Tl:dr: Remember the human, even if the project doesn’t work, it wasn’t as useless as it may seem, resources consumption may be concerning
Also disclaimer: I have no involvement in the Fediverser project other than following it from afar and discussing with the creator in a few comments.
Hello everyone,
As the other thread is already quite active and I guess my comment would probably be drown there, I open this new to bring an alternative perspective on the project.
Remember the human
First of all, could we please try to limit the hostility against the project creator? It’s fine to disagree, to block, to defederate, but wording such as “hate”, “screw the person” don’t seem to align with “remember you will be interacting with actual, real people” and “Be respectful of others.”
Now that this is out of the way, a few considerations to take into account:
The Network Effect - the issue that Fediverser is trying to solve
As most of you probably know, the network effect prevents most of the users of an existing platform to switch to another one. “Why would I go there where there will be no one, when all the people I want to interact with are here?”
It was the case for Mastodon until Twitter started to really become mediocre, and Signal still hasn’t convinced most of the Whatsapp userbase to make the switch. Matrix is struggling to be a full Discord replacement, but has the benefits of having bridges with most of communication platforms (https://matrix.org/ecosystem/bridges/)
Those bridges can ease potential reluctant users to at least try out Matrix, as they can still access their previous network.
That was the whole idea behind Fediverser. I remember the initial plan being a two-ways bridge between Lemmy and Reddit, allowing people to see content from Reddit from Lemmy, interact with it, and having people on Reddit seeing responses too.
Added with all the Lemmy pros that we know (third-party clients, alternative front-ends, etc.), it could be a huge helper into bringing more people into Lemmy. Which brings us to the next question.
Do we need more users?
I know this is highly debatable, but I will try to bring some perspective on this.
I have been an active user on Lemmy for a few months now. I like it here, great apps, nice people, interesting discussions.
But still, I still to go Reddit too.
Why? Network effect. As much as Reddit sucks today, there is still content that is only posted there, and sometimes I just want to read that content. And I’m not talking about niche topics like obscure fandoms. Parenting, personal finance, relationship advice, fashion advice are topics that aren’t very popular on Lemmy. And probably won’t become anytime soon due to the network effect. Which is fine for me.
But the issue I see is that overtime, the migration might never really happen. We might be in a “next year is the year of the Linux Desktop” or a “Chrome vs Firefox” situation rather than a “Digg to Reddit migration”. And I’m taking examples where the alternative is still widely used. Lemmy could actually become Diaspora, as over time, more and more people just think that the convenience of a Revanced third-party client is better than having to browse two platforms.
But to be fair, the future doesn’t even matter that much. What I wanted to say here was that I understand why the Fediverser creator wanted to avoid that scenario, and tried to accelerate the process.
Resources consumption
The list of instances part of the Fediverse project can be found here: https://communick.news/c/communick_news_network. I had a look at two, https://level-up.zone/ which replicated a gaming sub, and https://selfhosted.forum/. While they are quite active, they don’t seem to be that active (most of the threads have less than 5 comments, there are a few that high the hundreds, but they are quite rare).
I have seen several admins complaining about the system resources consumed by alien.top instances, “as much as the largest instances”. Does that mean that if tomorrow reddit.old dies, we double or triple the number of users on Lemmy, instances would have to be shutdown? Can we afford a growth this large? The scalability issues have been mentioned since June, and it seemed that things had improved on that side, but should we be worried that Lemmy will hit a scalability ceiling at some point?
However, to be fair, I guess this point is mainly assessed as a “low return on investment” for the resource consumption. Which brings us to the previous point “What what Fediverser trying to solve”.
As a conclusion, I hope this perspective might help people see why this project was made, and that maybe it does not deserve all the hostile reactions from the other thread.
That’s it, thank you if you made it to the end. Looking forward having a discussion in the comments.
Have a good day.
Edit: I noticed I didn’t mention the copyright issues in the comments, but to be fair I’m far from being knowledgeable on the question. It might however have a Streisand effect of having Reddit sue a single person over comments that are made for free by Reddit users. Is that worth being sued by them, I don’t know (also, what about alternative front-ends like LibReddit, or archive websites?)
My opinion on it is pretty simple:
- I’m here to read posts by and talk to humans, and a post made by a human somewhere else and copied over by a bot without said human’s knowledge or consent is not “made by a human” anymore as far as I’m concerned.
- I don’t f*cking care about the size of the Fediverse above a certain threshold, and we have reached that imo. There are great posts and discussions here already, so it’s fine if it attracts more people and it’s fine if it doesn’t. The important bit imo is that the people who join do so because they understand and care about the platform’s goals and ethos, not just because it has the biggest potential audience.
