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.
...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.