this post was submitted on 12 Jun 2023
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Technology

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Rumors, happenings, and innovations in the technology sphere. If it's technological news, it probably belongs here.

Subcommunities on Beehaw:


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I run a few groups, like @[email protected], mostly on Friendica. It's okay, but Friendica resembles Facebook Groups more than Reddit. I also like the moderation options that Lemmy has.

Currently, I'm testing jerboa, which is an Android client for Lemmy. It's in alpha, has a few hiccups, but it's coming along nicely.

Personally, I hope the #RedditMigration spurs adoption of more Fediverse server software. And I hope Mastodon users continue to interact with Lemmy and Kbin.

All that said, as a mod of a Reddit community (r/Sizz) I somewhat regret giving Reddit all that content. They have nerve charging so much for API access!

Hopefully, we can build a better version of social media that focuses on protocols, not platforms.

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[–] [email protected] 10 points 2 years ago (5 children)

Its pretty much the same as old reddit, so it is fine. I am sure that there will be addons and stuff to bring back any functionality that is missing.

In terms of the community, it is hard to say - the same subs that I spent so much time and enjoyed so much are either not here or nowhere near as big and developed. I used to spend a lot of time on Formula1, Battlebots, but my account was nearly 12 years old and I had many that I used to visit from time to time for fun. Many of those are just not there in any meaningful way.

It is just going to take time to rebuild, I think.

[–] [email protected] 8 points 2 years ago* (last edited 2 years ago) (2 children)

Redditor of 11 years here - i feel you.

For what it's worth, i'm trying to start one of my favorite reading subs (maliciouscompliance) -

/c/[email protected]

https://lemmy.world/c/maliciouscompliance

[email protected]

I'm interested in Battlebots too, so if you start one I'll definitely join!

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[–] [email protected] 10 points 2 years ago (8 children)

It's interesting but I still think the federated universe still has too many quirks to be understandable by most people. To be honest, I haven't bothered documenting myself so I might say stupid things but I can't understand why identity is tied to a server, it seems like a terrible design mistake when it's obviously the first thing i'd want to decentralise. In short, I'm me, it shouldn't matter that I'm on beehaw, lemmy or some random mastodon or kbin server. Huge mistake imho.

Then the content obviously needs a lot more contributors but many of the good reddit contributors where also mostly tech illiterate and I'm still worried that the high complexity to enter the fediverse will put off many people and keep it a fun, but somewhat boring, little niche.

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[–] [email protected] 10 points 2 years ago

I still don't quite understand how it works, instances and all that.. but I'll figure it out, and I'm here for the cause.

[–] [email protected] 10 points 2 years ago

I think its a little rough around the edges, but thats to be expected given that its less than a year old. The big hit for me is the mobile app which just isn’t that good. This will come with time. I’d rather have an half-baked implementation thats showing promise over what Reddit is doing. I like decentralized social media because you can pick and choose what communities you interact with. If lemmy.world decides to go full enshitification (although I can’t figure out how they would monetize), you can just pack up and going to another community.

This honestly reminds me of when I was growing up in the early 00s, I was part of several different community forums that I loved dearly. There were other groups I looked into, but some were just toxic and unappealing, so I left after a while. I feel like Lemmy gives us the same freedom. I really hope to meet some awesome people here. Right now it’s just big enough to still allow meaningful dialogue and create cool relations. I felt like Reddit was too big for its own good even with niche subreddits; it didn’t feel like posting was worth it as it would get buried or just get a low effort response.

[–] [email protected] 10 points 2 years ago

It’s been great so far. I’ve mostly been using Mlem on IOS. Still early in development but it gets better everyday. Even though I was on Reddit for 8+ years I have no intentions on going back to it. There is great potential here and I hope we can tap in to it.

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

I like it and was able to adapt easily, but some of the UI is terrible (and I mean this in a constructive way), specifically:

  • Page weight is too high, when I use back/forward or switch tabs on mobile my browser has to do a full refresh. Tildes and kbin are very lightweight by comparison, not sure what the JS code of Lemmy/Beehaw are doing to cause this issue.
  • Adding new subs is confusing, but mostly because the “Subscribe” button is hidden by default when you visit a community on another instance.
  • The process of subscribing is convoluted You 1. visit an instance, 2. find a community, 3. copy the url,4. go back to your community, 5. past it, 6. open the search link in your instance, then 7. click subscribe and wait a little. It feels like that can be streamlined or something.
  • Loading “All” is slow, I understand why, but the UI should do something to explain it to me instead of popping in posts.

But, the discussion seems good, the actual UI is reminiscent of old reddit so I’m happy, and I’m surprised how easy it is to discuss things across instances.

