hey everyone. if you want to post links or discuss the Reddit blackout today, please localize it to this thread in order to keep things tidy! Thanks!
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I posted this on Kbin too, but I thought people might find it interesting here as well. I feel like maybe younger/shorter term users, and other people really don’t fully understand what’s going on with Reddit, and how it’s been building to a crescendo for a while.
tl;dr: This shift in Reddit has been coming for awhile, and was heralded years ago by fundamental changes they made to how users engage with their platform, most specifically by turning “/r/all” into “/r/onlywhatwewantyoutosee”.
I was a Reddit user for 12 years and change. I pre-date the Digg migration, and honestly I thought the years after that were its peak. There were warning signs that it was going downhill at many points in time, but I think the moment that really signaled Reddit was never going to return to what made it popular and successful is when they removed NSFW subs from /r/all…even though they’d rolled out /r/popular a year or two prior, supposedly for that purpose.
It’s not because of the restriction of NSFW subs in and of itself, it’s the implications/precedents that were set for the service as a whole. At that point, it became crystal clear that Reddit wanted to make sure the vast majority of users would be stuck with reddit recommended content only, and from there out it’s felt more like user manipulation for maximum advertising. Think about it - probably 50% of the most popular posts are either thinly veiled ads, or posts LOADED with ads that Reddit is surely getting clickshare revenue for linking to. Then there’s the sponsored posts hidden in with the normal posts, and the banner ads inserted between those.
The point of /r/all was to show everything, in real time, as it was growing in popularity. That’s how people discover things they like that they didn’t know existed - but finding those things, means spending less time in the controlled environment engaging with the content they most want you to engage with, and making them less revenue as a result. When /r/all turns into “/r/onlywhatcorporatewantsyoutosee”, there’s really no going back or improving. This API bullshit is just the next iteration of that same long term strategy - control what users see and interact with by forcing them to stay in their tightly controlled environment
NSFW posts weren’t the primary reason why /r/all got limits. /r/all was littered with hate and bigotry and general garbage. If /r/all had been left alone, Reddit would have continued on the path to becoming Voat.
Not modifying, to some degree, what subreddits appear on /r/all would have made trying to remove the bigotry off the site that much harder. (It will never completely go away; the site is too huge at this point.) While they should have used the idea of quarantines long before they started out with flat-out removal of these subs, these weren’t just “[racist slur] are dumb” type of stuff. These were subs that outright called for the violence and death of people who weren’t them. These were places for racists and bigots who had no qualm about doxxing people with hopes that bad things would happen to them.
You can argue “Well, then, ban the people who do that kind of thing!” Sometimes when the pool gets full of scum, you have to recognize the point where spot cleaning isn’t the cure and you have to drain the pool to stop the scum from gathering.
You’re not wrong at all on that, however, the quarantining and banning of hate communities happened before the removal of any and all NSFW subs from /r/all. The hate groups were largely getting restricted well before that. I realize they’re two sides of a similar coin - but there were different motives behind the shifts. Recall also, that most of those groups getting quarantined and banned were not NSFW communities.
Nobody was using boobs or twerk videos for hate speech. A 4K/60FPS version of that gif of Alexandra Daddario wasn’t being used to advocate violence against political figures. That later shift was done purely for user control of content. Reddit (probably) isn’t getting click shares off of imgur reposts of daddarios boobs. If they’re not standing to gain, they lose every time someone leaves the front page and goes to a sub page to explore more. They also get fewer eyes on their paid content if people are turned off from using /r/all because they don’t want to see said boobs. That particular move was a dollars and cents content control move only.
The other side to all commercial social apps is driving engagement, and as you said driving ads and cash generation. These both are harmful to users. Driving engagement seems to be a more subtle thing, but more harmful of the two as it is kind of corrosive. So commercial social apps are just bad.
Controlling the cattle has become the overwhelming purpose of the Haves.
Just dropping in to say fuck Spez.
AskHistorians is taking the approach of “blackout for two days, then read-only moving forward indefinitely.” I think that’s a good approach as it still removes the functionality of the subreddit while reminding people of what they’re missing out on due to the admins’ actions.
I know there are bigger subs, but AskHistorians is an absolute jewel in Reddit’s crown. For all the dumpster fire subs that raise controversy and drag Reddit’s image down, AskHistorians is the one sub that could always be pointed to as a sub with an inarguably positive impact. It’s also a sub in a unique position because its moderators are probably the hardest for Reddit to replace, because many of them are the historians that answer the questions, or have personal relationships with those that do. In addition most of the historians aren’t really Redditors, participating only on AskHistorians. Removing the current mod team and replacing them would absolutely 100% kill the sub forever.
