This morning, I had free time. As usual, opened my Apollo app, only to be greeted by the loud reminder that I am cut off from the community I have lurked, posted and lurked in almost a decade.
Days, even weeks before Apollo closed, KBin, Tildes, Mastodon and lemmy have been the talk of reddit. The fediverse is trending and just for the heck of it, I applied to lemmy.ml and vlemmy.net. My account wasn’t approved on vlemmy.net for days and only recently did my lemmy.ml account was approved, only to discover they don’t allow the creation of new communities.
I searched around and discovered lemmy.world. The sign up was painless, just like in reddit. As soon as I signed in I was able to create a community and started browsing right away.
As this day came to a close few more things jumped at me.
- The posts may be fewer but the quality and length is higher.
- The people I interacted with are more than helpful, positive and kind.
- No karma points
- The collective unity behind scorning the corporatization of the greater net.
As I browsed and scrolled, and discovered communities, I am reminded yet again of the bygone days of old, when the internet was young. When everyone had geocities website and phpbb forums.
Here, everyone is making the community into a digital home, built on ideals of a freer more independent internet. Here I felt something that I haven’t felt in a long time. And maybe it is nostalgia or maybe just a post trauma from the drama that is reddit.
But as I mindlessly scroll through the post here, I say to myself, this could be a good home. And truly, I am home.
Good day fellow lemmies. And thank you for reading through my long winded rant. I just want to express how happy I am to have discovered this place.
In time, may this grow into a friendlier, kinder reddit. And in time, may it surpass what it wasn’t intended to replace but took on the responsibility anyway; a testament to the enduring resilience of our love for all things free- an internet of the people, for the people and by the people.
I remember the countless days I’ve spent on traditional forums back then (particularly Gamespot and niche forums like Dissidia-Forums).
The internet did feel freer back then. And it’s a little sad that I haven’t felt that same sense of freedom for so long. For the past decade, the corpo-fication of every major social media just highlighted how much we needed platforms built for and by the users; platforms built for discussions and not merely for content consumption and advertiser-friendliness.
I’m glad I made the move, and I hope the fediverse continues to grow in the right direction.
Freer true. But isolated and less archival. Some forums tend to just disappear without a trace and some are hard to find (though I guess the directories and web rings back then have this mitigated.)
Still with the fediverse, I am hopeful that much of these concerns would be slowly addressed. And with the influx of users catapulting the platform to a more mainstream one, more and more issues would come to light and be easily stomped out.
As is frequently said, we’re just in the “growing pains” phase after all. :)
wefwef even lets you transfer subreddit subscriptions to Lemmy communities with Apollo!
I didn’t get to export my data from Apollo before Reddit shut down the API. Is it too late for me to transfer my subreddits to Lemmy? Is there any good way to do that now?
Try the export option in wefwef and if it didn’t work make a post in !wefwef@lemmy.world
Afaik wefwef is the only way to do this rn
You’re spot on!
That’s the perfect way to put it, Lemmy feels like the forums back in the earlier days of the internet, before social media took over everything and the internet was a bunch of little small niche communities, but each one was tight knit.
Not only that but the idea of the fediverse reminds me a lot of the internet of old where multiple blogs and geocities pages would be linked by blog rolls. Now that that I think about it, maybe federation is really just the modern blog roll. 😅
Goodness, I just had a memory of web rings in the 90s on tripod, anglefire, and geocities, lol.
If I set up a Lemmy instance it’ll have to be named lemmycities.
Goodness, I just had a memory of web rings in the 90s on tripod, anglefire, and geocities, lol.
If I set up a Lemmy instance it’ll have to be named lemmycities.
Omg! The web ring!! The link swaps and the directories. I feel so old… lemmycities. What a perfect idea. If only lemmy is as simple as clicking install on softaculous, I would have installed an instance ASAP. Build it on an offshore/privacy respecting VPS and build as many communities as I want without limits.
The thing you will need to get your head around, is that you’ve not just joined lemmy.world. You’ve just joined the fediverse. I’m currently commenting on your post from kbin. I don’t even have a lemmy account. I am not on lemmy while I type this.
Want to ‘boost’ a ‘toot’ on mastodon, the fediverse equivalent of twitter? No problem. I’m almost certain you can do that from lemmy too, like I can from kbin. Hell, there are people working on allowing people on lemmy, mastodon, etc. to read and comment on wordpress posts:
https://wordpress.org/plugins/activitypub/
There are still bugs to be ironed out, but imagine being able to retweet a youtube comment from facebook messenger with a reaction gif off instagram. Impossible, right? Not in the fediverse.
And I for one think that’s really really cool.
Caveat: you’re an early adopter. There are going to be bugs. On the other hand, unlike reddit which made millions in advertising revenue, IME the people running networks in the fediverse don’t wait ten years to half fix issues.
I’m really liking Lemmy so far. I’ve been able to scroll Lemmy like I did on Reddit, basically 1:1. There aren’t a high volume of posts coming in yet but hopefully we’ll get there soon.
True. And in busier communities, you wouldn’t really know that it’s not reddit. With the dark theme, I feel like I’m back to using Apollo. Whether the UI is intentional or both lemmy and Apollo took inspiration with each other really helps the feeling of familiarity, like riding a new bike after the old one was broken.
Great write-up.
Forums definitely had, on the whole, a better quality discussion, friendlier discourse (but not always), and less spam. That said, I feel as though we are romanticizing them a bit as a knee jerk to the cess pool that reddit became.
The Achilles heel of forums, in my opinion, always was how disparate they were. Each one with different sign up rules and clunky interfaces. And you sometimes really had to go searching to find one that was appropriate for your needs!
Also, forum owners would shill out to vendors, and some members weren’t always welcoming to newcomers. “We answered this four years ago so go rtfm” is not good for conversation and discussion, no matter how true it may be.
I’m not saying all this to be negative, but rather to say that the fediverse improves on all of these negatives. It can being everything to one place, apps are coming that will further improve the user experience.
And hopefully those managing the code behind the scenes tweak it along the way to minimize karma whoring and spamming (not sure what can really be done about AI).
In short, I too am really happy to be here and am thankful for the (probably inevitable) fall of reddit for making me realize how wonderful this is.
I’m really happy to see what it’s growing into! When I joined, there were only a few thousand users across Lemmy and kbin, and it was pretty quiet. But the quality was definitely there, which is what convinced me to stay. I’m also really happy that casualconversation is over here, I used to be pretty active on the subreddit but stopped using it a while ago, definitely gonna be more active here again :)
True. This is just my first week on lemmy and I am enjoying the quality of discussions, as well as the responses. Unlike in some subreddits and forums where any question can be dismissed, at least in lemmy as I experienced it, there seems to be more willingness to engage and inform. All in all a very non toxic experience. And all the more made me more hopeful for what it could become in the future.
Btw, you have 201 karma point equivalents by kbin’s metrics
