Keep in mind this is not "lemmy vs reddit". Browsing through this index [1] you see moderators and users migrate also to platforms like kbin, discord, discourse and matrix
I didn't even know about kbin [2] but it seems like another solid fediverse presence. This multiplicity of platforms (ruby, php, rust, python, go, elixir, you name it) that all adhere to a protocol is intrinsic to this "movement" [3] and it is what makes it vaguely... inspiring. Echoes of an earlier, more optimistic time.
https://lemmyverse.net/ is also a good place for finding either Lemmy instances or communities while on https://fediverse.party/ you can find links to the most important resources regarding the main platforms on the fediverse.
A bit off topic, but why does it seem like not a single page on this site uses caching of any sort?
Every time it’s brought up and I click into it I’m met with minute(s) long loading screens. Surely they aren’t pulling all of these stats from every node every single page load right?
I don’t think this is off topic, because this is a common theme across all of Lemmy. Not necessarily no caching, but abysmal performance across the board.
As much as I want the project to succeed it’s unusable currently, and with more Reddit communities coming back from the blackout, their opportunity to claim the user base in the long run is already passed.
The stats over the last month are impressive (if you can get them to load), but it’s going to be a flash in the pan if they can’t make the website function, and I fear the ship has already left the dock.
Their performance has always been hit and more often miss. I was a fairly heavy user, a lot less now. From the hilariously shite search results, to their alien equivalent of the fail whale showing up a few times a month at least. Sometimes a refresh resolves, sometimes doing something else and then coming back later resolves it.
Don't get me started on the new UI, or how the old less awful UI loves to drag me back into the new extra shit one.
I don't know if I'm being more demanding, or extra pissy, or what. Is this not most people's experience of Reddit?
And they've had millions of dollars and nearly two decades to unfuck it. I still remember the /r/bestof post (linking to /r/askreddit) that taught us "502, it went through; 504, try once more." because commenting was occasionally a total dice roll and the error messages were obtuse.
If I have to eat some lag in the early days of Lemmy or wherever, so be it. I'm fed up with Reddit's shit, I'll try someone else's.
Exactly! And also keep in mind that all of this is open source created by volunteers like you and me in their free time. Imagine you and me working on a side project like this during weekends. We will probably be focusing on implementing the protocol right, fixing all those rendering and mundane CSS issues, making sure the login and session management does not have security holes. Essentially get all the functional stuff right. And one day Reddit makes some crazy announcement which drives hoardes of people to our little project. Pretty sure we'll not be prepared enough to deal with scaling issues due to the sudden influx of new users.
Its a matter of setting the expectation of involvement.
This isn't two people working on it on the weekend as a hobby project that got too much attention during an unforeseen event.
Rather, it is two people who worked on it as a full time job (no other sources of income) from grants for three years (with funding running out this year).
For a rough estimate, one would expect about 10,000 hours have been put into the project (2 people, 2000 hours a year, 2.5 years).
It is less of a hobby project than Minecraft was in 2012.
All of what you’re saying is correct but so is what the OP said.
It’s very difficult for a volunteer run operation to scale up at short notice. The same time Lemmy has to if it wants to capture disaffected Reddit users.
Reddit is still in the process of making bad moves I think; unless I missed something and they announced a reversal of the API pricing changes?
Lemmy should grow at a sustainable pace. The population boom from the blackouts is transient. As the moderators on Reddit get less enthusiastic about doing free work for a company that clearly doesn’t like them and will happily take away their tools, some will give up. The communities there will get less well taken care of, eventually users will notice, and there should be a slow trickle out. That’s the sustainable stream Lemmy should try to capture.
Or none of this will happen and Reddit will go back to normal, in which case fine, who cares, right?
I feel like the population boom was enough to enable a few communities to settle in Lemmy and now they’ll grow more organically. So far I’m enjoying the quality of posts there, it’s definitely a situation where quality over quantity makes sense.
honestly strikes me as a HN sorta thing where there is a small group of motivated and technically savvy types. noise-to-signal ratio is pretty good, and overt or covert 'hailcoporate' sorta stuff is not especially common.
