What non-technical criticisms do you have of the Lemmy/kbin/link aggregator fediverse experience?
- Exclude explicit software bugginess or missing features
- Include experiences or knock-on effects that may have arisen from (1)
- Comparisons to Reddit are ok. We know the reasons for the differences, but this is just about expressing yourself
Discovering communities is easily the #1 complaint, I don't think it's a technical issue, it feels mostly a conceptual issue with how everything works. I understand why duplicate communities exist because of how the Fediverse works, but in practice it's pretty annoying to the users. For example I tried to look for an anime community just to see if there's any discussion, but I had no idea where people were.
There's anime@lemmy.ml, this looks like the most popular but it's mostly repost bots. There's anime@lemmy.world and ani_me@lemmy.world, both of which barely have users. There's anime@kbin.social, which has some threads going on but few users.
Because of the amount of duplicates nobody knows where the users actually are. Since everyone's confused, nobody participates because they feel like nobody else is going to see their content. On Reddit you had one definitive subreddit for each topic, on Lemmy it feels like a guessing game at times which one's the right one.
We're settling into communities more as time goes on (like how !moviesandtv@lemmy.film is the definitive movie/tv hub), but I think we've got a ways to go. If Lemmy wants to go more mainstream it needs to tackle this, whether it's through multi-reddit style communities that combines feeds or some way to combine comments on crossposts or maybe some other way.
The Fediverse is rather different. I'm sure there will develop some sort of sign posting system to point out where to go but by its very nature, it will be subjective. Perhaps some sort of vivacity score could be used to judge how alive a community is and some way to show all communities across all instances in a say top 10 listing. In time communities with the same broad focus will develop a particular or set of focuses (foci, focae - not for me). Time will tell.
Lemmy is different to the walled gardens and it needs to mature and develop its own way of doing things. I love the fact that the largest instance went down with a bang for a while and the rest carried on fine. I feel for lemmy.world residents and admins - I'm a sysadmin myself. However that demonstrates the sheer power of the fediverse. I will be spinning up an instance eventually, once I've got the hang of using it and I run some quite important stuff at work.
Tools and memes will develop over time but make no mistake, the fediverse has hit its teens in life. What sort of adult we get will be interesting. We do need to keep it out of the hands of a single authority whilst still allowing civilized discussion, for a given value of civilized. Instances can refuse to peer with others so we can gradually develop networks that work for subsets of the human race. The tricky bit is enabling this to happen within earthly laws and boundaries. Governments hate decentralization for obvious reasons. Instead of Messrs Apple, Google, MS etc they potentially have to deal with me and you and the other n billion people on the planet!
Yes, the world fracturing creates a bunch of duplicate islands. They need to overlap.
Its just super unattractive to join. If I am thinking about joining a platform I want to know if there is content that is interesting to me. Now if I go to https://join-lemmy.org/ what do I see? It greets me with explanations of the Licensing, tells me all the programming languages and frameworks, shows me pictures of code and something about mod tools and of course immediately offers me to run my own server. None of that is even remotely interesting to me even now that I am a registered user. Not to mention that the design is questionable. Then it says "Join a server". I am not here to join a server, I am here to join a platform. And if I click on that I am met with about 50 different instances, of which I have no idea what to choose and what implications my choice has.
The whole federation thing, the design, everything is just unintuitive and unattractive to join.
I agree that it is unclear to folks that Lemmy is not a platform and this causes frustration and disappointment for new users. It probably should be clearer on join-lemmy.org that this whole thing is just a bunch of servers talking to each other.
It's absolutely a platform, it's just not centralized.
join-lemmy.org needs some serious work if it's really what people are going to link when others ask about it; it's really no wonder that we've mostly only amassed technical folks. I also think the default UI/UX could use a lot of work to bring it up to standards with other modern social sites. I wish that would be a priority for the devs, but I know they only have so much time to devote to things
I tried to solve this a tiny little bit by giving my own instance a clean and friendly frontpage, but I think I still need to do more work to attract people who aren't fedi-inclined.
I like that front page, nice for a 'smaller instance' that has a specific target. I should steal it for no.lastname.nz
Please feel free! Source is on GitHub, it uses Astro with the Starlight template.
I love this landing page. Great job!
Thank you!
Can make this argument for email....
Which is why no one is running their own email server and people go to the platform that is easiest and most well known.
Email has the benefit of legacy. Lemmy does not.
Multiple communities with the same theme in diverse servers mean lots of repeated information in my home page.
I find hard to find new niche communities. All is all, the common denominator. My home is what I already have subscribed. Local instance communities are there. But I don know a good way to get offended content from communities outside of those categories.
There's a few different community browsers:
browse.fediverse.de
lemmyverse.net
It's still got the problem of being repetitive.
