this post was submitted on 12 Jun 2023
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Please check my post, I think everything I said is very valid, but I want this community to see it too, and help steer the discussion, I think reddit is doing this intentionally.

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[–] [email protected] 23 points 1 year ago (2 children)

To be fair, I think Lemmy has some usability issues that are probably holding it back some. Like, typing [email protected] will make a completely useless link to the other instance that doesn't let you subscribe to it or post there. There are also only two apps, and they're cool, but clearly unfinished. That's just a couple examples off the top of my head.

I think they're minor issues that will be ironed out relatively quickly, and whining about federation being unfathomable nerd stuff is just silly, but it is true that this is all happening before Lemmy was really ready for it, and a lot of casual users will be scared off by that.

[–] zarquon 12 points 1 year ago (2 children)

It's even funnier/worse then I expected.

Jerboa notices that's a link and makes it click able but clicking it opens my default email client instead of anything lemmy.

[–] [email protected] 8 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

A user mentioned a toggle in the App info for Jeroba that allows instance links to open in-app, as opposed to a web re-direct. They do plan on adding more instances to this list from what I understand. Since toggling, it has felt more like a functional app imo. "They’re working on expanding it past their default list, but to enable those long press on Jerboa > App Info > Open by default > toggle the enable button and turn on all the links."

[–] [email protected] 3 points 1 year ago

Using Lemmy seems better in a mobile browser than in the app. But maybe that's just me

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

well, i don't want to be rude, i'm not communist or capitalist, just an average guy and i respect every political views, But when your alias/name is 'communist', i think you just obtain the opposite of what you want. I agree with you : federation is missunderstood and if people doesn't want an instance with political bias, they can choose another one.

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

Inconvenient for this one usecase, yes

I make my username communist everywhere to make people question communism.

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

Why would they question communism if they see that username? If I see someone is named icecream I'm not going to question icecream.

[–] [email protected] 8 points 1 year ago (1 children)

It's more about inciting conversation, you can't imagine how many people have messaged me just to fight me over my username.

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

@communist people say federation is an issue when you get multiple communities on the same topic. There is the "technology" community on beehaw, there is also the "technology" community on lemmy.ml, then there are countless communities named the same on other servers as well. But I do not think federation is an issue. I know of at least one site that has the same issue with multiple communities with the same name. And it is centralized. And it has no issue with that.

It's name is facebook.com

[–] [email protected] 16 points 1 year ago (2 children)

This is not an issue with federation, centralized services like reddit have the exact same problem, it's just a problem with anything that lets anyone build a community, really.

[–] [email protected] 13 points 1 year ago (3 children)

I've been using lemmy for all of like, an hour, but discovering communities is kind of a pain. Wish there was an instance/community browser inside my instance instead of going to a third party site, searching, opening, copy, and then pasting, then subscribing.

I really see no reason why https://browse.feddit.de/ is not integrated into the site.

[–] [email protected] 7 points 1 year ago

I just learnt about browse.feddit.de from your comment. Thank you.

[–] socialjusticewizard 1 points 1 year ago

Oh neat. I knew there had to be more comms than I was seeing.

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

Do you mean something other than https://beehaw.org/communities ? It has a local/all toggle and a search function. On the web interface, it's on the header of every page.

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

Yea. That will only show communities that members of beehaw are already subscribed to. And importantly, I’m not registered on that instance. That’s not the website I use.

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

@communist basically yes. And that would only be aleviated if only admins of a website would be allowed to create them. Which is a kind of hyper centralization not something many people would be fans of.

[–] [email protected] 5 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Yeah, but it has nothing to do with federation, so that's misinformation. And we wouldn't want it to be any other way, really.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago
[–] [email protected] 8 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Sub is private. Please repost the text here so everyone can read it.

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

Here's what was written there:

I think there's a team of people intentionally spreading lemmy misinformation. I think reddit is trying to get people not to switch from this platform

People are saying the same things everywhere, but on any analysis, they don't actually make sense, let me give an example:

>Lemmy is absolutely too convoluted for normal people. "There are multiple servers, many of which overlap with each other content-wise? Which one am I supposed to use? This isn't as simple as reddit," says the photographer who posted to /r/earthporn, says the politics junkie who posted in /r/worldnews, says the creative writer who posted to /r/nosleep.

