They are heavily overloaded, the dev already upgraded the server as high as possible (16€ to 67€ per month), but that only helped at the beginning, now that some are saying to join kbin instead of lemmy (because of lemmy devs apparently being tankies), the server is essentially close to dying. This is also an issue with some lemmy instances, earlier today I was unable to reach feddit.de.
> already upgraded the server as high as possible (16€ to 67€ per month)
No judgement on you or the dev using "as high as possible" here, I realise it could be a simplification in this instance.
However, I have seen a fairly strong pattern of fediverse servers being run by people with relatively few skills in system administration/web apps/operations/etc. It seems like there are a lot more people who are engaging with it on the same level as people renting multiplayer game servers, or installing Wordpress on a consumer-focused VPS provider.
And I think this is kinda great. I want the fediverse to be accessible at that level or even below! It does lead to issues like this though.
67 euros per month is a small server, and a single server is not the best way to run a service that other people are using. It's different when it's your personal site, but a social network?
I think the fediverse needs to figure out whether it wants to focus on making smaller servers easier or bigger servers easier. It's fine if most people are on million-user servers with teams running them, and it's fine if most people are on family servers that can go down without much negative impact, but this middle ground where people are on ~10k sized servers that individuals without the necessary skills are struggling to keep running on a volunteer basis seems to be a bad middle-ground.
Honest question ... How far can you push "one server"? Given that HN runs on one server (plus one mirror) and this apparently serves a not that small community well ... Given "1 million connections" are possible on one server ... Given that green threads are a thing these days ... Given that SQLite is so much faster than networked databases ... Given that a monolith is faster than Microservices ... Given that it's possible to use a compiled language instead of trying to speed up interpreted languages ...
What's the limit here? HN is a great example of what's possible, but can a single beefy server scale to handle the traffic of a Reddit?
Serving a social network is not the case where you'd want just one server. Mainly due to reliability concerns, spikes in traffic and different patterns at different times.
But if you like the idea of ignoring best practices, there are EC2 instances with 192 vCPUs that go for several thousands an hour. And taking as example Golang benchmarks https://github.com/smallnest/go-web-framework-benchmark where it's not uncommon to be able to serve 6 digits of 30ms requests per second with just 4 cores. Then the conclusion is, the limit is the sky, if you are stubborn enough.
Several thousands an hour is a bit of a stretch, maybe you meant monthly? but your point still stands.
For those interested: right now the largest instance I see is a u-12tb1.112xlarge (448 vCPUs, 12 TB RAM, 100 gb networking) which is ~$109/hr on demand or $40-80/hr with a 1-3 year commitment. This works out to ~$29k, ~$58k, or ~$79k per month.
If you don't need 12 TB of memory, there's a 6 TB instance for roughly half the cost.
Another dumb question ... for "several thousand an hour" I could buy a pretty decent server myself ... last time I checked (on https://yourdatafitsinram.net/) the largest physical server there was like 10 grand.
Combine that with the ability to actually throttle a physical server (ie you only pay what you actually use, not per hour) ... I guess I would propose the following scaling strategy:
1. get cheap physical server
2. get your software up and running
3. get a second physical server that is roughly twice as capable
4. use that second server as a "beta" and development server ... do a lot of profiling there
5. once your real world usage spike on the first server routinely reach 80-90%, switch production over to the bigger server
6. get a new development server that is twice as beefy as the former development server
I mixed up pricing. Several thousands a month. But if you could buy a 192 CPUs server for just 10 grand, seems like not a bad deal. Especially if this hypothetical project is able to attract the load we are discussing for longer than a few weeks.
this really depends on the software. a website using a "slow" interpreted programming language (php, python, ruby etc) in a "heavy" application that runs many tasks in the background on each pageload does not compare to a website that merely returns static information, either directly from the webserver or mostly from cache (no or much less need to waiting for cpu to process, or disks to fetch data vs ram). it is easier to just archive and provide access to existing content than to also run all the "invisible" services around that content.
You have to remember, that until 1-2 weeks that 16€ server was more than enough. This was a tiny community and most people (including me) had not heard about kbin, many not even about lemmy.
My eventual plan is to host my own 1-user instance and rely purely on federation.
In theory shouldn't there be able to be both? Some apps should be able to optimize for large-scale usage while others optimize for ease of installation and maintenance in your spare time, but all should theoretically (barring the inevitable drama) be able to federate with all the others.
I do wonder what the funding model is supposed to be for the large servers. Tiny servers can be funded out of pocket, but large platforms can't, and the resource requirements of fediverse apps seem to be much higher per-user than those of a centralized platform.