And there's not a great way to suggest "you might like..." based on your current subscriptions.
IMO, moderators of communities need to merge their communities. Identify which community is bigger and quite frankly push users to just use that one, to reduce the ambiguity over which one to use. The software ideally would also have an officially supported way to just close your community and transfer everyone's subscriptions to a different one, so that we don't have these duplicates confusingly still showing up in the listings.
I personally did this. I tried to create and promote a community I thought I was the first to make. When I learned it actually already existed (and just... didn't show up in search because of course not), I shuttered the one I made and pointed it at the other one.
What's bizarre to me is that the Android community even did switch to a different one... and then switched back to having two?? It's weird and I don't understand why they did it.
It’s a solution, but I don’t like it.
1.- It’s less resilient. If (more like when) one server goes down it could take the only community in a topic with it. 2.- If the moderators for the community of your interest are kind of dickwads, or absent, or malicious, you have no alternative. 3.- Federation can create weird problems. If your account instance is not the community’s one, you could be effectively banned, without doing anything wrong. 4.- Creates a perverse incentive for using the biggest instance you can for both creating communities and users. Some of the bigger Lemmy instances already are under heavy load and having problems to stay online. Imagine if we discourage using small instances.
Some mechanisms to “merge” communities across servers would be cool addition. Every Android community in every server that still federates with each other lists every post in all of them. Moderators moderate the posts in their instance. Link repetition is the same as inside of one single community. If one of the composing communities moderator team doesn’t does it’s part it could be expelled from the composite. Like a soft de-federation.
Just rambling. It’s a complex problem.
It’s a solution, but I don’t like it.
1.- It’s less resilient. If (more like when) one server goes down it could take the only community in a topic with it.
2.- If the moderators for the community of your interest are kind of dickwads, or absent, or malicious, you have no alternative.
3.- Federation can create weird problems. If your account instance is not the community’s one, you could be effectively banned, without doing anything wrong.
4.- Creates a perverse incentive for using the biggest instance you can for both creating communities and users. Some of the bigger Lemmy instances already are under heavy load and having problems to stay online. Imagine if we discourage using small instances.
Some mechanisms to “merge” communities across servers would be cool addition. Every Android community in every server that still federates with each other lists every post in all of them. Moderators moderate the posts in their instance. Link repetition is the same as inside of one single community. If one of the composing communities moderator team doesn’t does it’s part it could be expelled from the composite. Like a soft de-federation.
Just rambling. It’s a complex problem.
Agree it isn't simple. "We want control without control"
1.- That would make Lemmy servers ultra unsafe to host. Server owners would not be able to moderate content hosted in their machine. It would make a good distributed solution, but not a federated one.
Maybe we’d prefer a centralized organization, with distributed resources. But seeing the defederation drama every week, it doesn’t look the path anyone wants to follow.
The "front page" of lemmy, either the local of the instance you're on or the "all", is pretty bad. Low quality, uninteresting, obscure, sometimes vaguely rude. News about small video games, hyper specific gripes, obscure memes, uninteresting articles with no comments. Compare that to reddit when it was good, which reliably emphasized the biggest world news stories, genuinely interesting user anecdotes or personal stories, academic knowledge (especially AskHistorians), videos or images that grip you, etc. I'm not sure what the issue is with lemmy's front page. Is it an algorithm problem? Something to do with federation? Is the user base merely too small for now and this will improve on its own with more engagement?
It's too bad because the "front page" is the user's first taste of lemmy. Most users will browse without making an account for a while before finally making an account and subscribing to specific communities.
In general, I think lemmy is already great. There are starting to be lots of cool communities, and even if the quantity is lower, the quality seems to be higher.
The front page of Reddit is one of the places I’ve actively avoided. That’s the place where I’ll find everything that the rest of the world likes to see, but none of the stuff that I care about. I tend to be interested in strange niche topics, and my multireddits reflected that quite clearly. To me, the front page of Lemmy is about as boring as the front page of Reddit, so no big changes there.
Yeh for the last few years especially of my using Reddit I would only ever go directly to the 4-5 subs that I frequented. Never once went to the home page/“all”, or the new discover page or whatever it is.
For now I’m using All on here to try and find some communities to join, and which ones to block. I’d say in a few months I’ll just be using Subscribed.
In order to discover interesting places I just went to https://lemmyverse.net/communities and joined every community with an interesting name, such as science, technology, physics etc.
Some sorting would be good. I'd also like to be able to hide posts without having to block the poster. Right now there is very little user control.
I strongly agree that it needs to improve. Besides the sorting algorithm issues, one issue is that "all" depends on what people on your instance have subscribed to. So small instances might not have much or have a very biased all. I think Lemmy should at least default to basically subscribing to the N biggest communities for all instances, purely to seed the "all" view.
