I'm an old reddit user, going back to '08. Like many of you I'm sure, I've seen the site rise and fall. Killing 3p apps was a major blow, along with the purge of so many subreddits, and now you have to log in to even view it...it's getting real bad.
I had heard of the fediverse back when Mastadon was first announced. Briefly checked it out, but didn't give it much mind. This morning I was browsing reddit and read a thread about the continual degradation of the site. Someone mentioned Lemmy (new to me), but I thought "hey! I'll check it out, why not''. A brief google search gave me some iOS apps, and I wound up using Voyager (10/10 btw, Voyager reminds me a lot of Apollo in it's hayday). I applied/logged in....and just...wow. Wow y'all. Lemmy reminds me so much of reddit circa late 00's. Sure, there is a smaller user base, but so was reddit at the time. I remember the subreddit you were supposed to go to when you made an acccount and introduce yourself :D
And here on Lemmy, nothing looks like obvious bot posts. Content seems real. In correlation with that, the post titles seem pretty reasonable and not based around rage bait / click bait.
After setting it up on my phone, I found the desktop site (I'm on a laptop some times) and I adore a.lemmy.zip. To me its the perfect layout. The other incredible thing about Lemmy is just how seamless it was to set up, on both mobile and desktop. It feels super accessible to non-technical users, which is something I don't think is true for a lot of fediverse things.
But seriously, I used to adore reddit so much. Watching it fall apart has made me sadder and sadder over time. There was seemingly nothing in its place. I really felt like that era of internet over entirely. Just my first few hours on Lemmy has made me realize I was wrong, in the best way possible. It gave me chills. I'm looking forward to this platform growing. So anyway, thanks for any/all of you who developed/are developing Lemmy. It really, truly feels like a return to the golden age of social.
my only questiom is how can anyone tell me that what has haopened to reddit wont happen to lemmy?
Three primary points.
A) No one owns all of Lemmy. Or the fediverse in general, for that matter. No single power hungry or nutbag admin can pull a spez and make wide sweeping changes to the app, or who its run. Admins hace control over their own instances, and that's about where it ends There's dozens of significantly-sized instances and hundreds of small ones. They'd ALL have to agree in order to make changes that affect the entire userbase.
B) There is something kinda close to singular all-powerful admins, that can make changes affecting everyone, and it's the Lemmy devs. They do control the software, and ultimately can do whatever they want with it. However, that issue is already mitigated two-fold. For one, Lemmy is free-and-open-source, so if push came to shove, the software could be forked (I.E. copied) and maintained by others. For two (and much more significant) Lemmy isn't the only software that makes up the reddit-like corner of the Fediverse. We ALREADY have k-bin and PieFed, which many users already use and prefer over Lemmy. And they all talk to each other seamlessly.
C) There's no profit motive. Lemmy instances aren't funded by ads or venture capital, they're funded mostly by donation, and sometimes just by nerds who can afford it. Because instances are smaller scale, rather than the single giantic monolith that is reddit, they can be run for just a couple hundred, or maybe a couple thousand, bucks a year, depending on size.
That's not to say that there aren't entirely different issues that may threaten the health of the Fediverse as a whole. For example, following on point C above, there is risk that costs will increase as the Fediverse continues to grow, faster than some instances will be able to keep up with. There's also risk that, while most admins are well-meaning and try to be transparent, nothing prevents admins from being actively malicous and, say, running data harvesting, or injecting malware into their web frontends.
Overall, I think the Fediverse has a MUCH healthier foundation than reddit ever did.
Point B is the most important. The software is open source and can be forked... if there is enough interest and support. We've seen it happen with OpenOffice/LibreOffice, ownCloud/Nextcloud, mySQL/mariaDB, and other cases. In many cases both projects will continue in parallel, sometimes even remerging (node.js and io.js) or cross-developing (lots of Neovim features made it back into Vim).
Thanks for all those points. I diidnt know about any of that but I can see how. they mitigate the possible eventual enshittification of Lemmy
It will happen eventually. Just like Capitalism leads to Fascism.
So we probably need to define exactly what the "what happened to Reddit" is, but in general whatever that thing is, it absolutely will happen to Lemmy.
The trick is that we can just run to the next instance.
On Reddit you can really like video games. So you subscribe to /r/gaming. But then that becomes garbage so you subscribe to /r/Games. But then that becomes garbage so you subscribe to /r/TrueGaming, or /r/TrueGames or whatever and the list goes on and on. Maybe you always have to keep jumping ship. Now you're subscribed to /r/NoSeriouslyTheBestGaming.
But what do you do when Reddit becomes garbage?
When the core is rotten what do you do?
On Reddit you're fucked.
On Lemmy, you go elsewhere. Lemmy.world sucks? Go to piefed.world. That sucks? Go to the next thing.
The core of Lemmy can't be rotten, because the core of Lemmy can just be tossed aside.
Yes, it's all probably going to take a bit more work, but a small jump or a small shift isn't much at all when you really look at it.
Much weirder things will happen here, but in theory it should self-heal as long as there are people to keep it alive. For instance, the other week the maintainer of a custom web UI used by a few instances tried to sneak his own secret ban list into the software. Fortunately, people noticed and he was roundly ridiculed and the repo forked into less duplicitous ownership.
...I have no idea what those last two sentences were but OK. Im glad that the story ended ...good? ....Right?
Thanks for letting me know though about the other people keeping Lemmy in check.
Roughly speaking, apps hosted on the internet can be divided into 2 parts: the frontend and the backend. The backend is the server that provides access to any of the data associated with the app, as well as handling any operations a user might request; this is typically done through sending specifically formatted data to specific URLs on the server. The job of the frontend is to make it more natural for a human to access the data and available operations.
A frontend can be many things; the most common, however, are webpages and apps. In the case of lemmy, there is a webpage frontend that comes default. There is also a popular third-party webpage frontend called Tesseract.
A few weeks ago, after updating the version of Tesseract they were using, the db0 instance noticed a large number of errors. In the end, they went through the code of Tesseract โ which is publicly available on github โ and found that it would silently reach out to a Tesseract server (importantly this is not the backend that whomever installed Tesseract was trying to communicate with), download a filter list, and silently apply it while disguising filtering any post you tried to access as an error.
The filter list was very opinionated, and often felt arbitrary; and due to the fact it was downloaded from the internet, it could be updated at any time without notice. Additionally, any of the options Tesseract provided around filtering had no effect on the secret filtering.
Because the code is publicly available, the instance owners forked it (made their own copy, with some ability to keep getting updates from the original source) to remove the secret filtering.