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[–] [email protected] 10 points 2 years ago* (last edited 2 years ago) (1 children)

So far I have no problems with 99% of what everyone else seems to have. It's not super intuitive to sign up and figure out all the instances/sites, but it wasn't THAT hard and I'm not planning on signing up too often. Finding new subreddits (for lack of the terminology knowledge) really needs to be improved - it took me well over a day to figure it out (but admittedly I was only using jerboa).

The only things that bug me are some missing quality of life features my 3P Reddit app had, like automatically making as read when scrolling past and being able to quickly hide/dismiss seen content. I'm not used to seeing the same articles over and over. Also, and it's pretty dumb, but being able to double tap for up vote and triple tap for down vote. Don't need it, just drive myself crazy since it's so ingrained.

The only other "complaint" I have is simply the amount of content. I was subscribed to quite a few niche subreddits that fit my interests/humor well, and those obviously haven't migrated over. The YEARS of help in computer subreddits or whatever isn't here. There's no crazy specific subreddit to discover with tons of content.

With all of that being said, I currently have zero plans or desire to go back to Reddit, and it really hasn't been all that hard so far. I swapped out my homescreen shortcut on my phone and I've been enjoying my time so far. I'm desperately hoping that this doesn't die out in a couple days/weeks/months because it's good to have competition, Reddit is effectively dead to what I need it to be, and I have zero desire to give Reddit any money after their views on us came out (to name a few reasons of many).

I also hope the toxicity stays away, but I'm not that naive. And I'm REALLY hoping that people with more time than I have bring over their comments/posts so I can search for them here. Reddit was one of the last places I knew that wasn't stuffed full of ads and bot-generated, search-optimized posts that made little sense and didn't help at all.

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[–] [email protected] 10 points 2 years ago

Anything that takes social media out of the power of greedy corporations is an A+ in my book.

[–] [email protected] 10 points 2 years ago

I like pretty well. I've been on reddit for over a decade now, and the UI on Lemmy is kinda like a combination of the good parts of old and new reddit to me.

People here are nice (maybe that's because my home instance is Beehaw...); and I like the small community.

[–] [email protected] 10 points 2 years ago (9 children)

honestly I hope it stays this active. fediverse feels more at home to someone whos been on the internet since before it was so centralised, something like this feels like a good mix. lots of different decentralized sites able to communicate with eachother, rather than just one site holding everyone hostage. mastodon never really took off too big but I hope lemmy can make it happen.

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

First impression is very good. But many instances do not allow the creation of new communities. Which brings me to all the little specialized subreddits that I used daily on Reddit are not on Lemmy. :-( Yeah general ones like Movies is there but I need my fix for r/Dune! :D

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[–] [email protected] 9 points 2 years ago (14 children)

Used Reddit for 13 years, tried out Kbin and Lemmy yesterday and settled on Lemmy.

Long story short, I’m going back to Reddit.

There needs to be ONE site, Lemmy.com, that people goto. This entire thing about having .whateveryouwant is VERY off putting. Most internet users have been trained to be extremely wary of odd or unusual things, so having anything besides .com/.net/.org will turn away a huge portion of users.

I initially setup an account on Lemmy.world, then realized that I couldn’t migrate it to another server and that when I deleted that account on that server all my comments were deleted.

Deciphering the distributed nature of it took me, a relatively tech-friendly person, almost the entire day and several ‘What the fuck?’ posts. I now understand it more. There are some very low-level guides that have been haphazardly put together, but there absolutely needs to be a MUCH smoother guide/explanation to this whole thing. That learning process will turn people away for sure.

BECAUSE I understand it more now, I’m left feeling VERY uncomfortable about my data security. If this is going to become a mainstream thing, as it reaches and before it gets to that critical mass of users, there’s going to be SO. MANY. SECURITY ISSUES. There’s no 2fa at all, hacking and user-account hacking is just going to run rampant, and I’m left wondering ‘Where is my username and password actually stored?’. The answer, sadly, is wherever the dude who’s running the instance/server is. In the ‘Fediverse’ your server instance might be hosted in a US or EU data center with proper digital and physical security, or it could be Joe Blows basement in Iowa running off a NAS. The easy-to-see future here is that Lemmy will fail to attract a critical mass of people because they’ll initially arrive, after a few months their instances will just cease to exist/get shut down/the hosts will decide its no longer a fun hobby to do.

With a large corporation, they have the staff and resources to secure and maintain the servers physically and digitally, and keep staff up-to-date on current infosec threats and get out in front of them. Beyond that, if there IS a breach, they have the ability to recognize it, understand the legalities and requirements of reporting it, and can be held accountable by regulatory bodies. Joe doesn’t have the resources to really maintain and keep a server running, nor the knowledge of his responsibilities for keeping the data safe digitally or physically.

