If you care about this stuff, please at least give the fediverse a try. Yes it's inadequate right now in all kinds of ways. But the main reason is that not enough people are there. It needs critical mass.
Pick whatever you want - kbin, lemmy, mastodon. Go there, find your community (it will probably look very sad compared to Reddit). And contribute something positive - comment, post, whatever. If everybody just did that, we would kickstart something durable that couldn't be destroyed and take back the internet that everybody is pining for.
That's the thing - what I like about reddit is that every single community is right there. I don't need to figure out a new complex system. It's a megaforum with every single subniche you can think of, without having to go to any other site or any other server
I want a centralized megaforum. I don't care about federation or what technology it uses. I just want easy access to everything
This seems to be a very common sentiment that is not stated that clearly often, but it makes me very sad to read it.
The magic of the internet, once upon a time, was discovering content in your own time. You stumbled into that cool niche forum, found someone’s personal blog, a flash game page. It didn’t need big centralised services to be fun.
Internet users have become consumers and want to be fed content. I do not understand this sentiment at all. It feels like we are all addicted to the easy dopamine kicks of scrolling Reddit/Facebook/Twitter now.
I think it's correlated to the failure of search engines.
There is no way to discover content anymore, long gone are the days where some expert's blog would appear prominently when searching a topic. Now all the results are people trying to sell you something. Reddit has replaced google (more or less) for a lot of people.
The only functional search engine nowadays is marginalia.
Yeah, I Don't get it personally. People are seeing the results of Reddit and their thoughts still remain: "yea I want all my eggs in one basket". I appreciated that when one forum shut down it didn't take out my entire means a of communication. That if a big forum shut down it wasn't the only big forum for a given community. I Don't know what changed for people to not value that variety, that redundancy.
Also, don't know why no one remembers RSS feeds if they want an aggregator anyway. Even Reddit and YouTube have RSS protocols (for now). I never used them but it's nifty for the best of both worlds.
The problem is that as the Internet has advanced and filled every aspect of our lives, the average technological literacy of users has fallen off a cliff. I understand that in every aspect of life you cannot and will not care about being fully literate with everything, for instance most car owners are not mechanics, but that literacy used to be a requirement for access. I speak as someone who experienced the tail end, and thus one of the lowest bars of entry, but I still had to work to find things. I had to tinker with IRC clients, with port forwarding torrents for my Linux ISOs, for self-hosting servers for me and my friends. To find new communities was a mix of Google plus word of mouth, and took a bit of effort, but that effort was okay. It made finding and joining them more special. If I just click a “subscribe” button then it’s not as interesting to me. Not to mention by making the barrier of entry so low, it means the barrier of quality is lower too.
Preface: I'd like for the fediverse to win, active on both mastodon, and reading lemmy; however, economies of scale in the present Internet does not favor that outcome:
* What we want is high signal/noise ratio.
* In the magic old internet, the bar for signal was relatively low, because it competed with books, and TV.
* The competition over attention has raised the bar over what "good content" looks like.
* Content like that don't materialize out of thin air, but needs an audience to keep it alive, and to grow, and select, and feedback
* The re-fragmentation of internet communities risks loss of economies of scale for the content creators to create or maintain high-quality gems.
Let's take something specific, say furry artists. Their content loop for reddit was: post cute pics on r/furry, if it hits quality bar, gets upvoted, and seen by ~1000s of people; 0.1% of those will commission a new drawing, draw the thing, get paid, post it on reddit, close the loop.
In a re-fragmented Internet: 1, a lot less people will be able to find those "gem forums" focused around a topic, and they won't browse it daily; and 2, the artist needs to spam their stuff to all the communities to get the fraction of traffic they have on reddit.
The outcome from this re-fragmentation _in our present time_ will be the "hallowing of the middle", the "hobbyists scaling towards professional", and people who are just really into the thing, and make some money on the side. In a re-fragmented Internet, you are either a fully professional -with competent marketing team- or you're doing it for the ~20 people sharing the same forum.
