Slashdot -> Fark -> Digg -> Reddit -> Lemmy

Tried the official Reddit app today and boy people weren't joking when they say it sucks. I thought it'd just be the usual experience plus some ads but I was totally wrong.

The official app doesn't respect your subreddit subscriptions at all, instead force feeding you feeds of whatever their algorithm thinks will drive maximum engagement just like a shit version of Facebook. The "hot" etc functionality is completely stipped from it entirely.

Guess I'm here to stay on the fediverse now.

What absolutely sucks about this is that I had carefully curated my subscriptions on RIF in order not to exacerbate my dumb mental health issues.
Hell, I've read angry posts about people in recovery from addiction and alcohol saying how they keep seeing ads for beer or gambling and things like that.
It's horrifying!!
- The algorithm really doesn't work when you are critical or sceptical over a subject. For instance crypto sceptics from r/buttcoin being shown binance ads. Yes, they do show an interest in crypto, but may be the least suceptible persons to that ad.
- Me too. I suffer from PTSD myself so I avoid things like the war coverage in Ukraine. The app is full of it and I can't filter it fully like I can in RIF.
- people in recovery from addiction and alcohol saying how they keep seeing ads for beer or gambling
  Not that this is how it works, but I imagine a diligent algorithm looking at those individuals and that content, and then thinking "mhhmm this will generate maximum revenue!!".
- From an advertiser perspective it makes sense to sell to addicted people. Mission accomplished?
you don't mention the copious, copious amounts of ads and sponsored contents
wow thanks reddit, you are more and more Facebook-like now, congratulations.
- Yeah, that's pretty bad too but I was at least willing to accept there is a valid reason for that to keep the lights on.
  However, when they go as far to break the core functionality of the website and turn it into another Facebook with psychological manipulation at its core then that's a whole other thing entirely.
I hate the reddit app but I don't have that problem. My home page is all what I've joined.

I think even calling it Lemmy is not the right move. Yeah, Lemmy is the server software running on a bunch of instances. But we also have kbin, and new softwares will pop up and fork and come and go over time. Once we can do some kind of account or community level migration, it won't matter whether you are on Lemmy or kbin or the next great thing. Everything will be federated so it will inter-op beautifully. If an unfriendly instance admin comes along, we can collectively cut and run with minimal interruption.

Thats still a way off from where we are now but the hard step was getting to the Fediverse in the first place. So, welcome to the newcomers among us.

this is the future nerds like me have been imagining since the early 2000's
- Laughs in BBS or
  Laughs in Newgroups
I think the concept of the Fediverse is still really alien to people, even the people who are using it. Everyone is still so used to their centralized platforms, so they still think of the Fediverse in terms of platforms rather than as a whole.
You still hear people say "Mastodon" to mean the microblogging corner of the Fediverse even if they're not actually on Mastodon, and now people say "Lemmy" to mean the link aggregation corner of the Fediverse even if not everyone is actually on Lemmy.
- I recently found and like the term "threadiverse" for reddit-like federated software
- Maybe this is an unpopular opinion but the word "Fediverse" leaves a sour taste in my mount just because it sounds so much like the stupidity that was "Metaverse" (yes I know they are completely unrelated)
- Yep, and that’s totally fair.
- Are you saying there's other reddit-like/inspired webservices that are part of the fediverse that aren't Lemmy? What are those?
undefined> calling it Lemmy is not the right move.
Spankin' new here, so what do I know, but while the semantics might not be completely accurate, that is not an uncommon occurrence. And Lemmy sounds personal, with a bit of a Motorhead edge to it.
Maybe we'll all be called Lemmies web slinging in the Fediverse one day.
- Yup, having a name is a pretty important aspect of growth. And while the fediverse could certainly work, it's not very intuitive for new users and also covers such a broad range of functionalities that it won't help people who are specifically looking for a Reddit alternative. Sure 'lemmy' is a misnomer, but it's better to have a name being used incorrectly than no name at all.

