Used Reddit for 13 years, tried out Kbin and Lemmy yesterday and settled on Lemmy.
Long story short, I’m going back to Reddit.
There needs to be ONE site, Lemmy.com, that people goto. This entire thing about having .whateveryouwant is VERY off putting. Most internet users have been trained to be extremely wary of odd or unusual things, so having anything besides .com/.net/.org will turn away a huge portion of users.
I initially setup an account on Lemmy.world, then realized that I couldn’t migrate it to another server and that when I deleted that account on that server all my comments were deleted.
Deciphering the distributed nature of it took me, a relatively tech-friendly person, almost the entire day and several ‘What the fuck?’ posts. I now understand it more. There are some very low-level guides that have been haphazardly put together, but there absolutely needs to be a MUCH smoother guide/explanation to this whole thing. That learning process will turn people away for sure.
BECAUSE I understand it more now, I’m left feeling VERY uncomfortable about my data security. If this is going to become a mainstream thing, as it reaches and before it gets to that critical mass of users, there’s going to be SO. MANY. SECURITY ISSUES. There’s no 2fa at all, hacking and user-account hacking is just going to run rampant, and I’m left wondering ‘Where is my username and password actually stored?’. The answer, sadly, is wherever the dude who’s running the instance/server is. In the ‘Fediverse’ your server instance might be hosted in a US or EU data center with proper digital and physical security, or it could be Joe Blows basement in Iowa running off a NAS. The easy-to-see future here is that Lemmy will fail to attract a critical mass of people because they’ll initially arrive, after a few months their instances will just cease to exist/get shut down/the hosts will decide its no longer a fun hobby to do.
With a large corporation, they have the staff and resources to secure and maintain the servers physically and digitally, and keep staff up-to-date on current infosec threats and get out in front of them. Beyond that, if there IS a breach, they have the ability to recognize it, understand the legalities and requirements of reporting it, and can be held accountable by regulatory bodies. Joe doesn’t have the resources to really maintain and keep a server running, nor the knowledge of his responsibilities for keeping the data safe digitally or physically.
On top of that, if Joe’s basement loses power/gets hacked/Joe decides he’s moving to San Fransisco and can’t bring his NAS with him and the server goes down, and that’s where my instance is hosted well there goes my entire account/comments/data.
Finding and subbing to communities is painfully difficult. It should be one-click, but somewhere I need to goto an external list, find what I want, and then copy/paste the URL into the search… and then 50% of the time, it doesn’t work. This is an understandable growing pain and can likely be fixed by UI/UX upgrades, but for now it’s a definite turn-off.
There simply is no content. I’m not a creator, I want content aggregated for me, and I’ve gotten used to having a single place to get it from that floods me with thousands of different articles/memes/posts/etc every minute. Until the user base arrives in one single place and starts generating content, there’s no reason for most people like me to be there as by far the larger number of users never create anything at all and only exist to consume the content generated.
There’s a giant list on the wiki that has hundreds. There’s even one with a fancy front end that searches through all the other sites and remembers your episodes and the shows you watch.
Two NextCloud instances, one is a RPi4 with a big external HDD which I use for backups, the other one contains everything else, including PhoneTrack. Happy to have a self-hosted privacy-friendly way to share my location with family.
Email using mailcow.
Jabber server using prosody. Using it with immediate family and two friends. Still super happy.
Web server including personal blogs. Currently looking to migrate away from Wordpress into something static without comments.
I have a small and humble set up. Pihole on my old Pi3, OpenMediaVault, Kavita, Qbittorrent on my Pi 4 and my other Pi 4 is running fucked up Lemmy and Mastodon instances because I’m new to this stuff.
This will be an extremely hot take for some: Almost all recent online games are complete garbage that solely exist to make profit and create addicted user bases and they hurt what videogames truly are, a revolutionary and interactive form of art.
I think we’ll see a temporary “return to normalcy” after the protest finishes and most subs come back online. But come June 30 and the end of third-party apps, we’ll see a bunch of users come back to Lemmy/Kbin again.
In a way, this seems like the best way of driving things. The protest has raised awareness and got a ton of development work going, and then there’s going to be a respite giving instances time to prepare themselves for the second surge.
Think of email as people sending letters over the phone. When it first came out, mail carriers only took their specific-sized paper, which couldn’t fit into mailboxes provided by other carriers. People could only mail each other if they used the same carrier. For example, kids wanted to send letters to grandmas, but the grandmas used different carriers. Eventually, some carriers got together and decided to use the same size of paper and mailbox size. The standardization became the email protocol.
However, with the new ease of sending letters, some mean people started sending messages to the grandmas, so grandmas stopped allowing all the carriers to deliver to them. This is how ban lists were made.
Grandmas can be very different, and each has their own things they are okay with. Eventually, this led to many bans making it hard to keep up except for the largest carriers that could hire staff to ensure compliance. They bought out the smaller carriers as more people switched to them. This is called centralization.
Some grandmas thought it would be neat to find and share recipes together. They sent their collections to recipe magazines and asked the magazines to send the completed magazines back to themselves, the other grandmas, and their grandkids. These became the first media forums, blogs, and websites. Eventually, people wanted to get their blogs about different topics all in one place. This became social media.
It was really messy at first because the magazines/websites created were in the order that the stories were received. They could be about anything, and some of the stories were from that yucky kid in class that talks about bugs and poop all day. To solve that, they started voting on what topics were the best and only showing the good ones to everyone but allowing those that really wanted to hear about bugs and poop still read and talk about that. This became link aggregation.
The rules for how that voting worked were decided by the website owners. Sometimes they would cheat to get their stories put to the top, for example, their choice of who Superman or Batman was the best superhero. People started wondering why they had to listen to those people, so they started making their own websites. All these small splits ended up with the main website everyone went to and mostly empty websites about whatever topic the small website wanted to discuss. Since that didn’t solve the situation, they came up with the idea that maybe the small websites should talk to each other, and as long as they didn’t talk about the one issue, they split from the big website. They could all stop being on the big website. This was called federation.
From what I’ve seen and read, server to server traffic is less taxing on instances than client to server. So even if your instance is JUST you, it would be your instance talking to everything else so it would have some net benefit on the federation. But it would take a lot of users self-hosting solo instances for this to help in any noticeable way, I’d think.
There is certainly no downside to running a solo instance, if you’re even slightly interested I would say go for it!
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