We all know about how Reddit closed-sourced back in 2017 and will be killing off third-party apps this July, what will Lemmy.ml do to avoid facing the same fate? Reddit started off like this (open, aiming for freedom) and it all went downhill from there.
Email and websites are great federated success stories. Distributing the stakeholdership across companies in an interoperation keeps the peace, even in the face of crony capitalism. Just like each company has their own email server and website, they could and should operate their own federated instance of social media, be it Lemmy, or Mastodon, or Matrix… Or whatever becomes entrenched.
People forget that before SMTP email, there existed proprietary email! Yes, it’s true. In fact it took more than 10 years for a federated email format to replace entrenched proprietary IBM and Xerox mail products.
In the end, even corporate clients prefer solutions they can have a controlling interest in, because they want some control of their kingdom, and they usually have the means to get it. You don’t need extreme ancap or communistic views to get there, but you need a lot of patience. Decades of patience. It takes a long time for expensive lessons to settle in.
Except that the email game is now very centralized. Companies run their emails through MS or Google. Both of which have created barriers for independent email servers by marking them as spam more often than not. Email is NOT an example of a successful decentralized service.
I am very aware of the kind of centralization you describe. It is inevitable. And will happen to Lemmy, and Mastodon, and Matrix if/when they become large enough. It’d go so far as to say we are already there with the World Wide Web. What you describe is simply the Pareto Principle in action and it’s a law of natural order.
For me the measure of success of a decentralised service is a bit more modest: I need not that the market shares be evenly distributed among parties (that is a discussion of economics I frankly am not all that interested in debating).
But everything else still applies today: I can spin up a mail server today for pennies and start handing out my email to Average Joe, and (most of the time) they won’t roll their eyes and say “uh how do I use this?”. This is the ultimate, practical test of success of a decentralised communication service. For me it need not be fancy, it need simply to be used.
I am aware that in some developing countries this is not entirely true. I also think that these communities haven’t had the time it takes to learn the very expensive lessons of centralization, as I made in my original point.
I also think some backsliding is possible, and probably happening with the marketshare of email providers today. Then there will be come some outtage, companies will lose profits and we’ll all collectively relearn that maybe putting all our eggs in one basket isn’t such a great thing.
If there is two things you can count on in people, it’s greed and forgetting history.
Right, I am specifically saying that you cannot “spin up a mail server today for pennies and start handing out my email to Average Joe”. It will fall in their spam folder and you will have to jump through many hoops to make sure that it actually gets delivered as expected.
The Pareto distribution of users across servers is a different thing than the big players creating ways to ensure that the small players aren’t playing on equal terms. The former will happen for sure, the latter can hopefully be prevented in the Fediverse.
Right, I am specifically saying that you cannot “spin up a mail server today for pennies and start handing out my email to Average Joe”. It will fall in their spam folder and you will have to jump through many hoops to make sure that it actually gets delivered as expected.
I experienced this specific issue you desribe myself. Turns out my server configuration was out of date and not following best security practices.
the big players creating ways to ensure that the small players aren’t playing on equal terms
This has really not been my experience. Again, in my experience the only “barriers” I have encountered relate to de facto upgraded security protocols. Which is totally reasonable and within reach of any competent server admin (hey, if I could figure it out, anyone with a bit of knowledge can).
uucp existed before SMTP and is still working for email…
The replies already here have touched on the most important factors and why they matter (it’s open source under AGPL and it’s decentralised, the core devs are ideologically anti-capitalist so they won’t go public or sell out to advertisers, the users are the primary stakeholders)
But they haven’t mentioned an issue with this question: we are a community. What could WE do to about becoming the next Reddit after a decade?
Most important? Get involved. Acknowledge that volunteering and donations are powerful! The best thing you can do is to help the devs, whether it be coding, translation, documentation, web design, or the many other things that help this place thrive. I see all these posts saying “Lemmy should make onboarding easier!” as if approximately two people are there to do all the work.
