The developer of Sync for Reddit is working on a Lemmy app

Chloyster [she/her]@beehaw.org to Technology@beehaw.org – 962 points –
reddit.com

New subreddit talking about it here. I'm assuming it will eventually be a Lemmy community

https://reddit.com/r/SyncforLemmy

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I think what he's getting at here is people asking him about building an alternative platform to Reddit - much like Lemmy, Kbin, Tildes, etc. are - as opposed to an app serving as the frontend for an existing alternative platform. I've seen poeple buzzing about that on some of those threads about Apollo on Reddit. Those people are so in denial, and there were so many of them, that I couldn't conjure to effort to point how ridiculous that idea is. Some people did, and were quickly shut down with the usual complaints (fediverse is confusing / doesn't work, etc.)

The whole insistence that the fediverse is too complicated is so strange to me. People are acting like you need to know how to federate multiple servers in order to make/read posts. It's been exactly the same experience as setting up an account on any other website for me. The only difference is I had to spend five minutes understanding what an instance and how to find communities on instances that are not my own.

Some people are just fundamentally resistant to any kind of change, I suppose.

I agree. It's just people being lazy and resistant to change. The irony is that it was exactly those "big techs" that bred this kind of behavior on them, now they turn around to criticize those big techs, but have no spine to do what actually takes to change that, so they keep on taking the abuse.

I thought I was getting the hang of it until I couldn't find communities. I pasted the link into jerboa and it still can't find it.. I can see the community on a feddit directory but I can't find it in jerboa.

I don't know about Jerboa, but this happens on the web too, and it's usually on more fringe / less popular communities. There's a workaround that works for me, I mostly heard about it from someone else here on Lemmy. It's not great user experience, but it works.

  • Go to the search function;
  • Type in the name of the community, hit enter;
  • Select "Commnities" on the search type dropdown (yes, you have to do it after submitting the search as per the previous steps, seems like another UI bug);
  • If after doing the above the community is not found, then here enters the magic sauce:
    • Change the search terms so the community is fully qualified / keyed as !communityname@instance.server, all in lowercase. So, for example, if you're looking for the "kreisvegs" community on feddit.de, type !kreisvegs@feddit.de on the search field;
    • Submit. It still won't be found. Give it a few seconds, change back the search terms to only the community name (without the instace and "!" at the start). Submit. It should now show up.

You may have to repeat step 4 onwards a couple times, sometimes.

My uneducated guess as to what's happening: the federated communities listing is probably cached on the instance, and by default it'll only look for communities cached on your instance. My guess is that federated communities only gets into the instance cache when members of the current instance have searched / subscribed to that community. Typing the fully qualified community name on the search field (which is the tip I got from someone else) apparently forces the search function to actually contact the external instance to look for the community, instead of looking in the cache, but that can take some time, hence why you should wait a few seconds on the 6th step. That guess could also explain the problem also happening on Jerboa, since the problem would be server-side.

It may be a bug, I've been seeing some weird quirks in Jeroba myself, though I'll admit I'm still figuring it out.

That's kinda ignorant of the HUGE amount of work it takes to build an alternative Reddit, not to mention the community management and moderation tools.

Why not just deploy a Lemmy instance, turn off federation and call it a day?

Apollo is also more than just a consumer for an API, they run their own servers as well create a better user experience.