- cross-posted to:
- [email protected]
- cross-posted to:
- [email protected]
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Lemmy has one significant problem that platforms like Reddit and Mastodon don’t, and I don’t see that problem easily going away.
The companies who use raw data as a source of their wealth steal everything that isn’t bolted down. Platforms like Reddit and Twitter realized this, and put their content and APIs behind restrictive paywalls.
Lemmy and Mastodon content is free for anyone to hoard and add to their pile.
I guess technically you might be able to create some kind of “firewalls” (distinct from network firewalls) that heuristically kill AI harvesters, but it will be a perpetual battle.
Can you elaborate why that is a problem for Lemmy?
Is this actually a bigger issue for Lemmy / Mastodon users than on other platforms? In case of commercial social media, the data is sold, here it’s freely available. In both cases my data is potentially used by third parties. This might not be perfect, but I see very little alternatives rather than not publishing any data in the first place. Which would somehow contradict the idea of social media, wouldn’t it?
Which would somehow contradict the idea of social media, wouldn’t it?
No. Nothing about the concept of social media dictates that all data must be available for everybody.
I don’t think that all data on Lemmy is available for everybody. As far as I know all private messages between users are only visible to the involved users and (as there is no end 2 end encryption) the technical administrators of both instances involved. Same with user passwords, the sign up mail adress etc.
All other content on Lemmy so far is public. As there are no closed communities, I don’t think anybody would expect the information published here to be somewhat private.
On Facebook, Reddit etc. we do have closed communities that may trick users into thinking that whatever they post there is only visible to the target audience while in reality it’s heavily analyzed and sold to third parties.
Please enlighten me, but I currently can’t see any inherent issue that is specific to Lemmy and Mastodon.
Actually just got here based on that post. Knew about the fediverse before, but was hesitant to take the plunge
Outstanding choice.
Just keep in mind, the instances are all made up, you can see everything from everywhere and if you don’t like limits or administration on one instance, you can always move to another.
Once you populate your homepage with the right communities (and block all the furries/tankies) you’ll love it here
Or add additional furries because they’re mostly just silly little guys.
It depends on how furry is the subject. I have seen some furry exchanges that are uncomprehensible.
Just block the fascists and you’re good to go, tbh. The tankies are a very small community here.
Furries are pretty wholesome – whether they and queer people are there, I use as a miner’s canary to see if a place has a welcoming and chill atmosphere.
People can like what they want, I just dont personally enjoy seeing that myself. In my experience I havent seen any fascists, just Authoritarian advocates.
Sure, people can like what they want. Though I don’t think we should encourage inaction against the far right. Unfortunately, I’ve seen a few, but indeed very few. Personally I feel divided on tankies, but in my perspective, the greater foe is the fascist. That said: AAAB (All Authoritarians Are Bastards), and if we can combat both effectively, then great!
But also, to put it as a metaphor. If I had to pick my battles – and had three bullets, and there were a fascist and a tankie in the room with me, I’d shoot the fascist immediately, and keep two to safeguard against tankies - so that if I shot, I still have a credible threat afterward.
A tankie is an ally against a fascist, and can turn into a fiend - so let us make sure that they have to stay our friend. And while they are our friend, then let us treat them with at least kindness. They don’t need to like us and we don’t need to like them; but we need to band together against the storm.
Welcome To Lemmy! (Immediately starts bickering over the various pros and cons of furry vs. tankie)
Furries have a very strong association with far right movements.
Far right movements, if anything, want to kill furries. Press X to doubt.
Burying one’s head in the sand will surely help the movement get rid of neonazis. It works all the time! quo vadis USA?
Thanks, working my way through that now
One thing you’ll see here is that it’s a lot more human than Reddit. People here are wayyyy more willing to ask questions and understand instead instead of just assuming. People here are also more willing to actually provide links and supporting documentation.
Of course, I’m not saying that always makes people right, but people are also more willing to accept when they’re mistaken and also give people the benefit of the doubt.
It’s a breath of fresh air on the internet.
Yeah, me too. I was getting tired of the Reddit bubble I have been pushed in to for a while now. This here is such a refreshment…
Welcome!
