Going by comments in the post, the required login is coming in waves, so not all people may notice immediately.
Still, as Reddit is strong-arming its way across, maybe worth signaling to people there that the fediverse may be used without an account, so long as there’s even one instance that implements logged-out view as the protocol allows it?
I don’t have access to my account any longer, possibly VPN ban, though I never tried to recover it so I can only guess why mine is lost, else I’d post myself.
We definitely need the 1.0 release of Lemmy now more than ever… Keep up the good work devs btw!
Yay devs!
While I think there’s some merit to the idea of talking about the fediverse on corporate legacy social media platforms, I think the best and most effective thing we can do is put in extra effort to engage with the fediverse itself, making posts and comments, building up new communities, and so on.
Reddit is no doubt getting worse and more closed off all the time. They treat their users like shit, or at least, like a resource to be harvested for profit. But at the same time, Reddit users will sit around complaining about the platform until the cows come up, but when it comes time to do anything about it (like, for example, go check out the fediverse…) they don’t ever take any action. And this problem isn’t unique to Reddit either, people just love to complain about X on X, complain about Facebook on Facebook, complain about Tiktok on Tiktok, etc. It’s hard to tell how much of that is just performative internet shit vs genuine addiction to their particular algorithm of choice, but in my view it’s a real problem…
In other words, the question is “where we should be spending our energy?”
Should we be spending it on Reddit, trying to convince a bunch of people (who frankly range from ambivalent to straight-up addicted) that Reddit sucks? Or should we spend it here on the fediverse building the communities from the ground up?
Yeah, came to say more or less the same thing. I genuinely believe we’re big enough where we don’t need to tell people we exist. We can spend our time making the fediverse a better place so that anyone coming to look for an alternative to Reddit can look at the fediverse and think “that looks like a cool place”.
I’d guess there is a balance to be struck.
lemmy world is the top result when searching reddit alternatives. I agree the best thing you can do is to make this a good active community, anyone who is done with reddit will have no trouble finding their way here.
I got banned from reddit, and it took me 2 weeks to think to search up “reddit like alternatives.” This is not a problem with disenchantment with Reddit, this a problem with Fediverse visibility.
Would you search up “reddit like alternatives” if you hadn’t been banned? And if someone came on Reddit a few days before you got banned and said to you “hey, this is the Fediverse, come join us”, would you join, or would you say “I have no reason to leave Reddit or to use any other Reddit-like platform”?
I also don’t it’s a “disenchantment” problem. I believe it’s more of a “refusing to change because it takes effort” problem
honestly, in the months leading up to it I may just have. The AI posting ragebait problem was/is getting very untenable over there and it would have been a nice safety valve to come here and gripe about the world without having to dance around corporate boilerplate ass covering “rules” governing what you can and and can’t say. I suppose you’re not without a point though. Hindsight is 20/20 after all.
im never going back to ad supported algorithmic brainwashing. decentralized open source, or nothing for me
Yeah Lemmy is the last place before I just go hang out in parks and be outside
You should stand on a box and shout at people for the irl social media experience
Just holding up images of memes outside
I’d toss a quarter in yer bucket for that.
TODAY’S TOP MEMES AT ELEVEN A FROG WONDERS ABOUT NIGHT SOUP. MORE IN FIVE MINUTES
For a second I thought that “eleven a frog” was a time of day.
ELEVEN A FROG NOW A TIME NEW MEMES IN FIVE
Me neither. But god damn if I just want a thriving community where I can get lost in threads on subtopics of topics that I’ve never heard of in my life.
You gotta share links to people, that’s how it spreads. They open it once wtf website is this? Oh that’s fediverse, what? Dont worry about it. But you send them a couple more memes from here, and then they finally wanna comment on something and they make an account.
make a piefed feed. that way they avoid the politics and tech:
Lemmy needs to grow organically, so communities can form their own cultures, instead of importing it wholesale from the largest forum on the internet.
