We all know about how Reddit closed-sourced back in 2017 and will be killing off third-party apps this July, what will Lemmy.ml do to avoid facing the same fate? Reddit started off like this (open, aiming for freedom) and it all went downhill from there.
I don’t think it’s possible due to it being decentralized. If anything goes wrong start your own instance. That’s what I think a lot of the new users don’t realize. This isn’t a reddit clone, it’s something with much greater potential
I think one of the big hurdles is the user accounts. If the instance hosting my user account goes down I’ll need to make a new one. That’s fine once or twice but we should watch out that this does not become a frequent occurence. Otherwise people might get dissilusioned - Nobody wants to create a new account every few months. And some people get quite connected to their accounts, too.
Mastodon avoids this issue by allowing migration of user accounts from instance to instance, is this / can this be implemented into Lemmy?
Can definitely be done. Just need someone to do it. I need to read more of the documentation and figure out how all this works before contributing, I don’t want to waste the dev’s time coaching a newbie. That’s the last thing they need right now.
I’m under the impression that getting the code running as effectively as possible for the 12th is the current aim But that’s just from what I’ve seen on Lemmy
neither reddit nor lemmy are social media platforms in the “conventional” sense. you have no value of identity (save for upvotes, which are meaningless) and it is probably proper etiquette to create new accounts every few months/year to ensure the crawlers can’t identify your user to a shadow profile anyway. losing your user account doesn’t mean anything because these platforms don’t really support an influencer type ecosystem anyway (oh sure, reddit now allows you to follow users and want you to sign up with email etc to lock you in, but don’t get baited) and the content you post should mainly be links, pictures or discussion topics that will fade away from value within an average of 24 hours.
While that might be true from the stance of “this is what everyone should do” it’s not realistic with how the general public actually behaves.
People are also trying to use discord like a traditional forum, that doesn’t mean they should, and they are suffering for it. There is this thing called “use the tool for the job”, if you use the wrong tool, then that’s not really an issue of the tool, it’s an issue of the user.
The replies already here have touched on the most important factors and why they matter (it’s open source under AGPL and it’s decentralised, the core devs are ideologically anti-capitalist so they won’t go public or sell out to advertisers, the users are the primary stakeholders)
But they haven’t mentioned an issue with this question: we are a community. What could WE do to about becoming the next Reddit after a decade?
Most important? Get involved. Acknowledge that volunteering and donations are powerful! The best thing you can do is to help the devs, whether it be coding, translation, documentation, web design, or the many other things that help this place thrive. I see all these posts saying “Lemmy should make onboarding easier!” as if approximately two people are there to do all the work.
I’d say it’s a mindset of coming from sites where you don’t have the power and the only path for things to happen is complaining to the higher-ups. Being open source and community-driven are things new users need to understand. We may well be their first experience on a non-for-profit social media platform, where we don’t have a designated full-time tech-support team, or a professional dev team of dozens.
You’re completely right. Community involvement works wonders.
@IverCoder I think Lemmy is different because what could you use the Reddit source code for? There wasn’t any federation so it makes perfectly sense that a website which only runs at one company will close source their code to avoid competition. With federation it’s different because the instances talk together so there is a difference between the protocol and the large instance. It’s like making email closed source. Doesn’t really make sense for such a protocol.
We, the users should make sure to stay on lemmy servers that use the open-source lemmy code. If other servers open up, who have closed source code, we should consider blocking them, at a minimum not support them by using their communities.
That will make sure that lemmy servers will keep using the open source code and thus will allow other people to spin up new servers.
I’m no expert, but my understanding of the AGPL license of Lemmy code is that any modification is legally required to display the modification’s source code prominently online. So if I’m not mistaken then they can’t close source the code, so long as the devs are willing to threaten legal action (like Mastodon vs. Truth Social)
- dont try to be a “outrage” generation machine
- dont try to capitalize $$$$
- open discussion != arguing
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I wouldn’t worry too much about that. A lot of the beginning of Lemmy was making sure we fostered and attracted a community that held anti-racist principles.
All the biggest lemmy servers hold those principles, and pretty quickly block any “voat-like” instances that pop up, as has happened in the past few years. Eventually those instances stagnate and die off.
A similar thing happened with mastodon iirc, truth.social was trump’s mastodon startup, and most of the fediverse blocked it very quickly.
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