this post was submitted on 12 Jun 2023
504 points (99.8% liked)

Technology

37525 readers
268 users here now

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.

founded 2 years ago
MODERATORS
 

It's been a long journey, but here we arrive. Welcome home.

top 50 comments
sorted by: hot top controversial new old
[–] [email protected] 57 points 1 year ago (3 children)

I think even calling it Lemmy is not the right move. Yeah, Lemmy is the server software running on a bunch of instances. But we also have kbin, and new softwares will pop up and fork and come and go over time. Once we can do some kind of account or community level migration, it won't matter whether you are on Lemmy or kbin or the next great thing. Everything will be federated so it will inter-op beautifully. If an unfriendly instance admin comes along, we can collectively cut and run with minimal interruption.

Thats still a way off from where we are now but the hard step was getting to the Fediverse in the first place. So, welcome to the newcomers among us.

[–] [email protected] 32 points 1 year ago (1 children)

this is the future nerds like me have been imagining since the early 2000's

[–] [email protected] 23 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (15 children)

Laughs in BBS or

Laughs in Newgroups

load more comments (15 replies)
[–] [email protected] 28 points 1 year ago (6 children)

I think the concept of the Fediverse is still really alien to people, even the people who are using it. Everyone is still so used to their centralized platforms, so they still think of the Fediverse in terms of platforms rather than as a whole.

You still hear people say "Mastodon" to mean the microblogging corner of the Fediverse even if they're not actually on Mastodon, and now people say "Lemmy" to mean the link aggregation corner of the Fediverse even if not everyone is actually on Lemmy.

[–] [email protected] 22 points 1 year ago (1 children)

I recently found and like the term "threadiverse" for reddit-like federated software

load more comments (1 replies)
load more comments (5 replies)
[–] [email protected] 13 points 1 year ago (2 children)

undefined> calling it Lemmy is not the right move.

Spankin' new here, so what do I know, but while the semantics might not be completely accurate, that is not an uncommon occurrence. And Lemmy sounds personal, with a bit of a Motorhead edge to it.

Maybe we'll all be called Lemmies web slinging in the Fediverse one day.

load more comments (2 replies)
[–] [email protected] 54 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (3 children)

Tried the official Reddit app today and boy people weren't joking when they say it sucks. I thought it'd just be the usual experience plus some ads but I was totally wrong.

The official app doesn't respect your subreddit subscriptions at all, instead force feeding you feeds of whatever their algorithm thinks will drive maximum engagement just like a shit version of Facebook. The "hot" etc functionality is completely stipped from it entirely.

Guess I'm here to stay on the fediverse now.

[–] [email protected] 25 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (9 children)

What absolutely sucks about this is that I had carefully curated my subscriptions on RIF in order not to exacerbate my dumb mental health issues.

Hell, I've read angry posts about people in recovery from addiction and alcohol saying how they keep seeing ads for beer or gambling and things like that.

It's horrifying!!

load more comments (9 replies)
[–] [email protected] 21 points 1 year ago (2 children)

you don't mention the copious, copious amounts of ads and sponsored contents

wow thanks reddit, you are more and more Facebook-like now, congratulations.

load more comments (2 replies)
load more comments (1 replies)
[–] [email protected] 47 points 1 year ago (2 children)

It's funny to read this article about the death of Digg again:

In reality, Digg changed their business model and pretended that they didn’t. That is something that is unacceptable with communities and won’t be forgotten. Reddit co-founder Alexis Ohanian hit the nail on the head in an open letter to (now former) Digg CEO – Kevin Rose:

“You chose to grow with venture capital and you’ve no doubt (I hope) taken some money off the table in your Series C round. I say this because this new version of digg reeks of VC meddling. It’s cobbling together features from more popular sites and departing from the core of digg, which was to “give the power back to the people.”

https://searchengineland.com/digg-v4-how-to-successfully-kill-a-community-50450>

[–] [email protected] 18 points 1 year ago (1 children)
[–] [email protected] 15 points 1 year ago (2 children)

At least Ohanian is married to Serena, and left reddit 10 years ago. Spez (aka Steve Huffman) is a fucking piece of shit that betrayed both of his co-founders

load more comments (2 replies)
[–] [email protected] 14 points 1 year ago (8 children)

Sadly, this is the only logical conclusion of things that are run for profit. Here's hoping the federated model proves more resistant in the long run.

load more comments (8 replies)
[–] [email protected] 38 points 1 year ago (9 children)

You're missing the precursors:

Email -> Newsgroups -> CGI forums / IRC -> Slashdot... :)

The new Fediverse really is kicking up IRC and newsgroup vibes for this old timer. Its very exciting.

