirated information is still transferred via it)
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IRC, peaking around 2003 according to WP
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Email (peaked later, in 2009, according to WP. Obviously still pretty healthy compared to the above two.
People tend to shift towards interacting with each other on large websites; these tend to later acquire mobile apps to cater to smartphone users.
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Facebook
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YouTube
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Twitter
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Reddit (though a fair number of third-party clients did exist)
If the Fediverse manages to pick up a lot of people, it’s probably somewhat-closer to the first phase.
deleted by creator
IRC was great back then. The other day I jumped on Undernet because I was feeling nostalgic. It’s still running but didn’t have much activity. The fact that it still exists made me smile.
Yeah, I did more-or-less the same on each of the Big Three networks. Not that they’re Reddit alternatives, but I thought that I’d at least take another look. They are still churning away, but the userbase is far smaller than it used to be.
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Old, Centralised Internet
Unrelated, but love the username, even though I never finished the series.
I need like a crash course on how this all works. I was so used to subreddits and I’m finding myself lost. I’d love to be a pilot of gardening/brewing/MTG subreddit style thing here but again, I need a crash course
15 years on reddit for me. Exclusively old.reddit.com and apollo for most of that. That site is dead to me now.
I just feel bad for the developer. Years spent developing an app for it to be worthless. That has got to be deflating.
Depends how you define ‘worthless’. In the case of Apollo, it certainly wasn’t financially worthless for him. And just to be clear, I have no issue with a quality app developer making money doing what they do.
I mean, actual take-home-pay aside from running Apollo, I have no doubt that Christian will be head-hunted like all hell from so many tech companies. I bet his future is solid gold after this. =)
I still feel bad for them. They created SO MUCH value for reddit, only to be kicked in the teeth.
Me too. RIP two best apps. Reddit is dead to me.
Well the good news is that the RIF dev is working on an app for Tildes. So god-willing at least it will stick exist in some form.
tildes is invite only right now though.
You can still do everything except upvote/down vote and if Tildes gets enough traction will move to non invite in the future
Does anyone have an invite?
Hopefully Tildes stops the invite only thing.
I understand it for them. They’re a slower, more mature forum - they don’t want to be Reddit. I’ve got an account there and I enjoy my time there, but I’ve been using Kbin instead of Reddit more often.
It’s probably just so they can build up a fanbase then open once they have enough high-quality users. I guess it’s to stop an Eternal September situation.
I’m genuinely sad. Not to be dramatic, but there were times where Reddit saved my life. Seeing the number of comments and posts I had made while I was scrubbing my account hit me harder than I thought it would.
but there were times where Reddit saved my life.
Yep, if it weren’t for their stopsmoking sub, I’d probably be dead today.
This was my sentiment two weeks ago, and I made an “is anyone else sad?” post.
It eventually devolved into a “ding ding, the witch is dead!” situation!
For me, it was JoeyforReddit on Android. What an excellent app! I was able to read at length because I could select my own font, sizes and color. It made for very easy reading on my eyes.
I love being here but am hoping for apps for these new socials. I cannot do the sans serif fonts without eye pain. I think the reading flow isn’t smooth. So improvements needed and will be well received.
Nice to see you all here.
It’s sad, but it seems to me you adapted to the fediverse, I see you on my frontpage every time I check it, great content, good job!
Thanks!
Yep. Sucks.
I was about to make a post like this. Trying to explain this whole situation to someone this morning, and found myself feeling way more feelings than I expected to feel over losing an app.
But it’s more than an app. For the last 7 years, it’s where my nerds hang out. It’s where I could get actual humans responding to weird questions.
It’s also the place where I often got shouted down and told in many ways that I’m stupid.
I expected these two things to balance each other out, but no. I’m sad to lose Reddit, upset that the reason is greed, and a little apprehensive about relying on Kbin for all my forum contend from now on. It’s been great here so far, but I’m only just getting started.
Artemis and Memmy are both Apollo inspired
I was always an old.reddit.com user on both desktop and Android so I didn’t think the loss of the apps would make too much difference to me.
Yeesh was I wrong; you can already see the falloff in content over there now.
And I am really sick of seeing John Oliver pics.
@Girlparts I’m running PowerDelete Suite right now and it is very bittersweet for me. 12 years of heavy participation, poof, gone like dry leaves in the breeze.
I felt this, but as the end of the month drew nearer and I adjusted to the idea of losing Reddit more, it has actually felt like a really cathartic process for me. Using PowerDeleteSuite on my profile, creating a new one here, searching for new communities within it. I honestly think this change will be a net positive for me personally. Reddit was absolutely swamped in noise and low quality content, it had been for years. A communal shift into a new world, that holds different values at the forefront, and by default (smaller, federated communities) content quality should improve. It reminds me a little of the old message board days.
I’m just waiting on a kbin app that goes at least some way to being as good an experience as Apollo was, as I’m mostly a mobile user.
Although reddit apps are dieing, many great apps for lemmy have popped up or are being worked on.