Not that I have any faith in Reddit to do the right thing. I just think it’s interesting to realize just how different of a position AskHistorians in than the rest of the subreddits, being at the same time more impactful than their subscriber numbers show, while being fragile enough to be permanently broken if handled poorly. They are also one of the only mod teams I’ve see who have issued a list of actionable goals that Reddit can address.
Also it’s interesting to see that their participation in the blackout is almost entirely on Spez’s head. That’s some damn fine CEOing there, Lou.
I hope one of the archive projects (archiveTeam or others) has backed up r/askhistorians past posts and comments, just in case.
Oh, I hope so as well, that sub is absolutely precious. When people talked about nuking their account(which I get it) it was for post like those that I feared for.
Not to worry, every post and comment on reddit has been archived, and is freely available as a 2tb torrent on Academic Torrents.
Is there an easy way to access this? I wanted to point out to some older reddit posts.
The askhistorians subreddit and it’s mod team are absolute gems, I was able to attend one of their talks at a conference and it was honestly one of the best presentations I’ve seen at these types of events. It is giant loss to the academic community to have them shut down tbh, and I hope they are able to migrate and keep their audience.
But then again knowing Reddit, if they migrate u/spez will probably allow Holocaust deniers to take up the space or something.
deleted by creator
hopefully we’ll be adding ‘lemmy’ to our web searches in a few years to get the best/most accurate information
This has been absolutely wild. Sadly, it’s not that surprising and the corporate speak is strong. While Reddit likely won’t change, the “type” of users that will leave over this is the kind of users that made Reddit the community it is today. These are all likely active members from Fark, Slashdot, Digg, and others.
Good news though, we’ve got a group of people that are experienced in making fantastic communities. I’ll bet we’ll do it again. We’ll see how this goes with the Fedditverse/Threadverse via Lemmy/kbin. I’m sure we’ll figure this community/magazine thing out soon enough.
Sometimes all we can control is how we react to the situation.
I find it a bit disheartening that a lot of comments on Reddit (I know I’m mostly staying away) are labeling us, the people who take issue with not only the API pricing but the entire direction the site is going, snowflakes and whiny babies.
A lot of “I don’t cares” and “I just want to use the site not see this useless protest” etc. I remember a time when reddit could come together and actually get results (for better and for worse).
Even the way people comment is different. Seems like a lot more low effort, mouth breather posts, or suspiciously bad faith arguments that I see in response to the increasingly rare thoughtful/informative dialogue in the form of posts or comments.
I’m not saying the site was ever an iconic standard to the peak intellectual, but there seemed to be more people hungry for that type of content.
Maybe I’m just looking back at everything through rose tinted glasses, but I miss the days of ending up going down a new rabbithole sparked by a random comment chain.
I wonder if it’s just me and I’m just turning into that old bitter dude longing for the “good ole days.”
That’s reddit from 8+ years ago you’re talking about, and small communities. Reddit has long been a mainstream community now, and we all know how the average person is.
This is a sub that could really benefit from just leaving reddit entirely anyways. Potentially being able to have more open discussions centered around piracy would make the content of that sub so much better.
Is the exclamation mark command meant to trigger a link? It doesn’t do anything for me. My “home” lemmy is lemm.ee if that makes a difference.
I’m not sure how to make a link to communities so that it works for everyone sorry. But yeah the ! Does indicate a community usually
Lots of Fediverse stuff works like you might know email to work, i.e.
thing@place.com, no matter where your email is hosted, you can send and receive messages from other hosts.In this Case, the
piracycommunity, within thelemmy.dbzer0.comdomain, you should be able to copy-paste the [email protected], or any community like it, into the search bar of your home lemmy server and be able to subscribe.Unless it’s blocked…
Just have to say: Has anyone notice that Beehaw is just way faster then Reddit? Sorry new here, just my first impression. By the way. Thanks everyone for this site.
It really is faster, I noticed that too.
Yes, when I first got on mid-day it way crazy fast. It has slowed down a bit for me as the day has gone on but still faster then typical Reddit speeds. I wonder if beehaw load is more late afternoon and evening, or if it is just more people flocking in, or maybe both.
Probably has to do with time of day, but it’s more snappy anyway. Smaller platform I guess, but it’s pretty nice
Maybe because I’m using Jerboa, but it feels slower to me. Jerboa has many issues though
Yes, I am on the web UI… Have not tried the app yet.
