I just don’t get how Lemmy is going to act as a proper replacement for Reddit.
I understand the basic concept of Lemmy and the Fediverse, and people are touting the concept of it being federated and not centrally controlled, but it is an absolute mess and nobody seems to have an idea about what to do with it.
How are communities going to grow if there isn’t at least some form of central management. Other than there being an underlying framework that connects the servers, they’re all just doing what they want.
Outside of the underlying framework, there’s no ‘guidelines’ or consistency. The servers have random names, and the main Lemmy.ml is telling people to register elsewhere.
How is this going to bring in a wider audience if people are being directed to lemmy.fmhy.ml, sopuli.xyz, or sh.itjust.works?
What is the purpose of the Fediverse when forums for niche interests already exist on the internet?
Does it make sense to have something like a ‘sports’ server that has communities for soccer, NFL, basketball, MMA? But then how do you get a consistent naming scheme that lets people know it’s part of the fediverse?
Maybe Lemmy could work as a replacement, but it seems like it needs a ‘flagship’ server with a group of people maintaining it to set an example. Then other servers that cover more specific areas, such as sports, can be set up and potentially work closely with that flagship group.
If this doesn’t happen, then I can’t see how this doesn’t just fizzle out.
P.S. I’ve also compared two different Lemmy servers and looked at the same post in a community, and there are different numbers of comments on each where they haven’t synced up…
I also wanted to post this to the main Lemmy community, but as I had to register via a different server, I’m not able to access that community from the server I’m using for some reason…
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.
That makes sense, it just seems that a lot of people are expecting Lemmy to replace Reddit, when it isn’t up to that task and isn’t what it’s designed for.
If people want it to be close to Reddit, then I think a ‘flagship’ server is the only option, but it seems like even that is fitting a square peg into a round hole, and isn’t something that anyone is taking responsibility for.
it just seems that a lot of people are expecting Lemmy to replace Reddit, when it isn’t up to that task and isn’t what it’s designed for.
Exactly, and that’s totally fine. Unsatisfied users will leave and content ones will remain.
I want Lemmy to succeed, I want to be optimistic about it as an alternative to Reddit, but OP is correct, and we need to be honest about this very simple fact:
The Reddit we knew and loved is gone, and that’s a sad, tragic thing, and there likely won’t be a 1:1 replacement for a long time, if ever.
It’s okay to admit to ourselves that this whole situation sucks, because it absolutely does. That doesn’t mean that we can’t enjoy Lemmy and other federated things like it, and it doesn’t mean that federation doesn’t have advantages over Reddit, but let’s be honest: most of us were happy at Reddit, using our favorite 3rd party app (like Apollo), and we wouldn’t be here if the admins weren’t happy to kill what we once loved.
All we can do is try to make the best of it.
This reminds me of when digg blew it self up and everyone was complaining that Reddit wasn’t like digg. In time something good enough will come along if lemmy isn’t it. In the meantime I’m enjoying myself here.
I feel the same. At the end of the day the community will migrate as we find the natural succesor be it Lemmy or something else.
Yeah, honestly it seems like there’s no real coming back from this, unless the board gets involved and does a complete 180 (and also fires spez, that guy cannot be trusted at all anymore).
How are you supposed to have any certainty that your communities won’t just be wiped out or the way you access reddit changed with 30 days notice, which is nowhere near enough time for setting up alternatives, right now most subreddits are going with discord, a bad choice but probably one of the only ones considering a lot of subs already have it set up. I don’t blame them for not choosing lemmy, its in beta, with mobile apps in alpha state (iOS not even fully released its on testflight).
Its almost like, I’d rather have a slightly worse experience whilst lemmy is developed and there’s less users, than be in constant fear of further features getting removed (mod bots, old reddit, nsfw content)
and also fires spez, that guy cannot be trusted at all anymore
In the long run, spez doesn’t matter. He’s the CEO because Reddit Inc. as a business agrees with him; fire him and they’ll put another who behaves the same in his place.
Fuck, I even think that keeping spez there is good in the long run. He’s scummy and too stupid to not let people notice that he’s scummy, so he accurately represents Reddit Inc.'s true values.
You seem to be assuming that Reddit succeeded because of some central effort by the admins, but that’s really not what happened. If anything it succeeded in spite of them.
I absolutely do not think that the admins made Reddit successful.
However, I think a degree of centralisation is required to enable growth and bring a wider audience in. And without that, Lemmy is at risk of fizzling out or just never reaching a decent user base.
I agree that a small level of centralization is needed. Communities need to be grouped by topic, i’ve heard the term “union” of communities (word which conjures up some good feelings haha). Of which all communities in the union have their posts and all from the others in the union on their community’s page. Idk if you’d call that centralization but you’d have to have some kind of leading or guidance.