Bob Dylan once proclaimed that who is not busy being born is busy dying. You’ll probably find us busy being born over here, but I consider that to be a good thing. We’re very happy to have you here helping us out with it. :)
Welcome! Most of us came over during the Reddit API fiasco a couple years ago. It’s a lot nicer here. You’ll notice the difference the more you post or comment. It’s not like screaming into the void, like you get on Reddit.
Welcome, I’ve been here two years and it’s been great. At first you might miss some content but that’s just your dopamine receptors resetting from the slot machine effect of reddit.
The “algorithms” here are simple and honest and all the Russian/Chinese bots are on lemmy.ml. Be careful though, you might end up switching to Linux if you stay here (which I recommend).
My best newbie tip is to use https://lemmyverse.net/ to find new communities.
Just set your home instance (in your case lemmy.world) with the house icon and all links will refer you to the right place for you.
Discoverimg new stuff isn’t always straight forward, but lemmyverse.net makes it a little easier.
Then there are communities for promoting other new communities as well.
Have fun, amd welcome!
Brand new to Piefed here - i’m clueless about what you’re suggesting here. Why is there no piefed-app, and why do i need to use another service to make Piefed useful?
I feel like everytime there’s a european alternative to anything, it’s always unnecesarily complex and extremely unintuitive…
You don’t need the other service. I personally strongly oppose pitching stuff about federation and so on (this is something for a user to look into if they are interested).
If you are looking for communities, click the all Communities -> All Communities button:
https://piefed.social/communities
And then type a keyword to find a community.
Voyager works for mobile:
https://f-droid.org/packages/app.vger.voyager/
You can also just use the mobile website (that’s what I prefer).
If you have any questions, just post them here:
PieFed also solves this natively better than Lemmy, so people coming in from Lemmy tends to give advice that is not all that useful for PieFed users.
Piefed is much newer so the clients don’t have the support they have with Lemmy.
Thank you for the suggestion, will definitely check that out!
Highly recommend lemmy. Yes, it doesn’t have all the communities that Reddit has and engagement isn’t as high, but its general content is overall good and it doesn’t feel littered with bots and spam like Reddit. It’s also much easier to access than it was when it first came out and the available clients are light years better than the garbage Reddit app.
So, I have Lemmy now and just made an account on PieFed. I don´t want to use multiple platforms. What would you suggest? Can I synch them?
Lemmy and Piefed communicate with each other natively. You’ll find people talking about Lemmy here because they are on Lemmy, and most of them won’t even realize that you are not. It doesn’t matter that you are not, as we communicate across the platforms just fine.
One of our greatest challenges is that we don’t have a good umbrella term to refer to all of us. But I guess that’s not such a tragic problem.
In either case, no further action needed on your part.
Welcome!
You only need one platform, it’s like email, you use the provider you like the most.
Yeah, this is part of what had me a bit confused. I’m on lemmy, and in addition there’re different apps/readers for different instances? I just downloaded the top choice from the app store (Boost for lemmy). But they all talk to each other? And as far as I understood, you can also interact with for instance Mastodon which is an alternative to Twitter?
In short, every Lemmy instance holds a complete copy of the full post and comment history of every user of every other website on the lemmy/mastodon network. Every post and comment you make is first copied locally and then sent to the other sites for their own local copy.
It’s more resource intensive to have all of these separate sites, but it ensures that if one falls, another can take its place basically instantly. Redundancy means lemmy is incredibly sturdy with effectively 99.99% uptime. Your site might go down, but just change the url and you’re back. Albeit with a new account to make. Though I haven’t had to swap sites at this point, and it’s not a common occurrence
We’re glad you’re safe now!
Thank you, happy to be here!
Welcome!
It takes a bit of fiddling and customization to get your blocklists and filters set up, but that’s true to a lesser degree for Reddit anyways. There’s tons of people that should be willing to point you in the right directions, though, should you have questions.
Welcome!
This place is not quite as active as Reddit, simply by virtue of the userbase being a lot smaller. But I’ve quite enjoyed the past three years I’ve been on this platform.