I don’t think Lemmy hosts images, or maybe it’s just me.
Indeed! I guess it’s (at least partly) because there’s not as much stuff going on that the user can see (and sometimes can’t see).
Sadly, most of my subs don’t really care about the Reddit drama, and I can’t find anything replacing them here. But at the same time… I kinda realized I don’t really miss them, and overall getting away from Reddit feels like a good thing for my mental health. For now, I think my lights stay out at Reddit, and it will be replaced by a mix and match of lemmy stuff and old school forums. And maybe discord for some special live events.
So while the blackout and all that happened leading up to it didn’t really change my Reddit experience, it changed my overall feeling about Reddit as a platform. Let’s see how this will hold up.
That’s my situation as well. Out of curiosity I went into reddit today to see how different it would look. It’s close to the same. A lot of the subs I go to are in the “Yeah it sucks but we’re small so we won’t make a dent so fuck it…” other subs like /r/games with their BS excuse of “we support it but don’t want to do anything about it”. Overall, kind of the same. Kind of makes me sad
There is only one sub I use that has not attempted to do anything about the API issue. They stickied a post forwarded to an explanation of what is happening in support of the blackout, but it is an important time period for us so no one was going to allow a full shut down. It’s one of the few non-toxic places to discuss our fandom. Beyond that sub, the others don’t matter much to me.
r/starfield?
A word on reddit, blackouts, & effective protesting: https://piped.video/watch?v=U06rCBIKM5M
wish some reddit mods participating in the blackout watched it.
He makes some really good points. Why should reddit corporate give a shit about a timeboxed tantrum? If people aren’t going to commit, then there’s no point.
I had thought that was a peertube link, but looks like it is just a YouTube redirect.
It’s a piped instance link which just downloads and serves the video from YouTube. It’s privacy friendly because your browser doesn’t hit Google’s site where they’ll just further build up your ad profile.
It seems to be used quite a lot here when people can’t find the video on PeerTube.
Mod of small (~26,000 users) sub. We’ll be staying dark indefinitely. Talking to my other mods for other subs and recommending they do the same. We’re tiny but hopefully it sends a message to our users.
As a user of a shut-down (maybe temporarily) community in Reddit, the fact that it was shut down and has a decently active (migrating) community here is the very reason i have a Lemmy account.
Shutting down on Reddit is a valid working strategy to send a message, so you made the right choice
NEAT
Mod of 60k. We’re staying dark indefinitely since all mods use 3rd party apps.
A word on reddit, blackouts, & effective protesting: https://piped.video/watch?v=U06rCBIKM5M
As I understand him, announcing a blackout for 2 days is equivalent to reassuring to come back for 363 days despite all that’s wrong. Basically signalling “you can do that with me”. I feel that interpretation has some truth, but also falls short.
As I understand the blackout, it is a warning shot. Like any political demonstration (and unlike romantic relationships, to which he compares it), it’s a show of strength and numbers to both sides. Both participants and recipients can see who else protests, and see how many.
A display of force alone can sway people to either join the protest, or to renegotiate. But those in power can always assume it’s a bluff and call it as such by ignoring the protest. Then, it depends on wether the protesting people are willing to follow through. What actual force stands behind that display of force? Are you willing and capable to escalate?
How many subscriptions and subreddits will leave if their demands are not met? And why didn’t they leave right away if they don’t like it anymore?
I think it’s perfectly fine to not escalate to the highest level right away. The intermediate steps are a form of communication and negotiation, and can prevent unecessary harm. But you should be prepared to follow through if the demands are not met, else you signal in fact “you can do that with us”.
Now aws too… this afternoon
Thinking about sticking to Lemmy for most things and using my Reddit alt account just as a porn aggregator. Who’s with me?!
There’s lemmynsfw.com as well now.
Oh! Fab. I was under the impression that Lemmy wasn’t going to allow NSFW.
None of the big ones were allowing NSFW posts on their instances, but anyone can create an instance that does allow it 🙂
ok guys I’m done with reddit
Similar but in my case it’s the war in Ukraine.
