I used to browse Reddit 90+% of the time from my phone through the RiF app, so after June 30th, here is what I did and what I recommend as a starter pack for others in the same situation:...
“You should always stay on lemmy.world. To join the “music” community from lemmy.ml, you click the search icon in the top right corner on lemmy.world (not the “Communities” link) and search for !music including the exclamation mark (!) at the start. You should see the community pop up in the list after clicking Search. In general, the search term is “![community-name]@[instance-name]”.”
A few times I was looking for communities using the search bar, and got confused that I found more than one community for the same thing (e. g. music) and they seemed to be on different Lemmy instances. I did not know if I can even subscribe to them or not, if they are even visible for me with my lemmy.world account or not, etc. Now I understand that part a bit better. Thanks again! :-)
Yes. a Magazine is the same thing as a Community on Lemmy and a subreddit on Reddit hence the r/whatever on reddit, m/whatever on KBin and c/whatever on Lemmy.
An instance is the name given to a server thats installed and run a copy of the KBin (or Lemmy) software. So kbin.social is a different server than fedia.io - both are running the KBin software but on different servers. You can create communities on one or both which can lead to overlap - there are several c/funny communities on Lemmy for example, each on a different server, modded by different users.
I use the LeechBlock add-on on Firefox for Android. It lets you block any group of websites by time of the day/day of the week or even by time used every day/week etc.
I use it to block libreddit instances by using a wildcard filter reddit so that all domains with Reddit in their name are blocked.
You guys confused me because I couldn't see any emojis in any of your names. Until I clicked on @SgtSilverLining 's name and then the link to view the profile in the original instance. Turns out kbin doesn't have the concept of a display name, only usernames.
I personally prefer Lemmy over Kbin for many reasons:
None of the Kbin names make sense. Why are communities called magazines? Threads are posts? It just doesn’t map to existing mental concepts very well.
Kbin makes you go through settings just to access your subscribed magazines.
Kbin exposes votes front and center in the UI. You can see who voted for what post / comment and personally I think voting should be private. Obviously, anyone can host their own instance and see the votes due to federation, but there’s a big difference between that and outright showing it in the interface.
Kbin’s UI looks a bit outdated and early 2000s to me. It looks like a mix of the old Facebook style and Digg.
Lemmy’s UI feels more performant, especially on mobile.
Microblogging feels like an afterthought. Makes the site feel like it’s shoving two different sites together.
Content wise, both Kbin and Lemmy federate with each other, so ideally you should be seeing the same amount of content, but there’s federation and load issues on both sides that’s preventing that from working correctly. I have faith it will be solved eventually as these are just early growing pains.
I will say that, personally, I’ve found more of the communities I want to join on Lemmy, but I am sure another person with different interests might say otherwise. Try both and make your own decision!
I don’t want to block all nsfw content but I really don’t want to have to block every new porn community that pops up on lemmynsfw. Is there a way to block all the communities that originate at lemmynsfw?
Can’t a corporation just enter the space whenever they want to? Can’t they start or even buy out larger instances? Even if Lemmy does take off, wouldn’t this inevitably happen anyway if the space gets popular enough?
So far I think this is the most succinct and correct answer.
In another thread I posted the hypothetical example of a company standing up an instance with a really robust infrastructure (lots of storage, fast and redundant servers, etc). They could use their more significant money and resources to offer things other instances can’t. For example they could attract big names to do AMAs, or they could create communities with huge amounts of useful content that lots of people feel is invaluable. People would be encouraged to make lots of communities there and lots might make it their home instance.
Then, once it’s really entrenched, the company could decide to start charging a subscription for access, or could start serving up ads. It could be painful to walk away from it in a similar way people have felt pain moving away from Reddit. The difference is that, regardless of how big it is, it’s still just one instance among many. You wouldn’t have to walk away from Lemmy, just that instance.
Generally I like it. It has a lot going for it. So for some constructive (uninformed probably, I only signed up today, but I have been lurking for about a month) criticism:
I don’t really like how there can be 10 “Official Linux” subs, because 10 self-hosted servers can create it locally. But Okay, I can deal with it, searching for subs I can see where everyone has mostly subscribed to for a particular topic.
Which leads me to, Although its distributed, it should be distributed with common “global subs” which sit on all instances of self-hosted. This would allow me to see that “/g/Official Linux” is the main one (others might exist and that is fine but they are local self-hosted and accessible globally but might be more niche). This would eliminate some small popup Lemmy’s self-hosted since they would need a reasonable amount of storage. But I’m not sure this is good or bad, if you want to self-host and not participate in sharing/storing that data, then fine but your local subs are not replicated to the distributed network. I don’t know in my own mind if this is all good or bad, but something like this should be explored.