Don't have a link now but as I understand it the main problem is they were using websockets and it didn't scale to so many users. So they're switching to rest api calls and that should fix a lot of the issues. But it's a pretty big switch they've been working hard on.
Note that what amounts to a single page app with all the links rendered after fetching some data from a service isn't going to be something that can be indexed by a search engine.
A google search for site:lemmy.ml with it rendered this way will never result in any data.
Part of the value that people have ascribed to Reddit is being able to do searches for a product review and limit it to just pages served by reddit. Lemmy appears to be ephemeral and not searchable.
Choosing a random Lemmy instance, I see server rendered content and <a href> links that are followable. Searching for 'site:<instance domain>' on Google turns up plenty of results, very much identical to what I see when searching for 'site:reddit.com'. Google seems to have no trouble indexing the site.
I expect you won't see results on Google, save for when you explicitly ask for the site, because there isn't much in the way of reputation. You are highly unlikely to see my personal blog, which is just plain old boring as it gets HTML, come up in search results for the same reason.
I've experienced that too for sure, but https://lemmy.world/ has been pretty responsive for me.
Keep in mind this is a little different than other social networks - there isn't a single centralized server so if you hit the software on a server that's underpowered or not configured properly, you'll get a very different experience.
> For the past three years dessalines and I have been funded to work on Lemmy full-time by generous support from the NLnet foundation. These donations are paid out when we implement certain new features. But now we are busy answering questions, reviewing pull requests and urgentlyfixing problems. That means we are unable to work on the milestones agreed with NLnet, and won’t receive payments from them. We are increasingly reliant on user donations to pay our bills. These donations currently add up to 1500 Euros per month, which is not even enough to pay minimum wage for the two of us. Hopefully more users can consider donating, so that we can put our full attention to making Lemmy better for everyone, and possibly add more developers to our worker co-op in the future.
It's not pulling stats remotely every request, but probably hitting the database with a dozen queries. Caching and optimization is not often a priority in this space.
Odd. I think it might be something else. I've been lurking Lemmy as I decide what to do about reddit and have not noticed any unusual loading times. The page linked to above takes two seconds to load (the spinny things stop turning and the data is given) for me. Literally, a 1-1000, 2-1000 and it's up...
I keep giving lemmy a try and I couldn't figure out what was bugging so much about browsing it. I finally realized I'm only seeing about 7 posts per window on lemmy as opposed to 12 on reddit. And now I'm realizing the content box is only 800px wide so comments feel really constrained. This seems like a weird style choice?
This is also one of the main reasons I hate using Signal. It's a tiny css change, but seeing only 4 chats and 6 messages per screen is just way less usable than double the amount on Telegram or Wire.
For websites, though, it's a lot easier to add custom css. If that's your main gripe, you're one browser extension away from a fix
I mean... it is. A few weeks ago the user base was very small and there was very little activity on Github (bug reports, feature requests, additional developers). Now there is a flourishing community and a lot of pull requests from new developers, leading to many smaller and bigger improvements.
The timing could've been better as the Lemmy devs were in the middle of a bigger refactoring (getting rid of websockets), which hindered development and the release of new versions. But I for once are happy with how active the development is.
Any platform will experience growing pains when their userbase increases dramatically. Even Reddit was frequently crashing when it acquired Digg's users, and still does from time to time.
I for one I'm very glad federated platforms are starting to pick up steam, and willing to weather the glitches. It feels like a return to the old Internet, where users had the control instead of a handful of megacorporations and investors/stockholders.
The reality in 2023 is all software is unbaked software. All software is buggy, frustrating, and almost-broken to the point of almost-unusable. There is simply nothing else, and we all navigate through this dystopic universe by finding software that are tolerably frustrating for each of us. The threshold is different for everyone. Reddit is buggy as hell and experiences downtime most weeks. I'm sure Lemmy has bugs too, but it's all about whether the trade-off makes sense for a critical mass of people. We will see.