On top of that, if Joe’s basement loses power/gets hacked/Joe decides he’s moving to San Fransisco and can’t bring his NAS with him and the server goes down, and that’s where my instance is hosted well there goes my entire account/comments/data.

Finding and subbing to communities is painfully difficult. It should be one-click, but somewhere I need to goto an external list, find what I want, and then copy/paste the URL into the search… and then 50% of the time, it doesn’t work. This is an understandable growing pain and can likely be fixed by UI/UX upgrades, but for now it’s a definite turn-off.

There simply is no content. I’m not a creator, I want content aggregated for me, and I’ve gotten used to having a single place to get it from that floods me with thousands of different articles/memes/posts/etc every minute. Until the user base arrives in one single place and starts generating content, there’s no reason for most people like me to be there as by far the larger number of users never create anything at all and only exist to consume the content generated.

[–] [email protected] 9 points 2 years ago (1 children)

What you're describing is just another Reddit. Where, eventually, a few select individuals with all the power make the wrong decisions and this entire disaster happens all over again.

Lemmy (and the fediverse) is a chance to change all that. It brings power back to the people, to the community.

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[–] [email protected] 9 points 2 years ago

I'm also testing out jerboa atm. And it's a bit rough around the edges, but gets the job done well enough. Still haven't explored too much of the Lemmyverse, but looking forward to digging in a bit deeper.

[–] [email protected] 9 points 2 years ago

I'd like to see more color settings. The default colors do not have enough contrast and are hart to read in some cases like the blue on gray.

[–] [email protected] 8 points 2 years ago

I'm really liking it! Federation is cool and everyone is so chilled. Not missing the cesspool of Reddit infighting

[–] [email protected] 8 points 2 years ago (1 children)

UX wise its okay, content wise, we are getting there. I am also happy its written in Rust, I am keen to contribute to the project in the future.

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[–] [email protected] 8 points 2 years ago (2 children)

The platform is fine and being able to subscribe across Lemmy instances is nice (i.e. I'm not even on Beehaw but here I am anyway) - it just needs more users and content.

The main issue is going to be getting that critical mass of users, especially on a platform that isn't quite as straightforward as a centralized one. Trying to explain how Lemmy works to my wife just left her confused and wondering what the point was. Getting people like her to make the jump to a federated platform is going to take time, effort, and - most importantly - content.

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[–] [email protected] 8 points 2 years ago

I love it so much that I started contributing to the project on GitHub

[–] [email protected] 8 points 2 years ago (1 children)

This is my first post, so hello everyone! I do like a fresh start every now and again but it's a shame it's happened in these circumstances. As for lemmy, I'm enjoying it so far. I'm just learning about how it all hooks together. I really like the decentralised concept. In a way, Reddit doing what it's done may have been the catalyst to give this new framework what it needs to succeed. The UI is similar but feels cleaner than Reddit (which I found extremely sluggish). So far, so good!

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[–] [email protected] 8 points 2 years ago

Overall it's pretty good! With more development on Jerboa and better backend performance and an influx of people, I think it'll be fantastic. I'm pretty pleased thus far!

[–] [email protected] 8 points 2 years ago (1 children)

Obviously not enohgh content or communities here, but the bones here seem good and that is what's important starting out.

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[–] [email protected] 8 points 2 years ago (1 children)

Enjoying it so far but there's a lot of posts about reddit and not much else for the time being.

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[–] [email protected] 8 points 2 years ago* (last edited 2 years ago) (5 children)

I personally think that this framework is better than what reddit currently has.

For example, a single instance dedicated to programming with its own various communities within it is a lot easier to manage and moderate than having all those communities (aka, subreddits) on the main reddit page itself. The fact that all these individual instances can interact with other instances (or not, if desired) makes this more robust. For example, the fear a lot of people have right now with reddit is that the reddit staff will just kick out all the mods of the popular subreddits, instill mods that will obey them, and essentially perform a corporate overtake of all those individual communities. That doesn't seem like it would be a problem with lemmy.

I am excited to see how this all plays out long term.

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[–] [email protected] 7 points 2 years ago

I love it. It feels like a more niche community (that's a plus). There's a strong sense of community here. I also like the UI (except for kbin--which I know isn't Lemmy--I can't seem to collapse comments there). Is it a little janky? Yes--and I'd argue that's part of the charm, sometimes.

[–] [email protected] 7 points 2 years ago (1 children)

It feels so freaking empty, maybe it's my lemmy client but I can't see any post older than two days

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[–] [email protected] 7 points 2 years ago

I'm still confused by the instance decentralized structure. And my feed seems chaotic. But so far I'm liking it !

[–] [email protected] 7 points 2 years ago

so far it's really nice, it's what I liked in reddit and before that forums, without being what reddit became.

the fediverse is hard though, but it kinda makes sense. I'll see if I get more used to it

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