It's been a long journey, but here we arrive. Welcome home.
I skipped Fark, but my progression is largely the same. Once in a blue moon, I still visit Slashdot. It's like checking up on an ex to see how they're doing.
It'll be great to see more people showing up on Lemmy.
People are so confused and overwhelmed about the fediverse mechanics though.
Maybe there is room for a product that is an aggregator for aggregators. Like, a centralised service that scrapes and collects all Lemmy instances into one super instance.
Its actually simple. Tell them, its like Email. You have an email account at gmail, but can perfectly fine have email conversation with someone on outllook. Lemmy instance = the same as a web email interface of any email provider. Most people will get their head around that.
As soon as you have to explain the fediverse to someone using analogies my experience is that most people have already given up. They just can’t be bothered to learn something new.
Ohhhh I kept hearing the email analogy but never WHY it was like email. Thanks for the ELI5!
Pardon my confusion since I'm new to the fediverse as well, but isn't every Lemmy instance like the super instance you are describing? You can access any community on any instance from any other; there are commentors in this thread from beehaw.org, lemmy.world, lemmy.sdf.org, programming.dev, and many others.
From what I know, the instances share the posts between each other, but they need to have had contact with another instance somehow before they can get posts from there. Something like a user searching for an instance that isn't yet known to their "home" instance yet or following a link to it.
As I understood it, this lets the instances know of each other. Posts of unknown instances won't show up on your instance until the connection has been made.
So maybe a super instance could somehow include a newly created instance as soon as it has connected with any other instance already in the super instance.
(might not be too coherent since I know little about this all as of now ^^)
Wouldn't the home instance already have to know about the remote instance in some way for it to show up in that initial user's search?
Nah those are like sibling instances. I'm talking about a parent instance that combines all the children instances with a new community that aggregates multiple remote communities.
Just thinking out loud, haven't really fleshed out the idea yet.
That already exists.
ATM, the thing you're confusing it with is that there are 4-5 "gaming" subs, but eventually if one gets big enough or the others get taken in by one this will happen, and it'll look like this instance "Technology@Beehaw.org" (p.s. I'm accessing this from Sopuli, so not on Beehaw).
Yeah, I think I get it - there's a bunch of smaller gaming@<lemmy-instance> kind of things, you're talking about a master c/gaming that combines all of the smaller lemmy instances of gaming channels, right?
Yeah, like multireddits!
I don't think such an aggregator is required. Interoperability is smooth enough that you don't have to think about different instances most of the time. I've only really noticed two points that would be confusing:
the sign up process
the "local"/"all" distinction
So I think what we really need to do to make this platform intuitive to people that aren't already familiar with it is:
Somehow streamline signing up. The process from googling Lemmy to having an account on an instance should not be confusing or intimidating.
Filter by "all" by default. The default should cater to the users which are less likely to figure it out themselves. If you don't understand what instances are and what "local" vs "all" means, then you are probably here for the "all" experience. If you understand and really want "local" you are probably fine having to set it yourself.
The all for default is actually an admin setting (for users not signed up)
OMG the "All" on that thing is about as useless as Mastodon"s "All". Crap flying by so fast you can't read it.
Don't look by new?
It's funny to read this article about the death of Digg again:
In reality, Digg changed their business model and pretended that they didn’t. That is something that is unacceptable with communities and won’t be forgotten. Reddit co-founder Alexis Ohanian hit the nail on the head in an open letter to (now former) Digg CEO – Kevin Rose:
“You chose to grow with venture capital and you’ve no doubt (I hope) taken some money off the table in your Series C round. I say this because this new version of digg reeks of VC meddling. It’s cobbling together features from more popular sites and departing from the core of digg, which was to “give the power back to the people.”
At least Ohanian is married to Serena, and left reddit 10 years ago. Spez (aka Steve Huffman) is a fucking piece of shit that betrayed both of his co-founders
Tbh, I totally forgot that Ohanian left Reddit like 10 years ago 🤦
Sadly, this is the only logical conclusion of things that are run for profit. Here's hoping the federated model proves more resistant in the long run.
Doctorow has it right. Enshittification.
In the medium run federated instances will have to be financed somehow as well. We'll see how that goes.
volunteer donations are more than enough to pay for a fedi instance
Depends on how many volunteers you have who are actually willing to donate
Funding, even in a not-for-profit sense, will always be an issue. Wikipedia struggles, but kinda makes it work. We're going to need something creative for the fediverse...
I donate to them fairly regularly, Wikipedia is fucking great!
So many long forgotten relics and old friends lost to time.
Trillian! I paid for the multi-messenger functionality too!
IRC is not dead. Since rexxit began I have started really searching for programming/data science/tech communities. I have found more than I know what to do with and many have an IRC. I just installed Pidgin on one of my Linix machines. Ha! What a time to be alive.
Rexxit, lol thats brilliant
by the way, anyone remember Trillian?
I never used it, but I did use similar things like Kopete and Pidgin. Both of those still exist and are still maintained, by the way, albeit far less useful now that the big four instant messaging systems are gone. Of those four, only ICQ still exists, and I doubt it still uses the same protocol, seeing as the old one wasn't encrypted.
Yeah some of those I had forgotten! For me it was usenet, IRC, ICQ, Yahoo Chat Rooms (I was one of the kids that dropped booters and other pesky little bots and hacks into them all the time 😂 - I’m still friends to this day with someone I met via Yahoo Chatrooms though!)
Definitely used Trillian, and the old phpBB forums before I found Reddit over 10 years ago…and now Lemmy
Oekaki drawing boards ಥ╭╮ಥ Oh how I miss thee...
I made an irc client in MIRC using MIRC script before it had multi-server capability and thought I was so smart and then a few months later they released the update with it in it. Oh well, it was fun at the time!
Still remember my icq number lol.
Same. I logged in to their icq web client recently for shits. Was a trip to see all the old usernames.
You mean to tell me ICQ is still online after all these years?!
I realise that this is unpopular. But personally while I disagree with the decision to charge (exorbitantly) for the api and appalled at the slander hurled at the dev, I think that is an business choice and one more item that I have to disagree and live with.
But I am very excited about the rise of the fediverse. I know that a company will eventually make a decision that I feel very passionately about, but I will be stuck making a difficult choice. With the fediverse, it provides the users with the opportunity to have control. This power of course often comes with various other costs (lack of a dedicated sre or moderation teams, etc). But I expect that over time this will evolve into options where paid offerings will come up that allows for higher QoS where required.
Honestly, if spez hadn't already sold the site to white supremacists, I'd be a lot quicker to defend this.
Who are the white supremacists he sold to?
It was the Chinese that he sold out to. Not the white supremacists.