As well, most instances should default to "all", because "local" is usually going to be extremely limited and misleading. Defaulting to local will just make the fediverse look bad. New users aren't going to realize they can switch to all. They'll just think there's barely any content and leave.
The worldnews thing is the biggest problem right now because the threads just get brigaded so consistently. And lemmy.ml, which has one of the biggest worldnews forums, has a soft ban on the world's biggest ongoing news story.
Lemmy has no algorithm.
Yes there is, and it's not that different from reddit. The sorting algorithm is what they refer to. Eg, hot is some balance of time vs votes, which greatly favours newer posts (too new, IMO -- posts it shows will typically no comments or maybe just one or two). Active favours high commenting rates and based on my observations, it seems to drop off around 2 days (too old, IMO -- a considerable number of posts shown by this algorithm seem to be around the 2 day mark). The top and new algorithms are straightforward enough.
All the algorithms favour big communities. There's a "best" algorithm in development, which would try to look at the top for each community and thus give smaller communities a chance. I can't wait for that, because right now, you'll rarely if ever see a small community hit the front page and it sucks bad.
As a general rule, the onboarding and discovery in the fediverse is pretty bloody terrible.
It has to exist to be terrible.
It’s difficult to figure out what to do when copies of your particular niche community exist in 5 different places, all with very similar subscriber counts.
I would hope in the future we get a more fleshed out version of multireddits. I think it would be a decent solution since I don't think duplication of communities is a phenomenon that will ever go away.
Even finding Lemmy was not easy. Just doing a search brought up Lemmy from Motörhead. Talented guy, but not really what I wanted. It took me awhile before I even found an instance, and that was only because of a YT video. Most folks will just use the first page of their chosen search engine, and then give up.
Then signing up to… pretty much anything federated is a confusing experience for new users. Trying to wrap your head around instances, communities, and so on. “Why does there have to be an XYZ community at Example instance, when there already is one on ABC Instance? Can’t they just merge? What’s the point? What if I want to be a part of example instance, but want to subscribe to communities on the ABC instance?“
When signup is done, but you then enabled 2FA. You input the string on your app, click apply. Then when you try to log back in, you find you’re logged out, and don’t know why. It’s because Lemmy is one of the few services to use SHA256, and not SHA1. So it doesn’t work with something like Bitwarden. I had to find a GitHub post to find out why this was happening. Not a good first impression.
Then when you subscribe to communities they’re either lacking in content, or reposting, sometimes from another instance.
There seems to be issues with posting media, and the whole integration with other ActivityPub seems to need some work.
Overall I think all this is growing pains. I wouldn’t say the service is ready, but I don’t think it’ll be ready, until it onboards new users. However I don’t think many new users (non-technical users especially) will stay, due to the issues above.
I'm still struggling with it. I clicked on a post that looked interesting and it took me to a server I didn't have a logon to. I wanted to leave a comment but I couldn't. Was I banned? Nope, I finally realized I'd been directed to a different server. Now imagine someone with zero IT background trying to deal with this. They'd probably just quit it.
It is interesting to be on the ground floor of something new though.
That is generally really annoying, when on desktop. Consider looking for an Android/iOS app. The app will keep track of your account, and you won’t really have that issue anymore. I use Thunder, and find it a decent experience on both platforms.
Onboarding is unclear for people. So if they just Google Lemmy it's a bit of a adventure for them to figure out they have to make an account where to make the account.
The friction around account creation is difficult. Many let me instances require manual approval, so that slows down me onboarding funnel.
Let's be Frank most people don't want to make an account, entering email and password and validation. Using some federated identity like Google Apple would make The onboarding easier for people
Discovery is very difficult, especially if you're on a smaller instance, you have to know what communities to individually subscribe to. There's some mitigations with find a Lemmy community websites but they're not built into most of the apps yet. So unless you're joining a very large server, Lemmy's going to feel pretty empty.
There's some gaps between Lemmy and other platforms around media rich posts, especially videos and GIFs. Posting a video on Lemmy is difficult especially if you're on a mobile device.
I still love Lemmy, these are just observations with respect to your query
Kbin allows login with Google since recently
One thing I've noticed that I feel might become an issue eventually is that occasionally someone will have something they really want to be seen, so they sort of cross-post it to every related community in every instance they can all at the same time, so it shows up in your feed a dozen times from a dozen different places and it takes sometimes a day or more to get fully pushed out of the way.
I've only seen it happen a few times so far so it's not currently a major issue, but I can definitely see the potential for abuse there. As more people join you'll inevitably start to get more of the marketers and influencers and eventually corporations showing up, and they tend to bring all their bots and tools and various ways of gaming the system so it'd suck if the whole feed ends up being just the same 3-4 things posted into dozens of places for the whole day.
