Lemmy is great if you love Linux and Star Trek. If you’re really into cybersecurity and privacy Lemmy has it all.
As a not really techy person but one who has been cruising online for a long long time I feel Lemmy is a lot like old old Reddit. Reddit was full of techies when I joined. It grew over the years into a bigger thing but it started with a bunch of nerds talking about shit I didn’t understand.
Yes, I feel the same way. Reminds my of reddit circa '07 back when r/Conservative was an anti-Bush subreddit.
I’m into Linux, but also into Factorio and motorcycles.
Lemmy genuinely is a replacement for r/Linux because the activity here is just as high as there.
But there is very few content about Factorio and motorcycles here. They are communities, but they don’t really replace the reddit ones, especially r/factorio.
Edit: Almost forgot about incremental games. Basically no content exists on those here.
Hopefully they will one day!
Squabblr seems like a nest of 13 year-olds trolling each other for fake internet points. Pass.
Oh boy you should see all the drama on r/RedditAlternatives when this shit blew up
We did it Lemmies!
Lemmy is an alternative to Reddit like MotherJones is an alternative to Fox News. It’s just more of the same from a different bias.
How so?
Because Both Sides are the Same. Do your own research. Checkmate, libs!
or something
Pwning the libs, brah!
I had been on reddit since 2008, I was looking for an alternative to the message boards I belonged to after the popularity of Facebook killed them off. I really enjoyed it, not the same level of community that you find in a message board but still good for conversation.
Then trump happened and it turned to shit. It’s so fucking toxic and I ended up getting banned for defending myself. Apparently fascism is good and standing up for yourself goes against community standards.
I’m a disabled 49 year old just looking for conversation. Facebook is also a toxic wasteland now. To say I miss myspace is an understatement but there’s hardly anyone there anymore.
I’m happy whenever I find a place that’s put the social back into social media because antisocial media is just trash.
There are dozens of us, dozens!
As for funding, the servers are supported on a donation basis, with no big corporations behind them. This leads to a problem concerning user data and privacy, as there isn’t a single accountable entity behind the network.
Bit of a weird take now, isn’t it?
It’s kind of fair, to be honest, and the “no big corporation” seems more like a pro than a con
Yeah, true. It seems like that is a pro that greatly overshadows the cons. Like someone else pointed out, it’s just worded weirdly in the article.
Kind of funny how the privacy crowd is big on Lemmy but it skips over the fact that all of its Lemmy data is hosted on the machines of people that have no accountability…
You’re always free to spin up your own server and host it if you’re concerned about the way your data is being handled. Not something you can do with the corporate alternatives
And only post on your own instance and talk with users of your own instance… Might as well just send emails to your friends at that point…
Emails also go to other’s servers.
But you could just host an IRC server.
But as soon as you interact with literally anyone (or anyone interacts with you) your data is still replicated on other servers.
Your posts are all public and discoverable by web crawlers even if your instance didn’t federate at all. That’s kind of the point of activityPUB
How about private messages which are also unencrypted?
No personally identifiable information or private account information is transmitted between instances. The only thing that is synced is the content of your posts, reports and up- and downvotes. And all of that serves a purpose and is shared willingly.
And the content of private messages.
I may be naive, but even though I don’t personally know my admin, this is a person who has a stellar reputation, and who I’d trust far more than some massive corporation that has to abide(1) by some anemic laws
(1)if it finds it profitable to do so
Eh, it is a con when there are problems, service problems, bugs, etc…
My instance have had a few of them and for a while our 1 admin was unavailable.
It is difficult or impossible to get it resolve because there is no contact point, nobody hired to fix issues that need immediate triage, etc… which can result in longer outages or bugs on specific instances.
I’m not complaining. This is a fantastic service that is being offered completely free from actual altruistic incentives, unlike corporations. There are a few downsides though.
Definitely, that’s why I always prefer instances with at least two admins, and a Matrix room for status updates
That’s great and all.
But feddit.de just became usable again after more than two weeks of being basically unusable - because the 19.0 and 19.1 releases of Lemmy were buggy and there was no downgrade migration possible on the database. No big corporation would break their product for two weeks like this.