This period has been regarded as the “golden age” of every successful social media website.
Getting big comes with its own problems. This isn’t an IPO, no one is trying to juice stock price, there’s absolutely zero reason to rush shit.
Why bother, if they want a good community they will seek one out. Growth isn’t necessarily good for this place.
Overgrowth certainly would have some drawbacks, but stagnation probably isn’t good either
I find the fediverse to be quite lively (more than reddit) even if it doesnt have 5 posts a second. Quality > Quantity. Would rather have 1 good post that gets engagement than 10 shitposts nobody ever sees.
goes back to lemmy where every 10th post is a shitpost about beans
deleted by creator
Bump. (he he he) :p
I’d say the fediverse is somewhat protected against the drawbacks of growth in a way Reddit isn’t.
As long as instance owners can handle the traffic, yes.
eh, kinda? Decentralisation means one instance can learn from the failures of another, and there’s bo one thing that can bring the entire Fediverse down. But that’s a worst case scenario.
What I fear is this: A spike of interest in the fediverse leads to many instances being overwhelmed, and the general newbie experience quickly turns many people away, leading to lots of people leaving with a sour taste. In the meantime, instances successfully adapt and new ones spring up, but most users aren’t coming back.
Imo that’s a more realistic scenario than some grandiose failure, and you could say it’s already happened several times.
A spike of interest in the fediverse leads to many instances being overwhelmed
they could just disable signups when they get too many users, or maybe use an invite system to limit signups
Blåhaj has that, works pretty well
Well yeah, that’s what being overwhelmed means
It’d be a good way to get people to spread out and make sure they don’t all join the same instance
we at least need to make sure we don’t shrink, which can sneak up on you and be difficult to stop, better to maintain some growth
I agree, make the place too big and it will become unmanageable the same way it went for reddit.
Moved over here after I kept getting a popup I couldn’t close pushing their app.
Reddit is finally dead to me. Good riddance.
I’m so sick of everybody and their dog trying to strongarm me into using their app.
It’s always worth pushing for the fediverse.
Fun fact, safereddit.com still works perfectly fine as a frontend in my experience! (not the only one out there, just an instance of redlib If you need to bypass the login requirement just add “safe” before “reddit” in the URL and it should let you in :)
I’ve been wondering about this- how are redlib sites still working if the authwall is being made more restrictive?
As far as I’m aware, Redlib gets around blocks in two ways. The partially implemented client-side blocks I presume are by just stripping the code (e.g. seeing the post but it’s greyed out and has a popup saying “sign in” in front of it, or when your whole screen is a login page but all the actual content was already loaded in the background, deleting that code means you can read the post just fine)
And the rest is just tricking Reddit by mimicking the request format & behavior of the Android Reddit app, which tricks Reddit into believing the user is supposed to be allowed access or shouldn’t be rate limited, because obviously anybody using the app is a real signed-in user… I guess? (this information is from their GitHub page’s README but I’m not sure exactly how all this works under the hood)
No, just no. Just stay off reddit lmao, not trying to be harsh or whatever but it’s a very simple answer.
there will definitely be some users over there that discover the fediverse and join us, there will also be some that won’t. And we don’t want them all to come, ghislane maxwell can stay on reddit forever from her country club prison computer, for example.
So just keep doing whatever it is you’re doing to contribute to the fediverse, either by being a powermod or just a lurker, and as the fediverse grows and adapts it will attract those it should attract.
Going back and contributing to a website owned by literal trump funders just seems like a complete nonstarter to me.
Idk, tell your IRL friends, discord friends whoever, sure, i just don’t think posting on reddit is the answer to doing anything positive for the fediverse.
No, just no. Just stay off reddit lmao, not trying to be harsh or whatever but it’s a very simple answer.
I second that!