I’d say it’s a mindset of coming from sites where you don’t have the power and the only path for things to happen is complaining to the higher-ups. Being open source and community-driven are things new users need to understand. We may well be their first experience on a non-for-profit social media platform, where we don’t have a designated full-time tech-support team, or a professional dev team of dozens.
Thank you so much for writing this. Its been a really hectic week for @nutomic@lemmy.ml and I… hundreds of notifications, private messages, people asking us for tech support, as well as tons of requests for fixes and changes.
We can’t and shouldn’t be doing this alone, we need all the support we can get, and people’s patience. I’m super thankful to all the people that have helped others in setting up instances.
I’m also confident that we will get over the hurdles, and become a threat to the US surveillance machine. The years of work many people have put in making this software will come to fruition, and they won’t be able to ignore us.
Thank you, very well said. For me, although I am a programmer, I’m not sure how much I can contribute (I’m just learning Rust now), but I joined the Patreon supporters. I think this is something everyone can consider who’d like to contribute to Lemmy in a meaningful way.
I haven’t checked Lemmy, but I’ve heard some projects intentionally tag a few easy low-priority features that are recommended for beginners to try and tackle. I’ve made some really minor CSS theming changes and basic frontend layout edits, the kind of thing which is pretty safe and doesn’t require expertise. Small things, but with a noticeable effect (especially when we had most of the Lemmy sites all using the same theme, so making slightly custom themes went a long way towards making it clear they are related but distinct)
I checked, and yes - there are issues helpfully tagged as “good first issue” in the Lemmy Github repo. So if anybody reading this, that could be a good start.
As nutomic, a maintainer of Lemmy explained in this post, currently the most pressing issue is slow SQL queries which is a performance bottleneck. This might contribute heavily of the overloaded servers, so the project in need of some SQL experts to take a look at optimizing these queries! Link to Github issue
You’re completely right. Community involvement works wonders.
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And, importantly, the rest of the network can defederate from them.
Yep, we saw this in practice with the Wolfballs instance, which eventually ended up defederated from most Lemmy instances before finally shutting down early this year.
I’m a newbie to all of this, what happened with the Wolfballs instance?
Wolfballs was an instance run by a USA right-“Libertarian”. I want to say it was maybe the 4th largest instance, for a long time. It prided itself on being for free speech, and was from-the-start populated with topics like anti-vaccination, racism, anti-LGBT+, nationalism and all that rot. The owner would gloss over it with “we allow everyone, we’re not bigoted, we fight hate speech with better speech”, but their userbase clearly were, because that’s what happens when you advertise in right-wing circles and attract people who who get kicked out of other websites for hate speech, revolting almost everyone but their in-groups. That’s why most ‘pure’ free speech extremist forums just end up with (literal) Nazis, pedophiles and people so spammy or detached they can’t even hold a conversation.
Naturally there was a lot of tension between them and the largely socialist userbase here, including a lot of trolls coming over just to raid, so eventually lemmy.ml and wolfballs defederated. I believe it was already defederated by a bunch of other instance, for obvious reasons, but I think the devs felt an obligation to try and make it work with the wolfballs admin, since they were a legitimate code contributor and seemed to honestly think civil co-existence was possible and mutually beneficial. They sincerely held liberalist ideas, it wasn’t just a mask to feign civility like many racists do.
At the end of January this year, the admin announced the instance was closing (if you appreciate Content Warnings, I’d just avoid reading the comments). Among other things, they mention that they had sincere beliefs the place would be used by doctors and layers who felt professionally censored, and that they had assumed neo-nazis online were just joking to troll people and were dismayed to realize, yes, they are serious and do believe in the nonsense they spout. Probably doesn’t help that the admin was in an interracial marriage.
Just to clarify, from what I remember wolfballs wasn’t as close-knit as beehaw or lemmygrad are, despite being so large. The userbases didn’t interact often, so the negative interactions made up a big portion of the few that were had. That’s probably the only reason it wasn’t defederated sooner.
