So I mean, most of us knew this beforehand and being on the fediverse we probably do not really care, but what was always on the horizon has no happened, the owner of Squabblr finally had enough having to be a decent person and has decided that his site is now “free speech purism”, so he gets to continue to insult LGBTQ people like he always does.
Seems from the comments that some other admins disagreed with the decision (so there were some decent people on that site!) and either left or were removed.
Not entirely surprising the whole thing, granted.
(edit)
Also, apologies as this isn’t truly reddit news but Squabblr was one of the sites frequently brought up in /r/redditalternatives so I figured this might still be relevant?
The sole motive behind transforming a three-month-old online forum into a “Limited Liability Company”, which they did, appears to stem from either intentions of selling it or the reception of funding, consequently relinquishing your authority over it.
what the fuck is squabbler?
Another shitty centralized proprietary social media clone. They already knew they failed so they’re doing this to get that right wing grift.
The reddit/twitter clone formerly known as Squabbles.io
removed by mod
I mean I don’t care for most of the “free speech” sites because I don’t care for the content that’s posted to them. In addition of never heard of Squabblr. But lets not be hypocrites here, the normal line is: “It’s a private company.” This also applies for companies you don’t like. Not just when a major platform bans people you disagree with in the name of reducing “toxicity” (a completely nebulous term that could be used to describe anything you don’t like.) They can do whatever they want. If you don’t like it, don’t use the site. Simple as.
If you fall into the right or left sides camp this will be an unpopular statement… I can’t understand why this has become such a hard thing to grasp
It’s already falling apart and I haven’t even heard of it. Sounds about right when it comes to chats and social networks these days.
So everyone is now against Free Speech I see, what a shame.
“Free Speech” is a dog whistle for far-right hate speech, when they spew hatred against minorities they try and call it free speech to make it sound acceptable.
And those same individuals will ban you or harass you if you call out their shitty behavior and vitriol. The far-right has no interest in real free speech, and want to censor any opposing worldview.
Absolutely, they’re not free speech at all. They’re huge hypocrites who just want to censor according to their view. They’re just using free speech as an excuse, if they had it their way they’d criminalize any form of dissent against them.
Not like the left is any better
This is why non-federated services are crap.
Exactly! The great thing about Lemmy is that if your instance’s admins start doing stupid stuff you can just go to another instance.
I may not be onto anything here, this may just be a coincidence. However, the timing of these two events are suspicious.
1: Squabbles.io rebrands to squabblr.co. The .io domain explicitly forbids anything that may be considered illegal by any country. The site could be shut down if this is violated. You know what would be considered hate speech by some countries, such as Canada? Discrimination of someone based on their gender identity, ie trans people.
2: Squabblr rebrands to a “free speech” website and removes all explicit mention of LGBT+ being protected under their ToS. Within microseconds (slight exaggeration, but within less than 24 hours) people are chiming in with the “trans women are not women” statements.
Was that planned, or just extremely unfortunate timing?
You’re not kidding about the anti trans openness there now. A poster was ranting about liberal safe spaces, when called anti trans this was his DEFENSE.
“I am not saying that people with dicks who claim thay are women should be exterminated…”
that was his defense. That should tell you everything about who squabblr is for now.
I used the site for a bit. It had some serious potential as a reddit alternative, and was poised perfectly to reap the benefits of a mass exodus. Of course, I used it when it was called Squabbles less than a week ago, before the cringy name change to drop a vowel to be more like the websites from the early 2010’s. I think the biggest hurdle for them was that they were a .io domain and couldn’t host pornographic material, so the porn subreddits couldn’t use the platform even if they wanted to. I think they recently switched to .co, so that might change, who knows.
I’m not sure I agree with the owner’s top-down approach to website design and management. I had no idea about his anti-LGBTQ opinions until now, but that’s one more reason to not to continue using it, aside from the fact that growth is basically reversing and very little OC is being posted.