(I'm not sure if the resource requirements are inevitable or just a sign of an immature app.)
Yes! Although I think that targeting both is unlikely to work in one app, which means we need interoperability and true federation between different codebases.
Currently this leaves a lot to be desired. It sorta works for status-based updates with Mastodon and a few others, but it's not a great situation as Mastodon isn't the most standards compliant player, and the standards themselves are pretty loosely defined.
Hell, I currently don't even have gigibit fiber and self-host a Mastodon instance at home. Currently hosting Plex (meaning content-sharing with friends and family), Mastodon, Matrix, Airsonic, Wireguard, PiHole, and more. Everything runs off an HP EliteDesk with QNAP hosting all the media. The SFF PC is quiet and uses relatively little power.
I am glad I have no data limit though - I apparently went through >3 terabytes (split 30/60 between up and down) last month alone, mostly due to Plex and Wireguard.
Also from what I've heard about Mastodon, running it is surprisingly resource intensive, for whatever reason the server doesn't seem to be very efficient.
Not sure about Lemmy. But for mastodon, there’s an incredibly high amount of servers to federate and keep a connection with. Then add all the storage for all the content being created. I can imagine it being heavy.
I agree here. I looked into setting up a public instance. Realized quickly if it gained tracking a single box is not going to work and you are immediately in a scale out setup of postgres at least.
Once you get to 3 postgres nodes, 2 LB's for the DB traffic, then Front ends with Load balancing, you are looking at 9 servers-ish minimum....
That monthly cost even in Linode is a bit more than I would be willing to front with no compensation.
That said, i may just setup an instance of kbin I can control and rely heavily on the federated portion to interface with the various communities. If my understanding is correct, I can access other lemmy instances even with kbin, such as beehaw etc.
I was digging through the lemmy perf issues a little and was surprised how they are doing things. Cool they got as far as they did though. Maybe I really underestimate how unique knowing how to scale things is
> Tankie is a pejorative label for communists, particularly Stalinists, who support the authoritarian tendencies of Marxism–Leninism or, more generally, authoritarian states associated with Marxism–Leninism in history.
I’ve always thought of “tankie” as a leftist who wants to murder non-leftists (ideally using the states military equipment, tanks, soldiers, etc…). In other words a “real” communist.
Tankie has less to do with any coherent ideology and more to do with just being on the side of whatever is not The USA.
It does tend to be true that all 20th century Marxists were and remain tankies, I was raised by such and have family friends who think Putin is awesome and it's fuckin embarrassing.
But I am a Marxist in the economic sense and also believe the USA is still a pretty good bet.
In my experience, "tankie" is more or less used these days to refer to "authoritarian leftists", people who claim to be on the left but support authoritarian nominally socialist regimes.
There's plenty of USA-hating anarchists who aren't being called tankies. The authoritarianism is a pretty important part of the term.
Though this isn't entirely incompatible with what you said, the major non-US geopolitical powers have historically been nominally socialist, and also happen to be authoritarian; so people who support non-US-aligned powers will have been supporters of the USSR or China, and I'm comfortable calling those people tankies.
It is one of those contrarian ideologies where people willingly brainwash themselves that the thing they oppose is bad, therefore the other thing has done nothing wrong. Just like the far right, they are so allergic to sharing facts and thinking that they will instantly use mod tools to remove anyone who attempts either when it hurts their feelings.
So I'd define it more as primarily someone willfully ignorant of genocide and other appalling human rights abuses with a mild preference for an economic system.
You're not wrong on any point of that, in the final analysis, BUT, I think it's worthwhile to compare tankies to the current set of kool-aid drinking Christian Republicans who are supporting the banning of books and other overtly fascist laws, because they really are two sides of a coin in this case, and illustrate the breakdown of social bonds we are currently experiencing.
If you step into the tankie mindset for a moment, you will zoom in on the book banning and anti-trans cudgel that's currently getting swung around, and they will contextualize that with our 400 year history on this continent, and pretty rightly conclude that there is no moral champion at the nation state level, and if there is, it cannot possibly be America, but if they're here, America is the one they are able to fight.
Likewise, if you step into a naive geopolitical viewpoint and say to yourself that Russia is a country that lost the cold war and which the West did not really help to become more democratic in the aftermath - you sent your capitalists and that equated to sending freedom, in the minds of Reaganized America.
But Capital does not concern itself with anyone's freedom but it's own, and Capital does business with anyone willing to do business with it, including its morally-liberated, and now ideologically-liberated, former rivals, who were never fucking communists in the first place; they were the new autocrats, same as the old autocrats, and likewise, Yeltsin was just a drunky thrown up there to give speeches while they reestablished control under the new capitalist branding.