It's funny to read this article about the death of Digg again:

In reality, Digg changed their business model and pretended that they didn’t. That is something that is unacceptable with communities and won’t be forgotten. Reddit co-founder Alexis Ohanian hit the nail on the head in an open letter to (now former) Digg CEO – Kevin Rose:

        “You chose to grow with venture capital and you’ve no doubt (I hope) taken some money off the table in your Series C round. I say this because this new version of digg reeks of VC meddling. It’s cobbling together features from more popular sites and departing from the core of digg, which was to “give the power back to the people.”

https://searchengineland.com/digg-v4-how-to-successfully-kill-a-community-50450>

Oh sweet, sweet irony.
- At least Ohanian is married to Serena, and left reddit 10 years ago. Spez (aka Steve Huffman) is a fucking piece of shit that betrayed both of his co-founders
Sadly, this is the only logical conclusion of things that are run for profit. Here's hoping the federated model proves more resistant in the long run.
- Doctorow has it right. Enshittification.
- Funding, even in a not-for-profit sense, will always be an issue. Wikipedia struggles, but kinda makes it work. We're going to need something creative for the fediverse...
- In the medium run federated instances will have to be financed somehow as well. We'll see how that goes.

You're missing the precursors:

Email -> Newsgroups -> CGI forums / IRC -> Slashdot... :)

The new Fediverse really is kicking up IRC and newsgroup vibes for this old timer. Its very exciting.

As a really old person, I was thinking today the vibe was unlike anything I've felt since Fidonet ;)
- Lots of similarities between Lemmy and FIDOnet. I’ve been saying this to anyone that will listen.
If we're including those then I think we have gone full circle and are back in the safe waters of protocols
+1 you're right. Especially IRC...oh how I miss those days.
- I miss that moment when I became the cool kid in the channel because I had an IRC bouncer
- There are still some good communities out there. I'm still on IRC every day.
  It's about the only constant over internet use from 1994 to present. IRC and E-mail. Also the web kind of, but it's changed so so much.
I never really used email socially, was always a chat or some bulltin system
IRC is STILL running to this day
- Yup, and some servers are very active.
- I know something like 28 thousand active daily users!
Usenet! Those were the days.

for me it was just

reddit --> Lemmy

You are here, so you are not late.
Unless you count a few random forums when I was a kid, same. You think we'll age out before whatever war starts?

The Fediverse seems like an interesting idea, but I hope it actually holds together.

The bar for being Reddit circa 2010 isn’t that high to be fair, I know expectations have changed but Reddit was down intermittently for years to the point I’m amazed it got the traction it did in hindsight. People talk about Lemmy having tankies on it as though early Reddit didn’t have some even worse unsavoury subs and users too.
- A lot of instances block the tankie instance anyways.
- No kidding, wasn’t r/jailbait the biggest sub for a while there?
I imagine as Mastodon and Lemmy pick up more users, we'll see a lot of activity and improvements in the underlying tech of the fediverse. Should be a fun ride, especially since it's in the hands of the community.
- Let's see if the technology can improve fast enough to retain users.
Let people on other platforms know that we exist! Lol

If you still have a Reddit account, unsub all the subreddits that are refusing to participate in a strike.

Fucking scabs
Good idea! Apparently most of my subs participated, so I only had to unsub a few times. Eerie view to see an empty front page after I was done, never had that.
Apart from this short visit, I stay away from reddit.
I'm kinda proud all the communities I follow followed suit! Even some pretty small/niche ones.
What would that do? Not like they can pay the mods any less lol
Damned good idea. I deleted all my posts and comments but also removing subs is good too.

So many long forgotten relics and old friends lost to time.

bbs, usenet, irc, aol chat rooms, aim/icq/msn messenger (by the way, anyone remember Trillian?), geocities web-rings, various phpBB forums (shoutout neopages), oekaki drawing boards, livejournal, stumbleupon,