Currently, it appears to me in my limited usage, some sub on some self-hosted (lemmy.cheapdomain.for.fun) could blow up and that self-hoster cannot afford to maintain it, and shuts down. Boom, sub gone? (see previous, note I have not explored self-hosting a Lemmy server yet).
Server blocking/banning: This one concerns me, since its hardest to manage and deal with. Firstly, IMO you are going to get bad actors setting up bad servers with ‘nazi love’ subs or worse, and they should be filtered from the main distributed service. However currently this is in a terrible state of affairs and needs to be addressed, since free speech is what its about. People may disagree with things and even reddit had dubious subs. But you could choose to ignore it and not subscribe. There needs to be a way to inform users of a selfhosted site, and *why" the decision to block it was. So not just a federated list of “blocked” but with clear reasoning as to why it was blocked by lemmy.world or lemmy.me . Users could then at least identify a site that is blocked and if the reasoning for the block is against their belief they can at least go and check it out for themselves.
While being distributed, perhaps there can still be a self managed tagging system for subs and guidelines for how to tag your local sub, for global acceptance. You dont have to tag as the system says, but not doing so may prevent you from being shared across the federated net.
Everything else is great. Most of the reddit communities I had anything to do with exist here, albeit smaller. The Jerboa app is great (and another that I tried which I forget the name of off the top of my head).
I even like that the fanboys of Apple, Raspberry Pi, Docker etc are here to downvote the crap out of anything remotely negatively said, against their favourite thing… (That one might be a bit facetious, but that is what freedom of expression is).
The primary incentive that comes to mind is improved availability. Often, instances can become slow, so I use another. By hosting a local instance I could always have a smooth experience....
If you host your own instance you are your own admin. That gives you personal control over content and settings. However, you need to pay for a domain name and you need a 24/7 server so there’s some expense involved. Then there’s maintenance like software updates and user needs if you take them on.
I think most admins take on an instance simply to contribute in building the Fediverse and create something to take some pride in. You get some clout in the community for doing that.
If the descentralization of social networks continue, we will have to prepare for the eventual rise of the instances wars, where people will start to fight about which instance is better and which one is weird to be in and so on, but that’s for the future of us all.
This will likely follow a similar pattern to email, since it’s starting from a very similar position.
At some point people will begin to assign identities to instances and imagine (rightly or wrongly) that being on an instance says something about a person. People do that with cars, shoes, and yes, even email domains.
From a technical perspective, right now Lemmy is as anonymous as can be — I’ve yet to see an instance that requires ANY kind of verification. I didn’t need to provide an email address, phone number, or any other identifying information to sign up. Didn’t even need to solve a captcha. I just choose a name and set a password and BOOM! I was in.
Once upon a time, email worked this way, too. Then came the spammers, scammers, and other bad actors, and this was deemed untenable. Nowadays, any email provider that allows anonymous signup is likely to be blocked by most of the email-using world. You won’t be able to use them to sign up for other services, and you might not even have your mail accepted by other providers.
This will definitely become a problem as Lemmy becomes popular, and instance admins will need to crack down, lest they be overrun and defederated by the rest of the world.
I’m not sure what the answer is. This is a problem that has not been adequately solved, IMHO. A few bad apples spoil the bunch. That’s been true since long before the Internet.
From a technical perspective, right now Lemmy is as anonymous as can be — I’ve yet to see an instance that requires ANY kind of verification. I didn’t need to provide an email address, phone number, or any other identifying information to sign up. Didn’t even need to solve a captcha. I just choose a name and set a password and BOOM! I was in.
Sopuli made me write a little paragraph about myself before they let me in
Lemmy is a federated link aggregator and forum. Kind of like a hybrid between email and Reddit. I’m a member of Lemmy.zip, but I’m posting on another Lemmy instance (I forget where this post is, Lemmy.world, right?). Lemmy.zip and lemmy.world are “federated”, which means if users on one instance interact with users on another, both servers will sync this activity. Lemmy.world will accept lemmy.zip user posts.
Community searching shows the community name and the server where it’s hosted. Even though I only have an account on Lemmy.zip, I can subscribe, comment, and post on communities from other instances, as long as lemmy.zip is federated with them.