The api changes really were about protecting their gold mine of data from ai data models scraping for data. Reddit wants to use that data to create its own models and then replace moderators with those models. The ultimate goal here is to turn the existing dataset into an automoderator on steroids that they could sell anywhere. Trouble is someone else is going to beat them to it.
There was a reason these changes lined up so nicely with Google doing the same thing. Everyone's realizing they've been spouting their gold from firehoses for any machine to pick up, and they're being reactionary and turning them off asap instead of just like, accepting it as a facet of having a public social network.
The Fediverse seems like an interesting idea, but I hope it actually holds together.
Let people on other platforms know that we exist! Lol
I imagine as Mastodon and Lemmy pick up more users, we'll see a lot of activity and improvements in the underlying tech of the fediverse. Should be a fun ride, especially since it's in the hands of the community.
Let's see if the technology can improve fast enough to retain users.
idk, I think it's there already. I'm already having enough content to engage with and post comments.
Sure, I can't scroll through new content endlessly, but there's enough to replace Reddit.
I might actually make posts here, too, since it's likely to gain traction. On Reddit, there were only a select few smaller subs I'd generally post to, and even then, only rarely.
I mean even Reddit wasn't really "endless" for me. On particularly boring days I could definitely reach the end of content that interests me.
The bar for being Reddit circa 2010 isn’t that high to be fair, I know expectations have changed but Reddit was down intermittently for years to the point I’m amazed it got the traction it did in hindsight. People talk about Lemmy having tankies on it as though early Reddit didn’t have some even worse unsavoury subs and users too.
A lot of instances block the tankie instance anyways.
Which instances are tankie-related?
I figured lemmygrad is a tankie instance, but is lemmy.ml another tankie instance?
lemmy.ml isn't explicitly "tankie" but the main devs are and the moderation will include not allowing posts/comments critical of China/Russia/communism/etc.
No kidding, wasn’t r/jailbait the biggest sub for a while there?
There were and are to this day a ton of subs with similar content.
Where does somethingawful fit in
Tried the official Reddit app today and boy people weren't joking when they say it sucks. I thought it'd just be the usual experience plus some ads but I was totally wrong.
The official app doesn't respect your subreddit subscriptions at all, instead force feeding you feeds of whatever their algorithm thinks will drive maximum engagement just like a shit version of Facebook. The "hot" etc functionality is completely stipped from it entirely.
Guess I'm here to stay on the fediverse now.
What absolutely sucks about this is that I had carefully curated my subscriptions on RIF in order not to exacerbate my dumb mental health issues.
Hell, I've read angry posts about people in recovery from addiction and alcohol saying how they keep seeing ads for beer or gambling and things like that.
It's horrifying!!
The algorithm really doesn't work when you are critical or sceptical over a subject. For instance crypto sceptics from r/buttcoin being shown binance ads. Yes, they do show an interest in crypto, but may be the least suceptible persons to that ad.
It's different with subs focused on addiction & recovery though.
Maybe it's a very bad idea to targeted knife ads in a suicide watch sub, you know? Susceptible people and all.
people in recovery from addiction and alcohol saying how they keep seeing ads for beer or gambling
Not that this is how it works, but I imagine a diligent algorithm looking at those individuals and that content, and then thinking "mhhmm this will generate maximum revenue!!".
From an advertiser perspective it makes sense to sell to addicted people. Mission accomplished?
Renegade BBSes -> IRC -> slashdot -> digg -> reddit -> imgur -> discord -> mastadon -> lemmy
with plenty of side quests along the way
Pre search engine time on Geocities trading mutual linking on each other websites, reams and reams of messages and emails
So we're a side quest then?
It's hard to tell.. it doesn't feel like one, but it remains to be seen.
But I feel like the other alternatives to Reddit and the fediverse are more of a sidequest at this point.
Gonna be honest it's kinda weird to me as someone who did just move over that there's a bunch of posts from people who just found the Fediverse claiming it as home while there's people who have been here since it's creation. It's got the implication that this was created as some sort of next jump from Reddit which doesn't really seem to be the case from my perspective.
That feeling makes sense, but I think everyone knows that the Fediverse wasn't created specifically to give them a landing in this event, just like Reddit wasn't created to catch the Digg refugees, etc. More of a "next phase in the evolution of this concept", and while it took a catastrophe, they're ready to consider that it's time to move on now.
The trick is going to be walking that line between preserving what made the Fediverse great and not alienating the newcomers. I think there's room for everyone, though, and really the big advantage of the Fediverse - we don't have to agree to co-exist, and can even co-existing completely separately if needed.
I think you bring up a pretty important point about federation in that it allows for and even encourages expansion in some ways, so that's a good way to keep optimistic about it. I guess I just feel a little embarrassed. Especially when you look at posts like the recent one asking Lemmy users how they feel about the reddit refugees, and it's flooded with responses from Reddit refugees instead offering unsolicited feedback about design choices. Then you have threads like this with people laying claim to the fediverse more or less. It just feels like some kind of a Christopher Columbus situation. While I realize that might be a little tone-deaf it's the best analogy I have for it.
Any community is a sum of it's members, good bad, or otherwise. I think there will be a wave of us Reddit refugees, but also word is going to spread to other places like Meta and hopefully bring in even more people. Getting people sorted into servers that are going to be able to handle the load, or even better getting them to host their own servers is going to be the way to go. Sorry if we're stumbling all over your garden in the meantime.
Getting people sorted into servers that are going to be able to handle the load, or even better getting them to host their own servers is going to be the way to go.
That part still worries me a smidge, and it's somewhat related to my other concern about funding/scaling. As more of the general public discover and move over, the % of the general population willing and able to host their own instance is going to steadily decrease. Not saying that we're all gonna die or anything, but it's going to be a shift and we'll have to continue to adapt.
Hmm. Theoretically you could commercialise an instance, I guess.
I expect that in time, that's exactly what will happen. Some instance somewhere will offer guaranteed availability and performance for a monthly fee to it's members. That feels icky at first blush, but why should it? It's not everyone's cup of tea, but no one is forced to use that instance to be part of the larger community, and one instance can't hold the community hostage like a single company social media company could. They'll have success right up until they don't and the Fediverse will sort it out through migrations of users and communities.
or make a non-profit. archiveofourown have ~20% of reddit's traffic and run purely on donation.
That might work too, but I feel like it could be tricky to fundraise if there's 1000 equivalent large-ish instances.
You'd have to have a hook - guaranteed performance or uptime. Maybe some niche feature set or enhancement.
I think it's similar to some of the other open source vendors out there that sell a service that they host, but do not actually own (even if they are one of the open source project contributors). You can't get too greedy because the thing you sell can be sold by anyone, so you have to compete on price and "extras". Not the easiest way to make money, but it's not unheard of.
