This is going to be a short and sweet little history of Reddit. Reddit was founded in 2005.
Take a look at what Reddit looked like in 2006: https://web.archive.org/web/20061206235353/http://reddit.com/
Note that it didn’t have subreddits back then because the user base was too small.
Look at Reddit in 2008 (December 31): https://web.archive.org/web/20081231080128/http://www.reddit.com/reddits/
Politics had just 72,314 subscribers. Technology had 85,678 subscribers, and the “Nicher” Food subreddit had only 4,438 subscribers.
Lemmy/Kbin follows the same path. Initially, generalist communities like Politics and Technology will have the most momentum and gain subscribers, just like Reddit did back then. As the user base grows, “niche” communities will be able to sustain themselves.
Let’s not think about the Reddit of today, let’s think about Reddit of old. Rome wasn’t built in a day.
Yeah. Eventually there’ll be another meltdown. There always is. At that point , it’d be great to have established structures, a simplified onboarding and a compelling app ecosystem.
Biggest problems I see with Lemmy right now is servers going down, defederation for petty reasons, and duplicated communities fracturing a user base. I’ve also noticed users with the same name on different instances but it’s not always clear if that’s the same user or a clone. i basically quit Reddit cold Turkey when I lost use of Apollo and I’d been there since well before the Digg migration. I’m looking forward to seeing how the Lemmy community resolves the issues I noted, no doubt they will.
you can’t be mad at both subreddits being too large and controlled by a few power mods, and lemmy having too many duplicate communities all run by different mods.
it is the core virtue of the federation model in the first place, in that if a community on an instance goes down, you have the others as backup.
past a certain size, the content that comes through subs/comms passes by too fast to be digested in time, and other content gets buried, so smaller communities should be more digestable.
as for cross-platform user verification check, lemmy can implement mastodon’s method of instance A giving you a secret to be put to instance B, and if it sees that secret from B, then it knows the user at B is you.
I’m not mad, I’m just noting issues that are confusing for new users. Duplicate communities don’t serve as backups. They are distinct from each other. A community going down just means it is gone, for practical purposes. Ive noticed that usually just one community of a given name has any active participation, the rest are placeholders with a post or two. Worse than creating communities as placeholders are Reddit mirror communities that are just populated by bot posts.
The other two are being worked on but onboarding will always be tricky as people have to get their head around instances. It’s not too tricky but still a hurdle.
The join a server page could do with an improvement - perhaps let people add their location and interests and offer them a more filtered list with some data like active users and uptime.
I kinda wish the Fediverse took an SSO approach to instance sign-in, where you can log into your account that’s on your instance, from any instance that is federated with yours.
The sign in would be handled entirely by your instance, and it would then give something like a JWT token to the federated instance to certify that you are signed in.
There is a difference already tho.
Early reddit didn’t have a gigantic metric removedload of meme and removedpost users. We do now.
Fragmentation will be a huge problem if we want Lemmy and Kbin to succeed. We can’t have 45000 technology communities with 45000 duplicate posts with 45000 different discussions under these posts. We need a way to unify all this in the clients and that, to me, seems like a pretty big issue as you can’t just get all the posts and merge them without ddosing all the Lemmy instances or without other unwanted side effects
You can have /r/technology and /r/tech and /r/technews etc…
It’s a problem that resolves itself. One community or the other will “win”.
And if not, whatever. On Reddit, my home city has two subreddits. The content between them is slightly different (different mod teams) and the comments on duplicate posts are different. I subscribed to both to see slightly different opinions and avoid echo chamber.
It doesn’t help when the same user posts the same thing over a bunch of instances. It’s obnoxious.
This is what drives me crazy. Just pick an instance to post on.
I disagree. To me, instances are like countries with their own constitution (rules) and police (mods). This means that two communities in different instances may seem the same, but they are not, because they have to follow the rules and culture of their instance.
Just like a PS5 club in Germany will not be the same as the PS5 club in the US because they will be culturally different. I think it will take some time for the Fediverse to think this way.
For me, this is better. Instead of having one giant technology community where your comments and posts are drowned out, we can have different technology communities with their own culture and norms, just like we visit different countries. Your comment and posts will be not drowned out.
It is a different paradigm to the centralised one of Reddit.
I still think getting to those other “countries” will be a challenge, but can be overcome.
I saw an issue that would allow admins to just point a sub to another server, if that community grows more. seems like a reasonable idea.
Users will only subscribe to a couple of those though, so It’ll be a competition amongst them all. Collections with the best content, discussions, and moderation will win.
why can’t we?
We’re going to need a bigger boat
Let’s not think about the Reddit of today, let’s think about Reddit of old. Rome wasn’t built in a day.
I can agree with this to a degree, but can’t we just not think of reddit? I mean, back then, I don’t recall redditors obsessing over other sites as much as I have seen on lemmy. Digg was the top dog, and I don’t recall daily threads about reddit’s numbers or how it wasn’t matching up.
It was just it’s own thing and not constantly comparing itself to it’s alleged competition. I feel like that helped it grow into it’s own thing, and we should give lemmy a chance to do the same instead of trying to turn it into reddit 2.0. That said, I might just be forgetting—there could’ve been constant ‘sky-is-falling-because-we-aren’t-Digg’ posts—but I just don’t recall them.
I can agree with this to a degree, but can’t we just not think of reddit? I mean, back then, I don’t recall redditors obsessing over other sites as much as I have seen on lemmy.
Back then, centralized corporate social media wasn’t seen as the clear and present danger to society that it is now, in our post-Cambridge-Analytica world.
It’s not enough to see Lemmy and Mastodon and Friendica succeed. Spez and Musk and Zuckerberg need to fail.
Digg refugee from back then. The amount of people coming over wasn’t as significant as we see today. But yes there were lots of posts about how to use Reddit, tools to make Reddit look prettier or more like Digg. Diggers found the subreddit subscription confusing. Literally all the posts we see today from Redditors coming to Lemmy.
This so much. The fediverse is young, and still in its early stages, still ironing out a bunch of bugs and issues. It’s only growing so well because the reddit admins keep finding more feet to shoot themselves in
True. I think it is important to understand the social media landscape is much different now. 2008 was when Facebook was getting started too.
We don’t need to become Reddit
https://www.ssllabs.com/ssltest/analyze.html?d=lemmy.world&s=104.26.9.209
Disable TLS v1.0 and 1.1
True. Give Lemmy time.