I think the important thing is the trajectory. Is it getting better over time, or worse? It seems like a lot of software eventually hits a peak and starts a long, slow decline -- especially internet services and social media platforms.
I read that bug was fixed recently, at least on lemmy.world. They accidentally left federation debugging on, so federating the post was happening in the foreground instead of the background, so your post probably succeeded and you were waiting for federation of the message to complete.
I am too, but I am sticking with it for now. It is really hard to ignore all the horrible horrible bugs, though.
> I’ve tried to reply to a post this morning and the submit button just spins. No error, nothing.
I have the same issue. I always always copy the text I've written before submitting on Lemmy, because it happens so often that it just swallows the text and my comment is gone forever.
I have noticed that manually setting the language to "English" (below the text box) somehow reduces the failure rate significantly. No idea why.
Other things I have issues with:
- The "Hot" ordering on my instance is never updated. The newest "Hot" post is 4 days old by now and it never changes anymore. Not sure what happened 4 days ago, but I can only browse by "New" or "Active". The "Active" browsing is dumb, because I think every new comment is bumping it up again, and "New" only gets you the brand new stuff that nobody has commented on yet. "Hot" would really be my preference, but that's broken...
- The commenting issues described above. If I don't set the language, I sometimes see "language_not_allowed", and sometimes the text just vanishes. The Android app isn't working anymore because of this. It won't let me set the language and it won't let me post or comment.
- Subscribing to other communities is painful. The UX is not there yet. You can't just subscribe. Instead you have to manually copy the URL to the search box and let your instance discover the community, and then you can subscribe.
- Missing comments/posts: When subscribing to a new community, you won't ever receive old comments for posts. You'll see new comments come in, but there is no sync mechanism (not even a manual one) to retrieve the old stuff. This leaves you with an incomplete view of the world.
- Missing comments/posts (part two): Even if you have subscribed for a long time, comments and post will not have all comments always, either because of a delay of minutes (or hours!), or just because of bugs, idk. It's annoying.
- Security: There are some bad security issues [example: https://github.com/LemmyNet/lemmy/issues/3060], which is obvious in the early stages of a piece of complicated software like this. But still. I think the reckoning will come eventually now that Lemmy is on the radar.
- Privacy: There are a number of privacy concerns, namely that posts can never truly be deleted, and that things are public that should not be (like likes/dislikes). See https://discuss.ntfy.sh/comment/51609
Yes. I spent last week hoping that everyone from Reddit moves to Lemmy, but I realised that I don't need Reddit to die, I just need Lemmy to be successful enough. There is a critical mass of people needed to sustain a set of useful sublemmys, but that number is a tiny fraction of Reddit.
That's the neat thing about federation. A lot of these people are coming from the million plus users of Mastodon who didn't need to make a new account to use Lemmy.
The active user count isn't up that much. It's mostly people finding out about Lemmy or remembering it exists. They're building the communities that will be there when the Reddit API changes finally go into effect. It's actually better that it happen this way so most people's first impression coming from Reddit is a good one.
Exactly. To me, all this talk of whether Lemmy will replace Reddit is a distraction. 90% of what is on Reddit is (in my opinion) crap, I would be happy if it stayed on Reddit or went somewhere else entirely. All I want to know is whether Lemmy can reach a critical mass where there is enough going on there that it's worth visiting.
> 90% of what is on Reddit is (in my opinion) crap
And most people would likely agree with you, however they'll have labelled a different 90% as the crap part. It's the bleed-over between those different parts that makes Reddit's huge user population effective at keeping up momentum even in smaller backwater subreddits. (e.g. "I'm already here reading r/funny, so I happen to see when occasional new stuff gets posted on r/obscurethingnobodycaresaboutbutme too")
> all this talk of whether Lemmy will replace Reddit is a distraction
The question is whether it can become a default place to build an online community. Currently, the answer is no unless you have extremely strong ideological coherence that will get your users through the Kafkaesque onboarding process.