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The alternatives? haha I don’t think you need to ask. Naturally I don’t use them, but many were either born or populated by communities banned from reddit or similar for being hate communities. So in the unlikely case any actually weren’t made with the intended target audience of toxic bigots, their userbase would have made it the case, just like Wolfballs.
Thanks for the detailed reply! This doesn’t sound like the first, nor the last, time where communities centered around hate inevitably implode under their own hatred. Or get shunned and isolated by the larger community (and rightfully so).
Yep, and I’ll add that I don’t even think the admin was hate-filled, but as a result of their ultra-freedom ideals, they tolerated hatred and soon realized they were surrounded by it, and it wasn’t just edginess or banter to get reactions out of progressives.
This is the most important characteristics in terms of moderation and the lemmy as a whole. It just cannot fall apart in a way Reddit did.
As users, reject changes that would make Lemmy too centralized, or profit-driven or lose a sense of community.
As app developers make the code resistant to hostile takeover, prioritize transparency, interoperability, as the AGPL has already helped facilitate, and customizability, to allow servers to tailor a community experience.
As server owners/managers foster and promote healthy engagement and discourse within communities, without power tripping unnecessarily. By fragmenting across different servers people can more easily spin up and migrate to servers where they feel more at home and heard.
- dont try to be a “outrage” generation machine
- dont try to capitalize $$$$
- open discussion != arguing
God, your third part is so true. The amount of times I’ve seen threads locked or comments removed because “you’re not playing nice.”
Like come on. Most of the time it’s someone having a debate.
After a while though it devolves into drivel. Folks “debating” just becomes a volley of insults. Mods probably have notifications enabled on threads, so if I thread blows up…well you can see my point.
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We, the users should make sure to stay on lemmy servers that use the open-source lemmy code. If other servers open up, who have closed source code, we should consider blocking them, at a minimum not support them by using their communities.
That will make sure that lemmy servers will keep using the open source code and thus will allow other people to spin up new servers.
I’m no expert, but my understanding of the AGPL license of Lemmy code is that any modification is legally required to display the modification’s source code prominently online. So if I’m not mistaken then they can’t close source the code, so long as the devs are willing to threaten legal action (like Mastodon vs. Truth Social)
Okay so they would have to write their own website that supports ActivityPub and is compatible to lemmy :)
And unfortunately, those companies have a huge leg up. They’ll generally be the ones to write ads and tracking into the server. They’ll get the investors money. They’ll make the flashy ads they play on Facebook and TikTok.
I mostly agree, I don’t think I would block closed source servers as long as they weren’t promoting bigotry, and as long as the federation still worked properly. I don’t fault users of a service for the sins of their parent company. It’s the same reason why I probably won’t block the Instagram ActivityPub initially - need to see how it shakes out.
That’s totally fine, but I remember when google users could communicate with XMPP. They captured all the users with better UI, etc, then closed it off.
Classic EEE. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Embrace,_extend,_and_extinguish
I admit I didn’t pay attention in the last when big tech would do this.
This is…hmm. I hadn’t even thought of this.
I have mixed feelings over faulting users for the sins of the service provider. I know that not everyone can care about everything, politics gets complex very quickly, but users are exactly what gives the service power. So I do fault them for continuing to use it. If a reasonable alternative exists, I think it’s important to stop supporting a dangerous company and to help start alternatives. Otherwise, inertia will just prevent any good changes.
True. I’ve been gently encouraging my friends and online contacts to switch away from the big tech / centralized offerings. There is a lot less toxicity in the federated versions of social media right now.
Yeah, it’s especially hard with social media, where a lot of their value is only because your friends use it. And your friends use it because most of their friends use it. So without a big event that shifts whole communities over, it can be unreasonable to expect people to “just move”, as much as I’d love that to happen.