- Communities mainly populated by bots feel like grotesque ghost towns. Answering a post and later realizing it was made by a bot makes you feel tricked and deceived. Your posts being copied to another social network by a bot impersonating you feels cheap and desperate, and like your rights are being seriously violated (which is probably the case)! This all could very well give Lemmy the bad rep of being the “fake bot social network”.
- On the big plan behind it, who the hell would want to or should take over a Lemmy account from an instance that’s widely known to be populated by bots, maybe even blocked or defederated for that reason?! That’s pretty much the worst entrance to the Fediverse you could have, almost guaranteeing a bad experience from the get go!
So by all means advertise Lemmy outside of the Fediverse, but don’t fill it with bot content just to make it look like one of the big social networks on first glance. Imo it will do much more harm than good, because you alienate the people already here and you give it a bad rep in the outside world.
One thing I hate about it is the posting of reddit questions. Several times I’ve tried to help someone having some sort of an issue only to realize the question was originally posted on reddit and the poster is not even on the fediverse, nor will they probably ever see it. It’s a waste of time and effort, and certain subs are already becoming a graveyard of unanswered questions with no value to anyone.
To me that’s not adding “content” it’s simply cluttering the fediverse with garbage from a site many of us left behind on purpose. Reddit sucks, why bring it here?
Eliminate all bots.
Crossposts are useless because the communities are not interactive.
The strength of the Lemmy community in my opinion is the high quality of discussion, and there is no discussion to be had on reddit reposts when we are not having our content reposted onto reddit.
I see where you come from. From a lurker point of view, it doesn’t change that much, though.
If in the near future the communication would be both ways, what would you think of the tool?
I think it only serves to continue to keep reddit afloat. If our stuff does get crossposted, then we’re effectively just still using reddit. The point was to leave the platform because of the leadership, not kinda continue to half use it by proxy.
It’s a bandage that needs to be ripped off, not re-applied.
I don’t think there are any high quality discussions left to be had with the current suite of redditors.
E: I see you’re getting downvoted and that sucks - I for one appreciate our discussion.
I don’t think there are any high quality discussions left to be had with the current suite of redditors.
First of all, thanks for your comment, I appreciate the discussion.
To answer your point, I’m not so sure, there are more spectrums and gradations than clear-cut groups.
I’m probably against the grain here, but I still see some quality content on Reddit among the thrash.
And when I tell those people who post interesting content why they don’t come to Lemmy, they explain that they don’t have the time to post everything twice, and even if Reddit is bad, it’s still where most of the people are.
agreed. the only useful bot here imo is autotldr, which could just be integrated into Lemmy itself, and having it be a bot is just a temporary compromise.
It would be nice imo if an extension system was added to Lemmy just like browsers. Autotldr, Wikipedia summarisers, remindme, video downloaders, etc could be handled like a client side extension instead of being bots. They’d work completely fine, and not clutter up everyone’s feed that way
Parenting, personal finance, relationship advice, fashion advice are topics that aren’t very popular on Lemmy… due to the network effect.
No, no. It’s because we’re almost entirely basement-dwelling nerds who are alone, have no kids, no money, and only wear clothes to avoid the shame of other people seeing our naked bodies.
also, what about alternative front-ends like LibReddit, or archive websites?
Alternative reddit front ends like teddit always explicitly state that they do not host any content. They do that for a reason.
Archives are noncommercial and noninteractive, which falls under fair use, and they also comply with DMCA takedowns.
Interesting, thanks.
Also actually kind of ironic to receive copyright advice from an account that could probably be considered as identity impersonation, but I guess we live in strange times ha ha
Why would it be ironic that an actor (whose job is, you know, to pretend to be other people on camera) would knows a bit about copyright laws in the States?
I simply don’t understand what this fediverser thing is supposed to accomplish.
So apparently it is “eventually” supposed to let Reddit and Lemmy users interact with each other. And this will somehow cause people to join Lemmy? If someone is a reddit user, posting in Reddit where 99% of the community is, and they happen to see a comment from Lemmy, why would they even care? Why would they leave their community with 99% of the people to move to a smaller inactive community that only has any action at all due to copying content from the site that they are already on? It doesn’t make any sense!
And if that sad state of affairs is the eventual goal for the project, what is it accomplishing right now, other than annoying people with bot spam? If you want to read Reddit threads, go read Reddit. There is no reason to spam your personal reddit rss feed to the world. And what is even the purpose for it creating user accounts, which is basically impersonating people?
I think it basically boils down to 1 question. Is it currently accomplishing its goal of bringing actual new users to Lemmy, in any measurable way. If that answer is anything other than “yes”, then why is it enabled in the first place? If that answer is “yes”, then there are still a whole host of reasons why that might not be a good thing.
So apparently it is “eventually” supposed to let Reddit and Lemmy users interact with each other.