Beehaw.org has a difficult onboarding process by design. And I welcome their experimentation.
But Lemmy.world is... fine-ish? The main issue is the bugs. If the sending of the confirm email fails, the website spins forever without an error. (And it looks like so many "confirm emails' were sent, that Lemmy.world was getting blocked for spam by its provider).
If you have an underscore in your username, the signup process hangs and spins forever.
If your password is longer than 20 characters or so, the signup process hangs and spins forever.
Etc. etc. Its not the best process and these bugs need to be fixed. But if you're like me (who created at the right time with a typical password and typical username), you probably get in to https://lemmy.world just fine.
> Beehaw.org has a difficult onboarding process by design
Beehaw fine. It was deliberate and up front about its gating, and they processed within a day or two, which again is fine because that’s what they said they’d need. (There are still random login bugs and the content leaves much to desire.) The process of getting one’s head around why a server must be selected, what trade offs that entails and how to make a decision about it is almost proudly dismissed by the Lemmy community, which is frustrating.
> The process of getting one’s head around why a server must be selected, what trade offs that entails and how to make a decision about it is almost proudly dismissed by the Lemmy community, which is frustrating.
I agree.
Lemmy community seems to be "toxicly positive". They ignore the server choice because they are worried that informing users about servers will make them leave for other webpages.
It'd be more appropriate if they were just honest about the Fediverse. Fediverse puts server-administrators front-and-center. Choosing a server means trusting the local administrators: not just for your username, but with your posts (ie: delivering them), your communities you build on that server, and your words.
We know that on Reddit, the admins/moderators can modify your words, shadowban you and other such behaviors. And I expect these tools to be employed in Lemmy (not that I know how to use them yet, but there's nothing stopping a few PostgreSQL scripts from accomplishing effective shadowbans or other such behaviors).
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For now, I chalk it up to the various community members feeling the need to grow and being naive. Its something I'm keeping an eye on, I'm trying to find 'the adults' in the community and trying to evaluate them myself.
But the only way to do that is to join up and make test posts / test discussions.
I don't know that I'd call it kafka-esque but I think they make a good point about friction - the signup process also includes learning about this new thing, which is going to throw people.
Especially, I think, because there is a gulf between what the service intends to be and what people want it to be.
Exactly. And there are some instances with people that really care about some subjects... a bit like Reddit 10 years ago. Those are prone to create something great.
I’m not sure why people think of it this way. Why not just create a lemmy account and try it out? There’s no physical stuff to move (unlike moving to a new apartment or house). You’re not required to delete your Reddit account either.
> Why not just create a lemmy account and try it out?
I did, twice. It took at least half an hour between bugs and scanning HN for answers to questions I was repeatedly told I shouldn’t be asking. (Like, how do I choose a server and what consequences does that decision bring. Questions which, after a defederation and onboarding bug and login bug, seemed quite pertinent.) Then there was minimal content, and to top it off, buttons that spin without doing anything half the time.
100% agree. These are the real issues with Lemmy that need to be discussed. I feel like I've seen your comments before... my understanding of you is that you'd probably enjoy the https://programming.dev, although the signup process there is a bit harder.
The admins at https://Lemmy.world continues to fix various bugs / performance issues.
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It looks like Beehaw.org curated the strongest community "before the #RedditBlackout". based on my browsing there, they're more focused on their various topics (anime, technology, programming), rather than the RedditBlackout... which is a much healthier long-term community feel. Alas, they have only kept that because they have made signups difficult.
Hopefully, Beehaw.org opens back up as the RedditBlackout wave subsides. They do plan to refederate in the long term, but only after new moderation-tools are created. No idea how long that would take, but no one seems to expect this particular defedization to stay forever.