I'm sure there are ways to filter those sorts of things out, but I think the challenge is going to be to find a way to keep it under control without putting too much on the user, so they don't have to be constantly tweaking their settings and blocklists, and so that new users who just browse without having an account yet don't just see an unappealing wall of nonsense.
Hopefully that doesn't end up being the case, but that seems to be the way it trends when you add more people in my experience.
Yeah this has to be my number one criticism at the moment. It's a bit of a catch 22: you want a steady stream of quality content, so you subscribe to multiple communities of the same name so nothing falls through the cracks, and then posters post to multiple related or same-named communities so nobody misses it 🤷♂️
I agree that is a vulnerability that will be exploited soon. Not sure the best way to combat it. Perhaps a crossposting limit/cost/penalty would discourage it.
This bears deeper thought though because since there’s no karma (let there never be), new accounts can bypass costs/limits from more permissive instances.
Good point and I hope to see more discussion around this. It actually seems kind of serious now I ponder on it.
It's already a thing. I scrolled New this morning and it was just a wall of the same story posted all over by some shit bot. This needs to be figured out asap.
It has sort of been said already, but I didn't find a reply stating my exact criticism so I'll chime in. Lemmy and the fediverse is confusing. Instances, federation, de-federating, and all the other techno-garble is not something most internet users have any frame of reference for and I imagine it is very off-putting to a vast majority of potential users.
I'm not usually one to harp on user experience but it's just a mess trying to get into this whole thing. I was driven by a hatred for reddit to figure it out and I'm a software developer by trade, but still was scratching my head at wtf all these terms were and how it all works. Lemmy and the fediverse desperately needs some onboarding/marketing work and to ditch this sentiment of "if you can't figure it out then we don't want you here."
100%. Mass adoption really needs "easy". From an average user experience, Reddit is instantly useable.
I do want to mention that despite what I said above, I think apps are doing a good job at making exploration kinda easier. Been digging wefwef/voyager and looking forward to Boost and Sync to check out.
I tried to explain it to my parents this past weekend, and I did not do a good job (because I only like 70% get it in the first place).
Agreed, though I think it's less "we don't want you here" and more "you're on your own". I liken it to Linux in that sense where new users are expected to try harder to learn the ins and outs. The difference is with Linux what you learn can be applied in so many more places in your Linux experience. With Lemmy, once you grasp the technical depth of it there's not much you can do with it except explain it to another person.
I don't know if this counts and it might be too much to ask for but it would be nice if there was some marketing or advertising.
Peertube and Mastodon have easy-to-digest videos explaining what the platform is and how it works. It would be nice if Lemmy had its own too.
Here is an alternative Piped link(s): https://piped.video/watch?v=gOkXkMzhdko
https://piped.video/watch?v=IPSbNdBmWKE
Piped is a privacy-respecting open-source alternative frontend to YouTube.
I'm open-source, check me out at GitHub.
I agree, though I probably wouldn't call it marketing or advertising. Maybe just a better and more accessible introduction and onboarding experience.
As an old, I just realized why the time I spend on Lemmy is less soul-destroying than equivalent time on Reddit.
I enjoy searching for topics of interest more than being spoonfed content. So in this respect, the difficulty of Lemmy is the point.
I get it that this is an aging hipster point of view, so really we are fighting for the soul of Lemmy.
How much appeal do we really want?
How fast do we want to grow?
What order should major features be implemented in? (Let alone the debate over which features.)
This debate will never end. Get used to the defederation wars. It is akin to “Am I my brother’s keeper”? This is among the first questions asked in Genesis and God declined to answer. We will fight about it till the end of time.
My best hope is that enough quality instances host quality communities that I can curate my own experience to make so-called social media serve me, not a tech company.
I thought that was the point?
Join us at lemmy.world/c/tinnedseafood! Or is it !tinnedseafood. But don’t I need the instance too? This is part of the problem!
This is a feature, not a bug. Yes you need the instance as well as the community name. This is akin to complaining that you can’t type in a URL without including the TLD (*.com, *.org, *.wtevs).
I am open to an explanation how you can expect to find a community without both pieces of information. There may be a less confusing way to structure the links, but the community name and instance name are basically required for a federated system.
Joined on one instance, it went away, had to create a new account on this instance.
Finding communities and content has been challenging, at least Memmy has the number of subscribers front and center when searching.
Content depth could be better.
These are also, IMO, growing pains that will resolve over time
That's a really annoying issue. Not being able to trust an instance to keep your account alive plants the seeds for a centralization problem in the future.
For me, you can't separate those two things. I want an online identity. I don't want to switch servers because of whatever reason and have to import bookmarks. I want my app to keep track of my subscriptions and just give me my replies/messages. I don't want to care whether I'm on lemmy.ml or whatever
Have my upvote good sir/madam/other. Use it in good health!