It’s already working as a prototype, as mentioned here: https://communick.news/comment/1229610
Here is the example: https://old.reddit.com/r/selfhosted/comments/1857wsg/question_instead_of_nextcloud_why_not_use_a_ftps/kb0ozc5/
Why would they leave their community with 99% of the people to move to a smaller inactive community that only has any action at all due to copying content from the site that they are already on?
Because then they would be interested in using the third party Lemmy apps and not the abomination that the Reddit one is.
It doesn’t make any sense!
And still Mastodon set-up a lot of repost bots when it started to attract people to the platform, by showing them they wouldn’t miss the content they wanted to see.
It also required Twitter going to crap, but Reddit seems to be following that trend.
Is it currently accomplishing its goal of bringing actual new users to Lemmy
It is: https://lemmy.ca/comment/5397535
But if you want a data report with all the migrations successfully done thanks to the tool, that’s probably too much to ask now
I do respect the human involvement, respect them enough in fact to expect them to reflect on the ramifications of their actions/creation.
Some LinkedIn tech bro who’s trying to get enough venture capital to boil the oceans using some overwrought genAI bullshit to create electoral campaign material is also “a human”, but being willing to create that horrid output with its consequences leaves both the product and producer open to critique
I got an invite to Blue Sky and realized why fediverse is great. Blue Sky already has the annoying kind of people that are on Twitter. We had those in fediverse, but they were all in some instances. Unfederated them and we are good. I don’t think the objective here is to get big as reddit, twitter, etc. I feel so much better having a small community that interacts with me and makes sense to me. It would be great having more people in fediverse as well, but the amount now is fine for me.
Judging by all the threads I’ve seen recently about the decreasing active user base of Lemmy, there are lots of people who want more, too. I don’t think any project is going to make Lemmy as big as Twitter or Reddit immediately, so that seems like an unfounded fear. There’s a vast mid area between current Lemmy and peak Twitter, so it doesn’t hurt to at least raise the number of normies here so we can get threads about things other than tech and news. I want to see biologists giving their opinion on a discovered animal, or people who worked on a random movie chiming in with fun facts, the earthquake guy, or the astronomy person, etc.
The variety of people made Reddit fun.
If you want science discussions, !science@mander.xyz and other communities there are quite interesting
As someone who has created two communities here in the Fediverse hoping they could ever draw attention and function as alternatives to Reddit, I have to simply say that I can’t do all the work alone. It’s good that someone is trying to bring in more content, even if it means bringing it from Reddit. Other people don’t like it? They’re welcome to fix it another way so long as it’s fixed. Otherwise niche communities will be all but forced to return to Reddit, as the statistics of stuff like “lirker vs poster” only ever benefit the most common topics, the largest instances, and sex / porn.
Also I honestly don’t understand why people are stoning their chests that the content is not “human produced”. Like, what are you trying to get at? It’s link aggregation, and in the end it doesn’t matter if the content was craftingly handwritten by a human who then walked to the Lemmy offices to retype it on the server’s keyboard - what matters is whether the entities who answer / comment on the post are humans or not. A reasonable fraction of content on Reddit is literally links to elsewhere and left there for people to comment on them - heck, it’s the entire point of some subreddits such as the news ones. Even in the cases where some introductory text or inviting commentary is posted alongside the link, the thing to comment on still requires going elsewhere to check anyway.
tl;dr: paraphrasing from what that sergeant from Starship Troopers said, “You are my content provider until you stop or I find someone better”.
Thank you, happy to see someone with a community creator perspective.
Just curious, which were those two communities? I can try to contribute if I can
They are Pokémon fandom specific ones so they’re really kind of niche-within-a-niche: @fakemon@fedia.io and @PokemonFanfiction@fedia.io . I started both when the Reddit migrations started so that people could see a landing spot and start activity, but as far as I’ve noticed none has grabbed.
Been also thinking of starting up their lemmy equivalents for discoverability. But ATM I myself have nothing to add to them other than (for the most part) Reddit reposts, so I’d rather see activity from other people first. Like I said: I’m interested in the community, not in the moderation.
I haven’t seen the alien.top stuff yet, but I had a friend that was working on a reddit bridge project that implements api over html for old reddit and new reddit. The idea was that you could target the api and make the client compatible with both reddit and lemmy. (The API is similar to Lemmy’s)
I got to play with it before he shelved it, and it worked great.
This seems like a better approach than the one they are trying to take.
Lemmy also needs a mechanism for linking your reddit user id (and twitter, and…) with your active lemmy id so users can find each other easier. I am surprised we don’t already have this with mastodon. Twiiter oauth is (used to be? I haven’t touched it in a couple years ) like a 5 minute thing to implement. Reddit apparently also supports oauth.
If you can sign into lemmy via a reddit login path, you could also do some other fun/interesting stuff.
Regardless, I don’t really see a need for any of it.
Lemmy has its own set of issues to deal with.