Trillian! I paid for the multi-messenger functionality too!
IRC is not dead. Since rexxit began I have started really searching for programming/data science/tech communities. I have found more than I know what to do with and many have an IRC. I just installed Pidgin on one of my Linix machines. Ha! What a time to be alive.
- Rexxit, lol thats brilliant
Trillian!! That's a chain of neurons that's been dormant for about 15 years...
- Good lord, I think I created several chat handles on other services just for the purpose of linking them to Trillian.
Yeah some of those I had forgotten! For me it was usenet, IRC, ICQ, Yahoo Chat Rooms (I was one of the kids that dropped booters and other pesky little bots and hacks into them all the time 😂 - I’m still friends to this day with someone I met via Yahoo Chatrooms though!) Definitely used Trillian, and the old phpBB forums before I found Reddit over 10 years ago…and now Lemmy
Still remember my icq number lol.
- Gosh icq...... this thread is making me tear up a little with nostalgia
- Same. I logged in to their icq web client recently for shits. Was a trip to see all the old usernames.
Oekaki drawing boards ಥ⁠╭⁠╮⁠ಥ Oh how I miss thee...
- I made an irc client in MIRC using MIRC script before it had multi-server capability and thought I was so smart and then a few months later they released the update with it in it. Oh well, it was fun at the time!
IRC thrives! The dusty corners of the internet where people continue to develop the most obscure software functioning as an unknown pillar of the internet still have IRC channels available to discuss and interact.
by the way, anyone remember Trillian?
I never used it, but I did use similar things like Kopete and Pidgin. Both of those still exist and are still maintained, by the way, albeit far less useful now that the big four instant messaging systems are gone. Of those four, only ICQ still exists, and I doubt it still uses the same protocol, seeing as the old one wasn't encrypted.

It'll be great to see more people showing up on Lemmy.

People are so confused and overwhelmed about the fediverse mechanics though.
Maybe there is room for a product that is an aggregator for aggregators. Like, a centralised service that scrapes and collects all Lemmy instances into one super instance.
- Its actually simple. Tell them, its like Email. You have an email account at gmail, but can perfectly fine have email conversation with someone on outllook. Lemmy instance = the same as a web email interface of any email provider. Most people will get their head around that.
- Pardon my confusion since I'm new to the fediverse as well, but isn't every Lemmy instance like the super instance you are describing? You can access any community on any instance from any other; there are commentors in this thread from beehaw.org, lemmy.world, lemmy.sdf.org, programming.dev, and many others.
- I don't think such an aggregator is required. Interoperability is smooth enough that you don't have to think about different instances most of the time. I've only really noticed two points that would be confusing:
  the sign up process
  the "local"/"all" distinction
  So I think what we really need to do to make this platform intuitive to people that aren't already familiar with it is:
  Somehow streamline signing up. The process from googling Lemmy to having an account on an instance should not be confusing or intimidating.
  Filter by "all" by default. The default should cater to the users which are less likely to figure it out themselves. If you don't understand what instances are and what "local" vs "all" means, then you are probably here for the "all" experience. If you understand and really want "local" you are probably fine having to set it yourself.
- That would be https://lemmy.directory

I realise that this is unpopular. But personally while I disagree with the decision to charge (exorbitantly) for the api and appalled at the slander hurled at the dev, I think that is an business choice and one more item that I have to disagree and live with.

But I am very excited about the rise of the fediverse. I know that a company will eventually make a decision that I feel very passionately about, but I will be stuck making a difficult choice. With the fediverse, it provides the users with the opportunity to have control. This power of course often comes with various other costs (lack of a dedicated sre or moderation teams, etc). But I expect that over time this will evolve into options where paid offerings will come up that allows for higher QoS where required.

Honestly, if spez hadn't already sold the site to white supremacists, I'd be a lot quicker to defend this.
- The api changes really were about protecting their gold mine of data from ai data models scraping for data. Reddit wants to use that data to create its own models and then replace moderators with those models. The ultimate goal here is to turn the existing dataset into an automoderator on steroids that they could sell anywhere. Trouble is someone else is going to beat them to it.
  There was a reason these changes lined up so nicely with Google doing the same thing. Everyone's realizing they've been spouting their gold from firehoses for any machine to pick up, and they're being reactionary and turning them off asap instead of just like, accepting it as a facet of having a public social network.
- Who are the white supremacists he sold to?
- He did what now?
- I must’ve missed that part of the story…
I'm also very optimistic right now. The challenges I see are more around funding, as continued work on the code bases and hosting seem to be the largest hurdles and ultimately easier with money than without. The Fediverse feels like an incredibly natural next step for a lot of users that are coming from a Reddit or Reddit-like background. Everything else (robust collection of communities, moderation, 3rd party tooling, etc) comes with the crowd and from the community, not from the "owner", and will only take time if we can solve for the funding/scaling challenges.
It is just the catalyst we need to transcend the status quo and normalize technology that respects its users.

