Honestly, at this point im hoping reddit fucks up even more so that more people switch to lemmy, seems most are switching now more than ever, heck its the reason why i heard about it in the first place
this post was submitted on 05 Jun 2023
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Same here! I really hope Lemmy starts catching on or Reddit will never listen to its users as currently there's no real Reddit competitor (aside from Lemmy, of course)
I want Lemmy to succeed, but I'm highly skeptical of the ability of the instance operators to be able to do so. There's a great deal of technical sophistication that is required to support a large number of users, and from what I've seen, they don't have it. This isn't a slight against them in any way, but they freely admit that they lack SQL expertise, and I think I've seen some significant gaps in their knowledge on how to horizontally scale. This instance, for example, is all hosted on a single virtual server. There are no load balancers, no database sharding, no fanning out of services onto different servers...security is as well also likely in a shoddy state.
Again, no hate from me, nothing but praise so far. But there are some significant technological gaps here, and I worry their team isn't large or technically deep enough to fill them. What's in place at the moment is just waiting to tip over when any amount of traffic starts coming over. For what it's worth, I have offered my expertise to the admins around networking, security, scale, and automation.
For what it’s worth, I have offered my expertise to the admins around networking, security, scale, and automation.
It's open source. That's what's great about it, the pro that beats out all those cons. You don't have to offer anything to anyone, you can just start contributing.
That’s not how this works. Lemmy itself may be open source, but the instance it runs on is not. All the work in work in the world on the Lemmy codebase won’t mean anything if its actual deployment is not built for scale, and that’s not anything anyone but the admins can do anything about.
That’s not how this works. Lemmy itself may be open source, but the instance it runs on is not. All the work in work in the world on the Lemmy codebase won’t mean anything if its actual deployment is not built for scale, and that’s not anything anyone but the admins can do anything about.
That's not how this works.
Lemmy doesn't run on an instance. It runs on everyone's instances. If lemmy should be deployed differently, then the first thing that would be needed is documentation and automated tools that make it easier for everyone to deploy their instances that way. You might be using lemmy.ml, but I'm not!
I’m referring specifically to Lemmy.ml, which is what the admins (of that instance) have been discussing and posting links to GitHub issues for. You can’t just take ‘everyone’s’ instance and spread it out into one giant working install of Lemmy. Every single instance that wants to handle scale is going to have to be built, managed, and maintained for it. If Lemmy.ml isn’t built to handle scale, then it’s going to go down when traffic spikes. They’re already having problems with their SQL database and traffic levels are basically nothing. You’ll end up with a bunch of users attempting to access any of the communities on Lemmy.ml and being unable to. They will need to go to a different Lemmy instance, which will have all of the same issues that Lemmy.ml will have regarding traffic load, and interact with threads there. The good thing about federation is that they’ll be able to keep using Lemmy on other instances, even if they don’t have access to Lemmy.ml specifically.
I promise I understand what I’m talking about, building for scale on a global level is what I do for a living. I also know something about open source projects, having co-founded Rocky Linux and the Rocky Enterprise Software Foundation and serving as its Director of Operations.
I promise I understand what I’m talking about, building for scale on a global level is what I do for a living. I also know something about open source projects, having co-founded Rocky Linux and the Rocky Enterprise Software Foundation and serving as its Director of Operations.
I'm not calling into question your qualifications. I do think you have misunderstood how lemmy works.
The lemmy.ml website could go dark tomorrow, completely offline, and lemmy would continue to exist and the software would continue to need maintenance and optimization. Those GitHub issues are for improvements that will help everyone, not only people using lemmy.ml specifically.
If you persuade lemmy.ml's admins to deploy a load balancer and whatever else, that doesn't help me. It doesn't help anyone who's hosting an instance that isn't lemmy.ml, which is most of them. It's arguable whether it even helps the admins and users of lemmy.ml itself, since half the point of federation is to not funnel users into one massive canonical instance that everyone is using. But if you write documentation or share automation tools that guide anyone on making their other federated instances more scalable, or if you contribute to lemmy's source code to make improvements there, then that helps everyone. It improves lemmy the federated network as opposed to improving only the single inconsequential instance that is lemmy.ml.
Yes, I understand all of that. I know that it helps all the various instance owners. But that’s a problem that has already been solved. Building for scale is not specific or special to Lemmy. There are already entire automation toolsets—things like K8s or Docker Swarm, Terraform and Ansible, and endless documentation and examples on how to use and implement all of this. You’re talking about the greater whole, and what I’m trying to talk about is Lemmy.ml.
I do agree we’re probably talking past each other, though, and that’s alright, that’s how it goes on the Internet sometimes.
I am planning on taking advantage of the inherent scaling of federated services and will be playing around with various self hosted fedi instances. friends and family get access and, if I am, comfortable, I will offer it more widely in my community in micro doses. I suspect that this will be replicated again and again by others. certainly not the solution to scaling, but an important, native part of it.
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Really hoping that big tree falls and opens up the canopy for the understory to grow.
I almost don't want them to succeed, so the exodus can continue to happen. Then again, I don't want this place overrun with their overwhelmingly idiot userbase.
At least in FLOSS communities they are willing to actually implement solutions to fix problems, so there's hope. Large corps don't care until it hurts their wallet.
