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165 comments

  • Saw the whole fiasco of Reddit unraveling and then went to Lemmy. Seriously fuck Spez and how he treated the developer of Apollo.

  • Reddit made me constantly angry, then the API thing forced me on their app which made me angrier.

    Lemmy makes me feel good and the app I use fits my needs near perfectly.

    This is a pretty decent group of weirdos we got here.

  • I'm a bit less extreme about it than many here. But, in short, back when Reddit made sweeping API changes it immediately gave me 'the ick' and so I sought less centralised platforms. Lemmy is the closest thing I've found to people just hosting their own message boards like back in the early internet.

    I'm a big fan of decentralized platforms and I love the concept of ActivityPub.

    That said, I still use Reddit and have recently started to really enjoy BlueSky, so I'm not militantly against the corporate platforms or anything.

    Finally, I just like the natural selection things like Lemmy and Mastodon have for those who are naturally more techy and nerdy.

  • I think that public forums should be publicly owned. These are essential social tools that allow us to have discussions with each other and shape our views and opinions. These forums must be operated in an open and transparent manner in a way that's accountable to the public.

    Privately owned platforms are neither neutral or unbiased. The content on these sites is carefully curated. Views and opinions that are unpalatable to the owners of these platforms are often suppressed, and sometimes outright banned. When the content that a user produces does not fit with the interests of the platform it gets removed and communities end up being destroyed.

    Another problem is that user data constitutes a significant source of revenue for corporate social media platforms. The information collected about the users can reveal a lot more about the individual than most people realize. It’s possible for the owners of the platforms to identify users based on the address of the device they’re using, see their location, who they interact with, and so on. This creates a comprehensive profile of the person along with the network of individuals whom they interact with.

    This information is shared with the affiliates of the platform as well as government entities. It’s clear that commercial platforms do not respect user privacy, nor are the users in control of their content. While it can be useful to participate on such platforms in order to agitate, educate, and recruit comrades, they should not be seen as open forums.

    Open source platforms provide a viable alternative to corporate social media. These platforms are developed on a non-profit basis and are hosted by volunteers across the globe. A growing number of such platforms are available today and millions of people are using them already.

    From that perspective I think that open platforms like Lemmy and Mastodon should be the focus. Instead of all users having accounts on the same server, federated platforms have many servers that all talk to each other to create the network. If you have the technical expertise, it’s even possible to run your own.

    One important aspect of the Fediverse is that it’s much harder to censor and manipulate content than it is with centralized networks such as Reddit and BlueSky. There is no single company deciding what content can go on the network, and servers are hosted by regular people across many different countries and jurisdictions.

    Open platforms explicitly avoid tracking users and collecting their data. Not only are these platforms better at respecting user privacy, they also tend to provide a better user experience without annoying ads and popups.

    Another interesting aspect of the Fediverse is that it promotes collaboration. Traditional commercial platforms like Facebook or Youtube have no incentive to allow users to move data between them. They directly compete for users in a zero sum game and go out of their way to make it difficult to share content across them. This is the reason we often see screenshots from one site being posted on another.

    On the other hand, a federated network that’s developed in the open and largely hosted non-profit results in a positive-sum game environment. Users joining any of the platforms on the network help grow the entire network.

    Having many different sites hosted by individuals was the way the internet was intended to work in the first place, it’s actually quite impressive how corporations took the open network of the internet and managed to turn it into a series of walled gardens.

    Marxist theory states that in order to be free, the workers must own the means of production. This idea is directly applicable in the context of social media. Only when we own the platforms that we use will we be free to post our thoughts and ideas without having to worry about them being censored by corporate interests.

    No matter how great a commercial platform might be, sooner or later it’s going to either disappear or change in a way that doesn’t suit you because companies must constantly chase profit in order to survive. This is a bad situation to be in as a user since you have little control over the evolution of a platform.