Wow. All the top comments are about finding / joining / onboarding.
I genuinely don't understand this criticism about the fediverse. It seems like people just want to be told what to do. I totally understand that this isn't a vertical platform like Reddit or Twitter but that doesn't prevent anyone from participating in the platform. It just means that you need to look for what you're interested in rather than be told what you should be interested in.
I've commented recently about the redundancy of communities - which I think is a related criticism to knowing what community to join (as opposed to instance). If I'm on this instance but another instance has a community of the same name, which should I join? Both? Meh. It's not something to stand in the way of using the platform at all but it is a bit annoying.
Anyway, my one "complaint" is just that the niche communities I'm a member of on Reddit don't exist here. Specifically, communities for buying and trading things like r/photomarket.
This is still a relatively new platform. It's going to take some time for it to build itself organically. It feels to me that a measurable amount of content on the platform is critiquing the platform. I think it would be more conducive if we all spent less time critiquing and more time generating original content - not stuff cross-posted from other platforms. I mean, in general, if you're searching the web for "a thing", the results aren't going to direct you to the fediverse unless you're specifically searching about something regarding the fediverse. Showing up in search results might be the tipping point that drives more users to join the platform.
Then it's a solid complaint. A quick story as to why you don't understand it: I use to do tech support and I'd hear so many coworkers get super frustrated about how stupid the people calling in were, because they couldn't even do..whatever the thing was. I would make a point to the new hires that they knew how to do this stuff because they're techies, because this is what they grew up learning. The doctor or lawyer or professor on the other end of the call is not stupid whatsoever...in fact, they're likely much smarter than the person calling them stupid, they just took a different path. The techie is unable to fathom that the depth of their own technical knowledge is not common knowledge whatsoever and takes the basics for granted. At its core is an inability to see one's self as more than a standard deviation from the norm. Cheers.
I don’t like him either
Yes exactly. Not many people like to figure out how something works, they just want it to work.
Apple's success isn't because it's the best at any individual feature. It's successful because All the features just work without having to figure anything out.
The same problem I have when it comes to Mastodon/Misskey/Firefish - I feel like everything is so fragmented, like I have to jump from one place to another. Thankfully, this applies significantly less in the "threadiverse" (Outdated name, we definitely need a new one) because there aren't 6 different platforms and tens of different forks, and Lemmy and Kbin are pretty much 100% compatible with one another, unlike those moments where you can't see Mastodon re-toots on Firefish a lot of the time or sometimes accounts' posts appear much later in a different instance. We don't need to worry about that here.
On one hand, I kind of like that there are separate communities to check up on. It's a very efficient way to waste time.
wait re-toots (boosts) on Mastodon are not visible on Firefish?
There are cases where reposts on some Mastodon instances and most of Misskey's reposts aren't seen on Firefish, but are seen on Misskey, because for some reason Misskey seems to have better protocol interoperability, so you get a vastly different experience even when following the same people.
Links between instances often don't work as intended, and there's no good way to redirect me from
some-other-instance.pub/c/cool-communitytomy-instance.pub/c/cool-community@some-other-instance.pubautomatically.You should check out https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/fediredirect/. This works for redirecting both communities and posts, although the latter requires to give your log in credentials to the extension.
Looks nice. Some us browse on mobile though.
I also mainly browse on mobile haha. However loading posts from my home instance is often taken care of by the app (client).
Thanks, I’ll try it out!
This is something we have a workaround on an extension I'm working on. You can right-click on a link and have it open in your home instance
https://lemmy.ca/c/instance_assistant
Thanks, this is lovely!
I don't have anywhere to discuss reality TV bullshit now :( Reddit was good for that. I just want to know if Charity sent the right guy home tonight and I haven't found a community for that yet.
100%
Loads more unnecessary and weird political comments on completely unrelated posts. On Reddit it depended much more on the subreddit whether you'll get those weird comments, on Lemmy I found lots of comments up high on various non-political communities which just repeat certain political combat slogans on many posts.
Even when I sympathize with 'that side' moreso than the opposite one, it's just dumb and annoying to me.
To me, all the complaints in this thread are a great filter. It keeps away all the people that are too lazy and/or incapable to figure out basic things, which are not the people I want to interact with online anyway
attitudes such as this one are my biggest complaint tbh
My thoughts exactly. One of the reasons I came here was to get away from elitist attitudes and punching down at people. If I wanted that, I would've just stayed on
TwitterX. Musk and his cult do plenty of that.exactly!! but with each passing week I see more and more of it on here :/
My tech self surprised me, as I agree.
However, my art self is sad. I'm sure the art community will take a long time to figure out Lemmy.
"It's a good filter" is often just an excuse to not improve the UX. You hear this way more from open-source technically-inclined folks than you do from folks who care about building a product that people want to use.