And for thirty years, mostly anyone who question it has been shouted down. "These are our trading partners and they're totally super into freedom, guys! China wants to be like us!"
And here we are. But anyways, rant aside, to the tankie and to the book-banning Christian Fascist alike, the enemy has lost all moral status, they are outlaw, and therefore any measure used against them is just, no matter how inherently unjust it might be in and of itself. As long as it's used against them.
This is how "good" people like you and me end up joining the organizations that end up living in infamy, whether it's my sainted grandmother who went to her grave believing Stalin was fine or whoever ends up as the evil poster boy for the current attempt at Christian Fascism that Barry Goldwater was already warning yall about.
If he had leaned into it like Trump did, he would've brought this all on much sooner, and we would be dealing with some other calamity here in 2023, but Goldwater called it, these people believe in apocalypse as a good thing, so all of us who are right-thinking, whatever economics we may favor, are gonna have to get on the same page about this one.
I agree that tankie-ism is very similar to various other far-right ideologies, and I think the only significant difference between a tankie (or late-stage USSR or CCP supporter in general) and other authoritarian ideologies is an aesthetic one. In my opinion, the core of left-wing politics is a radical opposition to authoritarianism, where the authoritarianism of the worker's relationship with capital is but one important example.
It's extremely telling to me that the mainstream right-wing view of the Russia/Ukraine conflict is one which supports Russia -- in perfect alignment with the tankies.
Marxism has to do with pointing out how capital operates on societies; there are no Marxist governments, though he did theorize that the world would eventually work its way to communism, in much the same way that we somehow worked ourselves almost to the point that we're not using slavery anymore.
Of course, we are all still carrying around child slavery in our pockets, most of us. It's got a shiny touchscreen and it helps us find our way around, through the power of child slavery.
Well yes, there aren't any capitalist governments either but economic system and government are intertwined. Bartering is the state of nature, everything else is government.
So you're right but I think people know what's meant.
Nah, and I'm no communist either. I'm the kind of wishy washy leftist that they hate.
Authoritarianism does not know a political stripe. Before 1917, the government of Russia was a self-identified autocracy with a god-given right to make Russians live how Russians have mostly always lived.
The worker's movement that took that down instituted a thing they called communism, but which was really just the old system with different uniforms and modernist art. Not that efforts were not made, and not that the old guard in the rest of Europe didn't take steps, but it was mostly that the revolutionaries didn't really know how to operate a ship of state, so they fell back on old habits and kept the branding.
It ended up as a collectivist nightmare, and it still had a privileged class at the top, but there was no ideological conviction that capital was a positive force which could do no wrong, so no, they did not have a capitalist government, and pejoritavely calling it communist is fair IMO, I think communism is a thing that could be done but which won't, in a just way, in the lifetime of anyone alive now. It can be done badly and people keep trying.
I'm a 30s-style socialist, myself. I think the New Deal was doing well and Americans could have had a nice country all this time, but I dunno, everyone wants to roll those dice and be one of the upper class instead of demanding justice now.
Real capitalism has never been tried either, there is no such thing as an ideologically pure society. Though it is important to note that all of the worlds governments are influenced by capital while "less" are influenced by the effort to achieve a classless society.
> Marxists were and remain tankies, I was raised by such and have family friends who think Putin is awesome
A curious irony is that the 45th POTUS once characterized Putin's decision to invade as "genius".
Actually I take the above as further evidence that the usual projection of political thought onto a single left-right axis remains hopelessly reductive.
To be fair looking at the tech stack kbin was not built with scale in mind. There’s likely a lot of hard scaling limitations to work through which is a fine challenge to have
Tankie is a pejorative label for communists, particularly Stalinists, who support the authoritarian tendencies of Marxism–Leninism or, more generally, authoritarian states associated with Marxism–Leninism in history. The term was originally used by dissident Marxist–Leninists to describe members of the Communist Party of Great Britain (CPGB) who followed the party line of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union (CPSU). WTF?
I wonder if it's possible for Reddit 3rd party app devs (Apollo, etc) to rework their existing apps to use Kbin or Lemmy instead. Could be a huge undertaking. But it would be an even bigger blow to Reddit, since they can easily funnel users away.
Sample size of one here, but I use Reddit a lot, I'd never heard of Lemmy until the last few days, and once I read about it I immediately added the master RSS feed for SDF's Lemmy instance to my feed reader. (It's https://lemmy.sdf.org/feeds/local.xml?sort=Active for anyone curious).
So now for basically the rest of my life I won't be a pure Redditor and I'll always have an OSS/federated alternative to it vaguely on my radar, it's a sea change.