My first recommendation would be to subscribe to some communities (equivalent to subreddits) you are interested in.
The main communities are mostly covered, but if they are particularly niche they might either be rather quiet or simply don’t exist yet. At that point the only real way is to get them going is to contribute yourself.Also, small piece of potentially unsolicited advice:
spoiler
If a community is hosted on a domain that ends in .ml, they are likely a “Marxist-Leninist” (authoritarian communist, aka “tankie”) community. The same holds for individual users.
The moderation in tankie communities (e.g. lemmy.ml) is generally not very great, in my experience.
They tend to not be particularly accepting of any criticism of their beliefs, so these places tend to turn into an echo chamber.Personally I blocked lemmy.ml, and the overall Lemmy experience has been better for it.
Enjoy your stay :)
Ah alright, thanks for the heads-up! :)
For all redditors and elsewhere who have come to PieFed or Lemmy, welcome! Don’t forget to contribute to the devs every now and then.
Lemmy/PieFed works like if you had multiple reddits (“instances”) talking to each other, and also to other non-reddits that are linked, like Friendica, Mastodon (this is “federation”).
What Instance to Pick?
If you wanna find a good instance, my recommendation is: don’t go for the biggest one. Pick a mid-sized or smaller one, or find one yourself. This is a great guide on Github giving some pointers, including a “idc, just give me some instances” at the top.
If you still wanna pick yourself but there’s a bit too much, I recommend going for the instances with 20-1000 people. The smallest are either self-hosted or probably just friends/classrooms, and if it’s too big, might get issues with hosting costs.
Apps
For Lemmy interfaces/apps, see here. I personally like Voyager, Mlem, and Thunder, but a lot of them are great. There’s even an old reddit-like look if you want. Here’s a list for the PieFed ones.
Pro-tip: Block Some Stuff
Don’t be scared! Unlike with Reddit, the block options are a bit better. The following is a list of keywords I’ve put up to block. It’s pretty useful so far.List of keywords
Trump
Kirk
ICE
Elon
Musk
rapist
Republican
pedophile
GOP
Israel
HamasBlock Sites
These will block the ones that pop up as links. I’m not going to directly link them, but either way here you go.
Fox News
Breitbart
Sputnik
Russian Today
Twitter
Facebook
Instagram
ThreadsAlso, if you keep arguing with the same user, don’t be afraid to block them.
Blocking is very powerful on Lemmy and Piefed.
Very nice comment
Came here directly from this reddit post. Totally new here - is Piefed only a browser-based alternative? Why is there no Piefed-app ? The only thing i can find is "Blorp for Lemmy and Piefed… sounds weird.
Post of apps that support Piefed:
Blorp dev here. Sorry for the silly name, but I assure you I’ve spend hundreds of hours making Blorp the best app I possibly can. It’s totally free, fully open source, and it doesn’t log any of our data. I would love for you to give my app a try!
Welcome!
I know Piefed is supported by Interstellar, Summit, and Thunder, and probably others that I forgot
I believe Boost also supports Piefed but I haven’t checked ( it does per @[email protected] )
You can browse https://www.lemmyapps.com/ and see if the apps listed there also support Piefed:
It does. Source: using boost rn
Thanks, adding their link to my comment!
One small thing to be aware of is that app support is a little more recent in PieFed than in Lemmy, so while the apps work well (I had good experiences with Voyager), some nice PieFed features that exist in the browser might be missing from the apps (for now).
The apps are still great, but it makes me personally prefer it as a web app for now. :)
Can confirm Summit supports Piefed and it seems pretty slick.
The content is the same between lemmy and piefed, but they have some different features, such as support for surveys and moderation tools.
Welcome and enjoy the content
So, I have Lemmy now and just made an account on PieFed. I don´t want to use multiple platforms. What would you suggest? Can I synch them?
You just pick one, unless you want to keep your accouns separate. No need to sync them. Here’s your PieFed account as seen on Lemmy.world, as an example.
I personally prefer PieFed. Lemmy is older and has more users.
@cabbage @Little_Protection434 yup, everything talks to everything else. I’m reading/posting this from mastodon.
