Going by comments in the post, the required login is coming in waves, so not all people may notice immediately.
Still, as Reddit is strong-arming its way across, maybe worth signaling to people there that the fediverse may be used without an account, so long as there’s even one instance that implements logged-out view as the protocol allows it?
I don’t have access to my account any longer, possibly VPN ban, though I never tried to recover it so I can only guess why mine is lost, else I’d post myself.
While I think there’s some merit to the idea of talking about the fediverse on corporate legacy social media platforms, I think the best and most effective thing we can do is put in extra effort to engage with the fediverse itself, making posts and comments, building up new communities, and so on.
Reddit is no doubt getting worse and more closed off all the time. They treat their users like shit, or at least, like a resource to be harvested for profit.
But at the same time, Reddit users will sit around complaining about the platform until the cows come up, but when it comes time to do anything about it (like, for example, go check out the fediverse…) they don’t ever take any action. And this problem isn’t unique to Reddit either, people just love to complain about X on X, complain about Facebook on Facebook, complain about Tiktok on Tiktok, etc. It’s hard to tell how much of that is just performative internet shit vs genuine addiction to their particular algorithm of choice, but in my view it’s a real problem…
In other words, the question is “where we should be spending our energy?”
Should we be spending it on Reddit, trying to convince a bunch of people (who frankly range from ambivalent to straight-up addicted) that Reddit sucks? Or should we spend it here on the fediverse building the communities from the ground up?
Yeah, came to say more or less the same thing. I genuinely believe we’re big enough where we don’t need to tell people we exist. We can spend our time making the fediverse a better place so that anyone coming to look for an alternative to Reddit can look at the fediverse and think “that looks like a cool place”.
I’d guess there is a balance to be struck.
I got banned from reddit, and it took me 2 weeks to think to search up “reddit like alternatives.” This is not a problem with disenchantment with Reddit, this a problem with Fediverse visibility.
Would you search up “reddit like alternatives” if you hadn’t been banned? And if someone came on Reddit a few days before you got banned and said to you “hey, this is the Fediverse, come join us”, would you join, or would you say “I have no reason to leave Reddit or to use any other Reddit-like platform”?
I also don’t it’s a “disenchantment” problem. I believe it’s more of a “refusing to change because it takes effort” problem
honestly, in the months leading up to it I may just have. The AI posting ragebait problem was/is getting very untenable over there and it would have been a nice safety valve to come here and gripe about the world without having to dance around corporate boilerplate ass covering “rules” governing what you can and and can’t say. I suppose you’re not without a point though. Hindsight is 20/20 after all.
EDIT: Oops! I accidentally wrote a wall of text!
I knew about AI models generating posts, but I never really thought about how problematic it could get. I don’t know much about Reddit’s rules, mostly because I left the platform before people started complaining of getting banned left and center, but I did hear a lots of people complaining about it here on Lemmy.
I’m sorry if I jumped the gun and started making assumptions about you right away. I have friends that still use X, despite knowing how bad that platform is, and how unhealthy scrolling through a feed on that platform can get, and even despite knowing there are alternatives (one of them tried Bluesky once, but quit it because “it just wasn’t the same thing”). I just assumed you were in a not-so-different situation before getting banned, even though I don’t know anything about you.
It also doesn’t help that I just assumed that everyone had heard about the existence of Reddit alternatives when the Reddit API protests happened. I completely forgot that lots of people came to Reddit after that, or weren’t even using the platform during the protest despite having an account. I forgot that there are probably some people that didn’t notice the protests because of their favourite subreddits being unaffected by it, and that it’s also very likely that there were a ton of people that were affected by it, but knew nothing about why it was happening. And there could be even others that knew about why it was happening, but didn’t know that people were starting to look for alternatives. I just assumed that people who stayed behind on Reddit after the protests chose to stay behind after hearing about platforms like Lemmy because changing platforms was too much work.