Honestly I don't think the UX is bad. Sure, a few things could be improved, but it's in a great overall state, especially considering its current growth rate
The way communities are federated. They are still centralised. The Usenet/Fidonet model (where the communities were distributed) from decades ago was superior (the communities themselves don't have a depenency on a single instance). While the Usenet model would require a bit more work to implement particularly around identity/moderation, it would make the system so much more resilient.
I want the app to open to frontpage, aka only the communities I subscribed to, sorted by New. I want it to take zero clicks to get here; I just want to open the app and have it there.
Apps are updating rapidly of course, but the last time I went through the main Lemmy apps on Android, the best one still took two clicks to get to my preferred view every time I close and relaunched the app.
You cn do this by changing your account settings.
It's "starting off" by being flooded with admins and mods* from reddit, many of which didn't listen to their communities and were power hungry. Lemmy today is basically reddit 2.0 but with growing pains and teething issues.
Could you say some examples? I've seen a lot of people mention they're ex mods, but haven't seen any moderation issues yet.
Mods and admins will always be like this, this is not a Reddit thing. The trouble is the people who want to moderate a community are the type who generally "want the power". It's a people not a technology issue and unfortunately not one that can be solved.
Do you mean admins or mods?
Sorry I meant to say admins and mods.
No worries, just clarifying. It would've been happy news if the admins were leaving their overlords.
I don't like all the communities that moved from Reddit that are just using bots to cross post shit from Reddit to here. All those communities seem to have are the bot posts. I'm not commenting to a bot; it won't respond. I don't know how many humans would see it, because literally no content is posted by a human. I post my own content, but then it's buried by the bot spamming stolen content.
I get the idea was to seed the community and make it appear active, but it just has the opposite effect. If I was to block the bot as I usually do because I don't care to engage with bot content, that community would be dead. At the very least, hide the fact it's a bot and make me believe it's a human I'm talking to.
where are the technical criticisms?
Make account migrating possible
When federating, load past content
Allow servers to have backups in place in case the initial goes down, or even better automatically share the load across instances (with usrt approval of course)
add multi community aggregation to aggregate communities of the same topic on different instances.
god yes, or anything better than the current. Maybe something like community 'groups' where one can subscribe to them all with a single click, or jsut remove some to their tastes. Tbh add a couple layers of that and it'd be an insanely powerful way to group similar communities
Setting up a Lemmy server outside of the golden path of using the Ansible template is extremely difficult. I do this professionally and I couldn't get federation working properly when running Lemmy on my Kubernetes instance.
Figuring out why federation is failing is very, very hard.
Lemmy requires a lot of resources to run. You need a VPS that's at least $20/mo to work adequately under any load. Disk storage requirements for the DB are also rather high.
Lemmy 0.18.2 has some horrendous N+1 DB calls, e.g. one query per language (173 of them) when you create a new community. This hamstrings databases that are not colocated onto the same machine, e.g. neon.tech's hosted pg db. I expect this will improve with time as the codebase matures, yet...
Instance administration tools are sorely lacking.
The comments are too long.
The redditors are really racist and really anticommunist sometimes. I get that the admin wants a diversity of opinion but the orientalism feels pretty intense nowadays
There shouldn’t be votes. Activitypub itself shouldn’t have votes but I can understand the broader community around it wanting them to kludge in functionality of places they’re trying to ape.
If you’re coming from Reddit or wherever though and don’t see this as a perfect opportunity to get rid of the part of the site all the problems stem from or are enabled by, I don’t know what to say.
Get rid of the votes.
How do you sort the content without votes? How do you pick out the good stuff from the spam?
You read it and when it’s good you respond with a contribution or expansion on the ideas presented.
Maybe you quote the post but write nothing, or put an emoji nodding and smiling and pointing at the quoted text.
When something’s spam you either ignore it or tell that person to fuck off. Maybe you report their posts, then a mod drops in and confirms that they should fuck off and either gently corrects them or bans them with whatever level of granularity is appropriate.
Are you willing to accept the assumption that bad content (e.g., spam, advertising, trolling, low effort posts) is far more common than good content (I.e.., high effort posts)?
If you are, then it seems to me that your system would involve a lot more people interacting with a lot more bad content than they do good content. Down votes are a mechanism that let's one person's time wasted interacting with bad content reduce the probability that everyone else will have to waste their time on that content.
No, that assumption is wrong. That phenomenon didn’t become common and problematic until systems to remove the human element were put in place. Like voting.
Think of the forum you go to for your niche hobby. No, not the subreddit or lemmy !, the forum with all those old guys (they are guys for my hobby) with signatures that have pictures of their pets and Miata and a proud listing of the equipment they use to do their thing. Do those places have problems with spam, advertising, trolling or low effort posts?