I see what you mean to an extent, and I also just moved over, but it's worth remembering that Digg -> Reddit was the same afaik. Like Reddit had been around and established for a decent amount of time before the fall of Digg. (This is second-hand info because I wasn't around at the time)
I've been on reddit for a couple years before the flood from Digg. The quality of content and especially comments went down right then, and never recovered.
Personally I skipped Digg entirely.
Depends entirely on the subreddit, in my experience. Places like AskHistorians didn't even exist when the great Digg exodus occurred. My favorite sub was /r/cfb which also benefited greatly from the mainstream popularity.
Not coincidental that both of these are relatively strongly moderated compared to many of the biggest/default subs.
I bet some early Redditors felt the same way about the Digg refugees.
I had the same journey but I'm pretty sure I found Slashdot by way of boingboing which I found by way of Diesel Sweeties blog posts when I first got a DSL connection in 2002 and was looking for comics and blogs to fill up my trendy new RSS reader lol
Lame. You weren't even on Usenet in the 90's.
Signed, Zoomer.
We you even on FidoNet?
I am old enough to not care what people on the internet think which is why I posted this, I am battle hardened
I think even calling it Lemmy is not the right move. Yeah, Lemmy is the server software running on a bunch of instances. But we also have kbin, and new softwares will pop up and fork and come and go over time. Once we can do some kind of account or community level migration, it won't matter whether you are on Lemmy or kbin or the next great thing. Everything will be federated so it will inter-op beautifully. If an unfriendly instance admin comes along, we can collectively cut and run with minimal interruption.
Thats still a way off from where we are now but the hard step was getting to the Fediverse in the first place. So, welcome to the newcomers among us.
this is the future nerds like me have been imagining since the early 2000's
Neocities has been around for years now.. I have a website there.. I do wonder if it's getting bigger though.
Seems like every old school platform is getting some sort of resurgence these days, and honestly it's understandable - the collapse of modern social media has created a wave of nostalgia for the good old days of the dot com era.
I still use both. 99% of Usenet is spam, but there still a few active groups (especially under comp.*). The BBS scene on the other hand, is booming. I see new users every week on my favourite board.
Are they doing BBS-over-SSH these days, or do you need a dial-up modem to participate?
Sadly most people CAN'T connect through dial-up, even if both parties have all the equipment.
A lot of telcos have redone their entire network in VoIP stuff (with heavy compression) which makes it hard to keep a connection even at 300.
How does a current day BBS work? Landline phone connections are a thing of the past here.
telnet or ssh (usually telnet)
If you're connecting from a modern computer, you just get a telnet client that does the appropriate code pages/ANSI/zmodem/etc.
If you're connecting from a real vintage computer, you get a little dongle that pretends to be a modem (and often accepts AT commands, including fake phone numbers), but secretly connects to WiFi and relays through a telnet connection.
Some BBSes do still have landlines, and there's the occasional ham radio BBS, but 99.999% of it is through IP-based telnet or ssh these days.
damn baud rate
FidoNet :D
Yeah, lemmy does have a certain BBS/FidoNet vibe. Makes me nostalgic…
I think the concept of the Fediverse is still really alien to people, even the people who are using it. Everyone is still so used to their centralized platforms, so they still think of the Fediverse in terms of platforms rather than as a whole.
You still hear people say "Mastodon" to mean the microblogging corner of the Fediverse even if they're not actually on Mastodon, and now people say "Lemmy" to mean the link aggregation corner of the Fediverse even if not everyone is actually on Lemmy.
I recently found and like the term "threadiverse" for reddit-like federated software
I really like that, I'm gonna do my part to spread it!
Are you saying there's other reddit-like/inspired webservices that are part of the fediverse that aren't Lemmy? What are those?
Kbin already exists, and a decent portion of people are switching over. It's still early days though, so it remains to be seen how it all plays out.
Currently kbin is the only one I am aware of.
Maybe this is an unpopular opinion but the word "Fediverse" leaves a sour taste in my mount just because it sounds so much like the stupidity that was "Metaverse" (yes I know they are completely unrelated)
undefined> calling it Lemmy is not the right move.
Spankin' new here, so what do I know, but while the semantics might not be completely accurate, that is not an uncommon occurrence. And Lemmy sounds personal, with a bit of a Motorhead edge to it.
Maybe we'll all be called Lemmies web slinging in the Fediverse one day.
The new Fediverse really is kicking up IRC and newsgroup vibes for this old timer. Its very exciting.
If we're including those then I think we have gone full circle and are back in the safe waters of protocols
IRC is STILL running to this day
+1 you're right. Especially IRC...oh how I miss those days.
I miss that moment when I became the cool kid in the channel because I had an IRC bouncer
I never really used email socially, was always a chat or some bulltin system
As a really old person, I was thinking today the vibe was unlike anything I've felt since Fidonet ;)
Do you think this is the end of your "journey"?
Same fucking journey as you. Reddit was a good run for 10 years, let's see if Lemmy can work.
What do we do if it doesn't? Just crawl back and apologize?
I mean, since there's no central site to shut down, Lemmy failing would pretty much just mean that it stagnates and some of the bigger instances shut down, at which point there still would be some remnant of it left to stay on, if a smaller one. Failing that, it isn't the only reddit alternative that people have been working on, so maybe one of the others will be more successful.
Exactly; if an instance goes down, then users can migrate to a new instance.
I don't think so. Although many will remain with Reddit, there is no incentive or loyalty for a significant % to do so. If reddit is shit, why not just use FB, Twitter or regular message boards? Already I saw many subreddits have discords already.
The question for most of those users is there a lesser evil in choosing one bad company over another? Unfortunately I just see this community content becoming fragmented as a result and no winners emerging.
I like Lemmy / kbin but I am concerned that a dev could just shutdown their server and a community, accounts are gone. Who pays the server bills, and maintenance backups etc? This seems incredibly problematic.
Beyond that they need a strong mobile app and 3P devs, a tool to read a users reddit profile and subscribe to similar channels, one click registration without selecting a server. It would be good to also have a mechanism for showing cross-platform posted content in a single view.
If honestly feels like the 90s wild west Internet days again. No alternative I have seen so far can address these concerns.
Really depends on the size of the active user base, the quality of moderation and layout of the discord server.
I find while I have a bunch of larger discords that I'm not very active in them. The smaller discords are often where it's at.
Nah. If Lemmy/Fediverse doesn't work out, there will be others. This has all happened before..
If the fediverse idea doesn't work out and it's yet another company the cycle is bound to continue.
A big chance is in front of us to break the cycle!