Seems okay at the moment, at least [email protected] properly federates
Yes, it works now.
Version 19.0 and 19.1 were basically not working at all.
Yes, happy to be over that
I think both things are valid points, but it’s worded in a weird way
A more explicit pro/con would have been better
No big corporation that controls everything
- Pro:
- Con:
This is a good point. Had it been presented like this, it would have hit different.
there isn’t a single accountable entity behind the network
Yeah, Instead of a single entity i know will never be held accountable for selling my data and storing my information in an unencrypted txt file, there are unknown entities! Like the
Simpsons(d’oh) quote says, “It could even be a boat!”The illogic reminds me a bit of Google’s new targeted ad privacy settings where your “privacy” is google’s pinky swear that they alone are profiting from you.
When you see takes this weird do you wonder as i do whether it is intentionally worded to push some kind of narrative (though i don’t really know what that would even be in this case), or is it written by someone so deeply in the tech bubble world that they are wildly out of touch? I don’t know.
Edit: Family Guy
Re “It could even a boat”, that’s Family Guy https://youtu.be/GKZJdaiJF84
But your point still stands.
Here is an alternative Piped link(s):
https://piped.video/GKZJdaiJF84
Piped is a privacy-respecting open-source alternative frontend to YouTube.
I’m open-source; check me out at GitHub.
Wow, i can even hear it in that Simpson’s “female announcer voice” how many more of my memories are lies?
Thanks for the correction
It’s actually not wrong if you look at it in another way.
- Big tech will abuse your data, but it will do within legal constraints, and there is actuall (though weak) accountability of these companies due to the legal system.
- On federated services like Lemmy, instances are hosted by anonymous individuals. Most social media laws don’t apply to them, and their legal accountability is basically zero.
- Lemmy, for example, does not comply with GDPR. There is no legal notice, no privacy contact person, no banner asking whether you are ok with the fact that your data is sent to unknown servers in random nations, no nothing. Private messages aren’t even encrypted, so any admin can read them without issues.
- There is no way to actually delete your data, as the GDPR requires. Deleted posts are only marked as deleted and you can see their plain text content by just pressing the “reply” button in any of the apps. There isn’t any kind of guarantee, that your post will be deleted on other instances. If federation has problems, the post will remain on other instances and is now permanently undeletable by the user.
- There are no moderation standards. Some instances will delete nazi content, some basically require nazi content. And some instance admin might even edit your posts to say something completely different. It’s all possible and in the hands of random people on the internet.
- Hobbyist-run services are much worse when it comes to availability and reliability. If something happens while the admin is on holiday, nothing will get fixed. If the admin runs out of money, doesn’t care anymore or even dies, the instance with all it’s content and users is just gone.
So there are very real risks attached to a hobbyist-run service with no legal accountability and no transparency at all.
We all know the downsides of Big Tech though, so it’s everyone’s personal choice to figure out which disadvantages hurt them personally more.
@squaresinger @LinkOpensChest_wav yes and don’t let people fall for quasi legal privacy policies that lemmy.world & ilk provide #Lemmyworld #accountability #fediverserated
That happens if you don’t have an actual legal team… I am sure they are doing their best, but if you don’t have a lawyer, you can’t do legal texts.
Very much this. Plus, how easy will instance admin Joe Schmoe fold under external pressure to give access to certain groups, government bodies etc? And how well have Joe Schmoe implemented good security practices on the server and related things? Etc.
That’s a bit misleading to say like that. Go to the website, scroll to the footer and click on “Legal”. Your instance, feddit.de, has a legal notice, with a privacy contact person, mentioning you can request data erasure, and detailing where your data goes. Mine, lemmy.world, has a number of in depth legal documents attached there.
However, yes, other instances they are federated with might not take it as seriously though, and if all your data is going there too, then that’s a hole in your data privacy.
There are two issues with that:
- The GDPR notice on feddit.de is not GDPR compliant, and the link isn’t even visible on mobile.
- If you request deletion, they can’t guarantee that the data is deleted on federated servers. They can send deletion messages, but federation is constantly not working correctly, other instances can decide themselves whether they do delete stuff, and if an instance is unreachable for a while, the deletion message will be dropped.
