While the initiative is very well appreciated, I don’t like using social platforms for the purpose of reading. I used to have a goodreads account but I deleted it and replaced it with an offline app, openreads, which offers basically everything I need to organize my hobby.
I just don’t need most of what online platforms have to offer.
Agreed, sort of. I use Bookwyrm but I don’t get the appeal of “social reading”. I don’t discuss books with others because my taste in books is lame, my opinions are usually controversial among book enthusiasts and I would rather not have people looking at what I read. Bookwyrm is also apparently much more expensive to run per user compared to most federated services so I feel bad for costing the instance admin money. But I don’t want to switch to a completely offline or personal instance because I like being able to sync across multiple devices and get book recommendations from the larger instance’s database.
This comment also reminds me that my reading has been paused for several months and I should get back to it.
Yeah in general, I like forums better than the format Twitter is in. I like topic-based discussions more than discussions spawned from short, potentially out-of-context messages.
Not to mention that the discussion is almost guaranteed to consist of similarly short (or even shorter) witty one-liners. Twitter format is just horrible, and its restrictions promote equally horrible behavior where you have to look for ways to convey ideas and feeling in a short manner, which almost never results in more polite and sophisticated conversations.
Never used Twitter for anything more serious than some announcements from the game devs I follow. Anything else is just plain stupid, which makes me really surprised over the wide-spread adoption of Twitter by officials and ministries and the like.
And raising the character limit is going to be even more absurd, because then it’s going to be reminiscent of an actual forum, just less structured and sensible.
Twitter, as a format, is the worst option between messengers like Matrix and proper forums of any kind.
Lemmy is not supposed to replace reddit. Lemmy is it’s own thing that has already existed for years now. The benefit of Lemmy over individual forums is the interconnectivity of separate communities and being able to view content from multiple communities in one single feed. You can subscribe to communities and view all your subscribed community posts in one feed. Theres also the All sort on the main page, which essentially functions as Lemmy front page. Its also, as you said, not centrally controlled. So if one part fails the rest can continue as normal. That makes it pretty robust. But it isn’t meant to replace reddit, a massive social media platform with millions of users.
what blew my mind, and the minds of many other people on reddit is that they (reddit) have 2,000 employees and yet still can’t piece together a good and accessible experience for their users…
No matter how many developers you get, you’re never going to have a good product if the guy calling the shots won’t allow it. I’m confident that the developers working on Reddit probably know damn well that their product is trash and there’s nothing they can do about it because their job isn’t “make a good site” its “do what your boss tells you to do”
A good frame of reference would be the VPS that lemmy.world is running on imo. Looks like they upgraded to a 4 core/16gb setup to handle the influx of users, so if your instance is running under 1k users, I believe those specs would be sufficient.
If it starts chugging, I wonder how well it’d work to run the server on the laptop and the DB on a VPS (or vice versa).
I saw you locked one off-topic post. It would be nice if you would also add a comment to such posts why it was locked. Otherwise if people randomly stumble upon such posts, it may leave the impression that the mods ban random things.
I decided a few years ago that I play games to have fun and if a game isn’t fun, I don’t play it. I don’t have much time these days to dedicate gaming, so I want to enjoy the time I do.
I’ve had a few I’ve really enjoyed until I hit some really terrible game mechanic or even a boss encounter I can’t get past. I’ll usually give it a few days/tries, but I’ll flat out just bail and uninstall a game if it is causing me too much stress.
I currently have 3 - one on Lemmy.ml, one on sh.itjust.works, and one on kbin.social. I did this for a number of reasons:
If something happens to one instance, especially during growing pains where user influx is indistinguishable from a DDOS, I’ve got a “backup” where I can still be active from.
These three (and beehaw, but I’m still waiting for approval over there) seem to be the larger (and/or fastest growing) instances - currently there’s an issue with Lemmy where if you “click-through” to a community on another instance, the authentication doesn’t carry - so you have to copy the link, return to your “home instance” and search for the link, then you can visit via your home instance and interact. Clumsy (but hopefully corrected eventually). By having an account already on these instances, clicking through isn’t a problem because I’ve got an account over there. (Note: I’m not talking about interacting with posts across instances, that works fine).
Kbin.social showed me that instances can have a different “look-and-feel” from each other. While Lemmy.ml, sh.itjust.works, and beehaw are all clones of each other, Kbin has a prettier UX. Until apps start showing up, the homepage of your chosen instance is how Lemmy will look for you across the fediverse.
Different instances have different home feeds, for some reason. I would expect that all settings being equal (view from all instead of local, or view subscribed and having the same subscriptions on each instance) they should all return a similar feed - but they don’t. Not sure why, if my understanding about how this all aggregates together works - I’m still testing.
Different instances have different philosophies and different rules - some allow porn (but most don’t, and even on the ones that do I haven’t seen any yet - and yes I have NSFW enabled). But I also don’t want to end up with a home-instance that’s another echo chamber of one certain point of view - and while communities from those instances can be filtered individually, it’d be nice to have a local instance that’s already not an echo chamber.
It’s still early enough that I’m not “married” to a particular instance yet, so now is the time to experiment and test. And since there’s no way (yet) to migrate an account, settings, subscriptions from one instance to another, now’s the time to explore and branch out and look around before I really get settled-in.
Edit: and apparently numbered points don’t work. Good to know.
kbin.life
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