Piefed has more features, faster development and is written in python.
To be honest it’s just a personal preference. You’ll have access to the same posts and comments either way.
No need to make multiple accounts. I remember when I joined Lemmy I made 3 accounts the first day and thought “ugh this is going to be a pain in the ass keeping all these separate accounts.” But I didn’t realize that all this crap talks together. So you just make one account and it connects to everything. It’s a lot easier than people make it sound at first.
If you ever do find yourself using a second account, I’ve spend a lot of time perfecting multi account on Blorp. Nice if you wanna use Lemmy and PieFed. I’m pretty confident that you won’t find a Lemmy/PieFed client out that that will switch accounts as seamlessly Blorp. For example, Voyager is one of the best apps out there, but it will close any open posts or communities when you switch accounts. With Blorp, you can switch accounts and continue exactly where you left off.
Interstellar and Boost (i use both apps on Piefed)
“The sweetspot is using both at the moment” - the sweetspot is siphoning knowledge from shitty platform into the fediverse
Honestly I haven’t touched Reddit since the API exodus. I just went without whatever wasn’t over here.
Same. I now see Reddit as I do Twitter, Tiktok, Instagram or whatever. If it’s linked somewhere or someone sends me something, I’ll look at it. But I’m not installing their apps or creating accounts to engage.
Consider these frontends:
You could say Lemmy has curated content
Lemmy has cured content, smoked content, also simmered and brothed content, all types of flavory nutritious content
Honestly, even as an American (from California - a rare state of sanity in this damn country), I’ve been moving to de-google and move away from stuff like reddit for months now at this point. Especially since user data requests by our federal government (and likely other world governments) are an open secret that these companies can’t really refuse.
Glad to see y’all on the same path :)
Yeah, YouTube and Google Earth are my main holdouts. I use PeerTube and OSM but there are still gaps
I deleted my google account and moved all of my youtube activity onto Grayjay (since it doesn’t require any account and any saved “subscriptions” are stored on your device locally), maybe that could be an option for you? They even have a desktop client now :)
I use FreeTube on my computer. I also have some YouTube channels that I download to my computer and host there to download / watch on my phone through Jellyfin (and use Patreon to give money to those channels). I I still end up on YouTube from my phone.
I still have a few issues with apps like Freetube / Grayjay though:
- It’s still YouTube. So it’s still a monopoly when it comes to many signals that indicate the platform is doing something inappropriate and it is an arms race with YouTube allowing these UIs to keep working. I suspect YouTube has enough lock in that they would invest in breaking these UIs over changing many issues users have. I think that only changes when creators cross post to other platforms and then they need to be able to make enough money for that to be worth it.
- I also, for now, still use an iPhone and most of these apps aren’t in the app store. (I have Invidious as a quick search in the browser but it frequently doesn’t work.) I’m toying with switching next time I buy and then my main focuses would probably be the camera and security.
Fuck Reddit and Fuck Spez.
The tankie stuff turns out to still remain a hard sell, who could’ve imagined… (block lemmy.ml if you can, if you can’t, switch platforms and then block .ml)
One unfortunate limitation of the fediverse is that blocking undesired categories of content is harder than on reddit: when you block a subreddit, it doesn’t exist on 50 other instances. None of the fediverse stuff handles that gracefully, the “subreddit” approach was just not a good choice for this kind of thing.
Unfortunately blocking an instance still leaves the commenters from that instance visible. That could be technically fixed of course by adding a new type of blocking.
Piefed blocks those users too.
You can set up keywords on piefed to filter out.
I’d rather block fascists. That’s the real hard sell, tbh, and fortunately Lemmy does not really have them so far.
Tankies are facists. More I see of them more I realize they are non US MAGA. Both leaning towards being ultranationalists with love for cult of personality leaders, authoritarian governments, and one party.
Only real difference is healthcare, but the shared love of preferring to trust in what they hope is a benevolent dictator to tell them what to do and get rid of their enemies is a common goal. Neither seems to actually want a government that fears the people that can easily replace leaders they dislike or abuse their power.