Of course not! Spam gets removed, advertising is relegated to the buy/sell/trade subforum, trolling is accepted or moderated out based on the community’s preference and ditto for posting effort.
Votes are very important if you’re trying to create a system that encourages a parasocial relationship between users. If you don’t want to encourage a parasocial interaction then there’s not much reason for votes.
Interesting perspective. Thanks for genuinely engaging, by the way.
I worry that the mechanisms you describe might not work as the number of users gets large. Check out "Eternal September" if you don't know about it already. Niche forums might be able to run like that just because they will never have too many members. For forums which many people are interested in (e.g., cat memes), this might not be possible. They may need a mechanism for high-grading content.
forgive me for swinging at the low hanging fruit, but:
if only there were some system that allowed users to switch to different servers when they get tired of the one theyre on.
september was a problem on usenet because it was a huge platform everybody was on. the structure of federated systems is inherently secure from septembers of yore and behaves like old forum splits. look at whats happening on world right now, it's having problems and people are leaving for other servers.
if all of facebook for example suddenly got sprayed onto a federated system, people who didn't want to be around that would just move to servers that enforced their norms or didn't federate with the newbies.
there is no need for content grading unless we just want to have that particular "internet as tv" parasocial relationship.
Fair enough, but that still doesn't address the problem for people who do want to be on a large server---full of many people who share their cat meme interests---and see mostly high quality content.
Wanting to be in a forum with thousands or millions of other enthusiasts is a legitimate use case for this kind of social media platform. In that use case, I don't know of any other way but voting to efficiently filter low quality content. "Just leave" avoids the problem rather than solving it, by denying people the opportunity to do the thing that most people go to Reddit for: to be part of huge communities and just see the good threads and comments.
Well now that’s a horse of a different phenotype. A person who wants to be in a giant platform shouldn’t leave when the aol users come barging in.
But voting isn’t required for that size of system to work. Consider a big forum: the cat memes thread might be a hundred thousand pages long and might have an images only button so you only ever see the memes, none of the commentary. Do you need a voting system to keep the quality up? No! When someone posts bad memes they’re told to get it right by all the other people.
I think one of the parts of Reddit (and most social media tbh) that you’re not really engaging with is that most users don’t post. Most users don’t put up pictures of themselves or share the most recent thing they ate or comment on someone else’s. Most users don’t fire off a two sentence missive when someone cuts them off in traffic or repost someone else’s so all their friends will see it. Most people using social media don’t post. And that’s fine.
So when you have a platform with that situation and you’re making money off of ads you want technologies that push engagement. For some platforms it was bigger more aggregated front pages (digg, slashdot, Reddit) and some more subtle ones used the conflict algorithm. That’s why we never saw votes before the age of social media, there wasn’t a reason to have them.
But when you’re not trying to sell ads and go public and get acquired and retire at 30 a multi-millionaire, that’s a “solution” (it messes up more stuff than it fixes) in search of a “problem” (there was never a dearth of good posts and everyone could find them).
We don’t need to extensive metrics to have a good, big, high quality community.
I like this...upvote! 😁
Hell yeah!
Hey everybody, come prove electoralism works!
IMHO, It's fine as long as there's no account wide Reddit-style karma.
Is it fine the way it’s implemented, with no vote anonymity?
No, I don't think so, but that's a different aspect.
Do you think the issues with voting (Samey content, lowkey groupthink, manipulation, etc) are acceptable if there was some technical solution to vote anonymity?
Are you sure the issues you mentioned are caused by voting? I'm not certain, so I cannot answer your question.
I without a doubt am.
its not the only cause but its absolutley why reddit ended up so uniquely bad in those ways. the problems were systemic and voting was a big part of that system.
think on it, you got slashdot, then digg, then reddit. they all try to run with this new method of handling both content and discussion: ranked instead of threaded. slashdot falls apart because digg does it better. digg falls apart because it has the method right, but it's trying to be legitimate news. reddit gets huge because it recognizes the ranked model is for social media as opposed to news and leans into it with all the bells and whistles. idk if reddit falls apart.
the canaries leave reddit for the fediverse and start lemmy. but why keep the things that made reddit bad?
In my opinion, the problems you mentioned are not caused by the voting system.
Groupthink is caused by a lack of discipline. Obvious hot takes or otherwise poorly formulated comments should be downvoted. Well presented contrarian opinions should be upvoted. Perhaps educating users on using the system in its intended way – promoting healthy debate or interesting insight – is better than removing the system completely.
Manipulation is caused by poor bot control, so while removing voting might help somewhat, this would be a band-aid at most. Unless you mean some sort of psyop manipulation that doesn't involve automation, which voting can, in theory at least, help against by refuting attempts at manipulation.