Thanks for opening my eyes :)
Despite it all, I don’t see Lemmy as being a platform with a community that is super accessible for every single human in the planet, so I don’t think it’s exclusively an advertisement issue. Not that that’s a problem that needs to be fixed, I just think that you’d have to partly remove the platform’s “soul” if you wanted to make it more accessible for it to grow. As far as I know, Lemmy wasn’t made to “kill” Reddit. It was made to be a place where people can hang out with other people who care about the same topics :)
i only went to lemmy because i remember it was mentioned during the API crisis, when i got banned from reddit when they used AI to massively target everyone. i do have a few forums as a backup i go sometimes.
lemmy world is the top result when searching reddit alternatives. I agree the best thing you can do is to make this a good active community, anyone who is done with reddit will have no trouble finding their way here.
I mostly agree, but I don’t think it should be 100%. How did any of us get here? Almost certainly it was someone talking on the legacy platforms. We shouldn’t spend time trying to convince people to join, but some people should spend some time spreading the word that the alternatives exist, and why they’re better. Honestly, I don’t think we want the users that need convincing. We do want the users who see the advantage and leave on their own, but they need to know about it first.
spreading the word is good, but those platforms censor us explicitly so it’s of limited value. we need alternative ways
Most frictionless places to push for I think would be in sites like linktr.ee and in the bio of services that aren’t direct competitors. Though also of minimal benefit if you’re not a public figure (journalist, artist, developer, someone actively posting whatever, etc.)
If Reddit account is still available and you’ve got the time & energy to convince some people to switch - go for it. Make sure to not enrich Reddit with anything else. I’ve decided against this way, because I wasn’t sure if I’m still talking to real people and the possibilities of spreading the word are very limited (posts often get deleted by mods).
Feels much better to feed the fediverse with content in my opinion.
The only thing that’s confusing to me, is like there is not a pottery group on here but I have no idea how to make one. I tried to figure it out I have no idea how to make an instance or anything.
You don’t need to create an instance (requires server administration skills), just a community (requires a few clicks). On the top right menu, there should be a create community entry.
Thanks I’ll try it
when you search for a community, make sure you’re searching “All” communities instead of just “Local” communities
this one already exists !pottery@lemmy.world
THANK YOU! I did look but I don’t understand the fediverse at all. The instances are confusing. Like I joined discuss.online but is that the same as lemmy? Idk I think Reddit has so many users because it’s easy and clear to use
Discuss.Online is one of the BEST instances! It has super-high uptime, meaning the admin team is very highly technically proficient. I left other instances due to very long delays causing problems, but I rarely to never experience such things with Discuss.Online.
In case it helps, Lemmy is the name of the software that is being run, which implements the ActivityPub Protocol that makes the Threadiverse (the threaded conversion style subset of the Fediverse, different from the microblog style of Mastodon) happen. Then Discuss.Online (DO) is the name of the “instance” (a server machine, running Linux as the OS). Our primary admin is I believe m_f, since jgrim the owner stepped back a bit to take care of his newborn child.
DO will share content with everyone else on the Threadiverse - not only other instances running Lemmy software but also PieFed, mBin, nodeBB, soon flarum may be added, and more. That’s the beauty of federation: you aren’t limited to just your instance, or even just Lemmy, you will access all of it, at once. I am not sure how your apps/clients handle things but I know that some of them hide the instance names - you can turn them on if you prefer to see them? It helped me get a better feel for the place - e.g. Lemmy.World holds about half of all users on the Threadiverse, and perhaps 90% of the most active communities (but people are trying to change that, to mix things up so that it’s not all in one place like that!!).
I guess you already know that a “community” is like a “subreddit”, which we denote like c/pottery rather than r/pottery, and then add the instance name. That said, the absolute best way to refer to it is with the exclamation point !, then community name, the at symbol @, then the instance name. This will make a link that anyone from any app can follow to navigate directly to the community. Like this: !pottery@lemmy.world.
DO would be happy to host a potty community here! See in the sidebar text:
A general purpose instance for discovery, fun, & sharing. It’s a welcoming place for all.
Welcome to discuss.online!
Home for interesting conversation, discovery, and fun. Everyone is welcome!
Guidelines
discuss.online aims to enrich the lives of everyone it touches. Please be kind as you use it.