>There is no way to prevent this from happening again. It will happen again, no matter what. If Lemmy gets big, it will only do so if a couple servers rise above all others so the normies can understand that those are the servers to join... and those servers eventually will take advantage of their users just as reddit has done."

There's no aspect of truth to this comment, as an example, let's try actually doing what they're saying is too hard:

https://beehaw.org

click "communities"

search "news"

oh, there's the one at the top with the most subscribers

https://beehaw.org/c/news

Done

So, did they just make up that it was too convoluted for normal people? Yes. Is there some truth to the notion that there are multiple communities for the same thing... Also yes, but there are on reddit too, it's no different than r/art and r/art1 r/art2 and the billion other subreddits in a similar position. People just search and then use the largest one... so is it an actual problem, or is it just grasping at straws? You be the judge of that.

Are there things that make lemmy difficult? Yes, but they're rapidly being solved and extremely minimal, other than that issue tracker, the other thing that might stop you is that some lemmy instances require a message and approve signup, this is because they widely aren't monetized and are run by volunteers with no intention of ever monetizing. Neither of these things are real blockers to normal human adoption, and neither of them are long-term fundamental issues.

If you think federation is too complex for normal users, I ask you, why does email face no such difficulty? Why is nobody complaining about how difficult email is because of federation?

The other issue is genuinely a problem, the lemmy developers are tankies... however, lemmy is released under an open source license, none of their ideology is being injected into the code, and this is akin to worrying about the ideology of the developers of email. Use an instance not created by them, and you're safe from this entirely, I recommend https://beehaw.org/

Don't let the misinformation factory stress you, I don't have proof that reddit is doing this on purpose, but this seems to be a common set of lies... and if you don't like lemmy anyway, there's also kbin, which federates with lemmy but is made by completely separate developers.

Federation is NECESSARY for a non-corpo/government propaganda AND control ridden future. If reddit were federated, nobody would give a fuck about this api thing, because we'd just go to another instance, and all of our content would still be available on that other instance. That's why reddit fears federation, none of the issues with lemmy are fundamental, let's build a better future, one where we don't have to hope a benevolent centralized monopoly/dictatorship on a community will work for us!

And lemmy is the only way to save these precious reddit apps: https://github.com/derivator/tafkars/tree/main/tafkars-lemmy

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

I wouldn't necessarily chalk that up to an intentional misinformation campaign. Federated social media is more complicated than non-federated to explain to people. I think folks just need to use better messaging. Like, "I use Lemmy at https://programming.dev" for example. That way folks are directed to a specific website with a sign up button as opposed to (searching then finding) a website listing multiple different websites.

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

People get these things mixed up all the time, it is more complicated to explain.

But it's not more complicated to use, somebody who doesn't even know about federation can use lemmy just fine, provided they're given the link to an instance.

this is the only thing that would trip such a person up: https://github.com/LemmyNet/lemmy-ui/issues/1048

[–] [email protected] 7 points 1 year ago (3 children)

I've also seen concerns about privacy and politics. It'd be great if you addressed that, too. I'd love to send you an upvote but I deleted all my accounts. 😅

[–] [email protected] 12 points 1 year ago (2 children)

I did address the politics, lemmy is open sourced and the politics aren't injected in the code, and if you can't deal with the politics, go to kbin. It'll still be federated, so, I don't care really, but I can't imagine leaving lemmy because of what the devs do in their free time.

Privacy is non-existent on reddit anyway, just because lemmy is imperfect there doesn't mean it's any worse than reddit, and this is a public forum, there's no privacy anyway.

[–] [email protected] 7 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

I didn't see those. My bad!

Privacy is non-existent on reddit anyway, just because lemmy is imperfect there doesn't mean it's any worse than reddit, and this is a public forum, there's no privacy anyway.

Completely agree. Just look at reddit's TOS. They own your data. Unfortunately, it still doesn't stop people from raising it as if reddit is a bastion of privacy and security.

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

but I can't imagine leaving lemmy because of what the devs do in their free time.

Would you still hold this opinion if the Lemmy devs were outright fascists?

[–] [email protected] 5 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

Yes, the code has nothing to do with anything.

They are red fascists to me.

[–] [email protected] 10 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

I'm mostly confused by a lot of the privacy talk, personally. If you post something on a public forum there practically cannot be a guarantee of deletion.

My concerns with privacy are abusive trackers scraping data like whati I'm personally looking at, how long I look at posts, what times of day and background ad tracking that for far beyond even that.