    On the other hand, open source has a very different dynamic. Projects can survive with little or no commercial incentive because they’re developed by people who themselves benefit from their work. Projects can also be easily forked and taken in different directions by different groups of users if there is a disagreement regarding the direction of the platform. Even when projects become abandoned, they can be picked up again by new teams as long as there is an interested community of users around them.

    It’s time for us to get serious about owning our tools and start using communication platforms built by the people and for the people.

  • Just like everyone else: APIcalypse and enshittification of Reddit.

    I think the real question is: Why a social news aggregation content rating forum instead of any other type of social media?

    If I cared about people, I would be spending my time on Mastodon. Since I care more about specific topics, I’m here on Lemmy instead. IMO, the structure of conversations is also much nicer and more readable here on Lemmy.

  • Arrived because r*ddit banned Infinity, stayed because I'm a Communist tankie.

    I always preferred and liked FOSS stuff anyway but somehow never heard of Lemmy/Graad/Hexbear until the API fiasco. I guess I always avoided the Chapo sub because I never listened to the show and I generally dislike those shows and personalities. I'm an older Commie, I didn't get radicalized by Bernie or podcasts or steamers or whatever so I kept my distance. Seems like I missed out though. Glad to be here now.

  • I discovered the Fediverse through Mental Outlaw and then started using Lemmy after the Reddit API thing.

  • communists aren't allowed on reddit, but communists built lemmy

    seemed natural

    • Quick notes for those who only know of Lemmy after the reddit API fiasco: from what I understand, reddit's banning of /r/chapotraphouse in mid-2020 is how Hexbear came to be (biggest instance prior to API drama, albeit unfederated at the time due to major software divergence) and the banning of /r/genzedong, /r/genzhao and /r/genzhukov in March 2022 brought a large exodus of users onto lemmygrad.ml, making it the most popular federated instance until the reddit API changes.

  • Once RiF announced it would shut down due to the API changes I made my account here. I only used Reddit on mobile so just staying on old.reddit wasn't an option. Tried a few different apps for Lemmy and landed on Sync since I can set it up as close to RiF as I could, but with improvements like sliding to up vote.

    It's a much better place here, and I actually comment more here than I ever did on Reddit due to the toxicity and just getting buried by bot accounts. My account was 12 years old when I left, now I've been here over a year and don't plan on leaving any time soon. You're stuck with me now

  • Non-ideologically: the culture is measurably better. Here's why.

    • The Lemmy Algorithm. This is a big flaw with Reddit -- people have the attention span for the first ten comments, and then subcomment upvotes halve (with decent std. dev -- we aren't Zipf's Law devotees there) until invisibility. I don't think my Reddit comments are even seen, let alone replied to. But here, new comments have a chance.
    • The sense of "mineness". A lot of people see this place as "their own", so there's responsibility to raise your communities right, and another to interact (hence, variably lower hostility). I don't post much but I respond a lot to the people who comment in them, because I feel that it'd be nice to contribute to do my part and keep this place up.
    • At risk of sounding self-absorbed/elitist, the entry level helps culture too. People are here because they were dissatisfied with the state of other sites, then made a jump; this is a sieve that to an extent increases the standard of sorting by new. (This has limitations of course -- we still have extremists for example -- and it isn't necessarily advocating for Lemmy to never be mainstream.)

    e.g. that Draw a Duck post a while back is probably far beyond a lot of platforms' capabilities/proclivities.

    (I admit: this is a paraphrased comment I made a few months ago)

  • As in, why here and not reddit? I drifted away from posting on reddit about 5 - 8 years ago. I was icky over their ads and tracking and it was just a time sink I didn't need back then, but I would still use alternate frontends (the current equivalent would be libreddit) to lurk while on the train trip to work and back.

    I forget whether I found lemmy from /r/piracy exploring bunker options (raddle and lemmy) or if it was through FOSS, but I liked its potential and have been here posting here since 2022.

165 comments