That said, the other community mentioned, the one on Lemmy.world (LW) seems to be struggling mightily, with only a single person posting to it and zero active moderators (the single mod there hasn’t posted or commented anything in the past 3 years). So you might talk to the single person that is posting, Arcanepotato@crazypeople.online (if I had put an at @ symbol in front of their name, it would have tagged them, sending them a notification and making it into a link), and see if they want to collaborate with you, either here on DO or over there on LW. Either way you might make a friend of mutual interest!:-D And/or just start posting in that community and see what happens:-). Others occasionally do that I see, it’s just far more rare. If you did make a community here, expect to have to do similarly: people won’t know right away and you’d be the only one posting for a LONG time, perhaps a year or more. The Threadiverse just does not have a large userbase to support communities, especially outside of tech or politics.
To @mangobanana@discuss.online, if you make a community, either the pottery one if you feel like making a second one or any other community, feel free to post about the newly made community to either/both !communitypromo@lemmy.ca and !newcommunities@lemmy.world.
The more people follow a given community, the more it propagates whenever a post is made, and the more it propagates, the higher is the chance of someone feeling like interacting with the community or even following. And making the post to either/both communities helps giving an initial boost, though persistence in keeping posting until it gains traction should still be needed.
Thank you so so much for your reply. It helped me understand a lot better! I already am using discuss! I really appreciate your answer
You are very welcome! 🤗
I joined discuss.online but is that the same as lemmy?
yes that’s a part of Lemmy, that’s all you need
I don’t understand the fediverse at all. The instances are confusing.
It’s kinda like email. Think of it like you’re on Gmail, I’m on Yahoo Mail, and the pottery community is on MSN. We can all talk to each other because we do like
@mangobanana@gmail.com(in reality you’re atdiscuss.online) and@die4ever@yahoo.com(I’m atretrolemmy.com). Usernames start with anlike Twitter, community names start with an!So when you do a “Local” search you only see stuff from “Gmail” like yourself, but usually you want to search “All” not “Local”.
For viewing posts on my feed I prefer “Subscribed”, this can be set as your default in your settings page.
have you tried an app on your phone? they can be a bit simpler to use than the website https://join-lemmy.org/apps
here’s another community that might help !newtolemmy@lemmy.ca
I’m using the brave app, and thank you so much! So far I’ve been able to create a question on one of the groups! Yay!
I don’t see your post. I think in Brave you would have to click to expand the Sidebar in order to make a post
for a phone I would better suggest Boost, Connect, or Summit
Yes I’m also using the boost app. I go back and forth depending what device I’m on
reddit is becoming like fb, bots and more bots.
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We definitely need the 1.0 release of Lemmy now more than ever… Keep up the good work devs btw!
Yay devs!
im never going back to ad supported algorithmic brainwashing. decentralized open source, or nothing for me
Yeah Lemmy is the last place before I just go hang out in parks and be outside
You should stand on a box and shout at people for the irl social media experience
Just holding up images of memes outside
I’d toss a quarter in yer bucket for that.
TODAY’S TOP MEMES AT ELEVEN A FROG WONDERS ABOUT NIGHT SOUP. MORE IN FIVE MINUTES
For a second I thought that “eleven a frog” was a time of day.
ELEVEN A FROG NOW A TIME NEW MEMES IN FIVE
Me neither. But god damn if I just want a thriving community where I can get lost in threads on subtopics of topics that I’ve never heard of in my life.
You gotta share links to people, that’s how it spreads. They open it once wtf website is this? Oh that’s fediverse, what? Dont worry about it. But you send them a couple more memes from here, and then they finally wanna comment on something and they make an account.
make a piefed feed. that way they avoid the politics and tech:
If i avoided politics and tech there’d be no more content left for me XD
Yes, I was burned too many times. First Digg, than Reddit. That’s already one too many.
Digg came and went so fast it was weird. Usually I’d expect administration to wait a little while longer before deciding it’s not worth it.
Moved over here after I kept getting a popup I couldn’t close pushing their app.
Reddit is finally dead to me. Good riddance.
I’m so sick of everybody and their dog trying to strongarm me into using their app.
You should take his word for it, my dog’s app is in fact the goodest app.
My cat would end me if I took a dogs advice.
FYI, in case you ever absolutely NEED it (people still post actual content sometimes only on Reddit that simply does not exist here on the Threadiverse), YSK that Ublock Origin has opt-in “annoyance filters” that definitely takes care of that popup.