Oh, I agree wholeheartedly. Decentralization is the way to go and I hope Lemmy succeeds. This particular implementation may or may not work out long term, but the underlying idea is sound.
We'll get it. Might take a couple tries, but we'll get it.
Consider exploring other Fediverse platforms before heading back to Reddit.
I've been using Mastodon for some time now so the Fediverse won't lose me, the question is if my redditing can be migrated.
I'd need to shoehorn the Something Awful forums in there somewhere between Fark and Digg.
x2
Although, TBH, I was farking and SA-ing at the same time. Something Awful in its prime was incredible.
Digg -> Reddit -> Lemmy
After experiencing the death of two "power to the people" platforms due to profit-driven VC-backed corporate meddling, here's hoping the third platform is the charm Lemmy & the fediverse.
I don't think the Fediverse will suffer the same demise as Digg and Reddit, precisely because it's not owned by a profit-driven VC-backed corporation, but there are a couple of other serious threats to its longevity:
Moderation. If the Fediverse isn't adequately moderated, it will quickly be overrun by Nazis, pedos, and spam. That's what killed Voat and Usenet.
Funding. This isn't like IRC, where a modern server can support tens of thousands of users in its sleep. Running a system along the lines of Reddit or Twitter requires a lot of computing power, and that's expensive. Where's the money going to come from?
I think smaller instances of a maximum of 1-2000 people are the way to go for the future. Most instance owners are hosting it because they want to and they have a lil extra cash to throw at it, the 500-2000 people instances are usually funded by the likes of a patreon ko.fi or other donation setup.
These instances aren't big enough that the cost is of an instance isn't massive and can therefore avoid the likes of Venture capital and Angel investors, and if they start to reach the level where funding is getting a bit short even with donations, they can close new account creation untill the number of donators increases beyond a point
TL;DR: Essentially instances should be welcoming new accounts in waves. So that their growth doesn't outpace donation income.
I was on reddit before digg, but left reddit for digg until diggv4, then I went back to reddit lol. The decentralized nature of Lemmy and the fediverse seems like it will be more resistant to that sort of bullshit though.
Unless you count a few random forums when I was a kid, same. You think we'll age out before whatever war starts?
The one true constant for me is 4chan 😅
I kinda grew out of it. It was funny when I was an edgy teenager but it got progressively more cringeworthy as time progressed for me, even though the content may not have changed much.
I stopped engaging with Reddit when meme-ification happened.Wheb it became all about the lolz abd short pithy responses, I started using it to find more interesting articles. Gone are the days wheb the average Redditor would read and make thoughtful contributions.
That is in part because the reddit algorithm doesn't like thoughtful contributions. These take time and understanding of the discussed matter. When your metric is positive (upvote) interaction per timeframe you need easily digestable content that people immediately react to. If I have to carefully read and think about the content my vote/comment is far too late to be "hot" on reddit.
Yeah that's basically it. Bots had overtaken Reddit too and just propagated that problem by re-posting posts/top comments.
I used 4chan when I was younger but trying to go back after reddit was super depressing, I lasted about 5 minutes.
I stopped using 4chan when the probability of getting goddamn CP snuff videos in the browser cache because of a /b/ raid got beyond trivial, so like pretty fucking early on.
4chan definitely got worse. like it was always edgy and stupid, but after 2015 every board just kind of became /pol/
Yeah, nazis kinda ruined it. pre-2010 it was more whimsical and ridiculous as opposed to cringey and unironically bigoted.
You missed metafilter.
Can’t leave out irc.
Anyone remember a small post-fark forum called bannination?
Just add usenet on the front end there.
And niche dialup bbs before that
Not going back too far, mine was IRC > Slashdot > StumbleUpon > FuckedCompany > Fark > 4chan > Reddit > Digg > back to Reddit lol > Lemmy
Are you following me?
I went back to Fark for a bit, it's surprisingly unchanged. That's good and bad, it's so linear and most of the comments are snarky/clever but maybe not particularly insightful. Reddit had a nice mix, a lot of funny predictable answers "And my axe!" but then also expert posters that would write 2 intelligent pages on a subject.
expert posters that would write 2 intelligent pages on a subject.
Basically the main thing I'm looking for in my replacement tbh.
Put BBS discussion boards, FidoNet groups, and Usenet out front and drop Fark for my path. Along with a variety of standalone forums and random stuff that never went anywhere, of course :) (yes, I'm old!)
Usenet was one of my startng point too... Funny to think it was (in a way) decentralized.
Edit: still is of course. Usenet is still around.
If you still have a Reddit account, unsub all the subreddits that are refusing to participate in a strike.
Good idea! Apparently most of my subs participated, so I only had to unsub a few times. Eerie view to see an empty front page after I was done, never had that.
Apart from this short visit, I stay away from reddit.
What would that do? Not like they can pay the mods any less lol
Decrease soft power those subreddits have due to popularity/subscriber count.
For me it was Slashdot->Hacker News,
And then in parallel Reddit->Lemmy
yeah HN feels kind of like old slashdot to me
slashdot has really stagnated over the years
BBS > various forums > /. & Metafilter & fark (no digg), > Reddit & twitter > the fediverse!
As someone who grew up speaking German:
GiMiX => XiMiG => Heise forums and ALL of the IRC => Reddit => Lemmy
My only problem is that we are in 2023 and we still need to read a bunch of text. Why can't we have holograms and a sexy AI whispering us the comments?
"As an AI language model, I can't use a hologram to whisper comments, but..."
Slashdot in its heyday was great. Then that sale happened. Somehow I ended up skipping Fark and Digg.
Slashdot started in 1997 and was sold to Andover.net in 1999, in the midst of a lot of early Linux people making a butt-ton of money (on paper, anyway) via the VALinux IPO.
VALinux, amusingly enough, eventually morphed into ThinkGeek and was later bought by Gamestop, an entity about which much has been written ...
There was another change in control of it in the early oughts I thought. Maybe not ownership but whomever was running the site changed.
For me, it jumped the shark around the time of the 2004 "OMG Ponies!" April Fools prank, which came across as nerd boys making fun of women in tech.
I seem to remember how short sighted that was.
Which part?
The bashing-women-in-tech part. Sure, they intended it as parody; but, considering the condescension towards women that was already running rampant on Slashdot, it was in poor taste.
There was del.icio.us as well!
I forgot about that site, what did it even do?
It was kind of a social bookmark sharing site, used it a lot back in the day! I saw word of a revival a while back, but like most things the revivals don't seem to work out. See Digg, Bebo etc. :/
I skipped Fark, but my progression is largely the same. Once in a blue moon, I still visit Slashdot. It's like checking up on an ex to see how they're doing.
It'll be great to see more people showing up on Lemmy.