[–] [email protected] 17 points 1 year ago (2 children)

As a really old person, I was thinking today the vibe was unlike anything I've felt since Fidonet ;)

[–] [email protected] 13 points 1 year ago

If we're including those then I think we have gone full circle and are back in the safe waters of protocols

load more comments (7 replies)
[–] [email protected] 29 points 1 year ago (2 children)

for me it was just

reddit --> Lemmy

load more comments (2 replies)
[–] [email protected] 26 points 1 year ago (3 children)

The Fediverse seems like an interesting idea, but I hope it actually holds together.

[–] [email protected] 14 points 1 year ago (3 children)

I imagine as Mastodon and Lemmy pick up more users, we'll see a lot of activity and improvements in the underlying tech of the fediverse. Should be a fun ride, especially since it's in the hands of the community.

load more comments (3 replies)
[–] [email protected] 13 points 1 year ago (6 children)

The bar for being Reddit circa 2010 isn’t that high to be fair, I know expectations have changed but Reddit was down intermittently for years to the point I’m amazed it got the traction it did in hindsight. People talk about Lemmy having tankies on it as though early Reddit didn’t have some even worse unsavoury subs and users too.

load more comments (6 replies)
load more comments (1 replies)
[–] [email protected] 24 points 1 year ago (6 children)

If you still have a Reddit account, unsub all the subreddits that are refusing to participate in a strike.

[–] [email protected] 13 points 1 year ago

Fucking scabs

load more comments (5 replies)
[–] [email protected] 20 points 1 year ago (5 children)

There was del.icio.us as well!

load more comments (5 replies)
[–] [email protected] 20 points 1 year ago (3 children)

I realise that this is unpopular. But personally while I disagree with the decision to charge (exorbitantly) for the api and appalled at the slander hurled at the dev, I think that is an business choice and one more item that I have to disagree and live with.

But I am very excited about the rise of the fediverse. I know that a company will eventually make a decision that I feel very passionately about, but I will be stuck making a difficult choice. With the fediverse, it provides the users with the opportunity to have control. This power of course often comes with various other costs (lack of a dedicated sre or moderation teams, etc). But I expect that over time this will evolve into options where paid offerings will come up that allows for higher QoS where required.

[–] [email protected] 18 points 1 year ago (4 children)

Honestly, if spez hadn't already sold the site to white supremacists, I'd be a lot quicker to defend this.

[–] [email protected] 12 points 1 year ago

The api changes really were about protecting their gold mine of data from ai data models scraping for data. Reddit wants to use that data to create its own models and then replace moderators with those models. The ultimate goal here is to turn the existing dataset into an automoderator on steroids that they could sell anywhere. Trouble is someone else is going to beat them to it.

There was a reason these changes lined up so nicely with Google doing the same thing. Everyone's realizing they've been spouting their gold from firehoses and they're being reactionary and turning them off asap instead of just like, accepting it as a facet of having a public social network.

load more comments (3 replies)
load more comments (2 replies)
[–] [email protected] 20 points 1 year ago (13 children)

So many long forgotten relics and old friends lost to time.

bbs, usenet, irc, aol chat rooms, aim/icq/msn messenger (by the way, anyone remember Trillian?), geocities web-rings, various phpBB forums (shoutout neopages), oekaki drawing boards, livejournal, stumbleupon,

[–] [email protected] 12 points 1 year ago (3 children)

Trillian! I paid for the multi-messenger functionality too!

IRC is not dead. Since rexxit began I have started really searching for programming/data science/tech communities. I have found more than I know what to do with and many have an IRC. I just installed Pidgin on one of my Linix machines. Ha! What a time to be alive.

load more comments (3 replies)
load more comments (12 replies)
[–] [email protected] 19 points 1 year ago (1 children)

It'll be great to see more people showing up on Lemmy.

[–] [email protected] 21 points 1 year ago (7 children)

People are so confused and overwhelmed about the fediverse mechanics though.

Maybe there is room for a product that is an aggregator for aggregators. Like, a centralised service that scrapes and collects all Lemmy instances into one super instance.

[–] [email protected] 16 points 1 year ago (4 children)

Its actually simple. Tell them, its like Email. You have an email account at gmail, but can perfectly fine have email conversation with someone on outllook. Lemmy instance = the same as a web email interface of any email provider. Most people will get their head around that.

