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this post was submitted on 02 Jun 2023
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The reluctance of redditors to move to lemmy always amazes me.
Not surprisingly, there's a lot of posts in a lot of subs about the recently announced changes. In every post the same pattern is repeated ad-nauseum:
- "i hate reddit, it sucks here, I've always wanted to leave, I'm never coming back once this happens"
- "maybe we should move the sub to lemmy so we won't have this problem in future?"
- "but what about all our data, the wiki & post history and such"
- "but there's no users on lemmy"
- "but that would split the community!"
This is the case even in the subs I would have thought would be really keen to jump ship, like /r/selfhosted
I think this type of approach is the right idea though, a better ecosystem can only be good.
"but there's no users on lemmy"
It's definitely a chicken and the egg situation.
I've been lurking here the past few days when I saw lemmy as a reddit alternative. I decided to sign up today as lurking isn't doing this place any favors. Hopefully more people will sign up, and the momentum will build and continue.
I've been on lemmy for about a year, and this is the first time I've seen lemmy this consistently active.
It actually reminds me of reddit in the earlier years :')
It's a chicken and egg problem for sure, but what I find a bit funny in every case like this (Reddit -> Lemmy, Twitter -> Mastodon, etc) is when someone says "X doesn't have any users!" it makes me want to reply with something like:
Well of course, if X had anywhere near the population amount of [Reddit, Twitter, Etc] then its likely that these changes wouldn't be happening in the first place, to avoid a migration...
These companies think they (and unfortunately in a lot of cases, are) too big to fail, if there was a competitor out there that had another sizable slice of the pie, then I doubt they'd be making idiotic changes like this nonsense over the API.
I know that this is just how the network effect works, but it does make me laugh for a moment every once in a while.
It's obvious that reddit had someone run the stats on what percentage of users would abandon the site completely and who would bite the bullet and eventually migrate over to their app. Obviously there must be more potential earnings with whatever projected percentage of users actually swallow their pride and use their app. All that Metadata must be worth a fortune to them.
Its funny to me that those of us posting viable alternatives in those threads get drowned out by doomerism (there's nothing we can do!!!). There are alternatives out there to reddit, and they're already better experiences.
It's really baffling. Especially because there are some solid but really small communities that would have a fairly easy time migrating but are still not even considering doing so because of the small userbase over here. These communities don't even benefit from the bigger userbase on reddit because the discussions are solely between the users that are subbed to the subreddits.
Hmm I think that normally it is legit hard to move a community to a new server/system. Even a small one. It was tried with a german subreddit to feddit.de and it failed.
Right now there's a lot of momentum, probably because reddit fucked up.
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Lemmy is just the latest in a very long line of potential reddit successors. Historically, you can't move a subreddit to a different platform because redditors are users of reddit, not users of your particular subreddit.
This is true, but of course individuals can choose to move.
This may not be a warm fuzzy thing to say, but I don't feel much of a "community" in reddit subs.
What I mean is that to me, 100 people reading a sub on lemmy once a week is just as useful as 1000 people reading a sub on reddit once a month. As in, I don't really care if the specific users from a reddit sub are here, just that there are some engaged users here.
undefined> “but there’s no users on lemmy”
I mean that's a reasonable point. The amount of users is always important for a platform adaptation. But I see a good chance for Lemmy if/when Reddit removes/restricts all porn subs.. IF there's a place for it in Lemmy.
There's no users on Lemmy?
Then who are you people!?
The voices of the abyss join us
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It just makes me roll my eyes, they act like it's all so hard to join or leave, when really it isn't. When tumblr had it's nsfw ban, I joined reddit. Now that Tumblr is recovering, I rejoin with a new account. When reddit is having it's api exodus, I join lemmy. All you need is an email and a username, the rest is up to you.
The only real concerns that are in the list are:
-
The wiki (which could just be a simple copy-paste), though I wouldn't like Lemmy communities to be exact copies of the subreddits. There's many gripes I have with certain subs that should be avoided with Lemmy. As for data, if there's information you think is important to keep, share it. Find communities to share that info with, create ones if there isn't one for the certain thing you want to share. Don't just keep it hanging on reddit. As tvtropes says, keep circulating the tapes.
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Splitting the community could be an issue, but a lot of subreddits simply AREN'T community based anymore. I can honestly only think of maybe three off hand that still feel like a community. One of which is only so due to it's somewhat more active discord server.
Let's get a hackathon going. Maybe it's possible to have a project which allows these apps to work with lemmy. I created a sub on reddit for it: https://www.reddit.com/r/apihackathon/
But maybe that's not the right spot - happy for someone to create a similar community here too.
I know it's unmaintained, but I really love the UI for "Slide for Reddit" and hope the dev for that picks it back up and maps the data inputs to Lemmy. Keep the UI exactly the same (maybe add tiny icons to the left of sublemmy names but that's it).
Oh man, Slide is my go to for years! Such a clean no nonsense experience. Would love to see similar UI.
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Great job dude, hopefully it inspires more migration.