It’s a similar situation with Youtube. People keep complaining about the enshittification, yet they keep giving their audience to the Google platform. People could argue “Oh, nah, I use Invidious/yt-dlp/Grayjay/etc, I don’t give Youtube my clicks” and this is a very naive take, because in the end of the day Indivious/yt-dlp/etc still rely on Youtube, and these peple are relying on content maintained by Youtube.
I myself have been boycotting Youtube for two years and counting, and I never looked back.
Yes, Youtube and Reddit have gazillions of content. Yes, we’re often unable to find said content anywhere else. Yes, life can become more hard if we refrain from said content. But while we keep seeking their content (even, and especially, through circumvented manners), they will keep enshittifying because they know they have what the complaining people are ultimately seeking and they know people are seeking it so badly. Once we finally stop, maybe, just maybe, situation would reverse and Youtube and Reddit will be the ones seeking us so badly.
Oh she has an unbanned account over there I’m sure
Being over here for about a month I’m finding being kicked out of Reddit isn’t that rare
I actually just got the “You used old.reddit.com you need to log in to view” and decided to see if any more people had adopted Lemmy. It’s more active than it was last time I was here, but probably still not active enough to move most casuals.
I’ll probably come back for the next couple days and re-build my communities, and see if it can keep my attention, but I’m not holding my breathe.
It’s unfortunate that Mastodon has also struggled, I’m glad Bluesky exists as an alternative but it would be nice to see federation more widely adopted by the masses. Maybe in time, with constant growth.
I saw the r/FauxMoi post today about the subreddit being marked sensitive information and de-prioritized by the algorithm and it’s clear enshittification is in full swing, so it’s just a matter of time before Reddit is mostly abandoned.
This is kind of my problem here. There’s a lot of hobby based communities in Reddit that hasn’t made the move and pretty dead over here so it’s what keeps dragging me back.
But gah, the new style is completely unreadable to me.
Mastodon has a decent usercount, but I really wish they would at least put a minimal effort into working with the Threadiverse better. It would be a huge improvement if they just made it so following a group/community didn’t put all of the comments on your main feed. Also rendering the contents of Threadiverse posts instead of just giving you the title and link to it.
https://github.com/mastodon/mastodon/issues/17008
https://github.com/mastodon/mastodon/issues/139
Mastodon seems to really not care about any other platforms aside from themselves.
Maybe some other microblogging platform will take over some day, like Catodon.
Any pushing you can do is probably not going to help. Last time it was some API shit that actually generated a small amount of outrage enough to move a small amount of people. Apathy, habit and lock-in will tend to defeat that, so unless this gets people at least as pissed as whatever the API thing was, I wouldn’t hold my breath.
Also, y’know, reddit… maybe it’s just as well.
With honestly a large number of general web searches being reddit results on virtually any topic, I think the need for login will gradually frustrate many into seeking out the fediverse. It could take a long time, though. It also may not have a huge effect passively, because there is a high chance that the information they want isn’t here.
Meh, leave them be, if people are interested they will find Fediverse.
Diffusion of innovation theory might apply here
Good thing piefed.social is following in reddits footsteps! Oh wait that’s really bad
If someone sees an instance requiring an account to do anything on they’ll think anything using that software will require one.
Also almost like the point isn’t about if you can host it yourself or there are other instances when the main dev is literally doing what everyone is angry reddit is doing 🤔
I’m out of the loop. What are they doing…?
CCP-style shadow profiling, among other things.
Trying to recreate a worse version of reddit karma and locking their instance behind a login page/requiring an account to view anything
I just opened piefed.social in a private window and it works fine
Was not like that yesterday
This may be unpopular to say here, but the fediverse needs to be less toxic for the average user. I’m probably going to be downvoted to hell for this, but here goes: the whole tesseract situation was a clusterfuck and the dev is a jackass, but in one regard he is right - there is a toxicity problem. I mean, let’s look at it:
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Lemmy’s main dev is what many would refer to as a tankie. He regularly spreads misinformation, supporting fascist governments, so long as they claim to be socialist or communist - and don’t belong to the west. Anything the West does is, by definition, evil.