I understand that many people are expressing explicit preferences for there to be only that 20 people they chat with, or only the hobbyist / geeks to participate and _I'm happy for them_. What I'm claiming above, is that this will kick the professional ladder out for upcoming people to build - show - get attention for their stuff. And that creates a less magical Internet.
If reddit was the only, or even best place for that I may agree. But reddit isn't Twitter, and in fact many rdddit circles detest OC despite also complaining about rampant reposts.
Ofc you exploit it anyway, but Reddit was never truly good for professionals unless they were eternally on reddit to begin with.
For what it's worth, Lemmy and kbin are very much the v1 of the fediverse, the UIs and servers are improving quickly as they break (just like how reddit was notoriously down all the time years ago).
After you sign up you don't have to care much about servers or instances, just tap "all".
I don't think it will be long before someone comes into this space with a good UI and the community that reddit just marooned and turns it into gold.
If you're looking for a one stop reddit replacement you're not going to find it. As such, I don't think selling the fediverse as "reddit without the BS" is an honest or even reasonable comparison.
You're going to have to stick with reddit and give replacements a dew years for the dust to settle before asking that question.
This is learned helplessness acquired from the past decade where the internet became five megacorp websites. No different from your siblings or parents saying they aren't good at computers. It isn't a complex system. You are surely capable of figuring it out.
I'm not even slightly interested in the "fediverse". My impression is that most of the people involved are more interested in the ideology of decentralisation and the technology than they are about community building. I don't care even slightly about decentralisation. The focus is to the clear detriment of the product itself.
This shows you have not been on the fediverse and certainly have not indulged with communities mostly populated by long-time fedizens who view it as a place from their community to their community. There is a lot of feeling of community, inside instances, wider subcommunities, with a great example being the push to pre-emptively block all Meta instances and projects.
Fediverse isn't it man. Whoever owns the server is in complete control of all the content and can delete it at any moment then you have to find a new server and start over. It only solves part of the the problem, not even accounting for how confusing it is to normal users.
Maybe they think the next "internet" needs to be entirely P2P or something?
Either way Fediverse has its problems but it's the best "old internet" i've seen in a long time. Lemmy and Kbin are just the start. I'm excited to see where it goes. Developing for the Fediverse is fun, frankly.
Pretty much all forum works like that. The admin can delete whatever stuff they don't like. But at least in fediverse, you still have an option to start over in another instance instead of silently accepting your fate. If admins deleting your stuff is a concern for you, then you can just run your own instance, which is not possible on proprietary forums such as Reddit.
That’s something I am trying to solve with my upcoming site LimeReader. The user data gets submitted to multiple servers and retrieved from multiple servers. Users can add their own servers if they like too.
I was hoping to have the beta already but I am now hoping to have it out this weekend. For those curious, I am the developer of HACK, one of the top rated hacker news apps for iOS and Android.
Using HACK rn and its great ;) I’m new to HN since using reddit less and this app is really easy and snappy to use. I particularly enjoy the “best comments and posts” feature. If I could offer one feature for the future, would it be possible to specify the range of time to view best posts from? Love using the app nonetheless!
Each action from the user (post, comment, votes etc) are signed by their private key. The resulting signature is sent along with the public key. The servers and clients all verify the signature with that public key.
Wait, so using the same private keys on multiple accounts on separate instance can work? When you post a comment from all those accounts with the same private keys at the same time, the servers will accept only one of them? How does replies work? Will replies to your comment get sent to just one instance or all your user accounts in other instances as well. Is this only works on lemmy or is it a hack that's not always supported by all ActivityPub implementations?
Sorry for the barrage of questions. I knew that accounts already have private keys associated with them, but I didn't know it's possible to use them at the same times across multiple instances without any negative impact.
No, I think you might be conflating my implementation with what the Lemmy/Fediverse/ActivityPub does. I am not using any of those. Unlike those, in my LimeReader, there’s no real concept of “accounts” or registration. The “login” phase is mostly used to help users easily generate the public private key pairs. But they don’t necessarily have to do it on my site. Any valid ECDSA p-384 key pair will work.