I thought so, too, but there’s [email protected], although I have not checked out that many posts there. And the name alone makes it sound more biased than something like r/CombatFootage
I’m glad to see there’s been more of a push for previously ‘48 hours only’ subreddits to move to an indefinite blackout - but I wish that more of them had committed earlier. That leaked internal email shows exactly what I already expected; they just see the protesting Redditors as a bunch of whiny babies who they expect to give up after a couple days and forget the whole thing.
hang on, what leaked internal email, do you know where I can find that?
i like the part where he implies that redditors are so deranged they will physically assault his employees.
i want to call complete BS on them making it out like the Redditors protesting would physically assault the staff. Guess that’s probably a reasonable thing now though. People are whacked in the head.
Seems on brand after the CEO doubled down on falsely accusing the Apollo dev of blackmail, even though the Apollo dev posted the recordings proving otherwise.
Yep. That was the point I became what he calls a ”whiny “ person and deleted my account.
He wasn’t content on slandering the Apollo Dev, now he’s slandering all of us
It at least seems like an attempt to push an “us” vs. “them” mentality.
I thought that was quite an escalation also. But maybe their health & safety committee reccomended it. Probably just trying to make the workers feel embattled and unsafe so they would avoid engaging with the issues and stay to reddits side. Its a PUA kind of doublespeak; spez is the one actually making the threat. But in a way it seems to come from us.
To be a fly on the wall at the water cooler. Please reddit workers, leak a zoom call.
Well in a world where people will attack a fast food worker for their order being wrong, it’s probably prudent to make sure the employees you are responsible for are protected.
I wonder if things are as tense as was shown in that video from reddit HQ.
was hovering over the link like “is this going to be a rick roll or something?”
so I click it and YES this is literally what I was imagining. not the rick roll, the previous comment. fucking brilliant. in the comments it says it is the last post to /r/videos
a lot of people mentioning ./ and digg here. on ./ there was this “first post” joke. it was very boring even at that time IMHO. but now is the moment to be thinking about “last post” if you are a person who has “last post” powers.
I’m not giving up. 11 year account deleted. I might read stuff on Reddit from time to time, but it will be without an account, in a private tab, through a vpn, with an ad blocker on.
there are also a lot of subreddits that went readonly. which doesn’t hurt much. when the first google result for something is a functional readonly reddit page, reddit has succeeded. When the first result I click is a message about the issue we’re facing that is much worse for reddit.
At the same time, the couple of subs posting the images and only the images are causing /r/all to have some anti-reddit commentary.
Either way, r/all doesnt look that different. Ok, normal-reddit-for-thing isnt on the front page, instead smaller-reddit-for-thing is there.
I’m sure moderators will plan more, but I think it’s going to be difficult to maintain coordination and whether I like it or not, I get reddits approach to just ignore this.
Does anyone know what’s going on with Lemmy.ml? I can’t access it and keep getting 502 errors when I try to check it on browser. Hopefully they’re just working on their server because that was the instance where I had subscribed to stuff. It won’t be a big deal if they’re just gone, just an inconvenience.
If they are gone, already, it is somewhat worrying for the viability of Lemmy generally, because I don’t want to lose my subscriptions and comments every time a server shuts down. I’ve made an account on beehaw and lemmy.world as well under the same username, and I probably will make ones under other popular instances just in case.
Not sure, but I’m getting the same thing when trying to connect directly. I’m guessing they got the hug of death. It’s the second day of the blackout on Reddit, this is probably the time of critical mass for people that are migrating. My assumption is they all tried to join that main lemmy.ml instance rather than distributing the load across smaller instances.
I’ve made an account on beehaw and lemmy.world as well under the same username, and I probably will make ones under other popular instances just in case.
Probably a better choice is UNpopular instances. Smaller ones. People who don’t quite grasp the federation concept are flooding in from Reddit, joining the larger instances out of FOMO, and overwhelming them.
I joined two days ago, a very small instance simply because I liked the name. And I read recommendations that the choice would not matter, that you can switch later anyways and whatnot.
Turns out, bad choice. Many communities are invisible to me unless I perform some exclamation mark shenanigans which I still don’t understand (or another person from my instance does, but since we are so few, that doesn’t happen so often).
Links to other instances are broken. For example, when yesterday’s megathread was closed due to 500 comments, the mod left a link there to this thread here, I suppose. Because since I’m not from beehaw, the link does not work for me.
So it really comes with convenience and benefits to be part of a big instance, as long as that instance can handle the load. It should not make a difference, but it does. I wish the communication was clearer about that upfront. I’m a nerd and can handle it (for a while), but surely some people would leave again, when experience does not live up to advertisement.
For the best experience, join the instance with the most content you’re interested in. Federation is nice in theory, but we’re not fully there yet.
