Reddit Wave and the Threadiverse
As much as there is plenty of new people joining the threadiverse, the real wave starts today, with thousands of subreddits going dark.
Existing Lemmy/Kbin instances get hammered with new user registrations and deploy different coping strategies. Some plead, some close registrations. New instances spring up.
Soon, mainstream media will discover Lemmy exists. They will probably miss Kbin entirely, and most will also be very confused about the federated nature of Lemmy. Some might be able to remember Fediverse exists.
When Kbin finally shows up on their radar, they will find it difficult to explain how it fits into the narrative they already spun. My money is on someone calling it a "fork" of Lemmy. 🤣
Eventually, as more instances start turning off registrations, and as some buckle under the load temporarily, the narrative becomes "this is why Lemmy will fail." Threadiverse will get treated like a VC-funded walled garden. Media will be flabberghasted at how "poorly" Lemmy and Kbin were able to "capture" the people wanting to migrate off of Reddit. They will complain endlessly about how hard it is to choose an instance, "confusing interface", and ask "thoughtful" questions on "how will they monetize".
Eventually, the wave subsides. Maybe Reddit reverses their silly ideas, maybe people get tired. There is a drop in active user accounts on the Threadiverse, compared to the peak of the wave, which is then taken as "proof positive" that Lemmy and Kbin could never "succeed".
What they will ignore, of course, is that by then Threadiverse is several times bigger and more active than before all the Reddit insanity. Communities stay active, people stay active, and slowly Threadiverse grows, as (just like the broader Fediverse) it is not a VC-funded startup that needs a hokey-stick growth.
It's a long-term project of making community-run platforms work. And that takes time, and effort, and love.
I think lemmy as a reddit alternative has a massive advantage over mastodon as a Twitter replacement. The dynamics of these two services is completely different. Whereas Twitter is all about people you follow and if they're not there you don't want to switch, reddit is about the individual subreddits. For those ones does not need to have all the same traffic or the same people. "Good enough" might be enough to keep people interested in those communities without missing reddit. It doesn't matter if I read my programmer memes in reddit or lemmy at the end of the day
That is true on one hand, but on the other the good subreddits on reddit were the ones managed by good mods. They kept the discussions at a quality level, not letting the subreddit devolve to memes, circlejerks or overall low-effort content.
Like of course we can make an m/c/askhistorians here, but it wont be the same without mods from r/askhistorians, and that's even more of a case with smaller niche communities.
I read somewhere around here about topic-focused content (Lemmy/Reddit/et al) vs people-focused content (influencers) and this is why for us here platforms as Instagram Twitter and honestly maybe even Mastodon are not as interesting as Reddit was and Lemmy is.
Maybe, but Digg didn't back down and died.
Those who do not learn from history are doomed to repeat it.
Those who do not learn are simply doomed.
We can only hope they are that stupid🙂
We can only hope we learn from Digg and Reddit ourselves. As in: us, the people using social media platforms. And if we do learn, we hopefully will not repeat the error of putting all our eggs in a bunch of walled-off, centralized baskets.
It is, in fact, up to us.
I'm new to all of this, can you explain the difference between Lemmy and Kbin? And why would Kbin get missed over initially?
These are just two different software projects that a Threadiverse instance can use. They federate with one another, so it doesn't matter all that much if you have an account on a Kbin instance, or a Lemmy instance. The differences are in the interface, some functionality, and the tech stack used (Lemmy is written in Rust; Kbin in PHP).
There are 100+ instances of Lemmy, and ~10 instances of Kbin. Kbin is a much younger project (hence it might get missed), and it's main instance, kbin.social seems to be experiencing more issues with the wave of new registrations. If you want to try Kbin, https://fedia.io/ might be a good instance to check out.
Sorry if this is a dumb question, but is the fediverse and the threadiverse the same thing different names?
I feel like I’m finally wrapping my head around a lot of this stuff, but I’m still learning all the terms.
The Fediverse is everything that is connected via ActivityPub. You have Lemmy and Kbin, but you also have Mastodon serving as a Twitter analogue, PeerTube as a YouTube analogue, Pixelfed as an Instagram analogue, etcetera, all of which are part of the Fediverse umbrella.
The Threadiverse is just the "forum" side of the Fediverse, the Reddit-alikes. At this point that means just Lemmy and Kbin, but there's no reason there couldn't be more alternatives in the future.
@melmi @FallGuy217
"#Threadiverse" - nice term. :)
On the technical side: I'm doing this toot from the Mastodon side. I used
https://MYINSTANCE/authorize\_interaction?uri=LEMMYCOMMENTURL
where MYINSTANCE is the instance I'm on (https://framapiaf.org) and LEMMYCOMMENTURL is the comment I chose to reply to (https://lemmy.blahaj.zone/comment/90402).
If I understand federation correctly, my reply should/could turn up on the lemmy instances involved in the thread - even though I don't have a lemmy account.
Yup, it got added to the comment chain, and I'm replying directly from Lemmy!
They already are. Several Mastodon posts saying so just this morning.
Mainstream media will 100% catch up more by the reveal of Meta's Twitter alternative that implements the
ActivityPubprotocol.Yeah but you can be sure Mets/Zuck will either bastardize the protocol from the start, or embrace/extend/extinguish.
Why would the implement it in the first place then?
Why did Google Chat implement XMPP initially (with federation even), only to then destroy it later?
Google's internal structure rewards duplicate efforts and people switching projects.
Interesting, but don't you think they'll just wall it off like how truthsocial.com is walled off?
A lot of fedi instances will block any Meta-owned instances on sight. Some will not. How it plays out long-term depends a lot on how well Meta instances get moderated.
