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.
I don’t want to visit that place anymore - could you please copy and paste the post here?
The point of this post is actually to get people to participate over there to stop the spread of misinformation, i’d appreciate it if you went over there with an adblocker, but if you insist:
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
It’s the same rhetoric as the apple guy used to show sideloading in such light as it would rob your grandma by its own.
undefined> i’d appreciate it if you went over there
Please don’t. At least not until the 15th if you must. Personally I’ll continue to avoid it.
I don’t think it’s an issue if you’re using an adblocker and promoting a competitor.
It is. We want their usage stats to show that users are objecting to their plans rather than just mods and app developers.
If you manage to get at least one additional person off the platform, then it’s worth it.
If you manage to get two, it’s very worth it.
If you get none, then yes, you’ve wasted your time, but it’s not that hard to convince at least one person.
It’s not about wasting time and it’s not about trying to get users to come over to Lemmy today or tomorrow.
It’s about whether you contribute to the protest or not. If you log in to Reddit and start writing comments then you’ll be flagged as an active user for that day and will lessen the impact a small amount. If many did it as you’re suggesting we should then that will lessen the impact of the protest more.
only if they don’t permanently move users.
It is. And how did you type that in a millisecond?
140 wpm baby
To challenge some of your replies, if those are welcome.
People do actually complain about email, quite often. Spam filters and deliverability are real challenges sometimes. Email also has a lot of gotchas that you can run into - like what happens when you lose control of a domain name? What happens if your email provider shuts down? Who actually owns the email - you or the provider? A lot of email protocol has inherent security and privacy issues too. I don’t know if I’d use email as the leading example. Phone networks or text messages might be a little more straightforward.
I also don’t think it’s entirely true that federation is strictly necessary. Wikimedia seems to run a lot of centralized services with large scale and large community with no federation. Tildes is a valid alternative to both Lemmy instances and Reddit with no federation. If Tildes for example went in a bad direction or became corrupted - it is open source. You could just start a new Tildes using the same source code. It isn’t federated, but does it have to be?
People do actually complain about email, quite often. Spam filters and deliverability are real challenges sometimes. Email also has a lot of gotchas that you can run into - like what happens when you lose control of a domain name? What happens if your email provider shuts down? Who actually owns the email - you or the provider? A lot of email protocol has inherent security and privacy issues too. I don’t know if I’d use email as the leading example. Phone networks or text messages might be a little more straightforward.
Very few of these things are something that normal everyday email users have to deal with with any regularity, I work in IT and while the windows outlook client does have a lot of issues, no such problems exist if you use gmail, or any of the common email providers, really.
I also don’t think it’s entirely true that federation is strictly necessary. Wikimedia seems to run a lot of centralized services with large scale and large community with no federation. Tildes is a valid alternative to both Lemmy instances and Reddit with no federation. If Tildes for example went in a bad direction or became corrupted - it is open source. You could just start a new Tildes using the same source code. It isn’t federated, but does it have to be?
Yes, it absolutely does have to be, because federation means that the community isn’t tied to any particular instance. Wikipedia is great right now, but what if somebody else takes over wikipedia, then we’re simply screwed, they have complete control over the platform, we can’t just stop using wikipedia and get the same content elsewhere, because that’s simply not possible without federation. Especially on profit-driven websites, this is an impossible issue to solve without federation.
. If Tildes for example went in a bad direction or became corrupted - it is open source. You could just start a new Tildes using the same source code. It isn’t federated, but does it have to be?
Yes, we could start a new tildes… but without ANY OF THE CONTENT, nobody would switch unless there was a massive reason to, it would take a massive feat of community organization to switch.
Whereas on a federated system, if you switched to another instance, you’d lose literally nothing.
Very few of these things are something that normal everyday email users have to deal with with any regularity, I work in IT and while the windows outlook client does have a lot of issues, no such problems exist if you use gmail, or any of the common email providers, really.
These problems do exist for normal people. If you violate Google terms of service across any Google service for example you will lose access to your @gmail.com account with no recourse. Email services that aren’t run by a megacorp shutdown all the time. In this list of Gmail alternatives posted on Mashable from 2007 over 50% are no longer in business.
With email most people have three options:
- Self hosting
This requires more technical knowledge than the average person has and comes with risks and deliverability issues.
- Use a smaller independent company
You could use service like ProtonMail or Fastmail - but these companies are far more likely to go out of business compared to something like Apple or Google.
- Use a megacorporation
This comes with privacy and control concerns. If you aren’t paying for Gmail - you are being monetized in some other way.
Yes, we could start a new tildes… but without ANY OF THE CONTENT, nobody would switch unless there was a massive reason to, it would take a massive feat of community organization to switch.
From a privacy perspective this sounds like a feature to me, not a bug. I don’t necessarily want my content to live in perpetuity. I regularly delete my Reddit comments and posts after a few weeks. I delete my all my social media accounts entirely every two years. Tildes going down and being replaced with a new instance and fresh content is not a problem for me.
Different values I guess.