Sure, people can use the things I've consented to posting online to do market research or whatever. But that's not something that can be practically stopped without end to ende encryption and then that's just... A matrix? To me it feels like a lot of the privacy complaints have revolved around wanting a social media to do something entirely removed from what a public facing social media even is at a core level.

I'm interested to hear peoples thoughts on improving the privacy, but I really do think there is a lot going into this expectation of deletion that isn't very practical when there are way more pressing issues about privacy violations.

edit: an analogy, if I publish a book, and later decide I want to fully retract the book, in within my rights to request that. But there is no practical reason for me to expect everyone to follow through, or that my publisher be required to hunt down every last copy and destroy them. On the other hand, I'm a lot more concerned about someone spying on my every move while I'm writing the book, doing research, and discussing it privately. Lemmy, to my knowledge, doesn't do the latter, but does act as a publisher letting people know they should destroy the book.

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

The Devs mentioned the privacy issues here

https://github.com/LemmyNet/lemmy/issues/2977

As for politics, I think that just goes to show have powerful Lemmy is. The code is open source and able to be self hosted outside of the developers control if need be. It truly doesn't matter what the developers or really anyone's persons political beliefs are. If something goes to crap just move to another instance or host your own where you create your own rules.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 1 year ago (1 children)
[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

Here's what was written there:

I think there's a team of people intentionally spreading lemmy misinformation. I think reddit is trying to get people not to switch from this platform

People are saying the same things everywhere, but on any analysis, they don't actually make sense, let me give an example:

Lemmy is absolutely too convoluted for normal people. "There are multiple servers, many of which overlap with each other content-wise? Which one am I supposed to use? This isn't as simple as reddit," says the photographer who posted to /r/earthporn, says the politics junkie who posted in /r/worldnews, says the creative writer who posted to /r/nosleep.

There is no way to prevent this from happening again. It will happen again, no matter what. If Lemmy gets big, it will only do so if a couple servers rise above all others so the normies can understand that those are the servers to join... and those servers eventually will take advantage of their users just as reddit has done."

There's no aspect of truth to this comment, as an example, let's try actually doing what they're saying is too hard:

https://beehaw.org

click "communities"

search "news"

oh, there's the one at the top with the most subscribers

https://beehaw.org/c/news

Done

So, did they just make up that it was too convoluted for normal people? Yes. Is there some truth to the notion that there are multiple communities for the same thing... Also yes, but there are on reddit too, it's no different than r/art and r/art1 r/art2 and the billion other subreddits in a similar position. People just search and then use the largest one... so is it an actual problem, or is it just grasping at straws? You be the judge of that.

Are there things that make lemmy difficult? Yes, but they're rapidly being solved and extremely minimal, other than that issue tracker, the other thing that might stop you is that some lemmy instances require a message and approve signup, this is because they widely aren't monetized and are run by volunteers with no intention of ever monetizing. Neither of these things are real blockers to normal human adoption, and neither of them are long-term fundamental issues.

If you think federation is too complex for normal users, I ask you, why does email face no such difficulty? Why is nobody complaining about how difficult email is because of federation?

The other issue is genuinely a problem, the lemmy developers are tankies... however, lemmy is released under an open source license, none of their ideology is being injected into the code, and this is akin to worrying about the ideology of the developers of email. Use an instance not created by them, and you're safe from this entirely, I recommend https://beehaw.org/

Don't let the misinformation factory stress you, I don't have proof that reddit is doing this on purpose, but this seems to be a common set of lies... and if you don't like lemmy anyway, there's also kbin, which federates with lemmy but is made by completely separate developers.

Federation is NECESSARY for a non-corpo/government propaganda AND control ridden future. If reddit were federated, nobody would give a fuck about this api thing, because we'd just go to another instance, and all of our content would still be available on that other instance. That's why reddit fears federation, none of the issues with lemmy are fundamental, let's build a better future, one where we don't have to hope a benevolent centralized monopoly/dictatorship on a community will work for us!

And lemmy is the only way to save these precious reddit apps: https://github.com/derivator/tafkars/tree/main/tafkars-lemmy

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 year ago

Of course they're doing it intentionally, what did you expect? They'll use any means they can to downplay the protest and prevent people from leaving.

But honestly, I don't mean to be harsh, but if some people believe all the shit reddit throws at them, and they don't even try to see for themselves, they probably "deserve" to stay there.

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

Fight the good fight!

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