Lemmy, or even ActivityPub are designed to be non-GDPR compliant. (Probably not on purpose, but the way it works makes it basically impossible to be GDPR compliant.)
But if I request it there, after its federated everywhere, what happens?
I imagine that this calls for a feature that can erase your data on every other federated server. If the activitypub protocol can send data from one server to another, it should be able to delete it or find a way to disable viewing said data.
Giving servers the ability to delete each others shit would be interesting to watch when an online war breaks out
That already exists. The person who created a post or comment can delete it. But it only works sometimes, since federation is constantly not working correctly.
Eh, that’s a mixed bag. Absolutely, one could setup shared delete requests, to federate a delete request, but it would be a bit of a lie as anyone could simply… update their instance to simply ignore delete requests.
For now, simply not having a delete feature is a more honest to the realities of the fediverse. There’ll never be a “true” delete, even if they do eventually support one that’s “good enough”.
I think it is a valid point, though. How do GDPRs even work on Lemmy? Do you need to submit one to every instance that your instance is federated with? What about transitively federated instances? Sometimes when you delete something, the delete action doesn’t get federated. That’s kind of terrifying. If you post something personally identifying without realizing it, then try to delete it, you might not be able to.
Imo, it’s something to keep on mind when posting on Lemmy, but not a reason to not use it.
Someone recently reminded me of the privacy issues here on Lemmy. Not so much concerned about my admin, but the inability to delete content was a big concern for me when I was first deciding on a new platform after leaving reddit at the end of June 2023. Sometimes I forget.
It is a good point, and I somewhat regret making that comment. It just was worded oddly in the article.
I used to spend a lot more time on raddle, but my addiction to fresh content is real, and there’s just a lot more here than there. Perhaps I should “be the change” and all that noise.
i actually prefer to browse lemmy from a mastodon account but it probably isn’t for everyone: iget every comment on a subscribed community in reverse chronological order in one feed.
Mbin https://github.com/MbinOrg/mbin
Pro for me: the ui is a bit more intuitive
I guess I missed it. Why there was a need to fork kbin? Are there issues with it?
The Kbin developer wants to focus his work on deeper technical challenges, while the Mbin developers want development to be more fast-paced with greater community involvement. Both takes are valid, but difficult to combine in one development effort.
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After I posted it, I found another discussion where it looks like mbin policy is that anyone can merge anyone else’s PR.
As a software developer, that actually sounds really scary.
how does it?
As quality control is more relaxed, there’s fewer safeguards against potentially bad code (bugs or harmful stuff, intentional or non-intentional).
When there was a bit of friction between kbin and mbin, this was the starting point: kbinwas criticized for being too slow and conservative, taking ages to implement features because everything needed to be thoroughly thought through and it’s just one man doing that. Meanwhile mbin went pretty far out in the opposite extreme. Both found the approach of the other potentially harmful (by either discouraging contributors or by not having enough checks in place).
A big advantage of more community involvement; more will get done in a shorter time
In the end it won’t matter for the end user, as both projects can choose to incorporate features from the other due to the open-source nature
So the question is, do you want it working now (Mbin) or do you want it working somewhere in the future (Kbin)
Mbin is very promising!
I really like Lemmy’s UI and general nicer community. I hope we see more people joining.
No wonder why I’m called “Resol van Lemmy” now.
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I gotta look into this Lemmy thing. Sounds right up my alley.
Who?
Lemmy, the singer of Motörhead that died 2015?
False, god can’t die
The bane of Lemmy searches, or the medal of “My query was not specific enough”.
No, Lemmy Koopa.
It’s similar to kbin
Nah, foget about Lemmy. The name isn’t edgy enough. Just think about Discord, Squabble, Insultr, TauntTornado, FuryFurnace or FistFight.
Fuck Reddit, but shouldn’t be so excited for external validation. We’re doing a good thing building this community, we know that without them signing off.
Good publicity means more traffic, which means more people for community, which means more content, which means the network is more entertaining as a whole (hopefully)
I don’t understand this sentiment. We know that, but that doesn’t mean we shouldn’t get excited over it.
Discord for large communities is dumb as shit. There’s literally too many people that real communication becomes impossible unless you move to DMs or an empty room.
so. much. this.