When I hear “free speech purism”, I immediately think that either the person/people who want that don’t know the dark forces they are inviting, or worse, they do know and they want it to happen. Neither of those are a good look. Some speech absolutely should be banned from these websites for obvious reasons. People who conflate freedom of speech for consequence-free speech are idiots who deserve to be banned from everything everywhere.
A ton of people flocked there because they think the Fediverse is too confusing, so now they’re going to Discuit.
I have accounts on both out of curiosity, but I had a feeling something weird was going to go down on Squabblr. I just got a weird vibe from that place at first. I am not sure about Discuit yet, but it’s yet another centralized service people are using because the fediverse is “too confusing”…
Yeah I’ve literally made accounts in squabbles and lemmy at the same time. At first squabbles was great, but somehow there’s something there that I couldn’t describe. I continued to go to lemmy but I’ve stopped going to squabbles for weeks now. And suddenly this!
Sometimes our instinct is spot on and we got to listen to it more often.
The commitment to tweet-like self posts is what made me leave. I don’t like posting an image or article without being able to provide a title.
Way too much drama on there. It’s like every week you have to catch up on what happened.
The people who think making an account on Lemmy.world is “too confusing” but think making an account on Reddit or one of these other random sites is somehow simpler really surprise me.
I get that federation is a new weird concept but it’s not like anyone needs to know what it is to sign up somewhere and start posting.
I’m sure it doesn’t help that people are complaining that lemmy.world is a huge instance. That only adds to the confusion.
Proponents of Lemmy: “Just join the instance that has the content you like!”
Also proponents of Lemmy: “OMG WHY IS THERE ONE HUGE INSTANCE”
With name like “Squabbles”, I knew it was only a matter of time, lol.
I honestly prefer fediverse remain as that complex open source alt, because it’s one of the few filters we have for users here.
I honestly don’t believe rapid growth is healthy for any platform, and we’ve even seen it here with how comments and memes are getting increasingly vitriolic and offensive. Fuck, antivax memes are starting to appear on lemmy.ml’s meme community.
I’m starting to think Beehaw had the right idea with vetting users, because there people here who think Lemmy should be another 4chan.
deleted by creator
I disagree. There are lots of good people out there who are not technical.
ok but then theh might lose their cool kids club and we wouldn’t want to not feel special and smart for… making an account on a website
I went there because it was simpler and more like reddit. Once this shit started to brew a few weeks ago I noped right out of there. Lemmy ftw
How is make an account on an instance, got to all, subscribe to interesting places, hard? It’s almost the exact same formula as Reddit
The first step is choose a server. On reddit you sign up for reddit, on Twitter you sign up for twitter, but on Lemmy you sign up for an instance that functions as a copy of the site that talks to other copies. And the choice of instance does matter because the admins run that instance. Already, the vast majority of normies are out.
People can’t seem to compute the fact that each Fediverse site is basically like email in reddit/twitter form.
When the majority of the world has been using centralised platforms that don’t have the complexities federated platforms do, it’s understandable that there will be people that get confused over why there are several “Lemmy” servers, or why they can’t sign into a Lemmy server when they signed up on another, or why when they try to find a Lemmy community on their server they can’t see it, but they can in Google.
Somehow email providers have avoided this problem, I think because they are pre-installed on devices as the “Email” app.
Sometimes it’s all about laziness, some people are just too lazy to put more effort to learn new things. I felt it too, I wanted the familiar, but the death of 3rd party apps finally pushed me to learn hot to lemmy. And I’m glad that I did.
It’s not laziness per se. It about the barrier for entry being too high. If they wanted to enter (as you did) they would find a way (as you have). However most people have other higher priorities and don’t really know if they want to enter so they do nothing. If the entry barrier is lowered (maybe by adding helpful pic/vid explaining how it works/where to go, a platform walk-through, people/celebs/influencers talking about their experiences, simple sign up requirements, easy searching, etc.) many more people would easily come in as it’s wouldn’t be as confusing to join.