I mean Reddit for me psychologically has gone from an OK platform to the bad guy very quickly here and in mere days I've gone from not even knowing alternatives existed to sniffing around the edges of one. Seems like Reddit is waving around a huge footgun right now.
Edit! : I can't help but compare Twitter and Reddit to insanely successful older companies like Apple and Microsoft. Both of those companies became very successful by building the biggest moat they could, muscling out their alternatives, acquiring or commoditizing their compliments etc. Google too. Yet with Twitter and Reddit here we have two social media companies who have just said "Hey let's do very public stuff that promotes direct alternatives to our core offering." Idk what to say other than... Dumb dumb dumb dumb dumb
He said that in regards to rolling his own version of Reddit. The parent comment proposes instead to repurpose the app as a client for similar but different already existing service.
It’s possible to run a profitable company that treats its customers well. It’s not possible to do that when you accept VC money or take the company public.
Big Apple fan here, but I’m under no delusion that Apple will always make great products or treat their customers well. The moment they struggle to maintain growth, they will resort to the same user-hostile tactics that have enshittified the rest of the internet. That will probably happen under a different CEO, but I think it’s unavoidable in the long term.
Any service that supercedes whatever next, will eventually be a protocol, and future generations will consider all the iterations in-between to be, dumb.
Some of the products are based on anti capitalist principles. Regardless of an amoral view of all this, combining capitalist ventures with egalitarian ventures seems wrong to me. To couple two wildly different ways of ethically interacting with the world and treating people not as commodities.
Which is why he’s so likable. Anyone focused on building companies has drunk the capitalist kool-aid in pursuit of infinite growth and wealth. That toxic mindset is directly at odds with the (long term) interests of the end users.
Decentralization is what both public and private social media needs, which tildes does not offer; but Lemmy specifically is not the long-term answer to Reddit either.
Still, that's irrelevant because mobility is one of the main purposes of the fediverse. That is, move to Lemmy or something else like kbin, yet, you're connected and may move again later on. Transferring of one's own content is still an open issue, though.
Besides, while tildes incorporates a lot of the lessons mods learned already after the first half a dozen years of Reddit, it is not meant to scale. It's a platform for small/medium instances, not very large ones.
It's a pity, though, there is so little support for decentralization/federation just because its design is a bigger challenge.
Another reason is, however, the absence of a constitutional protection of one's privacy outside one's own property. Because of that the consumers of the dominating nation in that market don't really grasp nor care about that aspect.
how does content moderation occur with a fully decentralized network? Do they have a democratic type system whereby you can vote to have things removed? I'm thinking about some sort of PI being exposed or illicit media.
Tildes doesn't feel like a reddit replacement. There are limited "subs", "nsfw" content or discussions aren't allowed, has been invite-only for years, etc. I don't know if Lemmy is a good alternative either.
It's more of an HN replacement (or addition) where you can get pretty detailed posts and comments without jokes and memes. It's like if HN added subs for games, hobbies, etc.
I've heard some pretty sketchy stories about Tildes moderation unfortunately, people being permabanned for obscure reasons within days of signing up for example. If that's where they're starting from, I'm not sure I want to see where they're going.
Agreed. Though the political opinions of the core owner (?) might be problematic for project growth.
For federated APIs though i tend not to think Privacy exists. "Delete me" is nice, but when it's already broadcasted to dozens of other instances it feels a bit moot. Still, worth doing right if you're going to do it at all - not sure why an instance owner would want to host everything indefinitely anyway. Storage concerns and all.
This whole conversation is making me want to take the plunge and check out ActivityPub. "It can't be that hard" lol, right?
The thing is that if they want to operate in the EU then this will have to be solved. The right to be forgotten exists, and saying "it's federated lol" is not an excuse.
Sidenote, i wonder if EU requires you keep some information about a user. Ie hypothetically, given some arbitrary P2P setup, you might need to record users that need to be forgotten, any aliases they fall under, etc. Lest you risk publishing said "forgotten" content from another source that is broadcasting.
Worse yet if this publication is in a slightly tweaked format that your software doesn't recognize.
> Since the operator and developer of lemmy has very problematic politics (defending genocide and homophobia for example), and is demonstrably incredibly hostile to non-authoritarians, giving him permanent access to your data (even if you delete your account) is a very bad idea.
this is talking about the developer of an AGPL 3.0 licensed software. WHAT HAS THE DEVELOPERS politics or for that matter, anything got to do with selfhosting lemmy ? isn't this problem with google or facebook yet no one seems to care about that but oh my god, its lemmy.
also, what operator is this talking about in particular because lemmy is a FEDERATED SOFTWARE. there are hundreds of active servers
Appreciate it! Shame. Kinda makes me want to fork Lemmy, because i like the tech stack more behind it lol. Hard to say if i'd like the source without looking, tho
Small update, this is giving me the excuse i needed to look into ActivityPub. I'm rolling my own implementation from the ground up, though more as an exploration into ActivityPub and to experiment with UX.