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Lemmy’s flagship instance is lemmy.ml. An instance where many communities have a “be nice” rule, but say anything against the (similarly aligned) group think and you’ll be ridiculed, insulted, and banned. Meanwhile, some pretty insane calls for violence stay up. And lemmy.ml isn’t even the worst in that corner of the fediverse.
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There are many other instances that aren’t great, either. Wander into an instance and accidentally say something absolutely factual that someone doesn’t like - ban, because some thin skinned mod sees it as derogatory. Remember the whole dragonfucker saga? Yeah, that’s very off-putting to your average user.
Look, I’m no stranger to Reddit group think, I’ve had it turn on me, and trust me, it’s no fun. Hell, I’ve had it on Facebook back when that was still a thing (yeah, I’m dating myself here). But it was nothing on what I’ve seen on here. I’ve been able to avoid it here (or, sometimes I’ve purposefully wandered into it in an attempt to disrupt an echo chamber, but then I knew exactly what I was getting into and expected as much), but what I saw happening to others - holy shit. I mean, to be fair, the instance I’m on is an instance that very rarely defederates, which I like because I like seeing different viewpoints including ones with which I vehemently disagree with (although the viewpoints are very unbalanced, that does have to be said). But it’s a hell of a lot more fun to not have to keep your guard up all the time.
So, you might argue, be careful which instance you chose. OK, so I chose an instance like Lemmy.world, which as far as Lemmy goes, is definitely more on the normal side of things. But then, who are they federated with? The next rabbit hole. And how do you know which ones have less crazies? Experience. And as a saying goes, experience is what you needed just before you got it. Then many people suggest putting together blocklist and what not. Another rabbit hole. Put briefly: it involves work, a lot of it. People aren’t on Reddit to work (for the most part), they’re there to have fun. If you need to put in so much work, at some point it’s not fun anymore. And that’s what’s off-putting for the typical user.
What can be done to make it more palatable for normal users? I honestly don’t know. I see it as a chicken and egg problem. We need more “normal” people to drown out the crazies, but then the “normal” people won’t come because of the crazies. Maybe Piefed is better in that regard - although I’ve heard there were/are?tesseract-style problems there, as well - I just haven’t had the nerve to go down yet another rabbit hole to figure out what’s actually going on. Which brings us back to square one - that’s already gone way, way too far for the average user. And I can’t exactly blame them. I’m “only” here because I care about open source and decentralisation. And I insist on staying here on matter of principle. But I can’t in good faith recommend it to anyone I know IRL.
Anyway, sorry for the long rant. Maybe someone has some better ideas.
I believe Lemmy has the potential for a wider range of discussion and debate than Reddit, or any other social media platform I’ve been on, simply because of the defederated & community-based system. The issue, as you describe, seems to be saying the wrong thing in the wrong place, which, to be honest, is similar to the real world. There are a lot of topics people probably shouldn’t talk about in public, but it’s normally fine for them to talk about in their chosen groups/community. Lemmy just kind of brings these groups and communities closer together, igniting more discussion, but simultaneously causing issues you describe.
For example, you can’t walk up to a group of homosexuals and try to convince them they shouldn’t be gay. You can discuss topics related to LGBT+ rights of course, but there are definitely off-limit discussions in that group, same as any other group. I think it’s a matter of paying attention to where you are in the Fediverse and who may be reading your response before blurting out what’s on your mind.
On the comment about tessaract; I cannot agree on the idea that the dev of tessaract was “right” about toxicity. Even if he was, he was in no place to take it into his own hands to address (especially in a secretive way). Lemmy is a community-based platform and we need to figure that stuff out as a community. We don’t have a corporate-level moderation team ensuring the platform is safe for those under 18, and we don’t have anyone enforcing political views in any way other than in specific communities (who have every right to enforce their chosen views). Just as some say we wouldn’t need police if we had strong communities, the same goes here, strong communities are the key. If you see a lot of toxicity where you browse, maybe your chosen community just isn’t a healthy one.
