2y ago

Slashdot -> Fark -> Digg -> Reddit -> Lemmy

It's been a long journey, but here we arrive. Welcome home.

65 comments

Tried the official Reddit app today and boy people weren't joking when they say it sucks. I thought it'd just be the usual experience plus some ads but I was totally wrong.
The official app doesn't respect your subreddit subscriptions at all, instead force feeding you feeds of whatever their algorithm thinks will drive maximum engagement just like a shit version of Facebook. The "hot" etc functionality is completely stipped from it entirely.
Guess I'm here to stay on the fediverse now.
- What absolutely sucks about this is that I had carefully curated my subscriptions on RIF in order not to exacerbate my dumb mental health issues.
  Hell, I've read angry posts about people in recovery from addiction and alcohol saying how they keep seeing ads for beer or gambling and things like that.
  It's horrifying!!
  
  The algorithm really doesn't work when you are critical or sceptical over a subject. For instance crypto sceptics from r/buttcoin being shown binance ads. Yes, they do show an interest in crypto, but may be the least suceptible persons to that ad.

Journey Before Destination
- Fuck Moash
  
  Air-sick low lander, that one.
  @MJKee9 @EonNShadow

Renegade BBSes -> IRC -> slashdot -> digg -> reddit -> imgur -> discord -> mastadon -> lemmy
with plenty of side quests along the way
- So we're a side quest then?
- Pre search engine time on Geocities trading mutual linking on each other websites, reams and reams of messages and emails

It's funny to read this article about the death of Digg again:
In reality, Digg changed their business model and pretended that they didn’t. That is something that is unacceptable with communities and won’t be forgotten. Reddit co-founder Alexis Ohanian hit the nail on the head in an open letter to (now former) Digg CEO – Kevin Rose:
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“You chose to grow with venture capital and you’ve no doubt (I hope) taken some money off the table in your Series C round. I say this because this new version of digg reeks of VC meddling. It’s cobbling together features from more popular sites and departing from the core of digg, which was to “give the power back to the people.”
https://searchengineland.com/digg-v4-how-to-successfully-kill-a-community-50450>
- Oh sweet, sweet irony.

I realise that this is unpopular. But personally while I disagree with the decision to charge (exorbitantly) for the api and appalled at the slander hurled at the dev, I think that is an business choice and one more item that I have to disagree and live with.
But I am very excited about the rise of the fediverse. I know that a company will eventually make a decision that I feel very passionately about, but I will be stuck making a difficult choice. With the fediverse, it provides the users with the opportunity to have control. This power of course often comes with various other costs (lack of a dedicated sre or moderation teams, etc). But I expect that over time this will evolve into options where paid offerings will come up that allows for higher QoS where required.
- Honestly, if spez hadn't already sold the site to white supremacists, I'd be a lot quicker to defend this.
  
  Who are the white supremacists he sold to?

Same fucking journey as you. Reddit was a good run for 10 years, let's see if Lemmy can work.
- What do we do if it doesn't? Just crawl back and apologize?
  
  Consider exploring other Fediverse platforms before heading back to Reddit.
  
  I mean, since there's no central site to shut down, Lemmy failing would pretty much just mean that it stagnates and some of the bigger instances shut down, at which point there still would be some remnant of it left to stay on, if a smaller one. Failing that, it isn't the only reddit alternative that people have been working on, so maybe one of the others will be more successful.
  
  Nah. If Lemmy/Fediverse doesn't work out, there will be others. This has all happened before..

Slashdot -> kuro5hin -> reddit -> Lemmy for me.
Any old k5ers on here?

The one true constant for me is 4chan 😅
- I used 4chan when I was younger but trying to go back after reddit was super depressing, I lasted about 5 minutes.
  
  4chan definitely got worse. like it was always edgy and stupid, but after 2015 every board just kind of became /pol/
- I kinda grew out of it. It was funny when I was an edgy teenager but it got progressively more cringeworthy as time progressed for me, even though the content may not have changed much.
  