I realized the beauty here is that i don't need to replace Lemmy, Kbin, etc. I can lean into them, and even if i don't gain traction (i probably don't want it anyway. Managing large projects are unfun), i still get to be part of the larger ecosystem.
Ie, why write a Client to Lemmy as you might with Reddit, when you can instead write a participating Server which also serves as a Client. Federation is neat like that.
Though i'm still unclear on a lot of steps with federation, so we'll see how this goes.
Tildes has stated they are not looking to be a Reddit alternative. They want to be narrow and deep in conversation so no images posts and porn. Also Reddit and HN has privacy issues.
Bizarrely, the empty husk of Freenode was advertised as a “partner” on the Gigablast home page for several months. (Then Gigablast went dark.) I’m still wondering what was up with that.
Ugh. I’ll take a look for the moment but the “secure” on that page (Cloudflare-provided I think?) has filled my weekly allotment of bullshit. Never going to be a regular as long as that’s on, sorry.
(There’s a special angry place in my heart for people who continue to devalue the word “secure” in the eyes of end users.)
If they want to grow and take on Reddit refugees there is no way they can do that if they are worrying about a $16/month server or $68/month server. They are going to require much more than that and if people are constantly waiting for content to load they will just go somewhere else; which lets be honest that means they will probably go back to Reddit.
I don't think they want to grow in that sense. And since this stuff is federated, you can use any other instance to subscribe to and interact with your subs.
It’s selfhostable, this instance is paid for by the devs who quickly set up a "buy me a coffee" profile just today, but essentially people are joining faster than plans were made ;)
This is how it was on the 90s internet. Sites got hugged to death on the regular. It's how we ended up with the platforms, really, cause they had the capital to handle these surges without losing the company's house.
Edit: and there was no Patreon or any popular platform to quickly save the site.
The CloudFlare bot-checker thing goes into an infinite loop on Firefox. Good sign the devs don't bother to test on anything but Chrome. In fairness, OpenAI does the same thing (not to mention Cloudflare itself has no excuse), so I guess it's just the world we live in, but I'm still never going to sign up for any site that does this.
While it's supposed to reduce captchas and things like that, I found it to be causing some checks to fail. I disabled it and stopped having issues with CF.
No fact was claimed other than what something looks like or is cosistent with, and I agree with that much. I'd say it's not even controvercial, no question about it.
Anyone who thinks reddit had anything to do with "microblogging" clearly doesn't understand what Reddit was. Hell, most of the good subs aren't even aggregation, but original content.
context for microblogging: kbin is a software running karab.in. It's a polish community, modelled after wykop, which includes microblogging functionality, so then does kbin. Wykop in turn was made after digg, the names mean same thing.
Of the visual design of the alternatives I've seen (and including Reddit design itself), I really like how this one looks so clean, so there's that. It actually makes me want to use it.
I had the same thought just now. Reminds me of the good old days of forums, which was what attracted me to Reddit originally. Looks like they have equivalents for at least two of my frequently visited subreddits, so that’s an easy sell for me.
Unlike lemmy, this has the advantage of links being links, so e.g. middle/ctrl. clicking works for everything, while in lemmy some (e.g. "X comments") are JS only.
Where do you find the "X comments" links that are JS-only? Just visiting the home page of lemmy.ml, all comment links are actual links that can be opened in a new tab or copy-pasted (e.g. https://lemmy.ml/post/1186587?scrollToComments=true)
Nowhere, now :( I swear it didn’t work for me when I posted this, but now it works, and I have absolutely no idea what changed. I even checked in git if there was some recent change, there wasn’t. I’m flabbergasted.
Found it. It actually doesn’t work at all: https://imgur.com/a/xuUfT4Q The first image is the button, which switches the cursor to one pretending to be a link, but only the second outline is actually clickable.
That's such a surface issue though and can be solved quickly. Much more interesting to compare the architecture and other things that can't be fixed by one day in some hours at max.
I don't know the specific circumstances here. But making a link js-only is often a sign that the developers are not aware how much of a problem complexity is.
Or, instead of using Link from whatever routing library they are using, they happen to use Button, or whatever. It can be a really simple issue as well as some underlying reason.
