Reddit done goofed. Reverting on 15 years of developer and community goodwill, the company is now charging unsustainable prices for API access with an unreal...
This was a great watch. I was a Relay user and DBrady (the dev) has also been crunching the numbers to see what he’d have to charge to keep the app alive. Honestly as much as I love Relay and would gladly donate for all the hard work he’s done, I don’t want to pay Reddit a monthly fee for a crippled product (no NSFW).
I’m liking Lemmy so far but in it’s current state it’s definitely not the answer for the average user. It’s sad to see Reddit digging it’s feet in on this because as the Apollo dev said in that video, all they need to do is make the pricing realistic and give the full experience and that would be totally reasonable.
Current state, I think you’re right, it’s not yet ready, but there’s a window between now and the TPA API change cutoff date that Lemmy and devs have to get Lemmy to a state that will be able to be good enough. We’ll see if when everyone’s Apollo/RIF apps stop working if Lemmy has smashed enough bugs and gotten enough apps to be mature enough to have figured it out…
Isn’t that API change just the end of the month? It’s nowhere near enough time to sort out all the problems that Lemmy currently has impacting its long term sustainability.
Things like:
Robust mobile apps. The ones we have are great starting points but they’re not ready for prime time yet. Remember the main reason the average user from Reddit might leave is because they don’t want to use the official Reddit app. When they see the Lemmy one is even worse they will stay at Reddit.
Robust mod tools. Right now things are going decently well because you have a lot of tech enthusiasts participating in good faith. As more users come on moderating will of the upmost importance to keep it from falling to bots and bad actors
Instances are currently too confusing for the average person. Some sort of guidance needs to be there, or a way of porting your account to another so that what you join is not a big deal at first.
Community finding without third party websites
A huge effort put into UI to help make things smooth for new users
A multireddit style feature of some kind so people can lazily subscribe to topics without worrying about the multiple instances they are from
Encrypted DMs and other user protections from a potentially power hungry instance admin
A simple solution to horizontally scale instances. Right now instance owners are just buying bigger VMs or dedicated servers and moving things over. This will only work for so long until the user count is too high. It’s natural that this will happen because instances are not well understood by the average new user, so they will naturally pick the biggest one. They need to be able to scale the service over multiple servers in parallel in order to accommodate large user bases.
A counterpoint to the scaling is that instances could cap their users at a certain amount and then new users would move to the next biggest instance. This spreads the load and is more inline with the original goals, but finding an always increasing number of reputable server owners will be difficult. This whole idea takes the control away from a big company like Reddit, but puts it in Joe from Bakersfield’s hands.
That list is getting long enough and my thumbs are tired, but you get the point. I think this is really cool stuff but I don’t see it being good enough for hitting that second wave of new users when the API changes come into effect. The next big wave, I predict, is when Reddit shuts down old.reddit.com. Maybe that will be a year from now and the timing will work out more in Lemmy’s favour.
Yep, I agree that it’s not there yet, but I think a lot can happen in 2 weeks. I think the bar you set for it being “good enough” is a bit too high. A lot of these things will are 3-12 month horizon items, but none are necessarily dealbreaking in the shortest of terms as long as the current batch of server owners are ready to scale with current donations. I think some of these things will be “nice to haves” as long as there’s clear momentum and a promise for some of these things to be addressed in the coming months. I think that the biggest issues that are plaguing the system now are more on the instance stability/lemmy-ui sorting issues might be able to be addressed in 2 weeks. There’s a lot of learning going on at the moment (see beehaw.org’s defederation stuff) and hopefully that type of thing will be more or less have a consensus on how it should be handled.
Everyone has their own definitions of “good enough”. I mean, I’m here trying it out so it was good enough for me :P So it really depends if you’re thinking Lemmy could attract early adopters, or mass users. Right now it’s only suitable for tech people who are interested in learning a little more about it and like the idea of the fediverse.
It’s unfortunate that the Reddit controversy came at the time it did. I think if it was one year later and Lemmy had a bit more polish and better mobile apps you’d be able to get a lot more people on board.
I think if it was one year later and Lemmy had a bit more polish
Yeah, maybe. I don’t know if Lemmy would ever get the polish if it didn’t have an influx of users. I think we’ll probably see one or two high quality apps and a decent amount of additional help identifying and fixing bugs in the lemmy and lemmy-ui developer pull requests as a result of the controversy.
The nice thing is that reddit will probably not get better as they move to the IPO and beyond. They’ll start being shittier and shittier from here on out. We just have to use this energy to make Lemmy the best it can be and it’ll be seen as a viable option for which to drop reddit for everyone.
This was a great watch. I was a Relay user and DBrady (the dev) has also been crunching the numbers to see what he’d have to charge to keep the app alive. Honestly as much as I love Relay and would gladly donate for all the hard work he’s done, I don’t want to pay Reddit a monthly fee for a crippled product (no NSFW).
I’m liking Lemmy so far but in it’s current state it’s definitely not the answer for the average user. It’s sad to see Reddit digging it’s feet in on this because as the Apollo dev said in that video, all they need to do is make the pricing realistic and give the full experience and that would be totally reasonable.
Current state, I think you’re right, it’s not yet ready, but there’s a window between now and the TPA API change cutoff date that Lemmy and devs have to get Lemmy to a state that will be able to be good enough. We’ll see if when everyone’s Apollo/RIF apps stop working if Lemmy has smashed enough bugs and gotten enough apps to be mature enough to have figured it out…
Isn’t that API change just the end of the month? It’s nowhere near enough time to sort out all the problems that Lemmy currently has impacting its long term sustainability.
Things like:
That list is getting long enough and my thumbs are tired, but you get the point. I think this is really cool stuff but I don’t see it being good enough for hitting that second wave of new users when the API changes come into effect. The next big wave, I predict, is when Reddit shuts down old.reddit.com. Maybe that will be a year from now and the timing will work out more in Lemmy’s favour.
Yep, I agree that it’s not there yet, but I think a lot can happen in 2 weeks. I think the bar you set for it being “good enough” is a bit too high. A lot of these things will are 3-12 month horizon items, but none are necessarily dealbreaking in the shortest of terms as long as the current batch of server owners are ready to scale with current donations. I think some of these things will be “nice to haves” as long as there’s clear momentum and a promise for some of these things to be addressed in the coming months. I think that the biggest issues that are plaguing the system now are more on the instance stability/lemmy-ui sorting issues might be able to be addressed in 2 weeks. There’s a lot of learning going on at the moment (see beehaw.org’s defederation stuff) and hopefully that type of thing will be more or less have a consensus on how it should be handled.
Everyone has their own definitions of “good enough”. I mean, I’m here trying it out so it was good enough for me :P So it really depends if you’re thinking Lemmy could attract early adopters, or mass users. Right now it’s only suitable for tech people who are interested in learning a little more about it and like the idea of the fediverse.
It’s unfortunate that the Reddit controversy came at the time it did. I think if it was one year later and Lemmy had a bit more polish and better mobile apps you’d be able to get a lot more people on board.
Yeah, maybe. I don’t know if Lemmy would ever get the polish if it didn’t have an influx of users. I think we’ll probably see one or two high quality apps and a decent amount of additional help identifying and fixing bugs in the lemmy and lemmy-ui developer pull requests as a result of the controversy.
The nice thing is that reddit will probably not get better as they move to the IPO and beyond. They’ll start being shittier and shittier from here on out. We just have to use this energy to make Lemmy the best it can be and it’ll be seen as a viable option for which to drop reddit for everyone.
That’s a good point, interest will drive a bigger investment. Looking forward to see how this plays out.