I believe in reality, the kneejerk reddit mod multiban just transitioned seamlessly into fediverse multibans and defederations - I know, who could’ve foreseen such shit. Some defederation happened for good reasons, but I’ve been cluster banned from a bunch of communities I never even been in as a “lemmy.world zionist”, apparently, and that last bit is news to me at least. People bring their sad, incredibly petty bullshit with them.
People here are no fonder of “alternate viewpoints” than on reddit, you can tell the hivemind kicking in just from the person who pointed out a couple of blatantly realistic issues 8 seconds ago.
People need to change their ideas about what the fedi/threadiverse is in relation to social media. It is an international forum of everything.
The lemmy.ml situation is heavily offset by instances that either limit them or block them enitrely, as well as Piefed acting as a direct foil.
The *iverse cannot be unified entirely. Lemmy/Piefed/Mastodon and Pixelfed should be seen as a platform unto themselves where one may find likeminded people. It is not tailored to anyone’s particular personal taste, and is open to anyone of literally any personal taste.
Lemmy does have a bit of a reputation for being the Fight Club of the fediverse… which is tbh, kinda fair but it kinda comes with the territory - literally. We’re all here and we aren’t all going to agree.
Speaking as a ln anarchist/council communist… There are some good instances and I simply don’t see the bad ones if I’m on an instance acc with good defaults.
I don’t view it as problematic if people are put off by Lemmy holding more normal, less capitalist and less reactionary views.
That said, in terms of preference, I’ll pick free communist groups over tankies and liberals (I decline to ever consider fascists an option at all).
In these dark times I’m not quite sure whether we can afford to lose what allies we have. But we do need to mold what can be sympathetic to our progressive and left-wing causes.
Piefed is problematic for me - although it has a lot of modern features, I oppose the karma system there. I prefer a system that cannot be abused by bots.
I don’t remember the dragonfucker saga. What was that about?
There’s an account that insisted people address them as that, because that was their username.
Then they had a handful of accounts named some version of “dragon” who they would borderline roleplay fuck in random communities.
It was really weird.
Like, no judgement if you’re into that. The ick was they seemed to enjoy doing it in front of people to make them uncomfortable, and people that get off on violating consent like that, are going to be giant trolls about it. That account even created their own instance (pretty sure they ban anyone else that comments or creates an account) just so they could get onto the admin comms and cause drama.
Like, Ive hooked up with a woman who (at least at the time) claimed to honestly believe she was a dragon. So technically I’m a dragon fucker too, I just don’t throw it in everyone’s faces unless it comes up organically
I’m also very aware that she wasn’t actually a dragon, and was most likely just trying to psych out of the military.
There’s a difference between advocating for a “set the world on fire” attitude, and a “we must take up arms to defend our continued existence” attitude. I think we are well past the point where we should be pulling our punches on fascist ideology. Putting flowers in the gun barrels of the oppressors just means there’ll be pollen on the bullets. I’d absolutely LOVE for there to be a peaceful solution*, but let’s be real: we’ve seen this horror movie before. We know what’s around that dark corner. I’d much rather go on the offensive and nip this shit in the bud.
(*and I hope there’s still time to have one, let me be clear)
What can be done to make it more palatable for normal users?
Make a piefed feed and advertise it. that way newbies avoid the politics and tech. ex:
I agree with you.
I sought out lemmy first during the reddit API closure saga. I started using it less when the quality started to decline to to corporatization and enshittification. Requiring logins to view content is the last straw that kicked me off reddit.
The most important lesson this move to lemmy has taught me: if we’re being served trash content, we can’t blame “the algorithm”. The basis of the fault lies with the users. Lemmy has been absolutely no short of ragebait, engagement bait, group think, and crazies.
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They instaban people who talk about Lemmy. It’s useless.
I’m still not banned yet