But as a first response, I think it'll chalk it up to "ops, we missed that" rather than "we like links that don't work like links", especially if the issue hasn't been reported yet.
Found the issue. It actually doesn’t work at all: https://imgur.com/a/xuUfT4Q The first image is the button, which switches the cursor to one pretending to be a link, but only the second outline is actually clickable. I added a gif as demo, will also report this to lemmy.
I’m so confused. Now that’s the case. But I didn’t dream being unable to open those in a new tab. WTF could be going on? I even looked at the git repo, no recent relevant changes
It's really unclear to me how Kbin is different from Lemmy other than UI and not being Lemmy — which is fine but unclear. Just another ActivityPub implementation?
Honestly the more I read about Nostr the more it makes sense to me. It would be nice if there were a more forum-like Nostr.
The main differences I've heard of aside from what you already mentioned; Kbin supports microblogging a-la Mastodon with the same account, and protocol-wise it maps upvotes to boosts so everyone looking at your "timeline" can see which posts you've upvoted. Both being turn-offs for me.
I really want the Fediverse to succeed as an alternative to content silos like Reddit, but at this rate I think that we're headed towards a world–like every other time Reddit fucked up–where a small number of people splinter onto different websites while "normies" stay on Reddit and continue to look at the funny memes be they posted by bots on badly moderated subs or not.
Hmm. Yeah being able to see which posts you've upvoted seems undesirable to me. I guess someone might argue that it would increase the consequences of voting and make people more careful? More anonymous voting seems better to me, if you're going to have voting.
I’m able to view through safari. I get a prompt to open in the app, but that’s every Reddit page, because Reddit is a jerk who doesn’t respect my decisions.
Dunno if others are seeing the same, but I am getting a blocking message saying the subreddit is "unreviewed content" and giving me the option to leave, or view in the app. In other words, it's not letting me view it on the website using mobile.
Even more, you can visit any NSFW subreddit in old site (eg nswf411), click 'view 18+' and now see any age gated subreddits. Though if you access it through from any GDPR country then you need to accept GDPR consent first on new site and only then move to old.
Until now, the only real demand for an alternative has come from users/communities banned from Reddit or opposed to the censorship/groupthink. Which is not an ideal set of users to start a new community with.
One day, enough people will hopefully realise that internet forums of old (i.e. before Discourse) were perfectly good. Get some reasonable mods, make the rules clear, enjoy the community. Then we might all chill a bit.
Pity everyone went chasing popularity, shouting loudly at each other and influencer moneys.
IMO, the value of Reddit was that it was a group of forums with SSO and decent discoverability.
If you wanted to find a forum on a specific topic on the broader web, you had to sift through various sites and look for individual hints as to their vitality, and then register and introduce yourself on each one. With Reddit it was a single search away, and the more or less consistent UI made it easy to tell "this is the active one."
But importantly, it retained a lot of the value a forum does: a comment pool that persists, that shows up in Google later.
Discord is a TERRIBLE substitute. It's not meaningfully threaded. It's not externally searchable. It doesn't even have the "it's federated, so we're not beholden to one specific owner who will inevitably tank it." catch.
>Which is not an ideal set of users to start a new community with.
It can be if you're part of the ever-growing number of normal humans whose views fall outside of the tightening Overton Window that American elites want to impose on all social media platforms.
Kind of a tangent but Voat used to be a direct clone, though it seemed to attract more of a certain negative tone among its users that seemed to characterize the site. Culture of a site is as significant as the tech in terms of persuading/dissuading users from participating, particularly early on imo.
Reddit has its own particular, identifiable cultural aspects (some positive, some negative) though it's also large enough that it's managed to escape being pinned down to only its more negative aspects. Twitter maybe not as much among some crowds though it's still a very broad userbase.
Admin, mods and finally users set the tone of a site and lead by example. On HN for example the more one has read over time what the tone of the place is and the type of content and moderation, the likelier it will continue, almost Ship of Theseus style with regard to users.
While if this place for example were more accepting of crass comments and submissions then the culture would adapt and invite more of the same. Some might like or prefer that but it also has its downsides, particularly for users who like aspects of a site/sub-community but find other aspects more difficult to be an apologist toward.
Idk where I'm going with this apart from I wouldn't want to be in someone's shoes trying to broadly handle maintaining a decent culture that isn't weighed down/characterized only by its more negative aspects :p
To add some context, Voat soared in popularity as Reddit closed down some hate-focused subreddits such as /r/fatpeoplehate. Predictably, when your user base is made up of almost exclusively people who are fleeing Reddit because Reddit wouldn't let them hate people loudly enough, things go downhill, especially if you're positioning yourself as a "free speech absolutist" alternative with lax moderation policies.
