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?
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.
It’s kind of fair, to be honest, and the “no big corporation” seems more like a pro than a con
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 !europe@feddit.de properly federates
Yes, it works now.
Version 19.0 and 19.1 were basically not working at all.
Yes, happy to be over that
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
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.
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.
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
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.
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.
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”.
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.)
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.
@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.
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
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 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.
Nah, foget about Lemmy. The name isn’t edgy enough. Just think about Discord, Squabble, Insultr, TauntTornado, FuryFurnace or FistFight.
I’m so glad I finally got into Lemmy. Reddit was destroyed on July 1st but I couldn’t get into Lemmy until November because the instances were so fickle.
In the meantime I tried saidit but quickly discerned that most of the users there were just really bad Reddit rejects. like the worst of the worst Reddit rejects.
Glad Lemmy finally let me in.
This place seemed to attract the older tech crowd instead of the Nazis like Voat did.
I am old’ish so this checks out.
Lemmy has its quirks and it has its own distinct cliques, for sure. Posting specific viewpoints on some specific instances can be a bit awkward, especially for new users. Let’s just say that if you haven’t been called a capitalist pig baby killer at least once on Lemmy, you haven’t had the full, well rounded experience.
All in all, Lemmy is fairly nice but people can still play follow the leader with comments. That is a curse with all social media, I’m afraid.
capitalist pig baby killer
I’m guessing your instance hasn’t blocked Hexbear and Lemmygrad yet.
That specific incident happened a while ago, just as those were getting more widely blocked. There is still an instance or two that can be vocal, but it’s not nearly as bad as it was.
I made the mistake of wandering into both of those places…
I think that was just a matter of fortunate timing. The other Reddit migrations were due to toxic subs being banned, so the worst parts of Reddit migrated to whatever platforms were being discussed at the time, which happened to be mainly Voat.
The July 1st exodus was due to the Reddit API being paywalled at extortionate rates to crush third-party apps, which affected normal users - particularly long-time contributors and the tech-savvy. Lemmy discussion was picking up steam at the time, so that’s where a lot of these users went.
If the timings were reversed and Lemmy got the worst users Reddit had to offer Lemmy probably would have handled it much better than Voat did (especially since the devs would loathe the new users), but I’d imagine a split forming between instances, with right-wing instances being defederated and creating their own bubbles of toxicity.
Yeah the thing I got from here was an understanding that focusing on free speech just means you have the worst users. If you want a free speech instance you’re free to be on one that others are defederated from
Probably because we get excited for new tech my shit and AP/Fediverse/Lemmy is so hot right now.
Reddit was going down hill long before the API paywall. That was certainly the final nail.
I’d say the first nail in the coffin was when they fired Victoria.
The final nail will be when they eventually kill old.reddit.
i built mine because i left reddit after a very long time. i agree with @TheVillageGuy, the mbin interface is more … reddit-y, i didnt like the sparse nature of lemmy.
those capthas really are annoying but thanks to them im at lemmy.blahaj.zone
I don’t recall being tripped up by the captcha’s, all I remember is that I would go through the whole process of establishing an account in an instance, and their response was infinite buffering and/or never sending me a confirmation email.
In that list, only Lemmy has voting or comments in a tree, both key features that make reddit into reddit. If I was going to put together a list of reddit alternatives, those last 3 wouldn’t be on it.
Oh, except hacker news. But it’s just one topic, people can’t make their own communities/groups/subreddits another key reddit feature.
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.
I really like Lemmy’s UI and general nicer community. I hope we see more people joining.
How did Discord make the list but not Imgur? At least Imgur is somewhat like reddit.
People will turn everything into a Discord server nowadays, no matter how bad of a match it is. I’ve even seen a Github project disabling their Issue tracker in favor of Discord, which is completely insane to me.
I think repos that do that just don’t know how to link discord to GitHub. They want the notifications/engagement but can’t get the two to talk.
Either that or they just don’t want people to report issues on a public board.
Either way, I feel like it’s bad all around.
Can someone please explain to me why discord is being used for everything? Isn’t it basically IRC?
It’s a great tool to set up with a small group of friends to stay in contact. It’s being pigeonholed for everything else
Its fancy IRC with voice channel support, etc
IRC is a completely open source protocol that anyone can develop clients and servers for, it’s been around for decades and has an army of dedicated fans and devs.
Discord is a program owned by a private company that everyone is using to chat while the company slowly implements pricing and walls their proverbial garden off.
Ease of use.
With your one Discord account you join all the servers you care about and interact with online/IRL friends.
There are downsides that people at Lemmy will find dealbreaking and I absolutely agree with them, but the convenience of it being a chat, forum (almost), voice/video calling and gaming platform for free with (currently) no ads triumphs all of that for the majority of people, and that’s what makes it popular. It’s also cross-platform so no one’s left out.