People are so confused and overwhelmed about the fediverse mechanics though.
Maybe there is room for a product that is an aggregator for aggregators. Like, a centralised service that scrapes and collects all Lemmy instances into one super instance.
Its actually simple. Tell them, its like Email. You have an email account at gmail, but can perfectly fine have email conversation with someone on outllook. Lemmy instance = the same as a web email interface of any email provider. Most people will get their head around that.
As soon as you have to explain the fediverse to someone using analogies my experience is that most people have already given up. They just can’t be bothered to learn something new.
do birds fly? do ducks duck?
For what it’s worth, there is an issue on staying on the same instance when clicking on a different instance’s community and dessalines agreed with the concept, so we might be seeing a change there soon.
Great description. Im stealing that one
Ohhhh I kept hearing the email analogy but never WHY it was like email. Thanks for the ELI5!
Pardon my confusion since I'm new to the fediverse as well, but isn't every Lemmy instance like the super instance you are describing? You can access any community on any instance from any other; there are commentors in this thread from beehaw.org, lemmy.world, lemmy.sdf.org, programming.dev, and many others.
From what I know, the instances share the posts between each other, but they need to have had contact with another instance somehow before they can get posts from there. Something like a user searching for an instance that isn't yet known to their "home" instance yet or following a link to it.
As I understood it, this lets the instances know of each other. Posts of unknown instances won't show up on your instance until the connection has been made.
So maybe a super instance could somehow include a newly created instance as soon as it has connected with any other instance already in the super instance.
(might not be too coherent since I know little about this all as of now ^^)
Wouldn't the home instance already have to know about the remote instance in some way for it to show up in that initial user's search?
Nah those are like sibling instances. I'm talking about a parent instance that combines all the children instances with a new community that aggregates multiple remote communities.
Just thinking out loud, haven't really fleshed out the idea yet.
That already exists. ATM, the thing you're confusing it with is that there are 4-5 "gaming" subs, but eventually if one gets big enough or the others get taken in by one this will happen, and it'll look like this instance "Technology@Beehaw.org" (p.s. I'm accessing this from Sopuli, so not on Beehaw).
Yeah, I think I get it - there's a bunch of smaller gaming@<lemmy-instance> kind of things, you're talking about a master c/gaming that combines all of the smaller lemmy instances of gaming channels, right?
Yeah, like multireddits!
I don't think such an aggregator is required. Interoperability is smooth enough that you don't have to think about different instances most of the time. I've only really noticed two points that would be confusing:
So I think what we really need to do to make this platform intuitive to people that aren't already familiar with it is:
The all for default is actually an admin setting (for users not signed up)
That would be https://lemmy.directory
OMG the "All" on that thing is about as useless as Mastodon"s "All". Crap flying by so fast you can't read it.
Don't look by new?
It's funny to read this article about the death of Digg again:
In reality, Digg changed their business model and pretended that they didn’t. That is something that is unacceptable with communities and won’t be forgotten. Reddit co-founder Alexis Ohanian hit the nail on the head in an open letter to (now former) Digg CEO – Kevin Rose:
https://searchengineland.com/digg-v4-how-to-successfully-kill-a-community-50450>
Oh sweet, sweet irony.
At least Ohanian is married to Serena, and left reddit 10 years ago. Spez (aka Steve Huffman) is a fucking piece of shit that betrayed both of his co-founders
Tbh, I totally forgot that Ohanian left Reddit like 10 years ago 🤦
Sadly, this is the only logical conclusion of things that are run for profit. Here's hoping the federated model proves more resistant in the long run.
Doctorow has it right. Enshittification.
In the medium run federated instances will have to be financed somehow as well. We'll see how that goes.
@amki @Luxsidus
volunteer donations are more than enough to pay for a fedi instance
Depends on how many volunteers you have who are actually willing to donate
Funding, even in a not-for-profit sense, will always be an issue. Wikipedia struggles, but kinda makes it work. We're going to need something creative for the fediverse...
I donate to them fairly regularly, Wikipedia is fucking great!
So many long forgotten relics and old friends lost to time.
bbs, usenet, irc, aol chat rooms, aim/icq/msn messenger (by the way, anyone remember Trillian?), geocities web-rings, various phpBB forums (shoutout neopages), oekaki drawing boards, livejournal, stumbleupon,
Trillian! I paid for the multi-messenger functionality too!
IRC is not dead. Since rexxit began I have started really searching for programming/data science/tech communities. I have found more than I know what to do with and many have an IRC. I just installed Pidgin on one of my Linix machines. Ha! What a time to be alive.
Rexxit, lol thats brilliant
I never used it, but I did use similar things like Kopete and Pidgin. Both of those still exist and are still maintained, by the way, albeit far less useful now that the big four instant messaging systems are gone. Of those four, only ICQ still exists, and I doubt it still uses the same protocol, seeing as the old one wasn't encrypted.
Yeah some of those I had forgotten! For me it was usenet, IRC, ICQ, Yahoo Chat Rooms (I was one of the kids that dropped booters and other pesky little bots and hacks into them all the time 😂 - I’m still friends to this day with someone I met via Yahoo Chatrooms though!) Definitely used Trillian, and the old phpBB forums before I found Reddit over 10 years ago…and now Lemmy
Oekaki drawing boards ಥ╭╮ಥ Oh how I miss thee...
I made an irc client in MIRC using MIRC script before it had multi-server capability and thought I was so smart and then a few months later they released the update with it in it. Oh well, it was fun at the time!
Still remember my icq number lol.
Same. I logged in to their icq web client recently for shits. Was a trip to see all the old usernames.
You mean to tell me ICQ is still online after all these years?!
I realise that this is unpopular. But personally while I disagree with the decision to charge (exorbitantly) for the api and appalled at the slander hurled at the dev, I think that is an business choice and one more item that I have to disagree and live with.
But I am very excited about the rise of the fediverse. I know that a company will eventually make a decision that I feel very passionately about, but I will be stuck making a difficult choice. With the fediverse, it provides the users with the opportunity to have control. This power of course often comes with various other costs (lack of a dedicated sre or moderation teams, etc). But I expect that over time this will evolve into options where paid offerings will come up that allows for higher QoS where required.
Honestly, if spez hadn't already sold the site to white supremacists, I'd be a lot quicker to defend this.
Who are the white supremacists he sold to?
It was the Chinese that he sold out to. Not the white supremacists.
The api changes really were about protecting their gold mine of data from ai data models scraping for data. Reddit wants to use that data to create its own models and then replace moderators with those models. The ultimate goal here is to turn the existing dataset into an automoderator on steroids that they could sell anywhere. Trouble is someone else is going to beat them to it.