I'm hopeful that Reddit alternatives which get popular now are getting an influx of more moderate users, who are fed up with Reddit's management's terrible treatment of developers (and overall bad direction lately with the redesign and pushing website users to use the app and generally chasing profit over all else). Sort of like how Mastodon got an influx of mostly decent users who are fed up with how Twitter is being run by an incompetent chud.
EDIT: But to be clear, what these Reddit alternatives are trying to do is still extremely difficult. They have a better starting-point than Voat, so I give them better chances to not end up as cesspools, but nothing is certain.
This is pretty much by biggest hope for the current uproar.
Voat was almost destined to become a nasty place because of the audience that reddit was disenfranchising at the time. If losing /r/fatpeoplehate was enough to make you seek an alternative platform, then the community you wanted to create smelled a lot like /r/fatpeoplehate. And regardless of whether you think that's a community that should or shouldn't exist, I don't believe it's a solid foundation to attract a wide userbase to.
The communities currently being disenfranchised are power-users, community moderators, developers .. if (Voat equivalent) were to happen today, it might find itself with a much more productive community to build from.
Ah, Voat. Thinking back, I cringe at the fact that I was quite a prominent user in it's very early days, before it got took over by antisemitism etc. Before the FPH crowd and others who were banned from Reddit came over, it was a reasonably nice place where otherwise-silenced (/"uncomfortable") topics coule be discussed in a fairly pleasant and intellectual way (sometimes). I even bought some merch to support the site when ako (or w/e the founder's username was?) was complaining about running out of money for the site.
A good example was that I actually remember discussinf about the increasing rate of transexuality amongst children on there (what could be the causes, the consequences, etc.), all the way back in circa 2015. 8 years before it became such a hot-button topic...
Voat never went away though - Poal was created and the entire, quite angry and detestable, userbase migrated.
There will always be a spectrum of humans, and every spectrum has two ends, and there will probably always be the "80% middle" forums, and the "10% ends" forums...
I created a "Reddit for News" where various RSS feeds provide an initial stream of stories but people have Reddit-like abilities to upvote or submit their own.
It's at https://www.goobix.com/news/ , I would be happy to get feedback or build capabilities people feel as missing.
I think you’re closest to what I was hoping for. Something like the vanilla software any admin could setup a reddit knock off ala a django forum app https://djangopackages.org/grids/g/forum/
Saidit seems like a direct clone that has some (limited) traction. /r/drama's Reddit knockoff just for themselves (at least I think it's just for themselves) looks to be larger, though (rdrama.net).
It seems even a slight amount of required effort is too much for most people to go to another platform. Which should probably tell you something about the quality of online content these days.
The rDrama codebase is used for rDrama.net (19.6k users), watchpeopledie.tv (338k users), and a few other sites that fizzled out. TheMotte.org uses an rDrama fork with all the fun features (like blackjack) removed.
The migration process is a lot of work and most communities just don't bother.
Sure but now could be a pivot point. These third party developers that are closing their apps could band together around a vanilla knock off if one could roll out a knock off like yet another Django app. Thinking of forum apps like https://djangopackages.org/grids/g/forum/
Social wise, I imagine there are controls to steer how the site allows new content. Maybe start with just the subs that naturally tend toward the most use and least controversy. The pet subs, car maintenance, science, benign hobbies, news (tough but worth the clicks), etc.
Does Kbin enforce developer beliefs on downstream admins and users like how lemmy enforces[1] a hard-coded "slur" filter? If it doesn't, then it sounds promising and I see why reddit is afraid.
This is what happens when 2,000 people are employed to run a site that can probably be run with 200. What the heck are 2,000 people doing, considering that 95% of the site is run by unpaid volunteers...
i thought it was almost 3000. I made the same point the other day, there's absolutely no reason they couldn't already be profitable, it's all just trying to get rich rather than exist.
I suppose it's more about the power mods, sometimes with help from the admins, aggressively suppressing certain ideas while allowing others to flourish. So maybe they don't need all those 2000 people...
Make the API reasonably priced instead of making it effectively impossible to run 3rd party apps, make 3rd party apps a reddit gold only feature, make reddit gold better in general(the main complaint ive heard is "why do i even buy reddit gold?"). They've got 2000 employees, surely there's enough people to come up with better monetisation ideas than I could in a few minutes that don't involve pissing off a big chunk of the userbase.
So "big money" caused Reddit to overcharge for API access? How? If this is bad for Reddit's valuation, "big money" should be demanding that they pull back. What do you know that Reddit's investors do not?
