I haven't read the post over on Reddit, I refuse to visit the site.
Of course there will be misinformation floating around there always is in these kind of situations, reddit would be a ghost town over night otherwise
this post was submitted on 12 Jun 2023
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I believe this is deliberate by the reddit team, actually.
But I have no way of proving that, the misinformation is truly braindead, though.
Oh I can guarantee some loser has taken it upon themselves to do this to in their eyes protect their beloved website
I can't see the message due to the blackout. Any chance it could be copied here?
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:
click "communities"
search "news"
oh, there's the one at the top with the most subscribers
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
I agree with a number of these complaints. I'm migrating over from reddit and I'm having a number of issues similar to what was posted.
Here's my experience.
OK the blackout started, I moved Apollo and Narwall to page 2 of my phone so I don't muscle memory click on them. I google lemmy because that's what people were talking about switching too before the blackout. I get linked to a page that says lemmy is a bunch of instances and it doesn't matter which one you join. ok.... but which one do I join? I goto the instance page and sort by which server has the most users and is in my country. Beehaw it is I guess. Let's sign up. Oh there's a form you have to answer questions about why you fit here and a human is going to approve me (still waiting on that one). Lets see which one has open registration, Lemmy.World. I try registering and it just spins (still does, tried it again today in firefox, safari, and edge). OK well lets keep trying until we get one to work (lemmynsfw.com was the winner at the time and since then I got an account at https://sh.itjust.works).
OK I'm in and I'm on a NSFW instance but I'm looking for technology, news, and politics. OK communities ALL, which technology do I join (Beehaw, lemmy.ml, midwest.social)?
It took me almost a day to get setup and the top search results on the issues I was facing all linked to reddit pages I wasn't going to click on.
I'm setup now and looking forward to things getting sorted out (there will be clear winners we all migrate to). I really don't understand the benefit of being federated. I honestly would prefer a single site that's a nonprofit similar to wikipedia but I'll be using this for now.
I really don’t understand the benefit of being federated
The benefit is to prevent this from being the next Reddit. Being a nonprofit doesn't really guarantee anything in the long term. OpenAI was a non profit and now it isn't... Rather than trust a single entity to not abuse its power, federation aims to not give any entity all the power to begin with.
It also solves practical problems. Which single benign entity would pay for the servers and internet connections to become the new reddit? I don't think there is one.
Honestly I'm fine with the current process. A site exists for a decade, collapses when it has to be profitable and we all move to the next one. Reddit was my replacement for Digg which was a replacement for slashdot. I'm fine moving every decade to the new site if everything is in one place and easy to use.
That said, I'm sure this platform will be fine once someone makes an app like Apollo to streamline it and 99% of people go to one instance for technology and one instance for politics. I didn't switch to reddit when it came out (I hated it). I switched when digg became garbage and reddit was the better alternative. I think that will be the case with this as well for most people.
Fair enough. I think it would be more accurate to say that you don't care about the benefits of federation, rather than there not being any.
But it while you feel fine with the "current process" clearly from an end-user perspective, it's worth considering how the process might harm you too indirectly. Some communities, especially niche ones, might not survive a migration. An enormous amount of information might eventually get lost if the old site dies or pivots to something that doesn't retain all the content.
And then there's all the things that can go wrong with giving all our data to a single entity. Maybe sometime in the future we find ourselves dependent on AI services and they go to shit. Now it's not obvious that we can keep migrating every decade because only a select few tech giants have the big data required to create competing services. And that sucks because we're the ones who generated it and gave it away.
Hopefully, the streamlining of the fediverse, which I agree needs to happen, will not be everyone signing on to the same instance, but rather the federation working great and the interfaces feeling so seamless that the average user feels like everything is in the same place without it really being so.
Those are all fair points. I do think these kinks can be worked out. I guess I'm just being impatient because I don't think the reddit blackout is going to make spez back down which means I'll need to find an alternative platform by the end of the month when narwhal stops working for me.
I don't browse Reddit on mobile, but I feel for you guys that do. It must suck. I also don't think spez will back down, and a transition to Lemmy or other platform will certainly take long, if it happens at all. It's just so likely that things will suck for a while...
The benefits of federation are vast, and the downsides are temporary, all of your issues are currently working to be solved.
https://github.com/LemmyNet/lemmy-ui/issues/1113
Also, as for picking which technology to use, why would you not just use the most subscribed?
Federation is just harder to bulid in the first place, that's why you're having any problems at all, the devs are ironing out all of this, and there's going to be better solutions for all of this, you're at the dawn of the lemmy fediverse, it's not mature and you shouldn't expect it to be.
We need federation for our future, if you don't want a single corporation to control all the content on a website, you should value this, over the minor annoyances that are currently happening (BUT ARE NOT FUNDAMENTAL)
If an instance is federated, competition is automatic, look at what happened to reddit, right? Do you want that to happen again? If not, you should value federation, all of that is completely prevented by lemmy with little to no downsides for the end user (long-term).
Yes, you're experiencing problems with federation now, but they're actively working to solve these things, and once they're solved, you'll end up with a version of reddit where you'll never have to worry about anti-user changes being implemented, or even pro corporation propaganda.
It's more fundamental than just the api thing, reddit is literally designed in a malicious way because it's goal is to make money off of you, lemmy is not.
You really have to look at the bigger picture here and realize the problems you're listing are both minor and solveable, and while they are related to federation, the problem isn't federation, it's that lemmy isn't very mature.
The problem with the multiple redundant communities is real, but it's also real on Reddit. It's just that Reddit has been around for much longer and there has been time for everyone to reach a consensus on which community is the real one. And even then there's different ones still. Is it workreform, antiwork, or workabolition you're looking for? Or for something with less of an ideological debate behind the separation, is it tabletopgamedesign or boardgamedesign?
It's a little different than having "news" vs "worldnews" though, right? You could have 20 communities called "news", and they all have different content as I understand it.
Yes, news and worldnews are different things. But the ones I mentioned above are the same thing, different subreddits. Like me_irl and meirl. No reason for there to be two, but there are.
So sure, maybe the Federation thing makes it even more common. But it's not a new problem, and it mostly self corrects. People gravitate to the bigger community. The smaller community will get some strays asking why there is not much movement here, and somebody will reply because we're all at this other place and then the next stray sees the message and doesn't even have to ask.
Additionally if the main community declines in quality I'd expect users to migrate
Definitely agree with you, though I'm not sure if it's reddit sponsored, users who don't know what they're talking about, or some other motivation.
I saw a post that said it has a large number of tankies and Nazis but have yet to find either.
the tankies are at lemmygrad, which is probably just blocked by your instance, considering it's blocked by a lot of them.
Haven't seen any nazis though.
I feel like Nazis always out themselves online and so far I haven't seen a lot of that on Lemmy yet. Tankies are a little harder to sus out unless the topic is relevant.
I saw quite a few when i was on lemmy.ml in 2021, i think the Reddit noise is drowning it out
I don't think all of the comments are by some reddits grand scheme to alienate people from Lemmy (though some of them might be), but due to true confusion. When people are advertising Lemmy as a plug and play style alternative to reddit, it's understandable when users try it the first expecting a centralized site where everything is in the same place that they would feel lost. That's how I felt when I first came across Mastodon.