You maybe correct. But I think that barrier you are saying is both am advantage and a disadvantage. For the long term it is a disadvantage since it prevents our site from growing. But in the short term it is an advantage in a sense that it helps our currently small insular group form our own identity and prevent our bidding lemmy culture from being drowned out.
In short it keeps the “normies” numbers to an acceptable level.
I don’t think it’s that complex though, I signed up my so and they wondered why everyone said it was so hard.
- Go to Lemmy.world and make an account on your desktop or browser on your phone.
- Go to liftoff on the playstore and attach it.
- Look for communities in search that sound fun or look at Lemmy.world’s communities.
- The end.
Don’t forget: try to sign up but that instance is having issues and you don’t even get a notification to let you know whether your application is pending.
This. And then get a link to a post on another instance where it just takes you to the website where you don’t have an account. It’s not very clear how that should work. It’s fine on phone apps but I’ve gotten stuck on the web a few times already.
Seriously though, how does it work? Is there a way to not have the “you must sign in” warning?
It’s still confusing, but if you look at this post where it says that this was posted to [email protected], the URL actually goes to https://lemm.ee/c/[email protected] (for me) so that’s how you’d view that instance if you were on another one. Doesn’t seem like there is a smart way for URL’s in comments to work like that though.
Edit: Well look at that. A Bot replied with the fix.
Do you know if they would have been able to do all of that on their own?
Probably not, because it’s not explained that succinctly on the front page. That’s why we all help others come here and get people to join the way I did.
It’s even easier on kbin since it shares pretty much the same general layout as Reddit.
We need more topical instances. Nobody found PHPBB’s confusing. Let people sign up for an account on the blindness instance, and the cooking instance, and the gaming instance. Eventually they’ll discover that they can use one account for everything, and it’s just easier to do it that way. But in the meantime they’re not confused. We’re probably going to market rblind.com that way; a spot for blind folks to network. Eventually they’ll discover the federated communities on there own, without us pushing it on them.
Those boards didn’t share any information though. People had different usernames often. The fact that all of this federates makes it more confusing. I’ve already clicked a link, gotten redirected to an instance I don’t have an account but looks visually the same and am confused why I got logged out. Luckily I have a password manager that doesn’t autofill or that kind of system is going to be a treasure trove of phishing.
It’s much better now, but at the first I gave up because I couldn’t figure out how to even sign up due to the rather poor web design. And I’m a programmer.
Except going to “all” only provides content from other instances that people on your instance are subscribed to. That is not well understood nor well explained. Whereas “all” on reddit is actually “all.”
It doesn’t really matter if it’s from other instances though, you can still see and look at it so who cares where it sits
No, it does matter. You can’t see it in all unless others in your instance are subscribed and it’s copied the server. You don’t see everything from other instances by default. Although there are tools to aid this issue, it’s not “easy” to discover smaller communities by browsing all.
As a counterpoint, “all” on reddit isnt “all” of reddit. Its an algorithmic concoction of things that you, or people like you, have spent large sums of time engaged with. Its designed only to keep you on the site, by any means possible.
It seems direct, but it’s actually secretly limiting. The fediverse seems limiting, but you can actually access “all” here.
It’s identical to Reddit. I don’t get it either. Federation is completely optional but people act like it’s forced upon them.
Federation being optional is the entire problem. It’s a pain in the ass to have to use multiple accounts because petty shitlord admins defederate everyone they don’t like.
But needing multiple accounts is already the norm.
Not only is the Fediverse puzzling, but it also struggles to clarify its essence; the majority lack an understanding of its functioning
My only complaint about it right now is that most instances only know about communities that are hosted there or that their users deliberately subscribe to. Which works fine for huge instances like lemmy.world, but small instances that aren’t running federation helper bots just don’t have much of an All feed, and initiating federation requests to remote communities you heard of through a directory or elsewhere is a confusing process.
“The fediverse” is puzzling, but Lemmy is simple. I find it weird people get so off put by sites just because they allow Federation. Like- are those same users going to quit Threads when it enables Activitypub? Just seems like a really weird place to draw the line.