The experience I get as a user of the app? Is it that hard to believe that people at the very top can be out of touch with the average user of their product? I'd be surprised if any of those people have even seen the Reddit homepage once. We've seen plenty of companies go down because they made an incredibly out of touch change which caused mass migration to a better product(the example floating around is Digg). All this happening right as they prepare to go public is really all the indication one needs to deduce what's going on.
> What’s the reason for it being more inter-operable with mastadon than lemmy?
Just to clarify, it’s fully inter-operable with lemmy. But while lemmy only has basic Mastodon support, kbin has full support. I’m guessing it’s just priorities.
- Your site says nothing. It doesn't say what kbin is, why I should bother, why it's useful.
- You have a link to docs. No thanks. Show me CONTENT. If I see content I like, I'll sign up.
- Why is fediverse better? (I know what it is, the average viewer won't)
- Mobile app "coming soon"? No, that should be directly the "Download Alpha Mobile App" Button. People know what alpha and beta are.
- Cute graphics = this is VC funded and going to tell me what I'm allowed to think. The fact I can't even see this walled garden the second I open the main page is a nonstarter for me as a user.
13 removals in the last day? That seems really tiny, but the community is also tiny so makes sense.
If you've ever run a service with open registration + user generated content, you know there is a lot of stuff to clean up. This seems to be a relatively small community, so there is also little to clean up.
Not sure what the ratio is though, which is more important than just counts of how many removals.
I'm ok with cleaning up blatant commercial spam and illegal content, but they seem to be removing comments from people who are just expressing their opinion. Not a good sign
Which comments specifically are you thinking shouldn't have been removed? Just did a quick check but seems fine to me, mostly off-topic and impersonation.
I am not going to claim knowing the policies 100% but I guess if a subreddit (magazine in kbin's parlance) has rules "A friendly place to chat. No politics please. Don't be a dick." (https://kbin.social/m/ukcasual@lemmy.world), then it's fair that any links to politics get removed. And the solution is to create your own subreddit (magazine) or even host another kbin instance yourself and federate with the rest. In other words, there could be many moderation policies on a single instance.
These are moderation actions from the whole Fediverse kbin.pub is aware of (mostly Lemmy) and they are from communities (subreddits) moderators, not from instance admins
True for every content platform. If the website just spews meta without showcasing the innards immediately (even just screenshots) it seems suspicious.
For kbin, they link 5 instances on top, but that doesn't connect the context.
https://kbin.social someone linked in another thread seems to be the straight to content site equivalent to reddit.com; kbin.pub is I suppose the 'marketing' / organising contributors & instance maintainers etc. site, whatever you want to call it.
kbin.social
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I couldn't find a link to the rules but if it's anything like other fediverse projects - Mastodon in particular - then I agree.
It's likely to be ruled by people with a 'toxic positivity' mindset who insist on everyone having the same set of political and cultural opinions as their own, with very little dissent permitted, under the threat of being individually kicked out, or having one's server defederated, or both.
As determined by your local Ministry of Truth, of course. You could see why many people might be skeptical of their benevolence.
Let's face it. A lot of these platforms will absolutely ban you for saying true things in a problematic fashion, eg. FBI crime statistics. It's widely accepted and celebrated and it doesn't pass the laugh test to say that it's just about stopping misinformation or whatever. Because you're hurting The Cause and that can't be allowed.
I don't think you are wrong per se, I've seen first hand that dismissal or even censorship of FBI crime stats.
But even though the data is truthful and I wish we could discuss it, it's hard to deny that the goal of the poster is usually to legitimize hate and after a few heated discussions the mods learn to recognize it as a red flag and they act early.
I know, it sounds like a slippery slope fallacy. But we've seen how platforms turn out when it's allowed. Eg voat or gab.
Yeah, I mean I get the rationale, but at that point you're pivoting from "we're combating clear hate/misinformation" - which can perhaps be readily justified to a reasonable impartial observer - to "we're combating speech/expression that we think is harmful", which in many cases cannot. In an era of high partisan hatred (ie. today) this will lead to community splintering.
The word “clear” is doing a lot of heavy lifting in your first quote, because in combination with the second quote it is simply excusing hate speech by saying it only matters if it’s clear to you rather than the reality: clear to those directly affected.
Because that is what you’re complaining about: the harassed voicing their concerns and having people make moderation choices based on that.
They are heavily overloaded, the dev already upgraded the server as high as possible (16€ to 67€ per month), but that only helped at the beginning, now that some are saying to join kbin instead of lemmy (because of lemmy devs apparently being tankies), the server is essentially close to dying. This is also an issue with some lemmy instances, earlier today I was unable to reach feddit.de.