It’s been a long journey, but here we arrive. Welcome home.
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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.
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!!
The algorithm really doesn’t work when you are critical or sceptical over a subject. For instance crypto sceptics from r/buttcoin being shown binance ads. Yes, they do show an interest in crypto, but may be the least suceptible persons to that ad.
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>
Oh sweet, sweet irony.
It’ll be great to see more people showing up on Lemmy.
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.
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.
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.
do birds fly? do ducks duck?
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.
Journey Before Destination
Fuck Moash
Air-sick low lander, that one.
:D
Do we have a sub on this side yet?
Not that I’ve heard of or seen unfortunately
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.
Honestly, if spez hadn’t already sold the site to white supremacists, I’d be a lot quicker to defend this.
Who are the white supremacists he sold to?
It was the Chinese that he sold out to. Not the white supremacists.
The one true constant for me is 4chan 😅
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.
I stopped engaging with Reddit when meme-ification happened.Wheb it became all about the lolz abd short pithy responses, I started using it to find more interesting articles. Gone are the days wheb the average Redditor would read and make thoughtful contributions.
That depended on the subs you were in IMO, there was a lot of that but there were others that still had worthwhile stuff that wasn’t just silly shitposting for fun. Now we’ve got Lemmy though and multiple instances of it!
That is in part because the reddit algorithm doesn’t like thoughtful contributions. These take time and understanding of the discussed matter. When your metric is positive (upvote) interaction per timeframe you need easily digestable content that people immediately react to. If I have to carefully read and think about the content my vote/comment is far too late to be “hot” on reddit.
I used 4chan when I was younger but trying to go back after reddit was super depressing, I lasted about 5 minutes.
I stopped using 4chan when the probability of getting goddamn CP snuff videos in the browser cache because of a /b/ raid got beyond trivial, so like pretty fucking early on.
4chan definitely got worse. like it was always edgy and stupid, but after 2015 every board just kind of became /pol/
Yeah, nazis kinda ruined it. pre-2010 it was more whimsical and ridiculous as opposed to cringey and unironically bigoted.
You missed metafilter.
Do you think this is the end of your “journey”?
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.
If we’re including those then I think we have gone full circle and are back in the safe waters of protocols
+1 you’re right. Especially IRC…oh how I miss those days.
I miss that moment when I became the cool kid in the channel because I had an IRC bouncer
Renegade BBSes -> IRC -> slashdot -> digg -> reddit -> imgur -> discord -> mastadon -> lemmy
with plenty of side quests along the wayPre search engine time on Geocities trading mutual linking on each other websites, reams and reams of messages and emails
So we’re a side quest then?
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.
I don’t think the Fediverse will suffer the same demise as Digg and Reddit, precisely because it’s not owned by a profit-driven VC-backed corporation, but there are a couple of other serious threats to its longevity:
- Moderation. If the Fediverse isn’t adequately moderated, it will quickly be overrun by Nazis, pedos, and spam. That’s what killed Voat and Usenet.
- Funding. This isn’t like IRC, where a modern server can support tens of thousands of users in its sleep. Running a system along the lines of Reddit or Twitter requires a lot of computing power, and that’s expensive. Where’s the money going to come from?
Same fucking journey as you. Reddit was a good run for 10 years, let’s see if Lemmy can work.
What do we do if it doesn’t? Just crawl back and apologize?
Consider exploring other Fediverse platforms before heading back to Reddit.
I mean, since there’s no central site to shut down, Lemmy failing would pretty much just mean that it stagnates and some of the bigger instances shut down, at which point there still would be some remnant of it left to stay on, if a smaller one. Failing that, it isn’t the only reddit alternative that people have been working on, so maybe one of the others will be more successful.
Exactly; if an instance goes down, then users can migrate to a new instance.
Nah. If Lemmy/Fediverse doesn’t work out, there will be others. This has all happened before…
If the fediverse idea doesn’t work out and it’s yet another company the cycle is bound to continue.
A big chance is in front of us to break the cycle!
Where does somethingawful fit in
I had the same journey but I’m pretty sure I found Slashdot by way of boingboing which I found by way of Diesel Sweeties blog posts when I first got a DSL connection in 2002 and was looking for comics and blogs to fill up my trendy new RSS reader lol