Obligatory fuck spez anyway:-P.
Fortunately AI bots (which they claim this supposed prevent them from siphoning the content) don’t use uBlock /s
welcome welcome, do you know your way around?
Lemmy needs to grow organically, so communities can form their own cultures, instead of importing it wholesale from the largest forum on the internet.
This period has been regarded as the “golden age” of every successful social media website.
Getting big comes with its own problems. This isn’t an IPO, no one is trying to juice stock price, there’s absolutely zero reason to rush shit.
i think its stagnant, because too many scattered when an instance just vanishes to other platform. and reddit isnt likely going through another wave of purges anytime soon.
A million and one people said they’d leave Reddit if
old.got shut down. Let’s see if they come.I didn’t leave I was asked not to come back
I left and didn’t go back.
I’m not sure that’s the flex you think it is
Reddit bans you for not being a rightoid these days.
they ban you for even looking at the site wrong. apparently they dont like “non organic behaviour” like comment too fast after account creation, old inactive accounts become active, or comment in subs(rare) that have some kind of requirement. you are also measured on a hidden thing called CQS score. other things is if your fingerprinting is off.
They also ban you for suggesting Fascists need to fuck off. They tell you its “inciting violence.”
Fuck Reddit. They caved to the fucking Nazis.
Bro they ARE the fucking nazis, ghislaine maxwell is literally a known supermod, the owners are trump funders.
spez loves Musk.
dont even need to say anything, just having a account with sudden activity is enough. plus they do waves of purges.
their AI moderation is terrible now, and it’s ruining the website.
I’ve long suspected these companies were doing this, but now it’s overt
You get banned there for saying trump rapes children, it’s like the emperor has no clothes except instead of fake clothes, it’s raping children. Fuck reddit dude.
I got banned for saying US healthcare is a scam and should be a human right, got banned for it
Honestly it’s been great because the login lock finally has broken my doom scrolling habit. Lemmy helps me keep a pulse on some of my interests without being a firehose of bs that was r/all. Mental health and sleep habits have been soaring lol
Well, I’m just one, but here I am. I left reddit a few days ago when they forced login for
old. I’m having fun learning about lemmy and fediverse now.
I’m on Lemmy for the first time today after discovering it because Reddit was doing this to me today. Good Riddance. Happy I found an alternative.
Welcome :)
Hi! We joined on the same day for the same reason :D
Edit: Nevermind, the little number next to my account name says I’m wrong. Apparently I have trouble reading a calendar.
I joined Lemmy like a lot of others, when Reddit shut down the API. I soon went back to Reddit but also stayed on Lemmy.
The big problem for me with Lemmy is it’s still way too small to use it the way I use Reddit. I’ve subscribed to a whole bunch of communities equivalent to the subreddits I read and comment on. On Reddit those subreddits have a few hundred people active on a daily basis, whereas on Lemmy they’re lucky to see 1 post and 2 comments a week.
Small communities and real discussions were always what I liked about Reddit, never the big subreddits with millions of users. For now, anyway, Lemmy’s communities are just too small to foster those discussions (on the topics I’m still on Reddit for, anyway; there’s plenty of politics here obviously).
While I agree there isn’t a ton of discussion in a lot of communities here, I have had pretty good success just posting the questions myself in communities where relevant even if the community currently has almost no activity. Sure you don’t get 100s of responses but I do feel the response quality is higher here and ultimately that’s the only way to help lemmy grow to be more active in those communities
I’m not really a question poster though, I’m a question answerer. I think most people are like me, which is why tiny communities (but non-zero) don’t have any discussions: there aren’t enough question posters, just a lot of question answerers waiting around like kids at the school dance.
Maybe a good middle ground would be to make posts answering questions others might have but that weren’t asked yet?
Me too! I never went back to Reddit though. I lost my account with rif that was carefully built over years. I still can’t figure out lemmy, fediverse, whatever it’s called. The tech is not something I care about. I want a simple and easy to use interface, like rif. But this is 1000 times better than dodging ads, bots and trolls on an over-capitalized website.
I want a simple and easy to use interface, like rif.