Lemmy uses a open source license called the AGPL, which is a type of reciprocal license (called copyleft), which basically means you can’t close the source without everyone who contribute agreeing to do it or rewriting their contribution (and i don’t think it ever happened, i think it can be extremely difficult ).
setting up a non profit that that has a decentralized power structure and is legally obligated to do public good might also provide another protection (but a copyleft license is probably enough).
It seems like the main driving factor in Reddit’s downfall is simple: money. They are making decisions that we the users hate because they think it’ll make them look more attractive to investors when they go public later this year.
Personally, I think Lemmy just has to avoid corporate greed, bending the knee to advertisers, and not allowing extremists on its platform (or at least forcing them to their own instance that can be de-federated). The first two shouldn’t be an issue for Lemmy as long as it is able to stay funded by users. The third seems like a constant struggle for every platform nowadays.
This is how it always goes. Hate saying always, but I can’t think of one instance where a public company made a move to improve something for their customers out of the goodness of their heart. It’s always about the money.
The whole situation doesn’t really make sense to me anyways. It’s not like Reddit isn’t currently pulling in a bunch of revenue. They also have been a private company since what, 2005? I know the answer for going public is “more money” but I’m like you I can’t think of an instance where a public company has done something for the good of its users.
It really does seem like open source user owned systems are the way of the future. We’ve been burned too many times by corporations at this point. Here’s hoping we don’t have to rely on ads and sponsors to keep the fediverse running.
The thing is, who a company’s “users” or customers are and what their product is fundamentally changes when they go public.
For Reddit, their customers have been advertisers, and their community members have been their users. Their product has been user eyeballs they can sell to advertisers. And prior to adopting ads, their product was an open community forum and content aggregator, and their customers and users were the community members.
After going public, however, their customers will be shareholders, and their product will be share value. This fundamentally changes how a business operates, and what it sees its purpose as.
@Lohrun @Billy_Gnosis Open source will win. Greed inevitably ruins good software products.
I don’t think it’s possible due to it being decentralized. If anything goes wrong start your own instance. That’s what I think a lot of the new users don’t realize. This isn’t a reddit clone, it’s something with much greater potential
I think one of the big hurdles is the user accounts. If the instance hosting my user account goes down I’ll need to make a new one. That’s fine once or twice but we should watch out that this does not become a frequent occurence. Otherwise people might get dissilusioned - Nobody wants to create a new account every few months. And some people get quite connected to their accounts, too.
Mastodon avoids this issue by allowing migration of user accounts from instance to instance, is this / can this be implemented into Lemmy?
Can definitely be done. Just need someone to do it. I need to read more of the documentation and figure out how all this works before contributing, I don’t want to waste the dev’s time coaching a newbie. That’s the last thing they need right now.
I’m under the impression that getting the code running as effectively as possible for the 12th is the current aim But that’s just from what I’ve seen on Lemmy
neither reddit nor lemmy are social media platforms in the “conventional” sense. you have no value of identity (save for upvotes, which are meaningless) and it is probably proper etiquette to create new accounts every few months/year to ensure the crawlers can’t identify your user to a shadow profile anyway. losing your user account doesn’t mean anything because these platforms don’t really support an influencer type ecosystem anyway (oh sure, reddit now allows you to follow users and want you to sign up with email etc to lock you in, but don’t get baited) and the content you post should mainly be links, pictures or discussion topics that will fade away from value within an average of 24 hours.
While that might be true from the stance of “this is what everyone should do” it’s not realistic with how the general public actually behaves.
People are also trying to use discord like a traditional forum, that doesn’t mean they should, and they are suffering for it. There is this thing called “use the tool for the job”, if you use the wrong tool, then that’s not really an issue of the tool, it’s an issue of the user.
All you have to do is retain ownership and never do an IPO.
Having shareholders in a public market makes a company go evil.
The Lemmy Devs are kind of hardcore MLs, AFAIK so I doubt they will ever have an IPO, lol.