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The communities that focus on... well... community... will win in the medium term. I recognize that most people are using Lemmy because they're angry at Reddit (and that's fine enough to create a short-term community). But people need to start thinking about what kind of community they want to create on Lemmy now, and not just be part of an angry protest.
Its happening, but slowly. Its harder to community-build than it is to just get angry and protest a webpage.
100% agree. These are the real issues with Lemmy that need to be discussed.
I see them being discussed. I don’t see them as “real issues” with lemmy though. They’re bugs to be fixed, not fundamental problems with the federation model.
Fediverse, and Lemmy in particular, has "good bones" on it. But the software desperately needs to fix a bunch of bugs. They weren't quite ready for #RedditBlackout, but who would be?
I'm thinking more from the perspective of kbin vs Lemmy. I don't think anyone's noted kbin bugs. kbin.social grew to over 35k+ users this past weekend, so they're also having a substantial boost from #RedditBlackout.
Community has somewhat arbitrarily chosen Lemmy as the first project to check out. Nothing wrong with that. I think I'll try kbin.social soon and see if my experiences are better. Especially since kbin.social is federating with Beehaw.org, Lemmy.world and other instances.
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But I feel like the choice of front-end is important. Little differences, like @community (kbin) vs !community (Lemmy) will make things incompatible in the long run. So a community needs to choose whether to be on kbin-side or lemmy-side of the fediverse.
Are you finding one community more pragmatic than the other?
The fundamental issue I found with Lemmy was the refusal to accept the onboarding process as being off putting to reasonable people I would want to interact with in an online community.
I haven't played with kbin.social yet. Most of my interactions with them have been through Lemmy (and noticing that users/communities are actually from kbin.social)
I feel like Beehaw.org is quite pragmatic. By cutting off the #RedditBlackout users, they've kept their community feel and the focus on community building. I dunno if I want to be part of Beehaw.org, but I support their decisions and can see the long-term benefits of their way of thinking.
Lemmy.world obviously is trying to capture #RedditBlackout traffic, and that's fine too. This has its downsides, the bulk of which is that 90%ish of the discussion on Lemmy.world is all around Reddit and/or Lemmy, as opposed to more pragmatic issues.
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The happy medium I've found is to look for specific communities, no matter where they are. https://programming.dev/c/programming is small but looks like it has the right mindset. https://mtgzone.com/c/mtg also looks to have the right mindset, by creating a Magic-the-gathering focused group.
The issue in the near term is human-coordination. People don't know which !communities or servers host the discussions they want yet. That's fine, people will self-organize one way or the other.
EDIT: Of course, https://Lemmy.world can work. But most users are obviously here for lower-effort experimentation rather than community building. The https://lemmy.world/c/android community seems to be taking off though and is on the right track.
The same can be said about Reddit. I’m not subscribed to any of the big subreddits there. I use it for niche communities. To me, that’s the whole point!
Lemmy’s having some growing pains right now (spinning wheel of death) but I’m confident they’ll be resolved. At that point, it’ll be much nicer to use, so I’m pretty happy with that.
As for people hoping to one day “jump over,” I think that’s a mistake with almost anything. Dip your toe in, don’t go “all in” on anything you’ve never used before. You’re much less likely to end up extremely disappointed that way.
In my experience, private instances of PhpBB forums provide niche webtools that are necessary for community building that Reddit could never replace.
The Tetris community created a Javascript gui called Fumen (https://harddrop.com/fumen/), that can be embedded into PhpBB forums.
The chess community created Javascript GUIs that read/write .pgn files (aka: move-history files) to help the community discuss games.
The Go community created a similar GUI for Go games. Etc. etc.
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Since the administrator controls the whole webpage (including Javascript), you can host local tools in a Reddit-like environment. I think people are sleeping on the potential here, especially if you've never used these custom web-GUIs before.
I'm still holding on because... Lemmy sucks ;) Everyone is going there now, there are issues. Let's stick on Reddit, the feed is actually a bit better now that some less popular subreddits show up, with all others protesting in some way or another, and it's expected Lemmy will kneel under the big influx of users. There were such reports from the first or second day of "subreddits going dark," if I'm not wrong.