100% with that. In fact I was listening to the Darknet Diaries ('highly' recommend their show/podcast if you're a techie) episode with Samy Kamkar from back in the day (1, 2), and he echoed the same sentiment. A lot of his exploits he's tried taking to the vendors only to have them make legal threats against him for his actions. So the next best thing was... you guessed it..., essentially doing a controlled release of it into the wild.
It's going to be a long year...
I may just be drunk but that's beautiful man.
I migrated from Digg to Reddit 13 years ago. Looks like it's time to move again.
I started looking into Reddit around 2007 and made the transition from Digg shortly after.
History repeats itself, it seems.
These are both sad and exciting times!
Lol, Reddit permabanned me and my 8 year old 500k karma account for "report abuse" after trying to report obvious bot accounts interacting in bad faith and reposting spam. Bot accounts generating "engagement" are more important to show investors for the IPO than users trying to maintain content quality, of course. How dare I report them!
I was already gonna leave once my Reddit Is Fun quit working, but the ban only hastened my transition to something better... like lemmy! Sucks for Reddit, I generate a lot of content. Their entire app and "new" Reddit is ad infested and disgusting.
It's good news for Lemmy. I wouldn't have just joined otherwise, and from a number of other posts it seems like this may have created a lot of defectors.
I was dabbling in Lemmy before, but now have fully moved!
I just started with Lemmy yesterday. Joined a few Matrix chats as well. For the most part those have replaced everything I used Reddit for. Still a couple of niche things I'm looking for, but all things in due time...
Same. I joined because of the current debacle, and the more I read about the fediverse, the more I like it. Hopefully this attracts talented people who can work on improving the UX, which I find lacking compared to, ironically, third party apps for reddit.
While I understand the sentiment, reddit is going public and will try everything to increase short-term profits for the share-holders. Getting rid of third-party apps is just one way to achieve this, other changes will follow and there is just no turning back, unfortunately.
Also AI companies will pay anything for the API access
They could have easily created pricing tiers which would have skimmed the maximum profit off each. Likewise they could embed ads in the API as a condition of access (even granting ad-free access for premium members).
For whatever reason they chose not to do these things. I'm leaning towards incompetence rather than malice.
Meh, I'm pretty sure they know what they're doing, they can't be stupid enough to believe that asking that much money to indie devs is realistic, they just want a way to kill other apps to force people using their official app.
Agreed they want to kill alternatives. I just think that done right they could make more money than now by not alienating part of the user base.
Agreed. They've just made the most tone-deaf update in /r/modnews as well that goes on to address zero concerns users have, while sending canned responses with zero actual useful information to the few comments they have replied to.
It's really sad to see Reddit in this state, as a long time user.
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It doesn't need to work it just needs to sell shrug
It's futile. Reddit doesn't care about the fallout, and it's only going to worse as they prepare to sell.
See I'm taking this as another hit to the quality of the platform Us who flee aren't the ones who lurk, but the ones who make comments or produce content. Exoduses like this have happened before and the quality has sunk ever so slightly. The black out of subreddits will hopefully make more people aware of the changes, and make Reddit know that people don't like said changes. It's still a good thing even if nothing happens.
A lot of lurkers are gonna flee the platform too though, but they might not join other sites/communities like Lemmy to replace it. So the loss for Reddit will be bigger than those who choose to migrate to Lemmy. And I expect a few lurkers from Reddit, like myself for the most part, are gonna be more active on Lemmy, since the community seems a lot less toxic. I didn't care too much about contributing on Reddit, since pretty much every discussion attracted trolls, spammers, or just hostile users, and the discussions, the exchange of ideas and experiences just vanished or drowned in a sea of noise.
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The hilarious part is that Fidelity, a current investor in Reddit, already cut the valuation of their stake in Reddit by 41%.. Its obvious that investors already see Reddit as a sinking ship and that the social media value bubble run on debt is deflating, now that the free money Fed policy is a distant memory. All these moves are going to do is shutter their company with zero to show for it. Had they just done nothing, their IPO would have probably gone better lmfao. Most intelligent Reddit ceo moment.
even funnier... as a dinosaur, reddit could have persisted on and grown. there were enough old souls wedded to reddit to make it less swampy than some other centralized sites. the gamification of interactions and internet point scoring was mostly ignorable with minor effort. now... there will be a non-trivial exodus of people. people who's identities are not completely tied to the daily dopamine hit. in other words, the very same people that build communities.
Just joined lemmy because of reddit's decision. Goodbye reddit. I'll keep my account on reddit up just long enough to see it go the way of Digg.
Yeah, I'm certainly not going to delete my Reddit account immediately. When Digg was fucking up, it took several rounds and I really made sure I was going to be comfortable on Reddit before I deleted my account there. But once critical mass was achieved, there were major threads on Digg that became literal ghost towns of deleted account comments pretty quickly. It was obvious what was happening. I don't expect we're going to see quite the same massive collapse at Reddit unless they follow up this API decision with killing old.reddit in a month and then dropping all NSFW communities in another month. If they do those things, Reddit is going to essentially die.
It's good to have options now
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ohh that's cute! if only we had other alternative for reddit, but better...
I switched over because of that lol
same here!
I haven’t seen any talk about large language models using Reddit api. I’d guess Reddit was a big source of ChatGPT's dataset and Reddit executives want a slice of that ML revenue pie. They suddenly sit on top of very large, structured, labeled conversation dataset and they want money for it. The cost might not be what they expect to be paid for user, it’s what they expect to be paid for all the users talking to each other.
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