Like markipol@beehaw.org said (sorry I don’t know how to mention users yet) in the other comment, this can be resolved without centralization.
For example “unions” of communities could be made that are the equivalent of a multi reddit. They would group together posts across all major “technology” communities into one feed.
Then anyone from any instance can engage via comments. Making a postswould require choosing to which of the communities iin the union to post to because each one would have its own moderators and rules.
Users would subscribe to the union to see technology contents across all technology communities.
Any user could create a union on any instance so major instances would have their own unions that include content from other major instances that they are in a good relationship with.
Would this not resolve the problem while keeping it decentralized?
Better yet, allow the creation of metacommunities which bundle together subs as you’re describing at the user level and give users the ability to export their community bundles to share with each other. Sort of like how multireddits work
I think with the influx from reddit, which gathers a lot of technical users (which I think are also among the first users to migrate), I can see lemmy getting a lot more contributors in the coming days/weeks.
Among the features I’d love to see happen, some would also address your concerns about the lack of centralization :
- Community federation : this would make it possible to “fuse” communities from different instances. The admin of a community would be able to add other communities as “subcommunities” and all posts from subcommunities would show up in the “main community’s” feed. If the relationship is reciprocal, the two communities would “sync” with each other in some kind of way.
- “multicommunities” : users would be able to create and share lists of communities that span multiple instances
- Better community discovery across instances
I think communities “fusing” like you mentioned would be a good idea, but I still think one server needs to stand out from the rest as a place for people to join.
Most people in this thread seem to be content with Lemmy not being Reddit though, and I just don’t think they realise how quiet it’s going to be if new users trying to leave Reddit aren’t snapped up ASAP.
Personally, if I go to a community and there are 5 posts a day with only a few comments, then that seems utterly pointless and I won’t be coming back. I imagine some people will give me shit for that and say that I should be the change I want to see, while also being the exact same and likely giving up on Lemmy after a few weeks.
I don’t think a “main” instance is something we want. If one instance completely takes over the whole federation, we will have another reddit debacle in a few years.
While Decentralization is not a silver bullet against monopoly (just look at what gmail did to e-mails), centralization seems to always kill independence once platforms reach a critical mass
To be honest, I think a main server isn’t just required to build a decent user base, I think it’s inevitable no matter what.
That being said, the benefit I see from Lemmy is that if people are unhappy with the main server, it’s an easy switch to something else. And not completely migrating to an entirely different platform.
Why would a main server be required if users can fluently interact across Instances? (which, imo, is an area where lemmy has the most margin for improvements)
I just think it will organically happen.
People will happen to join one server, they get their friends to join that server, and before you know it, it’s naturally become the most popular one. Because people have signed up to that one, they also start making their own communities on there.
Then it shows up as the first result when people google “Lemmy”, and carries on growing larger than the others.
The best way I see of avoiding that, is having servers that focus on a topic I.e. sports, tech, memes, porn, knitting etc.
That would prompt people to use different servers, but also keep some logic and organisation.
I dont think most people are sharing their usernames on this type of platform. Especially considering a bunch of ex redditrs are filling the ranks
I don’t think people will share usernames, but they’ll say “go here to use Lemmy”
“How are communities going to grow if there isn’t at least some form of central management. Other than there being an underlying framework that connects the servers, they’re all just doing what they want.”
No one has ever said the Fediverse will be as easily accessible as Reddit, I think it’s pretty much impossible because of the lack of centralization. But in my opinion, this just doesn’t matter. The only solution would be, as you said, would be some form of central management. It is impossible to have a platform which both fixes the issues Reddit has experienced indefinitely AND has central management. Any social platform which cedes some kind of control, or even just legitimacy, to a centralized source (regardless of how the implementation starts out), will eventually turn into another Reddit. (Assuming the growth is there).
From my point of view the only downside to how Lemmy operates vs. Reddit is the slight learning curve of understanding Federation. Once you understand the concept, your concerns about the platform “fizzling out” would be moot. If you understand Federation, how is it confusing that your different sports communities are in different instances? Each community is distinct in its values, rules, and moderators, they get to choose where to exist, and the alternative would be impossible without granting control to a single meta-instance.
“but it seems like it needs a ‘flagship’ server with a group of people maintaining it to set an example. Then other servers that cover more specific areas, such as sports, can be set up and potentially work closely with that flagship group.”
