Technology

Tell me you never experienced Usenet or the internet before Facebook and friends fucked it up, without telling me. We literally used to have all the things he's talking about, with much less of the drawbacks, before the internet became commercialized. Now the commercial web's unsuitability has finally reached the point of undeniability, and we're trying to figure out how to get back to that.

All very true. Lemmy is the closest thing to a Reddit alternative that I’ve found so far. But the signup process was kinda hard, and the user experience of the apps (I’m using mlem now) needs work. It’s confusing and clunky.

The fediverse can be tricky to sign up to and once you are there it is hard to find communities/interest to subscribe to. But I am learning how. And it is working for me. Another fediverse user gave me a webpage that helped me find more communities to join. Lemmy Explorer you can select the Home icon at the top to set your home federated server. Kbin.socal for me.

I even found a Baldur's Gate community and a Calvin and Hobbes community.

I have the IQ of a seedless grape, and I managed to sign up for both Lemmy and kbin.

I don't want a duplicate of Reddit here. Sure, I hope the niche/hyper-local subreddits will create communities here, but this feels new, fresh, full of opportunity. Growing pains are a good sign and temporary. I really like that karma is gone (kbin does have the boost).

I haven’t found Lemmy confusing to use at all. And I found that to be a big surprise. I expected more hurdles to have to jump to get started like Mastodon.

The one big issue so far has been the lag, upvotes not being sent, comments/communities not loading, etc. But the reasons for that are pretty understandable in my opinion.

The author starts with the assumption that the for-profit social media apps suddenly turned it shit but has some sort of unique benefits that the fediverse lacks. Actually, the design of for-profit social media apps has ALWAYS led to shitty experiences, similar to how most email traffic is spam. The fact that the fediverse doesn't replicate the experience of for-profit social media apps IS THE POINT and the author either missed it or is a shill.

All very true.

Lemmy is the closest thing to a Reddit alternative that I’ve found so far. But the signup process was kinda hard, and the user experience of the apps (I’m using mlem now) needs work. It’s confusing and clunky.

Even now, I’m getting errors trying to comment.

I think the "Fediverse is hard to join" thing is a myth corporate are pushing. I signed up for Mastodon and it took me 1 minute (mostly because I had to open up my email to verify it); same for lemmy.

TLDR - Reddits success was not in its variety but in its ease of use. We need a central place to simple make accounts and login to that is always up and stable and we need a unified front end for searching for communities.

Lemmy needs a front page and centralized signup, login and search spot. It is a waste of time and effort to explain the mechanics of how it operates to new users. If someone can easily signup, login and search communities (and create them) then the mechanics of how the system works can be explained at a later date.

The biggest issues for Lemmy right now and in the medium term are going to be scale, finding communities and signups.

There is so many people from Reddit and other sites that the current mega communities get bogged down and start being unusable which only adds to the confusion on signing up.

There are some ways around this but none are easy or obvious. A new user will know less popular servers to make an account on if the main ones are inaccessible. Also the log in at one server and you can sue the rest is not something that is quickly explainable.

Finding communities is also a challenge though it’s getting better with various sights and apps starting to pop up and we still need a lot of the main ones from Reddit created here but even a medium sized Reddit community would render a Lemmy server unstable.

It's better to bask in this island of growth and engagement than to sink down a rabbit hole of revenue that yields nothing. It's such a satisfying feeling to talk to people you know and respect instead of diving into a karmic spiral full of bots flooding the place with toxicity. When the author says, "There's simply no place left on the internet that feels like a good, healthy, worthwhile place to hang out," I think that somehow this is a good place. For the first time in a long while I feel compelled to join the discussion and share my thoughts. It's true that "the Fediverse isn't there yet," but that's what we're here for. Just the thought that some things are still halfway in the oven, or haven't even found their way in yet, makes the whole experience much more rewarding. And remember, there are no ads. Every day I miss Reddit and Twitter less (I had closed my account there a long time ago). I believe Lemmy has a bright future ahead of it, the success of which I believe depends on preventing uncontrolled growth. Time will tell.

As far as how humans connect to one another, what’s next appears to be group chats and private messaging and forums, returning back to a time when we mostly just talked to the people we know. Maybe that’s a better, less problematic way to live life. Maybe feed and algorithms and the “global town square” were a bad idea.

I know the author goes on to argue against this, but I agree with it completely. The "global town square" didn't just lead to IRL discourse becoming just as toxic as the worst internet cesspools, with devastating real-world consequences. It also killed what made the internet special.

The author talks about having to explore the web to find the content you want, stumbling on niche communities you'd never have heard of along the way, as if it's somehow a bad thing. To me, it was what made the internet so much fun. And it's one of the things I've most desperately missed in the era of big, centralized social media.

I've been going outside, the library, and engaging with my kids. Lemmy and Discord do scratch a social itch but they aren't the time sink reddit and Twitter were

I would argue that Mastodon and friends are a "good, healthy, worthwhile place to hang out", at least it really feels that way to me. It seems to have attracted a really wholesome crowd that really delights me considering I'm used to it being less of a crowd but just a handful of techie people hanging out in an obscure clubhouse. All the same people I have followed there are still there yet I now have a buffet of variety to chat with.

All very true.

Lemmy is the closest thing to a Reddit alternative that I’ve found so far. But the signup process was kinda hard, and the user experience of the apps (I’m using mlem now) needs work. It’s confusing and clunky.

Even now, I’m getting errors trying to comment.

David Pierce.

BA in Government and Media. Writing gig, writing gig, writing gig.

No wonder he doesn’t know where tech is going. No offense, but the best bits of the internet have always been driven by nerds and geeks building stuff. These people complain that Mastodon and the fediverse is too hard or not polished. They just lack the aptitude. They want everything handed to them with little effort.

Gotta wonder how Ernest feels, having kbin go from his niche side project to being name-checked in The Verge (even if it's in the context of pointing out it's not ready for prime time) in the space of like two weeks.