What does “ML” mean in this context?
Marxist-Leninist
Sorry for abbreviating in the previous reply, where this was not a wise thing to do.
Marxist-Leninist
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I wouldn’t worry too much about that. A lot of the beginning of Lemmy was making sure we fostered and attracted a community that held anti-racist principles.
All the biggest lemmy servers hold those principles, and pretty quickly block any “voat-like” instances that pop up, as has happened in the past few years. Eventually those instances stagnate and die off.
A similar thing happened with mastodon iirc, truth.social was trump’s mastodon startup, and most of the fediverse blocked it very quickly.
Oh my god, WHAT. Truth Social is just a Mastodon instance? It makes sense that his people wouldn’t bother doing any of their own coding, but it’s still kinda wild.
I mean isnt that kinda the goal of mastodon? Everyone is free to make their own community and everyone else is free to zone them out if they dont like it. If anything I’d say it was a good proof of concept.
Great point, but it’s still a hilarious marriage.
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The beauty of the Fediverse is that it doesn’t matter if it does. There could be instances like Voat/Poal, and there could be instances like pre-Digg-exodus Reddit, and if the divide is big enough the two sides will defederate from each other and won’t communicate. This is a solved problem in the microblog side of the Fediverse (Mastodon/Pleroma/Misskey/etc), where there is a huge variety of instances. Sign up on an instance whose rules and moderation you prefer, and you’ll be fine.
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@IverCoder I think Lemmy is different because what could you use the Reddit source code for? There wasn’t any federation so it makes perfectly sense that a website which only runs at one company will close source their code to avoid competition. With federation it’s different because the instances talk together so there is a difference between the protocol and the large instance. It’s like making email closed source. Doesn’t really make sense for such a protocol.
@IverCoder And another thing is lemmy.ml would lose users from other platforms such as Mastodon etc. Myself included because I’m using Friendica, not Lemmy. Though I do often interact with Lemmy users and make posts on Lemmy instances.
It’s an interesting point, because I wouldn’t see this as Lemmy losing users just because you’re on Friendica. We are interacting just fine, and neither site is trying to hoard users to make money from, so I say neither loses!
This is interesting. I’m new to the fediverse, and I thought that, for example, only lemmy instances could allow users to interact with each other.
Do friendica and lemmy share the same protocol, just implemented differently, or do they have some sort of gatewaway to allow interaction between each other?
Yes they do share the same protocol, ActivityPub. This allows the interoperability between the sites.
@naoseiquemsou
They are both using ActivityPub. ActivityPub is not a fixed protocol in itself but a framework for making protocols and implement any feature you want. So that means that some features available on some systems aren’t compatible with others. For example Misskey and Pleroma (and forks such as Calckey and Akkoma) have emoji reactions which aren’t compatible on other systems and therefore can’t be seen. But the basic stuff such as follow, post, comment, like is compatible with all systems.If you search for ActivityPub Fediverse software, you will find which systems you are able to interact with. Lemmy is a bit more limited than other systems because you can only see posts posted in a Lemmy community. You can’t interact with for example a Mastodon posts if it isn’t posted in a Lemmy community. However I found Kbin to be a good mix. Has the same features as Lemmy plus the Mastodon stuff: a profile for posts, boosts and can interact with any post on the whole Fediverse.
Thank you for the thorough explanation. I will research more about it.
@naoseiquemsou
You’re welcome :)
A better official app? Lol.
Seriously, though, it’s tough to say. I’m still unfamiliar with a lot of things here, and I’m not 100% sure it all works (but I do have an idea). I guess for me the biggest thing that turned me away from Reddit is the toxicity (in many, not all, subs) as well as the latest issue that felt like it was forcing me to do something I didn’t really want without a significant benefit. I’m not sure the latter can happen here, though, because of the way it’s set up. And it looks like the moderation team here is nowhere like the “top mods” of Reddit, although I have to admit I don’t know a lot about stuff here to have a good opinion.