I couldn’t disagree more, and this is one of my main gripes with Mastodon. Over reliance on a flagship instance only serves to shoehorn people into Lemmy without actually understanding how the platform works. Take the top three English-speaking mastodon instances:
- mastodon.social: 878k
- mastodon.cloud: 229k
- mastodon.online: 164k Source
mastodon.online was created by Mastodon as a secondary official instance, next to the original mastodon.social. When the Twitter influx happened, the vast majority of users signed up for mastodon.social because it was the “flagship instance”. Not as many user’s would have chosen mastodon.social if they actually understood how Federation worked, instead of just blindly signing up for the flagship instance.
Also, about communities about the same topic possible being fragmented across multiple instances is a pro of Lemmy, as long as we foster a culture of combining communities together who agree, while retaining the option to split off to another instance.
TLDR; Understanding how Federation works > Pandering to new users with a flagship instance
No one has ever said the Fediverse will be as easily accessible as Reddit, I think it’s pretty much impossible because of the lack of centralization.
I don’t think this is necessarily true. Right now Lemmy is very open with what it is and touts the federation openly. This isn’t necessarily a bad thing, but I think using clever user experience design to make it appear less federated might help.
As an example, currently there are communities dedicated to essentially the same topic across multiple instances. This isn’t a bad thing in and of itself, as these communities might operate with different ideals or goals. However, if say there was a functionality for cross-instance community linking, where communities that share the same idea and goals can link together as a sort of combined community, that might serve to give the users a more cohesive and uniform experience.
If then say, the community ends up diverging, a difference in opinion rising and the communities choose to split off, unlinking them ought (in theory) be just as simple as linking them, allowing the communities to once again go separate ways.
I meant that Lemmy will never be as accessible as reddit because of reddit’s centralization; every community is 1 of 1.
But I agree with you, community linking would be a good idea.
As for the clever user experience, what about an instance of lemmy dedicated to this? It combines different lemmy communities into one within the UI, giving a more Reddit like experience. The name can imply it’s a simple experience, like lemmy.madeeasy or something.
I wouldn’t use it, but some people would probable prefer it! (And find it easier!)
I don’t think you’d necessarily need an instance for it, you could probably do it with just some clever UX design. If you really set your mind to it, that could also be made entirely optional so people that don’t want that kind of experience can simply just not opt in to it.
I’ve poked around in the client source code, it’s more approachable than I expected. Haven’t really done anything there, but I’ve started putting together a userstyle to tailor the client a bit more to my own likes.
If one were to poke around in the client itself it’d wouldn’t be all that tricky to set up things like “collections” of communities and such and have that be entirely on the client without any update needed to the server software. If one adds that as a feature to the server itself though one could make it possible to share community collections with other people.
I think that’d be a rather fun feature.
How are communities going to grow if there isn’t at least some form of central management. Other than there being an underlying framework that connects the servers, they’re all just doing what they want.
Why would “central management” be necessary for communities to grow? Email doesn’t have any central management, and yet people are quite capable of building mailing-lists and other services on top of email. While mailing-lists may be “old-school” they still work pretty darn well; I’m on lists for my college alumni, for various interest groups, etc. that all get active discussions.
Lemmy will replace Reddit for some people by virtue of being a place they go instead of Reddit. The folks who end up staying for the long term will probably be comfortable with a new online space that’s just plain different. I’m sure changes will occur in the next few months, but Lemmy’s gonna be what it’s gonna be.
There will surely be people who try it and get frustrated because it’s not a 1:1 alternative, ultimately going back to Reddit. Probably the majority, tbh. But that’s fine.
The same way IRC servers and forums grew back in the 2000s. Centralized services are something that only started showing up in the early 2010s.
A lot of current users are young enough that they don’t have any experience with those things, centralized services are all they’ve ever really known. The simplicity and convenience can be a huge draw for a lot of people.
These things sort themselves out organically with some time, but it looks and feels messy until then.
While there is no central authority, there is the Lemmy Community Browser which lets you find Communities across servers, like some central directory
That really should be built into Lemmy.
This is great - I wish I’d known about this sooner.
Check this out, it’s a great guide to finding new communities on Lemmy: https://lemmy.blahaj.zone/post/61827
It includes a link to the community browser, discusses other non-intuitive community discovery tools, and how to subscribe to a remote community when you’re the first on your instance to find it, which is a bit janky as well.
This is great, too - this or something like it should really just be stickied on every instance. This answers so many questions that get asked.
Consider reaching out to your instance admins and suggesting that. There’s no central power who can make things happen on every instance, we just all have to coordinate together to increase the reach of good info.
To be frank, if I had Apollo for Lemmy I would even notice the difference
Firstly who said lemmy is a Reddit replacement? Just because there’s overlap doesn’t mean it’s a direct competitor. Secondly Reddit succeeded because of the efforts of millions of unpaid volunteers who room the time to set up wildly disparate subreddits and communities to create reddits unique flavour and space in todays social media climate. To say that it gained its status because it’s overseen by a centralised source is wildly inaccurate and disrespectful to the regular people who made Reddit what is is/was.