There was a reason these changes lined up so nicely with Google doing the same thing. Everyone's realizing they've been spouting their gold from firehoses for any machine to pick up, and they're being reactionary and turning them off asap instead of just like, accepting it as a facet of having a public social network.
The Fediverse seems like an interesting idea, but I hope it actually holds together.
Let people on other platforms know that we exist! Lol
I imagine as Mastodon and Lemmy pick up more users, we'll see a lot of activity and improvements in the underlying tech of the fediverse. Should be a fun ride, especially since it's in the hands of the community.
Let's see if the technology can improve fast enough to retain users.
idk, I think it's there already. I'm already having enough content to engage with and post comments.
Sure, I can't scroll through new content endlessly, but there's enough to replace Reddit.
I might actually make posts here, too, since it's likely to gain traction. On Reddit, there were only a select few smaller subs I'd generally post to, and even then, only rarely.
I mean even Reddit wasn't really "endless" for me. On particularly boring days I could definitely reach the end of content that interests me.
The bar for being Reddit circa 2010 isn’t that high to be fair, I know expectations have changed but Reddit was down intermittently for years to the point I’m amazed it got the traction it did in hindsight. People talk about Lemmy having tankies on it as though early Reddit didn’t have some even worse unsavoury subs and users too.
A lot of instances block the tankie instance anyways.
Which instances are tankie-related?
I figured lemmygrad is a tankie instance, but is lemmy.ml another tankie instance?
lemmy.ml isn't explicitly "tankie" but the main devs are and the moderation will include not allowing posts/comments critical of China/Russia/communism/etc.
No kidding, wasn’t r/jailbait the biggest sub for a while there?
There were and are to this day a ton of subs with similar content.
Where does somethingawful fit in
Tried the official Reddit app today and boy people weren't joking when they say it sucks. I thought it'd just be the usual experience plus some ads but I was totally wrong.
The official app doesn't respect your subreddit subscriptions at all, instead force feeding you feeds of whatever their algorithm thinks will drive maximum engagement just like a shit version of Facebook. The "hot" etc functionality is completely stipped from it entirely.
Guess I'm here to stay on the fediverse now.
What absolutely sucks about this is that I had carefully curated my subscriptions on RIF in order not to exacerbate my dumb mental health issues.
Hell, I've read angry posts about people in recovery from addiction and alcohol saying how they keep seeing ads for beer or gambling and things like that.
It's horrifying!!
The algorithm really doesn't work when you are critical or sceptical over a subject. For instance crypto sceptics from r/buttcoin being shown binance ads. Yes, they do show an interest in crypto, but may be the least suceptible persons to that ad.
It's different with subs focused on addiction & recovery though.
Maybe it's a very bad idea to targeted knife ads in a suicide watch sub, you know? Susceptible people and all.
Not that this is how it works, but I imagine a diligent algorithm looking at those individuals and that content, and then thinking "mhhmm this will generate maximum revenue!!".
From an advertiser perspective it makes sense to sell to addicted people. Mission accomplished?
Renegade BBSes -> IRC -> slashdot -> digg -> reddit -> imgur -> discord -> mastadon -> lemmy
with plenty of side quests along the way
Pre search engine time on Geocities trading mutual linking on each other websites, reams and reams of messages and emails
So we're a side quest then?
It's hard to tell.. it doesn't feel like one, but it remains to be seen.
But I feel like the other alternatives to Reddit and the fediverse are more of a sidequest at this point.
Gonna be honest it's kinda weird to me as someone who did just move over that there's a bunch of posts from people who just found the Fediverse claiming it as home while there's people who have been here since it's creation. It's got the implication that this was created as some sort of next jump from Reddit which doesn't really seem to be the case from my perspective.
That feeling makes sense, but I think everyone knows that the Fediverse wasn't created specifically to give them a landing in this event, just like Reddit wasn't created to catch the Digg refugees, etc. More of a "next phase in the evolution of this concept", and while it took a catastrophe, they're ready to consider that it's time to move on now.
The trick is going to be walking that line between preserving what made the Fediverse great and not alienating the newcomers. I think there's room for everyone, though, and really the big advantage of the Fediverse - we don't have to agree to co-exist, and can even co-existing completely separately if needed.
I think you bring up a pretty important point about federation in that it allows for and even encourages expansion in some ways, so that's a good way to keep optimistic about it. I guess I just feel a little embarrassed. Especially when you look at posts like the recent one asking Lemmy users how they feel about the reddit refugees, and it's flooded with responses from Reddit refugees instead offering unsolicited feedback about design choices. Then you have threads like this with people laying claim to the fediverse more or less. It just feels like some kind of a Christopher Columbus situation. While I realize that might be a little tone-deaf it's the best analogy I have for it.
Any community is a sum of it's members, good bad, or otherwise. I think there will be a wave of us Reddit refugees, but also word is going to spread to other places like Meta and hopefully bring in even more people. Getting people sorted into servers that are going to be able to handle the load, or even better getting them to host their own servers is going to be the way to go. Sorry if we're stumbling all over your garden in the meantime.
That part still worries me a smidge, and it's somewhat related to my other concern about funding/scaling. As more of the general public discover and move over, the % of the general population willing and able to host their own instance is going to steadily decrease. Not saying that we're all gonna die or anything, but it's going to be a shift and we'll have to continue to adapt.
Hmm. Theoretically you could commercialise an instance, I guess.
I expect that in time, that's exactly what will happen. Some instance somewhere will offer guaranteed availability and performance for a monthly fee to it's members. That feels icky at first blush, but why should it? It's not everyone's cup of tea, but no one is forced to use that instance to be part of the larger community, and one instance can't hold the community hostage like a single company social media company could. They'll have success right up until they don't and the Fediverse will sort it out through migrations of users and communities.
or make a non-profit. archiveofourown have ~20% of reddit's traffic and run purely on donation.
That might work too, but I feel like it could be tricky to fundraise if there's 1000 equivalent large-ish instances.
You'd have to have a hook - guaranteed performance or uptime. Maybe some niche feature set or enhancement.
I think it's similar to some of the other open source vendors out there that sell a service that they host, but do not actually own (even if they are one of the open source project contributors). You can't get too greedy because the thing you sell can be sold by anyone, so you have to compete on price and "extras". Not the easiest way to make money, but it's not unheard of.
I see what you mean to an extent, and I also just moved over, but it's worth remembering that Digg -> Reddit was the same afaik. Like Reddit had been around and established for a decent amount of time before the fall of Digg. (This is second-hand info because I wasn't around at the time)
I've been on reddit for a couple years before the flood from Digg. The quality of content and especially comments went down right then, and never recovered.
Personally I skipped Digg entirely.