I would love an app just like Sync that would work for Lemmy. Jerboa looks fairly close and quite similar just based on my very limited usage.
edit: clarification
I really hope ljdawson takes a look at this platform. However, in the last few years they have not been posting as many updates and I would not blame them for not starting a new project.
I'm here because of you. Loving your idea, and hoping they go for it. Because what the hell, Reddit.
Reddit banned him! They're freaking out so much.
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Thank you for starting the discussion. I was previously using Boost and now checked out Jerboa. Since Jerboa was inspired by Boost the transition was actually quite easy. Although some functions I really liked, e.g. jumping/navigating through the main comments or adjusting the font size of comments (they appear a tad too big in this app) are still missing. I would really appreciate if this community grows and the 3rd-Party devs could improve the experience further. I also was getting a bit bored by reddit as there was a lot of repetition and decreasing quality in content (while the popularity was increasing). But browsing through Lemmy and watching the enthusiastic mood of the growing community feels exciting again!
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Maybe you want to address mastodon client devs as well… they are familiar with the protocol.
I've been using iOS app Ivory for Mastodon, and it's FANTASTIC. Little did I know, they also make my favorite calculator app, Calcbot.
I would love it if they swooped in and developed for Lemmy.
This is a genius idea. Imagine all app developers get together and once reddit stops working they ALL from their app's interfaces recommend switching to a lemmy instance, and mention that lemmy will be supported on their app in near future.
This could be a massive blow to reddit since the traffic these apps contribute to is huge.
I love using Relay, and if it ever adopts Lemmy support then I'd be using it for sure.
I wonder how hard it would be for Lemmy to expose a Reddit compatible API. That work would only have to be done once, and then all the apps could just switch endpoints instead of each app having to implement the Lemmy API.
This is just an uninformed take, and I don't want to give the idea I know what I'm saying:
Probably very hard for things beyond the most basic browsing within one instance. There's unavoidable interoperability features we would want here but have no equivalent in a reddit environment, and such apps would just feel too limited versus using a browser with the current Web UI. For example, a user posts from another instance and you click to check their posts, which turns out are all over the place in federated space. Even if we create an API layer that condenses all those requests to a simple single call we would do on Reddit, how to label those results for wherethey reside is still another small UI headache. And that's one problem view out of a couple dozen in the app, while merely assuming single-instance browsing.
But more drastically, Lemmy's moderation tools are probably heavily different from those on reddit. Even if they're similar in actions - they're absolutely going to be dissimilar in completeness, Reddit is much older than Lemmy and has that time advantage. I know a large part of people who moderate reddit did it using third party apps for ease of use on a phone, and that's a demographic that probably can't be captured very easily.
Some things certainly don't map 1:1, but my own uninformed take is that it's probably not that big of a problem.
For example, a user posts from another instance and you click to check their posts, which turns out are all over the place in federated space. Even if we create an API layer that condenses all those requests to a simple single call
Doesn't Lemmy already do this? I am posting from feddit.de, but when I click your username, I can see your posts on lemmy.ml - inside feddit.de, served by feddit.de. The only requests my browser makes to lemmy.ml are for things like avatars.
The only way to find out how big of a problem it really is is to try, which I think I will do if no one beats me to it.
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I will be speaking with a lot of other reddit mods in my own mod teams and some other friends, hopefully I can bring some subs/people here.
Also thank you for doing this. @nutomic@lemmy.ml and I would rather be spending our time coding, and less time telling people about Lemmy. Its something I'm not very good at, and don't like to do too often, and greatly appreciate it when others are willing to help us out there.
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would be nice to see an app for linux mobile. I run postmarketOS on pinephone and pinetab, currently using gnome shell mobile. Of course, the lemmy website works great on all of my devices, but an app might be nice if I use this more to get notifications.
I use Tuba for Mastodon and thought I might be able to login to lemmy with it, but I guess not. I can see lemmy posts from there though.
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The thing about most of these apps is that they are actually proprietary closed source and have advertisements to fund development/make money. I dont quite know how they could be convinced to develop an app for a platform that (I think) explicitly does not allow ads. I haven't really used any of these except baconreader years ago so I'm really not sure how these apps are licensed.
However I hope some of them see the light of FOSS even on mobile platforms and decide to contribute to jerboa or even start a new Lemmy app.
RedReader is FOSS and has been my favorite Reddit app experience for several years.
The dev has already expressed an interest in possibly refocusing on Lemmy, too.
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Its not our preference of course, but they could make closed source apps for lemmy. I'd rather they build them out in the open, and they could still charge for them or accept donations if they like. Open source devs need to get paid too.
Is that really forbidden, though? Lemmy itself is open source, but that doesn't mean clients are forced to be as well(there are plenty of closed source email clients, after all, even though the protocol is open).
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Hey that's great, thank you for doing this!
I also hope those app devs, who are much more skilled programmers than I am, would be willing to contribute to the two existing open-source apps: Jerboa for android, and Mlem for iOS. We could definitely use the help.
I could see infinity doing it the second they get the idea. Foss apps be like that.
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