[–] [email protected] 10 points 1 year ago (2 children)

As soon as you have to explain the fediverse to someone using analogies my experience is that most people have already given up. They just can’t be bothered to learn something new.

load more comments (2 replies)
load more comments (3 replies)
[–] [email protected] 11 points 1 year ago (7 children)

Pardon my confusion since I'm new to the fediverse as well, but isn't every Lemmy instance like the super instance you are describing? You can access any community on any instance from any other; there are commentors in this thread from beehaw.org, lemmy.world, lemmy.sdf.org, programming.dev, and many others.

load more comments (7 replies)
load more comments (5 replies)
[–] [email protected] 15 points 1 year ago (15 children)

Same fucking journey as you. Reddit was a good run for 10 years, let's see if Lemmy can work.

[–] [email protected] 9 points 1 year ago

Yeah, I almost did it, skipped digg. Seemed like a poor reddit clone at the time. Was nice to be on the right side, but sad to see it fall away. All for RSS, open source and federation though, so its nice. Reddit could have done the same - when they open sourced and allowed voat to be, they could have had a federated framework then - and allowed individual servers to handle their own APIs. They could have charged a license fee or something to commerical users who put ads on and made profits, but open source wins again I guess!

load more comments (14 replies)
[–] [email protected] 14 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Such is life, nothing lasts forever. I could think of a good song for this, but nothing comes to mind yet as Im enjoying watching that Twitch counter of closed subreddits counting up nonstop.

load more comments (1 replies)
[–] [email protected] 13 points 1 year ago

Time for a new start.

Though Lemmy is very new, it’ll be exciting to see it grow over time.

[–] [email protected] 13 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

For me, Slashdot->Digg->Reddit->Kbin

We've moved once, we can move again

[–] [email protected] 12 points 1 year ago (3 children)

Gonna be honest it's kinda weird to me as someone who did just move over that there's a bunch of posts from people who just found the Fediverse claiming it as home while there's people who have been here since it's creation. It's got the implication that this was created as some sort of next jump from Reddit which doesn't really seem to be the case from my perspective.

[–] [email protected] 10 points 1 year ago (9 children)

That feeling makes sense, but I think everyone knows that the Fediverse wasn't created specifically to give them a landing in this event, just like Reddit wasn't created to catch the Digg refugees, etc. More of a "next phase in the evolution of this concept", and while it took a catastrophe, they're ready to consider that it's time to move on now.

The trick is going to be walking that line between preserving what made the Fediverse great and not alienating the newcomers. I think there's room for everyone, though, and really the big advantage of the Fediverse - we don't have to agree to co-exist, and can even co-existing completely separately if needed.

load more comments (9 replies)
[–] [email protected] 9 points 1 year ago (2 children)

I see what you mean to an extent, and I also just moved over, but it's worth remembering that Digg -> Reddit was the same afaik. Like Reddit had been around and established for a decent amount of time before the fall of Digg. (This is second-hand info because I wasn't around at the time)

load more comments (2 replies)
load more comments (1 replies)
[–] [email protected] 12 points 1 year ago (4 children)

Digg -> Reddit -> Lemmy

After experiencing the death of two "power to the people" platforms due to profit-driven VC-backed corporate meddling, here's hoping the third platform is the charm Lemmy & the fediverse.

load more comments (4 replies)
[–] [email protected] 12 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (3 children)

Renegade BBSes -> IRC -> slashdot -> digg -> reddit -> imgur -> discord -> mastadon -> lemmy
with plenty of side quests along the way

load more comments (3 replies)
[–] [email protected] 12 points 1 year ago (6 children)

My only problem is that we are in 2023 and we still need to read a bunch of text. Why can't we have holograms and a sexy AI whispering us the comments?

load more comments (6 replies)
[–] [email protected] 11 points 1 year ago (5 children)

The one true constant for me is 4chan 😅

[–] [email protected] 9 points 1 year ago (4 children)

I kinda grew out of it. It was funny when I was an edgy teenager but it got progressively more cringeworthy as time progressed for me, even though the content may not have changed much.

load more comments (4 replies)
load more comments (4 replies)
[–] [email protected] 10 points 1 year ago

I skipped Fark, but my progression is largely the same. Once in a blue moon, I still visit Slashdot. It's like checking up on an ex to see how they're doing.

[–] [email protected] 9 points 1 year ago

Slashdot -> Fark -> StumbleUpon -> reddit -> Lemmy for me.

load more comments
view more: next ›