Duplicated content I have only seen in connection to the nature of the fediverse so far (i.e., same topic communities spread across multiple large instances). I guess some people would try to farm internet points by posting low quality content, but if people like that content and vote for it, what's there to be done apart from blocking the community you don't like?
Also Lemmy's popularity would suffer if it was missing one of the key features of Reddit ("Full vote scores (+/-) like old Reddit." is listed as one of the main features on the official website).
You’re wrong.
If there’s a system in place that ensures more people see what you wrote for longer when it has a higher score you’re gonna write something that gets a higher score. The three websites I listed before (and myriad others) all had that exact problem and they had it not because of user discipline, a person could argue slashdot held the line on this up to the end, but because the system encouraged it. Voting is part of the websites system that encourages groupthink.
Botting is always the specter people bring up when talking about manipulation but all the real famous examples from those three websites were actual people all clicking the same button. We are also afraid of the sort of top down manipulation you described as being psyops but that has gotten so subtle that something as ambiguous as a user vote count that requires all kinds of anonymity and obfuscation ought to be just taken out of the picture. They can’t psyop you with the metrics if you’re not looking at the metrics.
Duplicate posts and comments weren’t even what I was talking about when I said samey content, but you’re right: it’s a problem. To the question of “what can you do aside from just unsubbing?” I say “get rid of the incentive to make the same posts and comments over and over again”, get rid of the votes.
I do think you’re right about the last part though, the popularity of lemmy would suffer if it wasn’t a drop in replacement for Reddit. I had this discussion with another person in another thread and they finally threw up their hands and said “fine, here’s the activitypub git, make your commit and let’s see how it goes”. I didn’t make any suggested change of course because it’s a wildly unpopular idea and people would need to actually ask for it on a wide scale for developers to change things. Once enough people believe the website can be more than a slop trough there’ll be a chance to push something but for now it’s hearts and minds.
You present very fair points.
A good demonstration of how the voting system is counterproductive is the Steam reviews that are ruined to the point that they're barely usable as it's nearly impossible to find a coherent actual review of a game and not a poor attempt at humor, or worse, a copy-pasted award farming sob story.
But Steam reviews are functional and have a narrow task of helping you make a buying decision, so it doesn't compare directly to a general purpose social network like Lemmy.
I understand how upvotes may promote groupthink and how downvotes may encourage unhealthy self-censorship but I don't agree that the problem is on the scale of being existential. The general consensus is that voting helps promote quality content and my personal experience with Lemmy so far makes me agree with it.
One of the maintainers has a similar argument against removing voting, but maybe they're right about the benefits of hiding the counts.
Also I think it would be good if there were fine-grained control for casting and displaying votes.
An even better example of metrics turned bad that follows the same trajectory as Reddit is Newegg. That site used to be great not just because of the very fine grained search tools but because of the reviews. You could know that by drilling down for socket, ram slot, peripherals and expansions that the motherboard with top ratings would be great. Now it’s as much of a mess as amazons reviews. The only way these sites could save their business model was to fall back on customer service under the eBay model (we will act as a proxy for your pig in a poke purchases).
Why did Amazon, Newegg and steam go so bad so much faster than Reddit, digg and slashdot? The level of incentivization present! Every user on a shopping site engages directly with the metrics, while the majority of users on aggregators engage indirectly with them through passive reading.
With all that pressure to conform to the expectations of metrics, shopping sites became a race to the bottom (or top, since they all wanted to get to the majority 5-star rank).
If it hasn’t become clear, I’m arguing that in the past, metrics were an existential problem for aggregator sites and this is evidenced by the fact that among other things the metrics were to fractious and incentivized antisocial behavior to the point that those sites either closed up shop or lost the user base. Successive aggregators responded not by trying to fix the problem but by accepting their role as antisocial non-communities.
I’m arguing that all the experiences we’ve told each other about are examples of the metrics still being existential problems although certainly not acute. And of course that the consensus is wrong.
You brought up earlier the idea of educating users when to up/downvote and I’m interested in hearing more about that. Do you think it’s reasonable to expect people to apply whatever decision rubric the particular instance proscribes in choosing to press the green or red button?
Wasn’t there a British tv show like that?
I admit, it's probably idealistic of me to expect all people to follow the guideline of "downvote is not a disagree button". But I assume most users are already acting in good faith and those who disrupt the intended use (promote quality content, discourage uninteresting content) are a minority.
There is no data that the algorithm is not doing its job on Lemmy. My personal experience show that it does an okay job at least, so I inclined to believe that voting is still more of a good thing than a bad thing. If the problems you mention become significant, then they should be addressed, but only if and when. It's unlikely that voting on Lemmy is going anywhere, so arguing about it is not productive.
Dessalines puts it pretty well here.
Also, Boosts in Kbin are more effective than upvotes but it's not obvious to a person who isn't aware of that