Depends entirely on the subreddit, in my experience. Places like AskHistorians didn't even exist when the great Digg exodus occurred. My favorite sub was /r/cfb which also benefited greatly from the mainstream popularity.
Not coincidental that both of these are relatively strongly moderated compared to many of the biggest/default subs.
I bet some early Redditors felt the same way about the Digg refugees.
I had the same journey but I'm pretty sure I found Slashdot by way of boingboing which I found by way of Diesel Sweeties blog posts when I first got a DSL connection in 2002 and was looking for comics and blogs to fill up my trendy new RSS reader lol
Lame. You weren't even on Usenet in the 90's.
We you even on FidoNet?
I am old enough to not care what people on the internet think which is why I posted this, I am battle hardened
I think even calling it Lemmy is not the right move. Yeah, Lemmy is the server software running on a bunch of instances. But we also have kbin, and new softwares will pop up and fork and come and go over time. Once we can do some kind of account or community level migration, it won't matter whether you are on Lemmy or kbin or the next great thing. Everything will be federated so it will inter-op beautifully. If an unfriendly instance admin comes along, we can collectively cut and run with minimal interruption.
Thats still a way off from where we are now but the hard step was getting to the Fediverse in the first place. So, welcome to the newcomers among us.
this is the future nerds like me have been imagining since the early 2000's
Laughs in BBS
or
Laughs in Newgroups
Web Rings. Remember those?
They're making a comeback, somehow: https://webring.xxiivv.com/
Oh, I love this.
Throwing this in the "fun retro internet" pile alongside https://neocities.org/
Neocities has been around for years now.. I have a website there.. I do wonder if it's getting bigger though.
Seems like every old school platform is getting some sort of resurgence these days, and honestly it's understandable - the collapse of modern social media has created a wave of nostalgia for the good old days of the dot com era.
And its newest form https://neopets.com/
I still use both. 99% of Usenet is spam, but there still a few active groups (especially under comp.*). The BBS scene on the other hand, is booming. I see new users every week on my favourite board.
Are they doing BBS-over-SSH these days, or do you need a dial-up modem to participate?
Sadly most people CAN'T connect through dial-up, even if both parties have all the equipment. A lot of telcos have redone their entire network in VoIP stuff (with heavy compression) which makes it hard to keep a connection even at 300.
How does a current day BBS work? Landline phone connections are a thing of the past here.
telnet or ssh (usually telnet)
If you're connecting from a modern computer, you just get a telnet client that does the appropriate code pages/ANSI/zmodem/etc. If you're connecting from a real vintage computer, you get a little dongle that pretends to be a modem (and often accepts AT commands, including fake phone numbers), but secretly connects to WiFi and relays through a telnet connection.
Some BBSes do still have landlines, and there's the occasional ham radio BBS, but 99.999% of it is through IP-based telnet or ssh these days.
damn baud rate
FidoNet :D
Yeah, lemmy does have a certain BBS/FidoNet vibe. Makes me nostalgic…
I think the concept of the Fediverse is still really alien to people, even the people who are using it. Everyone is still so used to their centralized platforms, so they still think of the Fediverse in terms of platforms rather than as a whole.
You still hear people say "Mastodon" to mean the microblogging corner of the Fediverse even if they're not actually on Mastodon, and now people say "Lemmy" to mean the link aggregation corner of the Fediverse even if not everyone is actually on Lemmy.
I recently found and like the term "threadiverse" for reddit-like federated software
I really like that, I'm gonna do my part to spread it!
Are you saying there's other reddit-like/inspired webservices that are part of the fediverse that aren't Lemmy? What are those?
Kbin already exists, and a decent portion of people are switching over. It's still early days though, so it remains to be seen how it all plays out.
Currently kbin is the only one I am aware of.
Maybe this is an unpopular opinion but the word "Fediverse" leaves a sour taste in my mount just because it sounds so much like the stupidity that was "Metaverse" (yes I know they are completely unrelated)
undefined> calling it Lemmy is not the right move.
Spankin' new here, so what do I know, but while the semantics might not be completely accurate, that is not an uncommon occurrence. And Lemmy sounds personal, with a bit of a Motorhead edge to it.
Maybe we'll all be called Lemmies web slinging in the Fediverse one day.
You're missing the precursors:
Email -> Newsgroups -> CGI forums / IRC -> Slashdot... :)
The new Fediverse really is kicking up IRC and newsgroup vibes for this old timer. Its very exciting.
If we're including those then I think we have gone full circle and are back in the safe waters of protocols
IRC is STILL running to this day
+1 you're right. Especially IRC...oh how I miss those days.
I miss that moment when I became the cool kid in the channel because I had an IRC bouncer
I never really used email socially, was always a chat or some bulltin system
As a really old person, I was thinking today the vibe was unlike anything I've felt since Fidonet ;)
Do you think this is the end of your "journey"?
Same fucking journey as you. Reddit was a good run for 10 years, let's see if Lemmy can work.
What do we do if it doesn't? Just crawl back and apologize?
I mean, since there's no central site to shut down, Lemmy failing would pretty much just mean that it stagnates and some of the bigger instances shut down, at which point there still would be some remnant of it left to stay on, if a smaller one. Failing that, it isn't the only reddit alternative that people have been working on, so maybe one of the others will be more successful.
Exactly; if an instance goes down, then users can migrate to a new instance.
I don't think so. Although many will remain with Reddit, there is no incentive or loyalty for a significant % to do so. If reddit is shit, why not just use FB, Twitter or regular message boards? Already I saw many subreddits have discords already.
The question for most of those users is there a lesser evil in choosing one bad company over another? Unfortunately I just see this community content becoming fragmented as a result and no winners emerging.
I like Lemmy / kbin but I am concerned that a dev could just shutdown their server and a community, accounts are gone. Who pays the server bills, and maintenance backups etc? This seems incredibly problematic.
Beyond that they need a strong mobile app and 3P devs, a tool to read a users reddit profile and subscribe to similar channels, one click registration without selecting a server. It would be good to also have a mechanism for showing cross-platform posted content in a single view.
If honestly feels like the 90s wild west Internet days again. No alternative I have seen so far can address these concerns.
Discord is way too engaging
@collegefurtrader @Cobe98 I find it’s impossible to follow a conversation on Discord :(
Really depends on the size of the active user base, the quality of moderation and layout of the discord server.
I find while I have a bunch of larger discords that I'm not very active in them. The smaller discords are often where it's at.
Nah. If Lemmy/Fediverse doesn't work out, there will be others. This has all happened before..
If the fediverse idea doesn't work out and it's yet another company the cycle is bound to continue.
A big chance is in front of us to break the cycle!
Oh, I agree wholeheartedly. Decentralization is the way to go and I hope Lemmy succeeds. This particular implementation may or may not work out long term, but the underlying idea is sound.
