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The end of Reddit? Why the blackout is still going – and what happens next (www.techradar.com)

submitted 1 year ago by hedge@beehaw.org to c/technology@beehaw.org

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[-] monerobull@monero.town 30 points 1 year ago

I'd love to turn the subreddit into a mere front to funnle new people onto lemmy or another community forum but I doubt the average user would enjoy that very much 😅 I think we will put it up to a vote, we also did one to determin if we should join the protest in the first place

[-] communist@beehaw.org 19 points 1 year ago

https://github.com/LemmyNet/lemmy-ui/issues/1048

https://github.com/LemmyNet/lemmy-ui/issues/1113

I think once these two issues are solved, the average user really isn't going to have any problem with lemmy.

[-] small44@beehaw.org 13 points 1 year ago

They should first add errors messages so people know why there's an infinite loading icon when registering or signing in

[-] communist@beehaw.org 1 points 1 year ago

I think you're going to need to elaborate, or create an issue on the issue tracker yourself.

[-] CascadeDismayed@lemmy.world 3 points 1 year ago

Fully agree.

[-] captainjaneway@lemmy.world 1 points 1 year ago

I'm not sure I agree. I don't like those two solutions. They basically try to centralize the platform. I think Lemmy is a little confusing at first, but that's a UX/UI problem and not necessarily a good enough reason to change underlying features of the platform.

I think a user subscribing to communities across instances is a pretty tough technical challenge and it would be very difficult to manage. How are particular communities decided to be a part of a multi-community? Is it voted on? Is there a mod of the multi-community? If so, that could still lead to bifurcation wherein you now have a multi-community that claims to provide all /c/pokemon content across instances but is potentially missing many viable communities on some instances due to things like moderator in-fighting or moderator preferences.

I like how Lemmy allows for sort of duplicate communities. Reddit already had that issue and people naturally flocked to the communities that had the content that suited them. I think it would behoove Lemmy to stay away from trying to centralize it all.

However, I agree that it is confusing. I think this is a UI/UX challenge which needs to be solved. I don't have the solution, but I think it's clear that the app language needs to help users naturally feel comfortable living within an instance and moving across instances.

I am open to suggestions and I am fully happy to be proven wrong. But as a software engineer, the second GitHub issue gave me the heeby-jeebies on a technical front. Seemed a little hairy for a young platform to take on right now. I think there are plenty of other lower hanging fruit id prefer for the community to solve:

Building a nice mobile android app Jerboa is pretty good but it needs some TLC. Timeouts happen frequently on my app and crash it/erase content I was reading
Provide better documentation/marketing materials for new users. I'm open to the idea of a centralized website where users can go to create accounts, learn about Lemmy, and maybe initially subscribe to popular communities

All in all though, I feel like Lemmy is totally usable. Actually, the most confusing thing to me was learning that I could see my comments and posts on Mastodon. That threw me through a loop. I still don't understand Mastodon since the UI - to me - just seems to be random comments. I don't really have any thread-based context to understand the comments I see on my Mastodon app. So for now I stick to Jerboa.

[-] communist@beehaw.org 4 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

They basically try to centralize the platform.

No, they don't, I don't know why you think that, this is really what federation is all about, seamless communication between servers, all they do is make it so that linking to different posts across the fediverse doesn't log you out, or remove you from your instance unnecessarily

The other one ALLOWS you to categorize subreddits. Neither of these are bad things in any way, and if you don't like them, you can manually visit other instances, and simply not use the multireddits.

I like how Lemmy allows for sort of duplicate communities. Reddit already had that issue and people naturally flocked to the communities that had the content that suited them. I think it would behoove Lemmy to stay away from trying to centralize it all.

This won't change anything about that, it'll just sort them by category

Building a nice mobile android app Jerboa is pretty good but it needs some TLC. Timeouts happen frequently on my app and crash it/erase content I was reading

this isn't worth focusing on right now because: https://github.com/derivator/tafkars/tree/main/tafkars-lemmy

Provide better documentation/marketing materials for new users. I’m open to the idea of a centralized website where users can go to create accounts, learn about Lemmy, and maybe initially subscribe to popular communities

join-lemmy definitely needs an upgrade.

[-] aard@kyu.de 16 points 1 year ago

In case you want to go that route: I made a bot that posts links to posts in a list of lemmy communities to a subreddit, optionally with flair and a comment of what is going on, to be run in a fully restricted subreddit (i.e., no comments show up at all, new posts need to be made via lemmy)

[-] edgerunneralexis@dataterm.digital 4 points 1 year ago

Would it be possible to make the bot post the content of the Reddit posts, instead of links to Reddit, via web scraping? That way we could avoid giving traffic and engagement to reddit.

[-] aard@kyu.de 1 points 1 year ago

It's the other way round: It posts links to Lemmy posts to reddit, and then adds a top level comment stating that to post and comment you need to go to Lemmy.