this post was submitted on 09 Jun 2023
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Lemmy
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Everything about Lemmy; bugs, gripes, praises, and advocacy.
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I first saw lemmy a few months ago, but forgot about it. The recent Reddit events have sparked interest again, and I am feeling adventurous. Major Social media platforms seem to collapse / mess up one after the other now, and the concept behind federation is very intriguing (especially that part that even different applications can communicate with each other thanks to ActivityPub).
Same, heard about lemmy, matrix and mastodon before, but never tried to figure it out before the current death of Reddit.
I doubt Reddit will really die though. When Musk got Twitter, many fleed to Mastodon, but over time, many returned back to Twitter (?). Digg did fail though, but I don't know when that happened, probably wasn't really in the internet at that time yet.
The hardest thing for me was finding the "right" instance to register in, and that is probably the challenge for most people. Going back to the "popular topics" thing, when bigger communities about a certain thing, or entire instances about that thing exist, people might just register there.
My current guess is that you either pick a general-purpose instance or a specific instance of your interest, if it exists.
I'm exaggerating a bit, I think Lemmy still is "too complicated" for a lot of Reddit users, and that will keep Reddit alive. It'll be difficult for users to stop using reddit when they can't find a equivalent super obscure community on Lemmy.
I'll probably end up lurking on reddit for a while still..
I've been going through teddit and libreddit for a while now, but i don't know if they will survive. The next option would be old.reddit.
I need to wrap my head around the searching. For example, I don't know if a Community "Geometry Dash" exists somewhere in the Lemmy fediverse or if I just cannot find it. On the other hand, I could create one? But if so, where? Would it fit onto lemmy.world? If I understood right, I can create communities on lemmy.world only anyways.
I agree, the hardest part for me was getting started.
“I like news - I’ll just register on the news Lemmy!” Ah. Sweet summer child.
Luckily I stumbled across my current instance and the creator seemed friendly and like a decent human being. But I doubt many casual Redditors will have the same patience to figure it out.
abuse of the user is pretty much baked into every corporate owned, centralized service. I mean, it literally creates an abusive power dynamic. walking away is often the only option and, without alternatives, that can be difficult.
Federated social is important because it offers and alternative that breaks the cycle of abusive and empowers the content creators and consumers again.
my apologies for using possible trigger words and concepts above, but I am so sick and tired of the same cycle time after time. we need this change.
Another problem I see is monopolization. If there is only one platform with no competition, there is no incentive to innovate. Good example is YouTube. No one can just afford tbps of bandwidth and exa or even zettabytes of storage, so federation (PeerTube) is a way to balance and distribute the load over many individual servers/nodes. (PeerTube also uses a p2p streaming mechanism to reduce strain on the server)
exactly. the internet was historically much more decentralized. laziness, ignorance and apathy got us to the centralized mess we are in today.
we (the unwashed masses of the world) cant directly compete on raw dedicated bandwidth and storage, but we can complete on quality and raw decentralized accessibility. the decentralization helps to mitigate the centralized storage and bandwidth advantages of the big players.
with enough federated instances, we will have a massively redundent medium through which like minded users can congregate and share ideas in a federated and self organizing way. the possibilities are pretty damn tantalizing.
Decentralisation is the reason why the internet was invented, to keep communication lines up in a nuclear war
indeed. DARPA for the wi... err...
Thank you very much!
Wow, there's so many new things to play with! Never heard of PeerTube before, but excited about the idea of a federated YouTube challenger!
And it looks like there's no shorts on PT? Awesome!
Google might start messing up the alternate frontend Invidious too (the exception
The video returned by YouTube isn't the requested one. (WEB client) (VideoNotAvailableException)started appearing, which is still fixable though), which is a nice option to view yt without the clutter, especially when not logged in.In case you know the media player
mpv, you can pass yt links directly into it and view just the video through it. You need to haveyt-dlpinstalled for this. Then you can type$ mpv 'https://youtube.com/watch?v=....'This is more for Linux though, idk how it is for Windows
YT has been playing games with 3rd party viewers forever. the number of times 3rd party viewers have had to rush out new builds to circumvent the latest YT breakage is disheartening.
At some point google will permanently wall off its garden to trap its users. what then, my friend?
Then one must either resort to the official youtube frontend (which is still bearable as long as content blockers work normally, I could not imagine getting spammed with ads) or using other ways of watching like PeerTube. Circumvention should always be possible in a way though as long as Google doesn't employ DRM on YouTube videos.
but, in a better world, circumvention should never be needed. with peertube, lemmy, mastodon, et al. there is no concept of circumvention - there is nothing to circumvent. thats the end goal here, at least for me (and I hope for others as well)
Yeah, and in the Open Source nature of the fediverse applications alternate frontends will also be able to thrive. (though the main fediverse app frontends come less cluttered / cleaner out of the box)