Edit:
Another thing is does lemmy, the community, want to go mainstream? I don’t think there’s anything inherently wrong with that. It’s just that I’ve been on Reddit for years and this is the first time I’ve heard of lemmy (or else I’d have joined long before).
From what I’ve read on Lemmy and Tildes, both communities want more people so it’s more active but not too many that it ruins the site. I’m one of the recent Reddit refugees and I agree that Reddit is extremely toxic. Any time I would make a comment or post on there I would get torn to shreds over little to nothing. I’m definitely looking for a replacement for Reddit, hopefully Lemmy can be it!
I apologize for deleting my comment. I felt I was too new to have valid opinions on the matter. I got used to reddit picking apart comments lol (just like what you mentioned). I’m still not used to the community here.
I’m staying with lemmy, tbh. The community is refreshing. They actually seem to encourage (mature/open) discourse here. I wasn’t as active in reddit as I am here in less than 24 hours. Lmao. I still miss some of the subs I frequent and they’ll probably be the reason I’ll still pop up in reddit from time to time.
I’ve been on Reddit for over 10 years at this point but I only have a handful of comments and posts there because of the culture there. That being said… the culture here seems very different! I’ve heard some people describe it as a “small town feel.”
Our opinions have always been valid, they just haven’t been welcome. There is certainly a difference between providing feedback on your comment and tearing it to shreds. (My response to your top level comment really was just a +1 bump to what you said)
I’ll also miss some subs I frequented, although it sounds like some subs are going to permanently shut down depending on how the next few weeks go with the API, 3rd party apps, and old.reddit.com
Personally I’m hoping Lemmy grows a little bit more so it has a larger more active community while maintaining that “small town feel.” I could definitely see myself staying here for the long haul if there is enough content and discussions to engage in.
P.S. it’s also cool that Beehaw has downvotes disabled and you can turn off viewing scores altogether in your settings.
some people describe it as a “small town feel.”
This is actually pretty accurate based on the short time I’ve spent here. Honestly, it’s pretty nice.
Our opinions have always been valid, they just haven’t been welcome.
Thank you for saying this. I guess I needed to hear that. lol. It would be amazing if lemmy grows a bit more - more activity would be nice. That’s my only concern rn, tbh. Hoping we both enjoy our time spent here!
I think we cannot tell, yet. For now everything looks good, as you said, ooen protocol and decentralized.
But when the hype hits then suddenly money could talk and things could get worse unfortunate.
Lets hope the best and use it while it lasts
Carefully curate and vet both devs and mods. Fight hard to ensure that the character of development and moderation does not depend on just one or two people, but of active internal practices that recruit, support, and otherwise churn out cool people that support the mission and guard it from people who don’t get it or are aggressively hostile towards it. Shoot for 2X of what you need (devs, mods) and start getting worried if it dips below that.
Ensure that funding models for hosting and development work are limited but viable. Make a rejection of certain funding models a hard requirement of being a dev or mod. Everyone thinks they can resist corporate pressure, but if you, for example, make a site ad-dependent, you will eventually come to the conclusion that you need to make editorial changes to avoid losing advertisers, and have a very good chance of falling into false dichotomous thinking: either the site dies or we ban X group that makes our site less attractive for advertisers. Trying to find ways to profit off of Reddit is why the APIs are basically planned for demolition right now. This also has a dev implication: optimize for lightweight resource use. Obviously devs try to do this in general, but you’d want to make it a real priority, as cheaper server (and dev) costs are a better way to make the project viable than finding more income.
Keep to your political commitments and ban/exclude those who stand for their antithesis. Those people already have corporations on their side and there’s no point to putting in all of this effort to just end up being a Reddit clone full of the incurious and bigoted. I’m sure you already know this, but lax moderation against, e.g., right wingers tends to create spaces where they want to be and nobody else does.
