I've been tentatively looking at Lemmy, obviously nowhere near the activity of Reddit but it's not a ghost town either and the Fediverse aspect is a big plus in my book.
In addition to a lot of other small details about lemmy, I don't like the way lemmy federates, I think if somebody made "subreddits for mastodon" instead that would have been more interesting.
Main instance (lemmy.ml) has quite heavy political censorship though. It’s not obvious or visible, and including under anti racism rules. Criticising non western countries leads to calls of orientalist and bans [0].
Also without a business model they will struggle to maintain the servers required for even a tiny fraction of Reddit
I think it's too early to complain about censorship. Moda are still probably adjusting to what is acceptable, and there are several instances where policies differ. Same as turning down whole of Reddit because one subreddit has strict moderation.
Regarding the business model, there isn't any. At best it will be run by donations if the costs mount top high. I'm curious to see where it will go, but at least there are no ads at least not yet.
> there are several instances where policies differ
For now, but if this is how the maintainers of the main instance feel, how long before they start defederating from instances without their strict policies? Isn't that already happening on Mastodon?
The fediverse ends up really confusing because it gets so balkanized. "One domain, one community" is easy to understand. "We're all seeing the same stuff no matter where you are" is easy to understand. But with defederation as an option, you have to navigate a complicated web of the meta social network—the network of networks, and who federates with who.
Email doesn't have this problem so much because ideology is not a concern for private messaging. You have spam and you have anticompetitive behavior, but you don't have "random guy who happens to maintain the instance had a falling out with the random guy maintaining this other instance."
If there are issues, you just migrate. It sounds bad, but if you expect one web site to forever serve you, you are subjecting yourself to their enshittification in the long run. Better to know these things have limited life times and plan accordingly. Early adopters are usually the most interesting crowd anyway.
I don't mind if something is slighlty difficult to use, as it serves as a filter to participants and limits growth (subreddits with over 100,000 participants tend to be kind of guerrella marketing, meme-infested shitholes).
The obvious drawback of course is that you lose the non-tech savy interesting people and experts. I don't know how to mitigate that, but still very interested in seeing where this all goes.
I think they should be able to govern their instance as they wish, but it's odd that they don't understand that putting (for example) criticism of the Chinese communist party under a general anti-racism rule — without explicitly mentioning this — is rather confusing. It's certainly not what the average new user would understand as racism.
This specific ideological slant is also not clear from its description on the instance list[0], especially when compared to instances like Lemmygrad.
Yes you’ve hit the nail on the head. It’s made out to be relatively censorship light, but in reality it isn’t. Things just need to be clear and up front so users know whether they want to use that instance.
You are writing this using the best Reddit replacement.
If HN had a subforum feature and an ability to embed pictures or videos in posts, or some kind of markdown light syntax, Reddit usage would die for me.
reasons why HN doesn't work as a reddit replacement:
- It has no subforums
- Almost everyone here is in IT, other topics only get discussed when they are interesting to IT people. On reddit, you can talk to historians, mathematicians, language enthusiasts, fans of your favourite series, etc.
- HN usability on mobile is... yeah
- HN is text only, that's already difficult for programming, but would make talking about e.g. mathematics really annoying, and for people who want to share art, that's even more obviously not going to work
I agree with everything except the mobile usability. Hacker News has some of the best mobile usability of the websites I am using. It is not perfect but it is way better than Reddit. Hacker News is very comfortable to read on mobile and the only thing which could be improved is the too small voting buttons.
I agree that Reddit is borderline unusable in its mobile website, and the official app is ad-ridden, but 3rd party apps (the ones they're trying to kill) are fine.
I find HN a royal pain on mobile tbh. Everything clickable is so small.
Thread with many replies, the deepest replies end up very squashed right in portrait, it's annoying to read. As is the flag/dead style but that's another matter. Obviously nothing I can't work around.
Reddit is 100 times as big as HN. I think (well, it's a pet theory at least) that internet forum dynamics change at each order of magnitude. If so, then HN can't be Reddit no matter what features we build.
If not in the content-mix sense, then in the sense that there is one and only one homepage, and that it's everything posted to the site.
Though in truth: there are some alternate views. "Pool", "Invited", and "Best" are subsets of submissions. You can also do a blank search on Algolia and set a time window to view the best items of the past day, week, month, year, or other arbitrary interval.
It's on the radar, but it will probably never have the critical mass that reddit has; can its servers handle and afford millions of users and billions of requests a month?
Currently it surely cannot handle the scale of Reddit. They do „tens of thousands“ now and will have to discover the bottlenecks for „hundreds of thousands“ first.
Anyways, maybe this gives Lemmy a boost towards the next level.