We'll get it. Might take a couple tries, but we'll get it.
Consider exploring other Fediverse platforms before heading back to Reddit.
I've been using Mastodon for some time now so the Fediverse won't lose me, the question is if my redditing can be migrated.
@OneRedFox @amki Yep. There's #Kbin and #Lotide.
I'd need to shoehorn the Something Awful forums in there somewhere between Fark and Digg.
x2
Although, TBH, I was farking and SA-ing at the same time. Something Awful in its prime was incredible.
Digg -> Reddit -> Lemmy
After experiencing the death of two "power to the people" platforms due to profit-driven VC-backed corporate meddling, here's hoping the third platform is the charm Lemmy & the fediverse.
I don't think the Fediverse will suffer the same demise as Digg and Reddit, precisely because it's not owned by a profit-driven VC-backed corporation, but there are a couple of other serious threats to its longevity:
I think smaller instances of a maximum of 1-2000 people are the way to go for the future. Most instance owners are hosting it because they want to and they have a lil extra cash to throw at it, the 500-2000 people instances are usually funded by the likes of a patreon ko.fi or other donation setup.
These instances aren't big enough that the cost is of an instance isn't massive and can therefore avoid the likes of Venture capital and Angel investors, and if they start to reach the level where funding is getting a bit short even with donations, they can close new account creation untill the number of donators increases beyond a point
TL;DR: Essentially instances should be welcoming new accounts in waves. So that their growth doesn't outpace donation income.
I was on reddit before digg, but left reddit for digg until diggv4, then I went back to reddit lol. The decentralized nature of Lemmy and the fediverse seems like it will be more resistant to that sort of bullshit though.
Journey Before Destination
Fuck Moash
Air-sick low lander, that one.
@MJKee9 @EonNShadow
:D
Do we have a sub on this side yet?
Not that I've heard of or seen unfortunately
for me it was just
reddit --> Lemmy
You are here, so you are not late.
Unless you count a few random forums when I was a kid, same. You think we'll age out before whatever war starts?
The one true constant for me is 4chan 😅
I kinda grew out of it. It was funny when I was an edgy teenager but it got progressively more cringeworthy as time progressed for me, even though the content may not have changed much.
I stopped engaging with Reddit when meme-ification happened.Wheb it became all about the lolz abd short pithy responses, I started using it to find more interesting articles. Gone are the days wheb the average Redditor would read and make thoughtful contributions.
That is in part because the reddit algorithm doesn't like thoughtful contributions. These take time and understanding of the discussed matter. When your metric is positive (upvote) interaction per timeframe you need easily digestable content that people immediately react to. If I have to carefully read and think about the content my vote/comment is far too late to be "hot" on reddit.
Yeah that's basically it. Bots had overtaken Reddit too and just propagated that problem by re-posting posts/top comments.
I used 4chan when I was younger but trying to go back after reddit was super depressing, I lasted about 5 minutes.
I stopped using 4chan when the probability of getting goddamn CP snuff videos in the browser cache because of a /b/ raid got beyond trivial, so like pretty fucking early on.
4chan definitely got worse. like it was always edgy and stupid, but after 2015 every board just kind of became /pol/
Yeah, nazis kinda ruined it. pre-2010 it was more whimsical and ridiculous as opposed to cringey and unironically bigoted.
You missed metafilter.
Can’t leave out irc.
Anyone remember a small post-fark forum called bannination?
Just add usenet on the front end there.
And niche dialup bbs before that
Not going back too far, mine was IRC > Slashdot > StumbleUpon > FuckedCompany > Fark > 4chan > Reddit > Digg > back to Reddit lol > Lemmy
Are you following me?
I went back to Fark for a bit, it's surprisingly unchanged. That's good and bad, it's so linear and most of the comments are snarky/clever but maybe not particularly insightful. Reddit had a nice mix, a lot of funny predictable answers "And my axe!" but then also expert posters that would write 2 intelligent pages on a subject.
Basically the main thing I'm looking for in my replacement tbh.
Put BBS discussion boards, FidoNet groups, and Usenet out front and drop Fark for my path. Along with a variety of standalone forums and random stuff that never went anywhere, of course :) (yes, I'm old!)
Usenet was one of my startng point too... Funny to think it was (in a way) decentralized.
Edit: still is of course. Usenet is still around.
If you still have a Reddit account, unsub all the subreddits that are refusing to participate in a strike.
Good idea! Apparently most of my subs participated, so I only had to unsub a few times. Eerie view to see an empty front page after I was done, never had that.
Apart from this short visit, I stay away from reddit.
What would that do? Not like they can pay the mods any less lol
Decrease soft power those subreddits have due to popularity/subscriber count.
For me it was Slashdot->Hacker News, And then in parallel Reddit->Lemmy
yeah HN feels kind of like old slashdot to me
slashdot has really stagnated over the years
BBS > various forums > /. & Metafilter & fark (no digg), > Reddit & twitter > the fediverse!
As someone who grew up speaking German: GiMiX => XiMiG => Heise forums and ALL of the IRC => Reddit => Lemmy
BBS>FidoNet>Newsgroups>AOL>Slashdot>Reddit>Fediverse
Slashdot -> kuro5hin -> reddit -> Lemmy for me.
Any old k5ers on here?
My only problem is that we are in 2023 and we still need to read a bunch of text. Why can't we have holograms and a sexy AI whispering us the comments?
"As an AI language model, I can't use a hologram to whisper comments, but..."
Slashdot in its heyday was great. Then that sale happened. Somehow I ended up skipping Fark and Digg.
Slashdot started in 1997 and was sold to Andover.net in 1999, in the midst of a lot of early Linux people making a butt-ton of money (on paper, anyway) via the VALinux IPO.
VALinux, amusingly enough, eventually morphed into ThinkGeek and was later bought by Gamestop, an entity about which much has been written ...
There was another change in control of it in the early oughts I thought. Maybe not ownership but whomever was running the site changed.
There were a whole bunch of mergers & acquisitions. Wikipedia has the whole sordid history.
For me, it jumped the shark around the time of the 2004 "OMG Ponies!" April Fools prank, which came across as nerd boys making fun of women in tech.
I seem to remember how short sighted that was.
Which part?
The bashing-women-in-tech part. Sure, they intended it as parody; but, considering the condescension towards women that was already running rampant on Slashdot, it was in poor taste.
There was del.icio.us as well!
I forgot about that site, what did it even do?
It was kind of a social bookmark sharing site, used it a lot back in the day! I saw word of a revival a while back, but like most things the revivals don't seem to work out. See Digg, Bebo etc. :/
Oh and metafilter
Core memory unlocked