That's a really interesting point - they're not to be trusted and they've already shown their hand, so to speak.
I can't see many connections for them...
Yup. But I do see it as potentially enabling people to migrate towards fedi, off of Meta instances, more smoothly than now. Some fedi instances will probably federate with Meta's instances, so one could have an account on a non-Meta instance (thus having access also to fedi instances that block Meta), but stay in touch with contacts on Meta instances.
That just might be enough to pull people towards greener pastures over here. 🙂
I am pretty sure that people who already migrated to fedi will mostly not want to migrate back to Meta-owned instances. So it seems to me like it might be a one-way street. Which would be good!
What I really worry about is two things:
I don't think Reddit will lose enough users to seriously consider backing down. But I expect the quality to degrade further, and I think this might start the slow descend of Reddit. I'm not sure if Lemmy, Kbin or Tiles will be the successors. I like Lemmy so far, but it was a journey.
Case in point: digg still exists.
That's kind of a moot point, since as long as they can federate with each other it doesn't matter what software an individual instance runs.
Fair, but now what I meant. I didn't mean one of them will be the successor. I mean I don't know if any of them will be.
It's okay to not be a successor. In fact, I know one of those you mentioned actively rejects being treated as a Reddit alternative.
The important thing is they exist and have a sizeable footprint where people could choose to spend their online presence and contribute. This makes Reddit less of a monopoly and erodes its hold on users.
I do not want another Reddit. Seeing how bad it became. I want a community with its own flavor that is distinct from Reddit. That way, however, I might feel or whatever my mood is for that time of day. I could choose where and what culture to interact with. These instances and new forum give me the power of choice that Reddit has tried so hard to withhold from us.
Hear hear. As time went on Reddit started to lose the magic it had in 10 years ago. When I was younger I thought Reddit had some of the smartest conversation online and I learned a lot from it. But the corporatization, endless repost bots, brain dead comments. I truly hope something new succeeds.
I came today from Reddit. Think i'm here for good. This feels magical.
Right I mean if most power users, contributors and moderators jump ship then sure Reddit will continue to exist for years but what’s the point of it other than accessing threads from years ago.
Watching bots argue about bullshit and clueless people interacting with them?
Tiles or tildes? Did autocorrect bite you?
Autocorrect realized my butt is delicious.
i miss some reddit communities, but for a basic usage, lemmy/jerboa replaces reddit without problem.
Jeroba and I have some issues I haven't been able to understand. Currently the mobile page works better for me, even though I struggle with reloads pushing the content I'm about to read away.
Jerboa keeps logging me out of my account lol.
And poor Lemmur won't even recognize Beehaw.org at all at the login screen.
The problem is that there really doesn't seem to be a great way to scale Lemmy. And yes, it's federated, but if someone joins my instance and starts browsing and posting on lemmy.ml communities, they still get slammed by my users. And so any popular community is going to struggle because of the lack of ability to scale.
Not quite the case.
When a user on instance B subscribes to a community on instance A, instance A begins to send in real-time the posts and comments of that community to B, which keeps a local copy of that community.
If instance B has 10 active users subscribed to that community on A, they’re all loading it from instance B. The end result is instance A only had to share each piece of content once with instance B, and instance B further shares it with the ten local subscribers, reducing the load on instance A.
The only exception is when instance B only has a single subscriber to instance A’s community, in which case replicating the entirely of the community is more work then that user just browsing it directly on instance A.
Tl;dr it’s most efficient for a large Lenny instance if most of its active users are on other instances.
I don’t think Reddit will see a huge drop in users in the short term. But hopefully this whole kerfuffle will give a big enough boost to Lemmy to kickstart its network effect.
Engagement is the most important thing to be striving for right now!
I was watching the counter yesterday as various subreddits went dark, and I started watching when it hit 1200, and woke up this morning with it being over 6000.
There was an initial hurdle to understanding how instances work together / how to search between them, but now that I have that figured out, it's a lot easier. Most of the communities that I actively interacted with already have similar communities here on Lemmy. r/FountainPens was a big one for me.
I watched the massive spike from 600 something subs to I think it was 3500? There was like 4 minutes of just mass closure. It was impressive.
I saw your comment and went "ooh, does that mean that there's a fountain pen community over here", and I clicked on your profile excitedly, but I can only see posts/comments that you've made within the communities I've already joined.
How did you (re)discover the communities that you frequented? Did you just search for them one by one? I enjoyed how organic finding new communities on Reddit often felt and I'm hoping I'm just missing that now because I don't understand Lemmy yet.
I can see comments and posts on their profile from communities I'm not in. Not quite sure why that isn't the case for you. Maybe a weird quirk of how the different instances are federated. Looks like they're talking about !fountainpens@sopuli.xyz. As for finding communities, I don't know what the UI is like outside of Beehaw, but when I go to the community list I can chose to search all instances to find communities all over.
I've noticed that some communities will just not show up when I search hereon fedia.io. !fountainpens@sopuli.xyz is one of them. No matter how I search for it, I can't seem to find it here. Other communities from Lemmy seem to be no problem, so it's odd.
I've reached out to one of the mods there to see if they have it set to not federate.
Yeah, I searched for fountain pens, selected to search all instances, and found it. The community should be /c/fountainpens@sopuli.xyz
I disagree. Going public hasn't served any tech company, except the founders, well. The changes announced thus far, are only the icing on the cake for what's to come. They pretty clearly don't have good management, or good decision making capabilities either. I think Reddit's on a rather fast descent to it's nadir.
"fast" is relative. Twitter is dying a slow death, but due to its size there are still millions/tens of millions of users.
Facebook is effectively dead for anyone under 35, and yet it marches on.