There was del.icio.us as well!

Core memory unlocked
Yea, kinda miss that one =/
I forgot about that site, what did it even do?
- It was kind of a social bookmark sharing site, used it a lot back in the day! I saw word of a revival a while back, but like most things the revivals don't seem to work out. See Digg, Bebo etc. :/

For me, Slashdot-Digg-Reddit-Kbin (Fediverse)

We've moved once, we can move again

Digg -> Reddit -> Lemmy

After experiencing the death of two "power to the people" platforms due to profit-driven VC-backed corporate meddling, here's hoping the third platform is the charm Lemmy & the fediverse.

I was on reddit before digg, but left reddit for digg until diggv4, then I went back to reddit lol. The decentralized nature of Lemmy and the fediverse seems like it will be more resistant to that sort of bullshit though.
I don't think the Fediverse will suffer the same demise as Digg and Reddit, precisely because it's not owned by a profit-driven VC-backed corporation, but there are a couple of other serious threats to its longevity:
Moderation. If the Fediverse isn't adequately moderated, it will quickly be overrun by Nazis, pedos, and spam. That's what killed Voat and Usenet.
Funding. This isn't like IRC, where a modern server can support tens of thousands of users in its sleep. Running a system along the lines of Reddit or Twitter requires a lot of computing power, and that's expensive. Where's the money going to come from?
- I think smaller instances of a maximum of 1-2000 people are the way to go for the future. Most instance owners are hosting it because they want to and they have a lil extra cash to throw at it, the 500-2000 people instances are usually funded by the likes of a patreon ko.fi or other donation setup.
  These instances aren't big enough that the cost is of an instance isn't massive and can therefore avoid the likes of Venture capital and Angel investors, and if they start to reach the level where funding is getting a bit short even with donations, they can close new account creation untill the number of donators increases beyond a point
  TL;DR: Essentially instances should be welcoming new accounts in waves. So that their growth doesn't outpace donation income.
I think the difference here is that Digg and Reddit were both VC-driven companies that wanted power, and the fediverse is fundamentally different.

Gonna be honest it's kinda weird to me as someone who did just move over that there's a bunch of posts from people who just found the Fediverse claiming it as home while there's people who have been here since it's creation. It's got the implication that this was created as some sort of next jump from Reddit which doesn't really seem to be the case from my perspective.

I see what you mean to an extent, and I also just moved over, but it's worth remembering that Digg -> Reddit was the same afaik. Like Reddit had been around and established for a decent amount of time before the fall of Digg. (This is second-hand info because I wasn't around at the time)
- I've been on reddit for a couple years before the flood from Digg. The quality of content and especially comments went down right then, and never recovered.
That feeling makes sense, but I think everyone knows that the Fediverse wasn't created specifically to give them a landing in this event, just like Reddit wasn't created to catch the Digg refugees, etc. More of a "next phase in the evolution of this concept", and while it took a catastrophe, they're ready to consider that it's time to move on now.
The trick is going to be walking that line between preserving what made the Fediverse great and not alienating the newcomers. I think there's room for everyone, though, and really the big advantage of the Fediverse - we don't have to agree to co-exist, and can even co-existing completely separately if needed.
- I think you bring up a pretty important point about federation in that it allows for and even encourages expansion in some ways, so that's a good way to keep optimistic about it. I guess I just feel a little embarrassed. Especially when you look at posts like the recent one asking Lemmy users how they feel about the reddit refugees, and it's flooded with responses from Reddit refugees instead offering unsolicited feedback about design choices. Then you have threads like this with people laying claim to the fediverse more or less. It just feels like some kind of a Christopher Columbus situation. While I realize that might be a little tone-deaf it's the best analogy I have for it.
I bet some early Redditors felt the same way about the DIgg refugees.

Same fucking journey as you. Reddit was a good run for 10 years, let's see if Lemmy can work.