Recently, Beehaw de-federated from much of the fedi-verse. This means their software works the same, but prevents their users from interacting with the rest of the community, and the rest of the community from interacting with their communities and users.
It’s complicated and annoying, but necessary to be federated to prevent the fate of Digg and Reddit.
Also, one instance could require email and 2FA to be safe, and choose to de-federate from an instance that has no verification and becomes full of spammers. Or, someone could create a Lemmy instance that requires verification of identity (like AMA used to do, or the old Twitter checkmark), so if John.Oliver from the “Lemmy.OnePercent” instance posts, you know it’s the real John Oliver. There’s benefits and complications from federation.
These are all for the sake of learning and are innocuos the way I’m using them. It is plain to see that someone with skills and an agenda could make more out of it than I have.
These are all for the sake of learning and are innocuos the way I’m using them. It is plain to see that someone with skills and an agenda could make more out of it than I have.
Source instances can be seized ( kolektiva.social/@admin/110637031574056150 ).
UUIDs aren’t “invested” enough. Interacting with a name rather than 08d86062-730b-4081-8c4c-b28bca1713b6 or c4e1261a-087a-448d-bd3f-5c3d8ab28aab is desirable.
GDPR will be interesting in the fediverse as once it’s out there it is really hard to remove/redact on all the other servers that the post has been federated with. It is a problem akin to sending an email to a mailing list and then asking everyone on that mailing list to delete that email… and forward that deletion request on to anyone they forwarded your email to and ask them nicely to do the same.
If I understand it correctly, someone could create a “cars” community on lemmy.world and someone else could create a “cars” community on another instance. Neither community gains enough traction to take off but if they had all been one it would have worked.
That seems problematic to me. Am I understanding it wrong?
You’re not necessarily understanding it wrong, and there is a potential problem there, but I think this view focuses on the problems over the benefits that this can provide. Think about how certain communities on Reddit were the only community for their subject there, and if you didn’t like the culture of the community or the moderation, your only choice was to create your own community with some variation on their name or some clunky name like “carswithblackjackandhookers” to signal how/why your similar community existed.
Here, you have the benefit of being able to create communities around the same subject with the same name (besides the domain, e.g. @lemmy.world/lemm.ee) but with different rules and moderation to make the community as you like it. There is the possibility it means neither community takes off, for sure, but there’s also the possibility both do well enough & have distinct enough posts & conversation that you now get two communities focusing on the same subject but with a greater variety of perspectives.
I realize that latter view may be a little on the optimistic side, but tbh we saw this even on Reddit with different communities around the same subjects. If anything finding those communities was harder there thanks to them having to adopt more & more arcane names thanks to abandoned, and existing communities but with different focuses.
My position differs currently for Mastodon and Lemmy.
In the case of Lemmy, I’m not yet 100% sure. Lemmy’s strength may also prove to be a weakness I feel in terms of it replacing Reddit, in that the decentralised nature naturally creates a dispersion of the audience. While anyone on Reddit could create a community, having them in one place really funnelled people into logically named communities. On the other hand while subscribing to a number of communities for Lemmy, it’s not that infrequent to come across the same or similar community on multiple instances and then needing to work out where you want to go. On one hand it’s probably good to have the varying perspectives and culture this will bring, but I think it’ll also make it hard for users looking for that definitive place to go. It’s very much early days though and perhaps many of those communities will naturally assemble in mass on various instances once the dust settles.
We’ll see how that plays out I guess, and right now my Reddit use is at maybe 10-20% what it was and I’m really looking to invest my time here. I think with time that both Lemmy updates an 3rd party clients will make working across instances more transparent and in turn broaden appeal.
I’m more bullish for Mastodon in the short term. The reason for that is my usage concerns me looking to follow an individual rather than locate a community of individuals. Since people will have one account, there’s less impact caused by decentralisation as my interactions with a person I follow is very much 1:1 (unless for some reason they chose to create and maintain multiple accounts). If I want to follow Apple’s account, they’ll presumably have a single one versus there maybe being 6 viable Apple communities across Lemmy instances. I find my use of Mastodon in terms of user experience is much closer and familiar to Twitter than currently Lemmy is to Reddit. Additionally, once it’s enabled for ActivityPub, I think Meta having Threads throws significant support around that particular ecosystem, and brings it to the masses. Can’t imagine we’ll see a billion dollar company spin up a Reddit alternative that is Activity Pub integrated to give Lemmy that same boost, unfortunately.