Discord is just an AOL chat room. Great for short-term conversations among 20 or fewer people. It’s not a good place to store your FAQ. It’s not a good place for large teams. It’s not a good place for anything searchable. It’s transactional. And I don’t know why people treat it otherwise.
I spend a lot of time in the r/furry discord server
It’s a wonderful place to just chat. Imo, discord is fine as a chatroom
yikes
What is yikes about hanging around with furries?
Furries are awesome people.
You know you’re in the strange corner of the internet when this isn’t getting disliked to hell lol
Perhaps made even more so by having been highlighted by a username such as yours, /u/cum.
I mean, fuck all those other corners then
Fuck those corners while wearing a fur suit, you mean
Yeah, I hate discord for many reasons but the primary reason is that I just think it is a terrible place to have a conversation. All the channels I see are always dominated by really low quality effort interaction, interesting conversations just get drowned out and lost by someone sharing another meme or responding to someone else’s low effort meme.
As someone with pretty intense ADHD, Discord is just so fragmented with so many channels each with their own conversations all fracturing out in different directions with no capacity to keep a handle on it. I hate it.
Fuck Discord
or interesting convos have a mod chime in and ruin it
“hey guys can we move this conversation to x-chat”
God I can’t stand servers that are Nazis for that. Guess what…natural conversation will change topics over time. I’m sorry I can’t keep up which of your 100 channels I need to jarringly break away from the convo and hop into whenever the topic even remotely, slightly drifts from what it started with. Discord channel Nazis don’t understand how human conversation works.
or or how about guilded? no? mabye revolt? no agian? element? wait what XMPP!!! are you sure that haS group chat? ok…
Right and when you step back and think about it, why create a conversation system that demands so much admin for moderators? A reddit-like system obviously still desperately needs good human moderation but the moment to moment guidance of conversation focus doesn’t require a human mod to always interject to refocus things, just an engaged and genuine audience.
I love discord for small communities, not that I have that many I’m in though. But friend groups, and niche topics. Places where the chat generally is a single discussion or two at a single point in time. And the voice chat is superb. Just drop in and out is convenient.
But it sure as fuck doesn’t compete with what reddit and Lemmy is doing.
To be honest even for small communities I just find discord an extremely difficult format to follow., especially because search of previous conversations is an afterthought (???).
I think it is easy to miss how powerful the reddit type thread structure is among the noise of how toxic and shitty reddit itself can be. I love lemmy because I think the reddit type thread structure is in most ways a direct upgrade to message boards/forums. The problem with message boards was that as a thread gets longer the probability increases steadily to 100% that the thread will be utterly derailed by people arguing over the most trivial detail of the conversation. This seems like a weird thing to empathize, but consistently I would find a thread on a message board that felt like a goldmine of interesting information and ALWAYS I would find to my consternation that the last three pages to the thread were people arguing over some stupid fact one of the commenters used incorrectly early on in the thread to make some ancillary side point.
The Reddit structure smoothly siphons off these side conversations and allows the wisdom of the crowd to direct the focus of the conversation through upvotes and downvotes. Does the Reddit structure get petty, toxic and judgemental? Yes, but I think it still qualifies as a near direct improvement on messageboards if the objective of the messageboard is to be a curated source of expert/niche conversations. Lemmy is awesome, you can learn so much just from reading quality comments sections.
Definitely. The comment structure is what got me into reddit in the first place. I love that Lemmy uses it as well.
Yeah and it is easy to think of Lemmy as a shadow of Reddit because it is so much smaller, but even if for the foreseeable future that is highly unlikely to change, now is the first time the form of messageboard popularized by Reddit can finally grow and evolve beyond whatever limited vision the company that owns Reddit has and that is huge. We are in a new era of social media. Now anybody can experiment with tweaking the Reddit form by adding this, taking away that, changing how upvotes or downvotes work… who knows?
This is just the VERY beginning of exploring the space of social network structures like Reddit and it is going to be awesome. People don’t get excited for new social networks anymore (corporations have made them so repulsive and unhealthy) but this is a super exciting time of innovation and evolution in the different ways we bring humans together in conversations online.