The person I was replying to was concerned about having a back-up account that would be on an instance that wouldn’t be down. Several of the larger instances have had down-times as they’ve struggled to handle the overload, as the commenter found to their dismay.
Putting their back-up account on one of the smaller instances rather than one of the popular ones would give that person the stability they are seeking.
Ah shit, you’re right.
Does anyone know what’s going on with Lemmy.ml?
Serious scaling problems with the database in Lemmy. The code was not really tested and tuned for the quantity of federation peers to replicate with, comments, votes, postings. A lot of big communities over there to replicate.
I’m seeing pending on all my remote Join to communities hosted there.
All of the most popular lemmy instances have been having issues while they deal with the massive user growth. I expect it will get better over time as things get figured out and lemmy devs make improvements. I don’t know what’s wrong with lemmy.ml specifically but it will probably be back online soon, I think one of the main lemmy devs runs it so it’s not like they are going to abandon it now that lemmy is taking off.
I’ve checked both Reddit and Lemmy since I created my Lemmy account yesterday. Reddit has lost a number of subreddits I used to read and the feed seems decidedly less interesting overall. Although the equivalents to all the subreddits I used don’t necessarily exist here, there is some good information here (particularly IT-related) and I think the overall feel of the community here is better - people seem (so far at least) largely pretty reasonable and there aren’t the armies of contrarians or downvoters just wanting to spread their anger at the world to everyone else. So, overall, win some, lose some, and if I end up just here instead of Reddit, I think any losses there will be offset by gains here. Which if you think about it makes Lemmy look pretty good, given that it is (a) relatively new; (b) volunteer-run and funded; © much, much smaller than Reddit.
I’m really hoping that lemmy can see a larger uptick in engagement. I know I should be the change I want to see in the world. However the thing I miss the most is pointless arguments in the comments section. :D
No you don’t.
That’s not an argument. An argument is a connected series of statements intended to establish a proposition.
No it’s not.
Yes it is.
It’s like going back to an abusive relationship…🤣…ahhhh feels like home
Sorry, is this the five minute course or the full half-hour?
An argument is a connected series of statements intended to establish a proposition.
Well I think it’s stupid and pointless that you miss pointless arguments. Are we doing it right?
Well I think it’s stupid and pointless that you miss pointless arguments. Are we doing it right?
Ohh for sure!
What you just want substance in your life? No debates over if Captain Picard could kick Luke Skywalkers ass? Everyone knows it’s Picard all the way. :D
To me Reddit was always the comments and less about the news story. The pulse of what was happening in your country, or town, or hobby, etc. I’m sure that will happen here on Lemmy too in time.
Did you just say Pickard can kick Skywalkers ass? Luke is a jedi. And a trained knight who has fought many battles.
Pickard is a desk jockey who sits in a fancy chair. It’s not even close.
Sure, the enterprise can best the falcon, but in a 1v1, there is zero chance of Pickard taking out Luke
I think you’re underestimating Picard. Like, not only was the man a wild punk in his youth before Starfleet straightened him out, but it’s shown throughout the series that he’s more than capable of bluffing opponents with access to things like literal time travel.
If nothing else, if he fights Luke, he’s not going to fight on Luke’s terms if he can help it.
Bluffing isn’t going to stop a lightsabre through the face.
In all honesty, I’m probably over estimating Pickard. Luke can force choke him from across the room while Pickard is doing his fancy speech
But wouldn’t they both win as neither would want to even fight the other so there wouldn’t be a battle to begin with?
You mean the same Luke Skywalker who threw his lightsaber away while confronting the most powerful men in the galaxy on board their planet-killing superweapon? And also tried to talk down the ruthless crime lord who had both his sister and her boyfriend as hostages? :P
There’s no need to get into a fight when you can call for a site to site transport an intransigent Jedi into a hard vacuum.
We haven’t established the parameters of this fight well. If outside/friend help is not allowed, Skywalker wins. If outside help is allowed: Picard wins
Also it is canon now that jedi can survive a hard vacuum for a moment at least, per Leia in The Last Jedi (iirc). But Picard is definitely smarter so he’d find a way I think. Probably.
Hard vacuum is survivable for a short amount of time, but The Force won’t really help Luke if he’s half a light minute away from the closest breathable atmosphere.
I’ve been really enjoying the Mlem client on iOS as well. Definitely still has a long way to go but it’s a wonderful start
Mlem is awesome, been really fun to engage and grow with this new community
Where do you find the key to activate it on TestFlight?