It’s not a direct replacement. It’s a toy for geeks that may or may not blow up in popularity. Look up the history of Linux, how it started, from what philosophy it stemmed, and what it is now.
I think most generally agree that it’s quite a mess, but there’s no reason it can’t be smoothed over time.
We especially need communities over different instances cooperating so that posts in one appear in the others. And some logical signup process so that users would know what to do.
I agree with what other people said as well: For me it’s not a replacement, it’s just a (for me) new way to interact with people with the same interests. How this will happen exactly and into what it will grow, we will see and should keep an open mind.
That being said I definitely try to find equivalents for my old subscribed subreddits, while also creating the ones that I’m missing. But I already learned that there is quite a lot of new stuff to discover, which is quite exciting to be honest.
How are communities going to grow if there isn’t at least some form of central management
What do users need?
- to discover and join new communities that they might be potentially interested in. This already exists.
- to see the content being offered by those communities. This already exists, by the very nature of the federation - for example, OP is posting from feddit.uk, I’m using lemmy.ml, and I’m seeing comments from sopuli.xyz
- to contribute with communities, preferably by registering only once. Ditto as above.
And that is already happening. The tools are there! They might suck but they work at the very least as proof of concept, showing that you don’t need a central management. What we need instead is to improve those tools and create new ones as necessary.
In this sense, the Fediverse is a lot like the very internet that it resides in.
What is the purpose of the Fediverse when forums for niche interests already exist on the internet?
Imagine if those forums were able to connect to each other. That is what we got here.
But then how do you get a consistent naming scheme that lets people know it’s part of the fediverse?
You don’t need a consistent naming scheme. At least, not for that. As instances communicate with each other, it should be easy to figure out that there’s a new instance popping up about sports or anything else.
Maybe Lemmy could work as a replacement, but it seems like it needs a ‘flagship’ server with a group of people maintaining it to set an example.
There is. It’s lemmy.ml.
In fact, one issue that I’ve found is that a lot of people confuse that flagship server with the whole, and they all get on it. I’m posting from it, mind you, but I’ve been here for ~two years and in general I happen to fit well in it. [I think.]
I also wanted to post this to the main Lemmy community, but as I had to register via a different server, I’m not able to access that community from the server I’m using for some reason…
I’m glad that you figured it out, otherwise I wouldn’t see this post!
SOMETHING TO KEEP IN MIND: yes, things are still messy and rough, but they’ll probably get better over time. A better interface, more discoverability for instances and their communities, so goes on.
And IMO the main merit of this federated structure is that you aren’t putting all your eggs (content and users) in the same basket (platform and administrating group). It’s perfectly possible that one platform decides to go rogue, just like Reddit did; but then it’ll be far easier to migrate to another platform in the federation. Centralised platforms have a nasty tendency to try to wall you in, while decentralised ones cannot do it by design.
it’s not going to happen overnight. six months from now we’re not going to have 400M users like other big platforms, nor 40M, not even 4M. that’s not the timeline to expect here.
every corporate-controlled media platform starts out OK and over time becomes miserable. when that happens i leave. for reddit, that point was about a year ago for me. for you, maybe that point is still 5 years into the future. when i tried Mastodon in 2016, it didn’t work for me even as others were using it daily, but by 2022 it was better for me than whatever i’d used before.
more generally, i’m here on federated systems because i’m sick of investing too much of myself and my community into companies that literally do not care about me or the long-term health of these communities. it’s OK if Lemmy has its shortcomings, because it has the one thing that competitors cannot ever have: it’s operated (and sometimes developed) by the same communities that use it.
federation presents different UI patterns, as you point out, but it’s what makes the above possible. what allowed Reddit to ever be good? a huge part was the 3rd party apps, the community-developed moderator tools, etc. federation is important because it means these things can always exist. if Lemmy was somehow taken over by someone like spez, and they pushed for API fees, those operating the servers simply wouldn’t install the update. and if we grow this enough then as with Mastodon, we’ll have alternative server software (Pleroma, Misskey, etc) that means that something like the above wouldn’t even slow things down.
this is a place where communities that want to exist for the longterm can situate themselves. IMO that’s the #1 objective, and as long as we secure that then all the secondary objectives around user experience and so on will happen organically in time.
if Lemmy was somehow taken over by someone like spez, and they pushed for API fees, those operating the servers simply wouldn’t install the update.
More than that, since it’s open source, should the main Lemmy be hijacked, it would be forked. It will be forked. It probably already has been forked.
It’s happened with other software suites before, and will happen again. OpenOffice.org died when Oracle bought it, but it lived on in LibreOffice.