I am using ECDSA P-384 for the keys and signing. Browsers come with the CryptoSubtle library which does this natively, so I am able to build it all with pure vanilla javascript without frameworks:
The client (browser) creates the public private key pair. The private key pair never leaves the client device. The client uses the private key to sign the records (data such as user metadata, comments, posts, votes etc). These signed records get sent along with the public key and signature to multiple servers hosted by multiple people and then fetched by multiple other clients from these servers. The servers (if they want but highly encouraged) verify the signature of the records using the public key. If verified, then it stores that record as “belonging” to that public key. The public key is basically the user’s identity. It’s also unique. So one public key is one account only. When other clients fetch these signed records, they also verify the signature.
Behind the scenes, there are no “real” accounts on servers. There are only records which have been sent by the public key and been verified. Using these records, the clients create the metadata of accounts, communities etc.
The API will be only 2 endpoints - /search and /create.
The /create accepts the signed records of various types. These are the types of records which can be created for my site which I also think should cover most similar sites: user, community, text, reaction, hide, bookmark, pin, award, view, delete, follow, report, collapse, media
The /search accepts the filters which are enough to build the feed of a link aggregator like website.
The signature of each record is unique due to the benefit of ECDSA signatures. So, the signature also becomes the “id” of your record. The replies to your comment all reference this “id” i.e. the “signature” of the comment they are replying to. These replies get sent to multiple servers (whichever ones the client has configured). Unlike the Fediverse, in my way, the servers don’t talk to each other. The client talks to multiple servers and sends its signed records to them.
I will have a more detailed write up in the coming days. I am having to have all this work as seamlessly as possible so that to a non-techy person, they shouldn’t have to understand such complexity. On the front end, it will look like a simply link aggregation site.
This seems to be very interesting and address the main drawback for current federated apps implementation. I do hope you can support ActivityPub somehow because you can jump start your community by allowing interaction to mastodon and lemmy/kbin instance. You don't have to expose all your feature set, just enough to allow people from those communities to talk to your community
No, that stuff is nonsensical. I don’t want to browse servers and keep a list etc. The federated stuff will never take off and in a way I hope it doesn’t, all that content locked away on personal servers that can go away at a whim.
I tried to make a lemmy account on my phone in between errands. Couldn't figure it out. I'll give it a shot on desktop, and I want a reddit replacement, but I wonder how many other people are gonna go to the same effort. Maybe that's a feature though, an escape from eternal September.
I joined kbin.social and have been pleasantly suprised with it. Everything I'm subscribed to there is slow moving at the moment, but frankly I find that pace refreshing. I've seen threads remain active for several days, which doesn't seem to happen anywhere else.
I tried to make a kbin.social account several times, and also lemmy.world, lemmy.social.
They all take several minutes work to fill out the form, and then another few minutes waiting. Then they hang with no error message. It's tedious and I've given up trying to sign up for any of these new fedi-reddits.
EDIT: ok, after reading some more of this thread I decided to have one more try. Sign up on squabbles.io took 2 minutes. Yay!
EDIT 2: information density is so low on squabbles. Also, they already block all NSFW content - I'm not looking for porn, but I am looking for a community where people are free to share whatever kinds of content they like, including stuff that I don't like. There needs to be strong boundaries - nothing illegal, no racism etc. But the boundaries should be as broad as possible. Besides, NSFW means a lot more than just porn. Are we allowed to share dirty jokes there? Or important but horrible videos exposing war crimes?
A community that decides to block all of this from the very beginning is not what I want. Although I can understand their reasoning and honestly if I was running the site I might we'll make the same decision.
May want to try Squabbles.io too. Easier to figure out and it has a friendly community. It was featured on Product Hunt yesterday. It made it to the top 3.
I never really got into twitter but mastodon is quite nice.
Lemmy/kbin still have some rough edges in their UI but given enough time I think they'll get there. If any of the big ex-reddit apps turn to the fediverse I think it'll give these communities a big boost.
Pick whatever you want - kbin, lemmy, mastodon. Go there, find your community (it will probably look very sad compared to Reddit). And contribute something positive - comment, post, whatever. If everybody just did that, we would kickstart something durable that couldn't be destroyed and take back the internet that everybody is pining for.