I was curious to see HN's view on removing Reddit account data. I have a couple old accounts (>12 years) with many thousands of comments. My personal perspective is that deleting all these comments, some of which contain technical help, advice, solutions, etc., would really be a net-negative for everyone.
I understand wanting to send a message to Reddit leadership, but in reality the blip is so small as to probably not even register.
On the other hand, those comments will probably be valuable to someone, somewhere, sometime and all I'd be doing is harming those future readers and salting the metaphorical earth.
Looking further into the future, let's assume Reddit collapses in 5 years in 2027. The money is dried up, management is gone, and all that's left are decades of data hopefully archived. Are people 5, 10, 20 years from now going to appreciate that a subset of data was purged in protest? Or are they going to appreciate that they found some useful data still in the archive that might actually help something?
I'd rather be in the latter camp. And maybe one day someone will ask their at-home AI bot a question about <niche topic>, and a small part of me will be emitted in the output.
I've heard of multiple people who have done the same and have had the same problem. It seems either so many people are requesting their data that it's bogging down the process, Reddit is deliberately slow-playing it, or both.
Does one have to be an EU citizen to request via GDRP?
If so - I made the offer to sell my accounts to any GDRP person for $1 such that I can make those requests for data (ill pay more than $1, its just to make it an actual transaction)
I have 17 years of content contributed to reddit... and I'd like to kill it all.
I'm not using reddit in the meantime to send a message of "this is what you're looking at when reddit keeps their current plans". I don't know if that's also part of your master plan, but if not, at least if a significant number of people think like that, then reddit has little reason to care.
I'm also on Tildes now, probably because of the invite-only FOMO, but a full comparative study (figuring out which lemmy instance to sign up with, as well as looking into other alternatives) is something I'll be forced to do only after June 30th, and I've mastered the art of procrastination so it's not going to be any sooner.
Lemmy and kbin are theoretically both compatible with each other, as well as with less-closely related projects like Mastodon, because they are all part of the Fediverse using the same ActivityPub standard protocol. (In practice, there are bugs because this is alpha software, and some aspects of running a link aggregator aren't in the ActivityPub standard and thus implementations differ, but it's really cool when federation works between different codebases.)
Lemmy, like kbin or mastodon, is a frontend to federated social media, ie ActivityPub. Lemmy is made to feel more or less like Reddit, while Mastodon is made to feel more or less like Twitter, and kbin is sort of in the middle and feels oriented to news aggregation, but they all interoperate over ActivityPub.
"Federated" means someone can pop up an instance, and even if the server isn't hosting any content, it can act your "view" into the fediverse.
Could Lemmy have something akin to r/all? I have always used Reddit more to discover new contents, trends, and communities then to check up on communities i already know (with a few exceptions).
Kind of broken though, it keeps showing new posts at the top when they are posted, which should not happen when you sort for Top Posts of the Day. Any place to report bugs?
I'm sure Reddit is prepared for a small contraction in their active userbase while also seeing a significant increase in monetizability of the remaining users.
My thinking as well. Let's encourage everyone to make the exodus not small.
Especially when you're a creator, you're an audience multiplier and it's worth pointing people to an alternative social site where they can also find your content.
I'd consider myself a creator, but it's all hobby and not commercial in the slightest. If you're commercial, I understand staying on reddit, but at least consider opening up a second profile elsewhere and pointing people there (while continuing to bet on both horses, so the audience can choose and you keep the audience either way).
I didn't even know about kbin [2] but it seems like another solid fediverse presence. This multiplicity of platforms (ruby, php, rust, python, go, elixir, you name it) that all adhere to a protocol is intrinsic to this "movement" [3] and it is what makes it vaguely... inspiring. Echoes of an earlier, more optimistic time.
[1] https://sub.rehab/
[2] https://kbin.pub/en
[3] https://fedidb.org/software