Yeah, I almost did it, skipped digg. Seemed like a poor reddit clone at the time. Was nice to be on the right side, but sad to see it fall away. All for RSS, open source and federation though, so its nice. Reddit could have done the same - when they open sourced and allowed voat to be, they could have had a federated framework then - and allowed individual servers to handle their own APIs. They could have charged a license fee or something to commerical users who put ads on and made profits, but open source wins again I guess!
What do we do if it doesn't? Just crawl back and apologize?
- I mean, since there's no central site to shut down, Lemmy failing would pretty much just mean that it stagnates and some of the bigger instances shut down, at which point there still would be some remnant of it left to stay on, if a smaller one. Failing that, it isn't the only reddit alternative that people have been working on, so maybe one of the others will be more successful.
- I don't think so. Although many will remain with Reddit, there is no incentive or loyalty for a significant % to do so. If reddit is shit, why not just use FB, Twitter or regular message boards? Already I saw many subreddits have discords already.
  The question for most of those users is there a lesser evil in choosing one bad company over another? Unfortunately I just see this community content becoming fragmented as a result and no winners emerging.
  I like Lemmy / kbin but I am concerned that a dev could just shutdown their server and a community, accounts are gone. Who pays the server bills, and maintenance backups etc? This seems incredibly problematic.
  Beyond that they need a strong mobile app and 3P devs, a tool to read a users reddit profile and subscribe to similar channels, one click registration without selecting a server. It would be good to also have a mechanism for showing cross-platform posted content in a single view.
  If honestly feels like the 90s wild west Internet days again. No alternative I have seen so far can address these concerns.
- Consider exploring other Fediverse platforms before heading back to Reddit.
- Nah. If Lemmy/Fediverse doesn't work out, there will be others. This has all happened before..
- We make it work!
  glares menacingly at Lemmy

Time for a new start.

Though Lemmy is very new, it’ll be exciting to see it grow over time.

Slashdot -> Fark -> StumbleUpon -> reddit -> Lemmy for me.

I had a good run with StumbleUpon, Google Reader, and a few forums before mostly moving to Reddit. Time to scatter again.

My only problem is that we are in 2023 and we still need to read a bunch of text. Why can't we have holograms and a sexy AI whispering us the comments?

Be the change you want to see in the world.
Be the change you want to see in the world.
"As an AI language model, I can't use a hologram to whisper comments, but..."
Why can't we

Such is life, nothing lasts forever. I could think of a good song for this, but nothing comes to mind yet as Im enjoying watching that Twitch counter of closed subreddits counting up nonstop.

"every new beginning comes from some other beginning's end"
Closing Time by Semisonic

I skipped Fark, but my progression is largely the same. Once in a blue moon, I still visit Slashdot. It's like checking up on an ex to see how they're doing.

The one true constant for me is 4chan 😅

I kinda grew out of it. It was funny when I was an edgy teenager but it got progressively more cringeworthy as time progressed for me, even though the content may not have changed much.
- I stopped engaging with Reddit when meme-ification happened.Wheb it became all about the lolz abd short pithy responses, I started using it to find more interesting articles. Gone are the days wheb the average Redditor would read and make thoughtful contributions.
I used 4chan when I was younger but trying to go back after reddit was super depressing, I lasted about 5 minutes.
- I stopped using 4chan when the probably of getting goddamn CP snuff videos in the browser cache because of a /b/ raid got beyond trivial, so like pretty fucking early on.
- 4chan definitely got worse. like it was always edgy and stupid, but after 2015 every board just kind of became /pol/

Slashdot

Damn, that takes me back.

Still a regular Slashdot reader/lurker. Don't do much posting there anymore though.
- I drop by /. once or twice a year... definitely not the same as it used to be. Even remember when they added accounts, I ended up with a sub-400 uid even though it felt like I took a while to bother.
  Kinda funny they stil have aim/icq fields on your user info page...
- I find the posts are... ok. Kind of an aggregator for things you probably read somewhere else. But the comments are a total dumpster fire.

Slashdot in its heyday was great. Then that sale happened. Somehow I ended up skipping Fark and Digg.