This iOS App Store link should automatically handle that: https://testflight.apple.com/join/xQfmkJhc
Appreciate it. Thanks!
No problem! Fair warning, it crashes pretty frequently for me so I’m mostly sticking with the browser for now. Also it expands every post in your feed, so you need to scroll through the introduction post stickied to the top of lemmy.world every time you reload the app.
I’m going to keep checking the app out though since it’s a nice start and is clearly gonna improve.
People say Lemmy is too complicated for most people, well that’s probably a good thing as it naturally filters out the people who only want to incite anger for upvotes. There’s no love on Reddits main subreddits anymore
I appreciate talking to people from all walks, though. If a community wants to filter people it should be explicit and on purpose.
@CanadaPlus @Senseibu well I’m reading this on mastodon, so that’s pretty wild.
In general, it’s probably going to be difficult for a community to filter people out
And I can see this back on Lemmy. Fascinating!
I’m pretty sure you could still be banned from [email protected]. I wonder how that would show up back on Mastodon?
In terms of complexity, becoming conversant enough in how Lemmy works to do basic things feels on par with IRC. The expectations about how easy it is to hop on a service and start using it have shifted significantly because of the centralization of the past couple of decades, but the evidence available from comparing the tone of Reddit to here suggests the speed bump is helpful.
I disagree, it’s easy to say that a barrier to entry is good because it keeps out trolls and those that just want to insight hate, but really those people will find a way when anything gets popular enough to bother with. Meanwhile, that same barrier prevents a lot of underserved people joining in and they’re left to deal with the same toxic people we’re trying to avoid ourselves.
The centralised services didn’t succeed because they were centralised, they succeeded because they lowered the barrier to entry drastically. It’s a lot easier to do that when you’re centralised, but that’s something we’ll have to overcome if we want this community and others like it to succeed. Otherwise we’ll just slowly die inside our own echo chamber.
Agree and disagree … when we say “people shouldn’t have to learn anything to use a technology,” that shifts any focus on better education to dumber services.
I think it’s not necessarily just dumber or more impatient people who can be soft-locked out by this, though. People who are too short on time to put a lot into hobbies (e.g. single mom working two jobs, and others with very busy irl lives) or learning a new unfamiliar system may also be left out, or older people with a anxieties or self-defeating beliefs about their ability to learn. And remembering here also that we are used to learning new internet systems, but that’s a skill in itself even though it feels easy to us.
Leaving people on platforms that have ad-drive, hate-elevating algorithms also has consequences for all of us when it comes to politics and conspiracy spread.
Technology is a tool, and the tool should be as intuitive to a human newly encountering it as possivle, imo. If people make the same mistakes or have the same confusion with something again and again, it means the system is badly designed for humans, not that the humans are dumb.
You’re right Lemmy is going to take a bit to get used to, but the kicker for me (and maybe a lot of people) is going to be at the end of the month when the 3rd party apps shut down. I’m either going to have to get used to something new either way, whether it be Lemmy or the official Reddit app and my understanding is that the official app is littered with ads and promotions that no one cares about so I probably won’t even bother.
They’re going to start adding ads targeted to comments and posts by keywords used in those comments/posts, too. Which obviously sounds horrendous.
Yeah. I’m not willing to use the official Reddit app. I tried for a day, and it was terrible. Using Lemmy with Jerboa feels natural, because the interface is very similar to the app I used for Reddit - Boost. There are communities I will miss, but it’s nice to actually see the fediverse start to grow, and participate in it. It’s hard to change from being a lurker to actually commenting, but the community feels more tight-knit.
I’m old and easily bamboozled by all this newfangled tech, and at first the whole fediverse thing was overwhelming. But eventually I realized it was not too different than an MMO’s multiple servers, and the idea of cross-realm and connected realms, and it functions not that much differently than a network mesh. You have multiple stand-alone nodes that are capable of cross-communications, so participate in a shared experience, and if one of the nodes goes down, the network will work around it.
It’s really not complicated once you give yourself time to think. And as long as the interface allows for the aggregation of random tidbits of data as we were accustomed to with Reddit, how the technology feeds that is not something the average user needs to worry about.
The only real difference between Reddit and Lemmy is that there is a bit more “hard wiring” that needs to be done by the user in order to set up a custom feed on Lemmy, but other than that, the user experience isn’t dreadfully different once the dust settles.
What IT related communities have you found? Keeping up with tech news was one of my primary reasons for keeping in Reddit. I’ve found a few things here, but not a ton. I’ll gladly take any suggestions