I also used to use RIF. Have you tried Boost for Lemmy? https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.rubenmayayo.lemmy&hl=en_US
we need a larger userbase, and more niche communities. I try and sub to every new one I see that I’m interested in
Why bother, if they want a good community they will seek one out. Growth isn’t necessarily good for this place.
Overgrowth certainly would have some drawbacks, but stagnation probably isn’t good either
I find the fediverse to be quite lively (more than reddit) even if it doesnt have 5 posts a second. Quality > Quantity. Would rather have 1 good post that gets engagement than 10 shitposts nobody ever sees.
goes back to lemmy where every 10th post is a shitpost about beans
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Bump. (he he he) :p
we at least need to make sure we don’t shrink, which can sneak up on you and be difficult to stop, better to maintain some growth
Also we need a stream of new users to replace leaving users (there will always be churn), especially when an instance goes down many users won’t signup again
I’d say the fediverse is somewhat protected against the drawbacks of growth in a way Reddit isn’t.
As long as instance owners can handle the traffic, yes.
eh, kinda? Decentralisation means one instance can learn from the failures of another, and there’s bo one thing that can bring the entire Fediverse down. But that’s a worst case scenario.
What I fear is this: A spike of interest in the fediverse leads to many instances being overwhelmed, and the general newbie experience quickly turns many people away, leading to lots of people leaving with a sour taste. In the meantime, instances successfully adapt and new ones spring up, but most users aren’t coming back.
Imo that’s a more realistic scenario than some grandiose failure, and you could say it’s already happened several times.
A spike of interest in the fediverse leads to many instances being overwhelmed
they could just disable signups when they get too many users, or maybe use an invite system to limit signups
Blåhaj has that, works pretty well
Well yeah, that’s what being overwhelmed means
It’d be a good way to get people to spread out and make sure they don’t all join the same instance
Yeah, and we shouldn’t push too hard before the devs make the experience easy enough. But the worst that I see coming from it is a slower adoption rate.
ee was overwhelmed and it was a large instance apparently.
I agree, make the place too big and it will become unmanageable the same way it went for reddit.
we do need growth because its quite stagnant and contracted since instances keep disappearing. the problem with reddit is they allow alot of botting, astroturfing going on. with the last big instance shutting down i noticed it became super stagnant.
I haven’t posted on Reddit since they killed third-party apps. Funny thing is, I was a paid subscriber for years before they did that.
Here to be the change I want to see in the world. Go Lemmy.
I got hit with that BS yesterday. They claimed it’s to “keep reddit safe” lol. Just say it’s because you want more money.
They’re only doing it to stop scrapers from having free access to posts. That’s their main product right now and they want to make sure they get paid for it.
No, just no. Just stay off reddit lmao, not trying to be harsh or whatever but it’s a very simple answer.
there will definitely be some users over there that discover the fediverse and join us, there will also be some that won’t. And we don’t want them all to come, ghislane maxwell can stay on reddit forever from her country club prison computer, for example.
So just keep doing whatever it is you’re doing to contribute to the fediverse, either by being a powermod or just a lurker, and as the fediverse grows and adapts it will attract those it should attract.
Going back and contributing to a website owned by literal trump funders just seems like a complete nonstarter to me.
Idk, tell your IRL friends, discord friends whoever, sure, i just don’t think posting on reddit is the answer to doing anything positive for the fediverse.
No, just no. Just stay off reddit lmao, not trying to be harsh or whatever but it’s a very simple answer.
I second that!
It’s a similar situation with Youtube. People keep complaining about the enshittification, yet they keep giving their audience to the Google platform. People could argue “Oh, nah, I use Invidious/yt-dlp/Grayjay/etc, I don’t give Youtube my clicks” and this is a very naive take, because in the end of the day Indivious/yt-dlp/etc still rely on Youtube, and these peple are relying on content maintained by Youtube.
I myself have been boycotting Youtube for two years and counting, and I never looked back.