Who owns Discuit?
deleted by creator
deleted by creator
previnder is the owner. I don’t know enough about the platform yet, but it’s yet another centralized network.
“Let’s copy Twitter and Parler, those are soo successful!”
Man it’s wild how much Twitter just went down in flames. The way you said that really just made me think, a year ago it was a wildly successful social media site with (if I got the dates right) a looming acquisition by a guy who’d shown some mild signals he was an egomaniac alt-right freak. Now it’s basically a smoldering pile of wreckage.
Have they learned nothing from the failure of Voat?
Isn’t Voat that superhero company in the show The Boys ?
Have we?
Nah, in the minds of right-wingers that just means they were unfairly censored by the woke trans left jewish globalist elite.
Didn’t they realise that Gab, Voat and Poal already exist?
Wtf is a squabblr
Used to be “Squabbles”. It, Lemmy, and Discuit were three of the major Reddit alternatives thrown around during the Reddit protests.
I’ve legit never heard of Squabblr or this… Discuit? What even are these?
Sites that are centralized and therefore have the same potential problems as reddit.
Squabblr was called squabbles until a very recent rebrand. You may’ve known it under its old name instead.
That was this stupid Reddit + Twitter mix, right? Never understood why some people were hyping that platform up so much.
Because they’re confused by the idea that some communities might not be hosted on the server they are logged into. lol
It felt like early reddit while it lasted. Lots of positivity and you started to recognize the usernames. On reddit I was a lurker, but I posted quite a bit on Squabbles. I’m already nostalgic about it lol
Every platform is nice when it’s small and not trying to monetize. The main benefit to decentralization is that anyone can spin up a new small instance, and block any other they feel has gone bad.
Well its nice to be able to have access to the platform from different instance. But its still annoying to have to resign up if the admins piss you off. They need to develop a way to switch instances but keep your profile/history. I had to get off Beehive when they defederated from lemmy.ml and I’d rather keep everything with me.
deleted by creator
It’s pretty alright. The dev is pretty fast, churned out a majority of the site between a month before reddit killed 3rd party apps and today. Decently responsive to requests and stuff too. But the site just didn’t grow, and the head dev was never okay with giving up sole leadership.
Nope.
On Reddit, just before most of us left, there were a ton of people going “omg lemmy and kbin are too confusing but I like squabbles!”
I signed up and checked in on it here and there, and then this happened. I am also on Discuit, but I’ve been spending most of my time on Lemmy.
I got a weird vibe from Squabbles/Squabblr and this basically confirmed it.
Same. I signed up to Squabbles but any time I visited, which wasn’t often, people seemed to be in the middle of a fight or dealing with the aftermath of trolls. They changed their name and URL and I stayed and at first it seemed fine, but the last time I checked the dev announced it was now suddenly a “free speech platform”; protections for LGBTQ+ people were removed from the TOS; and that all content created by users now belonged to the site to do with as it wished. So I deleted my comments (not many made so that was easy) and account and created one at Discuit. So I give Discuit a few months before that implodes, lol.
I am very grateful for kbin and Lemmy.
Yeah I’ve posted a few memes and replied on Squabblr, but I’ve been way more active on Lemmy. I also have a Discuit account (I created it before Squabblr imploded out of curiosity), but I don’t really have high hopes for that either.
If it wasn’t for Calipso, I wouldn’t have been into Squabblr at all. I think the site is ugly, and with all of the app devs bailing, Squabblr is done for.
Hot damn. I was reading the name and thought first its about squabbles, which I considered to be checking alongside lemmy how it develops.
So I was briefly shocked about this development, then I realised this says squabblr and not squabbles. And then I read your post.
Rollercoaster.
Reddit alternatives that didn’t pick up a lot of steam yet. We’ll see if they end up winning out over the fediverse or reddit itself, looks like squabblr won’t if it’s already gone the truth social route