To be clear I’m very supportive of both Lemmy and Mastodon and want both to succeed. I do think reddit being centralised has some benefits but, especially for people not looking to invest heavily in browsing across instances, and that it’s to be seen how Lemmy will evolve as it grows and if casual users will be able to sign up and easily find the communities and information they are after. The 1:1 person interaction for Mastodon I think simplifies things and Thread potentially will result in a massive boost for Mastodon. It’s early days for Lemmy and I can’t imagine in Jan or Feb that the majority of us here had even heard of it, let alone considered leaving Reddit. It’ll only continue to grow and I’m excited to watch it do so.
That’s a good question about users with the same name. I haven’t wanted to try other instances because I thought I’d need to think up multiple new usernames… But maybe I don’t? Interesting.
You can have the same name across multiple instances. I assume in the background there is a @yourinstance.tld as part of the name, but all the clients I’ve seen show just the initial part of it. I could see some impersonation and confusion issues.
In Jesus’s time, there were three different sects of Judaism.
One of them, the Sadducees, allegedly believed there was no life after death and that God didn’t care at all about what people did or didn’t do.
Their answer to your question of following the law is perhaps the most interesting.
They believed that what was put forth as laws were a gift to humanity and that following them inherently led to a better life in the here and now.
While I don’t personally see all of the laws put forward as beneficial, there are certainly instances where that makes a lot of sense.
For example, look at the full version of one of the commandments:
Honor your father and your mother, so that your days may be long in the land that the LORD your God is giving you.
Exodus 20:12
Would following a commandment to take care of your parents in their old age (‘honor’ here comes from the word for https://biblehub.com/hebrew/3513.htm) benefit you by setting an example such that when you are old that you too would be taken care of?
This was almost like social security in antiquity, much like the Sabbath was one of the first labor laws preventing working anyone more than 6 days in a row.
There’s something called the overjustification effect, where when you introduce external reward systems for something intrinsically rewarding people over focus on the external and forget the internal benefits. I think a number of religions have serious issues with that.
There’s even a certain irony in Job, named ‘persecuted’ in Hebrew because even though he lived a good life he experienced suffering which it explains by the intervention of Satan, today in the most common language among believers being the exact same word as “to do a task with the expectation of a reward.”
Disappointed ex-Reddit user after the APIcalypse - starter pack
I used to browse Reddit 90+% of the time from my phone through the RiF app, so after June 30th, here is what I did and what I recommend as a starter pack for others in the same situation:...
Browsers with digital wellbeing features built in?
Hi!...
What does it mean when the user has @ in front of the name
I know that users from different instances can have @instance after the user name, but what does it mean when the username is @username ?
Lemmy vs kbin witch one should in chose terms of privacy and content amount?
Lemmy vs kbin witch one should in chose terms of privacy and content amount?
A Mac OS Shortcut to Quickly Subscribe to a Community in Lemmy's Web UI (www.dropbox.com)
Summary...
Is there a way to block whole lemmy servers from your feed?
I don’t want to block all nsfw content but I really don’t want to have to block every new porn community that pops up on lemmynsfw. Is there a way to block all the communities that originate at lemmynsfw?
Why are people saying that Lemmy is free of corporate interest?
Can’t a corporation just enter the space whenever they want to? Can’t they start or even buy out larger instances? Even if Lemmy does take off, wouldn’t this inevitably happen anyway if the space gets popular enough?
federation test
test
Reddit Refugees on Lemmy, how are you guys liking lemmy so far?
What are the incentives for hosting a Lemmy instance?
The primary incentive that comes to mind is improved availability. Often, instances can become slow, so I use another. By hosting a local instance I could always have a smooth experience....
If Lemmy and Mastodon continues to get popular, we will eventually get Instance wars.
If the descentralization of social networks continue, we will have to prepare for the eventual rise of the instances wars, where people will start to fight about which instance is better and which one is weird to be in and so on, but that’s for the future of us all.
YSK: Your Lemmy activities (e.g. downvotes) are far from private (i.imgur.com)
Edit: obligatory explanation (thanks mods for squaring me away)…...
Do you believe Lemmy/Mastodon can become mainstream and fully replace their centralized counterparts?
What the title says. I think there is still a long way for that to happen but i’ve been hopeful. What do you think?
Reddit users lost?
Do we at this point have any substantial data on just how many users Reddit actually lost due to this?...
ELI5: If you're a Christian, why do you have to be good if Jesus will forgive you no matter what?
I grew up going to church but I'm not religious now and I never really understood this part....