Yes, Youtube and Reddit have gazillions of content. Yes, we’re often unable to find said content anywhere else. Yes, life can become more hard if we refrain from said content. But while we keep seeking their content (even, and especially, through circumvented manners), they will keep enshittifying because they know they have what the complaining people are ultimately seeking and they know people are seeking it so badly. Once we finally stop, maybe, just maybe, situation would reverse and Youtube and Reddit will be the ones seeking us so badly.
those people are the worst, i see them complaining about youtube on the YT subreddit, and they go on defending it when you point out the pervasiveness of rightwing content, and people like mr beast getting views. i was saying which is it, do you like youtube or you dont. and no i wont be logging in to youtube just to curate my feed, google wants this so they sell this part of your data.
I didn’t even know who Mr beast was until last year That’s how much I don’t watch YouTube
i dint know he was a pos, when the drama hit. the part where had to do a “commercial” video about Lunchly because shit was hititng the fan at the time. everyone likened the video to a jihadist in a cave meeting and the people, other influencers had a gun to thier heads. people were likely critcizing him, but i was saying why are you giving him attention, and i was like comparing him to right wing content, that is forced by youtube. and they started saying"we dont get that if yuo curate a feed, you must be searching out the content" wierd way of defending youtube.
The only thing I use YouTube for (and I can’t believe people use it for anything other than) is tutorials. Like I need to replace the window actuator in my car and I can look it up how to do it and there’s a video. I can’t believe people watch you tube like a streaming service. It’s kind of mind-blowing to me that people watch as much as they do. Like literally the only thing I use it for is tutorials.
Oh she has an unbanned account over there I’m sure
Being over here for about a month I’m finding being kicked out of Reddit isn’t that rare
One of us! One of us!
Her main account (which was once the reddit account with the highest amount of karma) is not banned and still a moderator of many big subreddits
I always browsed Reddit without logging in, created an account once, and deleted it hours later because the algorithmic feed was too much filtering for me. I want to click on posts as a one-off without permanently altering the way the platform sees me. Now I can‘t browse Reddit anymore, which gave me the final push over to Lemmy. It‘s tragic how much collective knowledge we lost though, as the „You scrolled too much!“ tracking/blocking also applies to search results.
in old reddit, i use the all function, you can filter out the subs you dont want your feed. i did it to subs.
Brother Lemmy has slowly taken over my news aggregator usage, conversations are better, with old reddit gone its even more of my usage going to lemmy
Glad to hear this! I really want Lemmy to thrive while Reddit continues its enshitification.
While I miss some hobby subreddits like blender. I lowkey get more inspo off ig, didn’t realize how many artists never post or get posted to Reddit. It’s a bubble that feels like it has everything. Also seeing other people’s work is oddly demotivating and I end up just scrolling/commenting more than I end up doing anything. Applies to any hobby really. I get all the dopamine of discussing stuff and imagining myself doing it, end up not doing it.
League of Comic Geeks replaced the comics sub for me, I wish it had a feed that wasn’t just time based tho. (only shows recent posts) Reddit was better for getting reccomendations.
i blocked the politics.world comms, so i wouldnt get any of those posts. only they were becoming quite low key zionists.
Fun fact, safereddit.com still works perfectly fine as a frontend in my experience! (not the only one out there, just an instance of redlib If you need to bypass the login requirement just add “safe” before “reddit” in the URL and it should let you in :)
I’ve been wondering about this- how are redlib sites still working if the authwall is being made more restrictive?
As far as I’m aware, Redlib gets around blocks in two ways. The partially implemented client-side blocks I presume are by just stripping the code (e.g. seeing the post but it’s greyed out and has a popup saying “sign in” in front of it, or when your whole screen is a login page but all the actual content was already loaded in the background, deleting that code means you can read the post just fine)
And the rest is just tricking Reddit by mimicking the request format & behavior of the Android Reddit app, which tricks Reddit into believing the user is supposed to be allowed access or shouldn’t be rate limited, because obviously anybody using the app is a real signed-in user… I guess? (this information is from their GitHub page’s README but I’m not sure exactly how all this works under the hood)
Fun fact, unless you are a social media manager for a company trying to astroturf content, you are under zero obligation to go on Reddit again ever.
Well, there are some subreddits that simply do not have an equivalent community on Lemmy, or any other place on the internet. /r/steroids for example. Eroids.com is fine, but does not have the same quality standards when it comes to moderation