  I stopped engaging with Reddit when meme-ification happened.Wheb it became all about the lolz abd short pithy responses, I started using it to find more interesting articles. Gone are the days wheb the average Redditor would read and make thoughtful contributions.

Where does somethingawful fit in

Gonna be honest it's kinda weird to me as someone who did just move over that there's a bunch of posts from people who just found the Fediverse claiming it as home while there's people who have been here since it's creation. It's got the implication that this was created as some sort of next jump from Reddit which doesn't really seem to be the case from my perspective.
- I see what you mean to an extent, and I also just moved over, but it's worth remembering that Digg -> Reddit was the same afaik. Like Reddit had been around and established for a decent amount of time before the fall of Digg. (This is second-hand info because I wasn't around at the time)
  
  I've been on reddit for a couple years before the flood from Digg. The quality of content and especially comments went down right then, and never recovered.
  Personally I skipped Digg entirely.
- I bet some early Redditors felt the same way about the Digg refugees.
- That feeling makes sense, but I think everyone knows that the Fediverse wasn't created specifically to give them a landing in this event, just like Reddit wasn't created to catch the Digg refugees, etc. More of a "next phase in the evolution of this concept", and while it took a catastrophe, they're ready to consider that it's time to move on now.
  The trick is going to be walking that line between preserving what made the Fediverse great and not alienating the newcomers. I think there's room for everyone, though, and really the big advantage of the Fediverse - we don't have to agree to co-exist, and can even co-existing completely separately if needed.
  
  I think you bring up a pretty important point about federation in that it allows for and even encourages expansion in some ways, so that's a good way to keep optimistic about it. I guess I just feel a little embarrassed. Especially when you look at posts like the recent one asking Lemmy users how they feel about the reddit refugees, and it's flooded with responses from Reddit refugees instead offering unsolicited feedback about design choices. Then you have threads like this with people laying claim to the fediverse more or less. It just feels like some kind of a Christopher Columbus situation. While I realize that might be a little tone-deaf it's the best analogy I have for it.

I think even calling it Lemmy is not the right move. Yeah, Lemmy is the server software running on a bunch of instances. But we also have kbin, and new softwares will pop up and fork and come and go over time. Once we can do some kind of account or community level migration, it won't matter whether you are on Lemmy or kbin or the next great thing. Everything will be federated so it will inter-op beautifully. If an unfriendly instance admin comes along, we can collectively cut and run with minimal interruption.
Thats still a way off from where we are now but the hard step was getting to the Fediverse in the first place. So, welcome to the newcomers among us.
- this is the future nerds like me have been imagining since the early 2000's
  
  Laughs in BBS
  or
  Laughs in Newgroups
- I think the concept of the Fediverse is still really alien to people, even the people who are using it. Everyone is still so used to their centralized platforms, so they still think of the Fediverse in terms of platforms rather than as a whole.
  You still hear people say "Mastodon" to mean the microblogging corner of the Fediverse even if they're not actually on Mastodon, and now people say "Lemmy" to mean the link aggregation corner of the Fediverse even if not everyone is actually on Lemmy.
  
  Are you saying there's other reddit-like/inspired webservices that are part of the fediverse that aren't Lemmy? What are those?
  
  I recently found and like the term "threadiverse" for reddit-like federated software

You're missing the precursors:
Email -> Newsgroups -> CGI forums / IRC -> Slashdot... :)
The new Fediverse really is kicking up IRC and newsgroup vibes for this old timer. Its very exciting.
- If we're including those then I think we have gone full circle and are back in the safe waters of protocols
- +1 you're right. Especially IRC...oh how I miss those days.
  
  I miss that moment when I became the cool kid in the channel because I had an IRC bouncer

I had the same journey but I'm pretty sure I found Slashdot by way of boingboing which I found by way of Diesel Sweeties blog posts when I first got a DSL connection in 2002 and was looking for comics and blogs to fill up my trendy new RSS reader lol

I skipped Fark, but my progression is largely the same. Once in a blue moon, I still visit Slashdot. It's like checking up on an ex to see how they're doing.

65 comments