Discord has a really low barrier to entry for conversation, it’s low friction. If someone playing a game gets a sorta funny screenshot they can share it in Discord and have a decent chance to get some responses or reactions.
But they won’t post it on Reddit or anything because there’s more friction there, it feels like more work to create a post and then you’re unlikely to get any responses anyways, and even if you get upvotes you can’t see who upvoted like if it’s someone you know, and there’s no easy emoji reactions. And users making comments to respond also feels higher friction than a message, people are just less likely to do it for whatever reason.
It just feels like small scale conversations are more likely to happen in Discord than anywhere else. If you have a small group of people then something like Reddit/Lemmy probably won’t be sustainable, it’ll never take off, but get them in Discord and you’re more likely to keep the group active.
Imgur was originally designed as an image server for Reddit. They actually share front pages (or used to, I haven’t been in a while)
Lemmy is great if you love Linux and Star Trek. If you’re really into cybersecurity and privacy Lemmy has it all.
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!
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.
There are dozens of us, dozens!
Key strengths of Lemmy
- Federation
- Tankies
- Star Trek memes
- Star Trek memes community civil war
Wait the trekies are fighting? i’ll light a candle
Risa had some mod issues, Tenforward was created. The people who actually post have basically all moved to Tenforward, it’s not really a war.
Tankies are a strength?
Tankies?
Lemmy has a large World of Tanks game community
Why are tankies a key strength? Or do you mean purely for entertainment value?
Computer, can you expand on the last point please
A prominent /c/Risa shitposter accused the mods of transphobia, loudly quit Risa and started their own meme community (and later deleted the comments after any evidence of transphobia failed to materialize).
Around the same time, a Risa mod removed some particularly low-effort posts despite Risa having “no rules”, which upset some users and so they fled to the other guys’ meme community.
Now there are two Star Trek themed meme communities.
I read this in Majel Barret’s voice and you can’t take that away from me
A prominent /c/Risa shitposter
This isn’t reddit, you can name names.
Stamets. He actually banned me from the new place after posting a dumb meme he just didn’t like (said I was “ban evading”). Did not know about him crying transphobia but it doesn’t surprise me, the person has a serious temper issue.
EDIT I forgot he also retroactively removed two AI shitposts posts I made after writing a rule about it (yet didnt remove his own)
Thought so. I have had my own run in with him.
In light of the current drama, could you maybe elaborate on your run in, and repeat what the deleted reply by stamets was?
THE prominent shitposter
???
Are you worried about being banned if you name him?
just blocked the only risa mod there is
- Linux tech support
if it’s not to make fun of tankied you are required to get blocked
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.
Welcome! Feel free to join !casualconversation@lemmy.world, usually it’s quite laid back
What about kbin (well it is connected with Lemmy, but technically it’s not Lemmy) and tildes.net?
Tildes is the only other reddit alternative I’ve been using. It has really high quality content, but posting there can be intimidating if you don’t have 20 minutes to write something insanely detailed.
I thought I heard they were integrating with activity pub, any truth to that?
I haven’t heard that - I suppose it’s possible, but if I had to guess I’d say they probably wouldn’t be interested. It’s even more niche than Lemmy in my opinion
kbin.social is only PWA right now. There is Interstellar app for Android being developed right now, but it is available only via Github releases (no Google Play nor F-Droid). And it works only on https://kbin.earth (or instances of /kbin fork called /mbin) right now.
Hmm… the app is indeed a great sounding proposition.
Mentioned the Apollo / Reddit saga but did not list Voyager as a client for Lemmy which at least for me has been the closest client in terms of Apollo experience. I know this is Android Police but it did talk about Android and IOS clients in the article.
Currently on voyager. It’s not perfect yet, but as a 7+ year Apollo user I honestly forget I’m not using Apollo/Reddit sometimes. I’d be interested to see if Christian gets involved in a Lemmy client. Apollo was the only app I’ve ever seen that never got worse and just worked in its entire life
I’m an Apollo refugee and have tried a number of apps but I keep coming back to voyager (the web app, not the app app). It’s far from perfect but it’s the closest to Apollo imo too.
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.
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).
There is a saying that if civil engineers would build houses the same way as software engineers build software, the first woodpecker would destroy the whole civilization.
In reality it is not easy to build good software and it can be fragile even with good practices. This approach allows anyone’s code merged without much supervision.
Another thing is (and I even noticed myself doing it, even though normally I think of myself as perfectionist) is that when one contributes a feature to a project that they don’t maintain. They just think only about the feature and the easiest way of implementing it, which isn’t necessarily the best way to implement something long term, adding complexity, makes harder to add more features and much easier to accidentally create bugs.
Third, preventing security vulnerabilities is hard even with good practices, someone could accidentally (or purposely) introduce a security vulnerability.
deleted by creator
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!
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