These problems do exist for normal people. If you violate Google terms of service across any Google service for example you will lose access to your @gmail.com account with no recourse. Email services that aren’t run by a megacorp shutdown all the time. In this list of Gmail alternatives posted on Mashable from 2007 over 50% are no longer in business.
Yet nearly everyone has an email, and nobody is suggesting we centralize it, because that would be a significantly worse experience for everyone. All of the issues you complain about would also exist in a centralized instance, especially the “use a megacorporation” one, are you suggesting reddit isn’t a megacorporation? If megacorps still work as options on federated instances, then that still means federation is a net positive, EVEN IF they’re the only ones that can make it work reliably, it’s still better that they’re all stuck competing. You’ll notice, gmail doesn’t suck.
From a privacy perspective this sounds like a feature to me, not a bug. I don’t necessarily want my content to live in perpetuity. I regularly delete my Reddit comments and posts after a few weeks. I delete my all my social media accounts entirely every two years. Tildes going down and being replaced with a new instance and fresh content is not a problem for me.
Why on earth do you expect your data to be private on a public forum?
Do you not know about archive.org?
Even on reddit, they EXIST to sell your data, privacy is completely nonexistent on public forums, and it never will be, you’re essentially asking users to trust in a benevolent dictatorship on their data.
Yet nearly everyone has an email, and nobody is suggesting we centralize it, because that would be a significantly worse experience for everyone. All of the issues you complain about would also exist in a centralized instance, especially the “use a megacorporation” one, are you suggesting reddit isn’t a megacorporation?
People are actively migrating to centralized communication platforms away from email. Pretty much every messaging application or chat service with mass adoption at the moment is centralized.
I am not suggesting anything, just saying that I don’t know if email is a great example of federation without issues. I think it’s important to be transparent about the downsides of federation as part of the discussion.
Why on earth do you expect your data to be private on a public forum?
Do you not know about archive.org?
There is a difference between expecting something to be private on the internet, and the application you are using respecting your privacy. Archive.org is not run by Lemmy - it is a third party outside of our ability to control. Lemmy can control how it handles deleted and edited content within it’s system. I don’t like how Lemmy handles deleted content for example. I think a delete should be a delete - it should be gone, or anonymized within Lemmy specifically.
Even on reddit, they EXIST to sell your data, privacy is completely nonexistent on public forums, and it never will be, you’re essentially asking users to trust in a benevolent dictatorship on their data.
I have not made that argument. There is also nothing, as far as I can see, that would prevent the owner of a Lemmy instance (or a fork of the Lemmy software) from doing anything you list here. The software license allows for commercial use and doesn’t seem to include any mandates for how instance maintainers interact with user data.
You’re forgetting that you’re comparing to reddit.
People are actively migrating to centralized communication platforms away from email. Pretty much every messaging application or chat service with mass adoption at the moment is centralized.
Matrix is catching on and growing rapidly for a reason. Also, email is still widely used in offices for a reason, have you ever had a job that didn’t send you emails? I haven’t. Have you ever had a job that didn’t utilize emails heavily? I haven’t.
Centralized messaging is used for instant messaging, which is a different usecase than email. I’m sure matrix will overtake the corporate world just like email did, because of the strengths of federation, a company can have an internal messaging client and not have to worry about leaks, and trusting microsoft/whatever company to run their shit well.
I have not made that argument. There is also nothing, as far as I can see, that would prevent the owner of a Lemmy instance (or a fork of the Lemmy software) from doing anything you list here. The software license allows for commercial use and doesn’t seem to include any mandates for how instance maintainers interact with user data.
You’re right, reddit does the same thing, though. You can host your own lemmy instance, and then you’ll be in control of the data. On any other platform, you have no choice beyond trusting the benevolent dictatorship.
If anything that’s a reason to fight for federation, not a reason to fight against it.
Great write-up and I think you hit the nail on the head, but I kind of wish you posted it with a different username.
I do hate that ancoms are associated with ML’s, totally unfair, but you’re right that does look bad.
I would agree. I’ve seen some sketchy comments about lemmy on reddit. I’ve set them straight when I see them. But, I am not using reddit anymore, so that’s that. Spend the focus here, growing the community instead
Yes, but, the problem is, I think we NEED to convince the sync and apollo devs to join lemmy if we want really good phone clients asap, and if they see this BS, they might think they shouldn’t.
Infinity, btw, is the app we need here ;-)
I feel pretty confident the devs of those apps know the truth. They’re clever people who are savvy to reddits workings like nobody else. The truth shall rise to the top.
Hopefully!
I think for Apollo to be profitable they will need a bigger user base than lemmy has right now, I think they’ll be late to join. I also think it’s possible the dev feels so burnt by the fiasco that they may want to walk away entirely.
It’d still be better than the no userbase they’ll have without lemmy.
I highly doubt Reddit is doing it intentionally. You’re talking to people who have chosen not to switch platforms, and so they’re giving you their rationalisations for it. The conspiracy theories aren’t necessary to explain the behaviour, people will find all sorts of excuses for resistance to change.
I don’t know why you’d give reddit the benefit of the doubt, they’ve been caught astroturfing many times.
There are other clients for the fediverse.just choose another one if youre worried.