Slashdot started in 1997 and was sold to Andover.net in 1999, in the midst of a lot of early Linux people making a butt-ton of money (on paper, anyway) via the VALinux IPO.
VALinux, amusingly enough, eventually morphed into ThinkGeek and was later bought by Gamestop, an entity about which much has been written ...
- There was another change in control of it in the early oughts I thought. Maybe not ownership but whomever was running the site changed.

I had the same journey but I'm pretty sure I found Slashdot by way of boingboing which I found by way of Diesel Sweeties blog posts when I first got a DSL connection in 2002 and was looking for comics and blogs to fill up my trendy new RSS reader lol

Lame. You weren't even on Usenet.
Signed, Zoomer.
- I am old enough to not care what people on the internet think which is why I posted this, I am battle hardened
- We you even on FidoNet?

That's funny because I've seen some people on Reddit say they're going to use Fark instead after the controversy. I guess old sites just don't die.

I still visit Slashdot pretty regularly, but I make it a point to avoid the comments section.

yeah - usenet has to be in there, as well as The Register

300 baud bbs built in boards .. LOL

Renegade BBSes -> IRC -> slashdot -> digg -> reddit -> imgur -> discord -> mastadon -> lemmy
with plenty of side quests along the way

Pre search engine time on Geocities trading mutual linking on each other websites, reams and reams of messages and emails
So we're a side quest then?
- It's hard to tell.. it doesn't feel like one, but it remains to be seen.
  But I feel like the other alternatives to Reddit and the fediverse are more of a sidequest at this point.

I now have the Enterprise theme song stuck in my head 😅

Where does somethingawful fit in

Put BBS discussion boards, FidoNet groups, and Usenet out front and drop Fark for my path. Along with a variety of standalone forums and random stuff that never went anywhere, of course :) (yes, I'm old!)

Usenet was one of my startng point too... Funny to think it was (in a way) decentralized.
Edit: still is of course. Usenet is still around.

BBS > various forums > /. & Metafilter & fark (no digg), > Reddit & twitter > the fediverse!

I kind of skipped Fark entirely, but other than that, yeah that was my route here.

Journey Before Destination

Fuck Moash
- Air-sick low lander, that one.
  @MJKee9 @EonNShadow
I miss Lopen-bot...
- Me too, I'm really trying to work with the community leaders to bring them here, but I haven't gotten much in the way of responses yet unfortunately.
Do we have a sub on this side yet?
- Not that I've heard of or seen unfortunately
"You didn’t let your friends drown in nameless oceans during a frigid storm. That was, sure, basic friendship rules right there" ~The Lopen

Not going back too far, mine was IRC > Slashdot > FuckedCompany > Fark> 4chan > Reddit > Digg > back to Reddit lol > Lemmy

I loved StumbleUpon. But I do like the forum style discussions from Reddit and now Lemmy.

Slashdot -> kuro5hin -> reddit -> Lemmy for me.

Any old k5ers on here?

I was just thinking about that too! I only used it briefly though, so more like Slashdot -> kuro5hin -> digg -> ? -> Reddit -> Lemmy
was waiting for a k5, took longer than I thought.

Fark eh. I used to have a double digit account number of there. Those were the days.

Somehow I missed Fark in that transition, but otherwise that was my journey too.

Just add usenet on the front end there.

And niche dialup bbs before that
Yeah, Usenet is what my brain mapped Lemmy to. You get your feed and post through your server. You read posts from others on other servers. Each local server decides what feeds it will carry.
Of course, there’s no central hierarchy for the communities like Usenet had.

I'd need to shoehorn the Something Awful forums in there somewhere between Fark and Digg.

x2
Although, TBH, I was farking and SA-ing at the same time. Something Awful in its prime was incredible.

BBS>FidoNet>Newsgroups>AOL>Slashdot>Reddit>Fediverse

I went back to Fark for a bit, it's surprisingly unchanged. That's good and bad, it's so linear and most of the comments are snarky/clever but maybe not particularly insightful. Reddit had a nice mix, a lot of funny predictable answers "And my axe!" but then also expert posters that would write 2 intelligent pages on a subject.

expert posters that would write 2 intelligent pages on a subject.
Basically the main thing I'm looking for in my replacement tbh.
- The problem is when the funny answers bury the experts post that you are looking to.

Pretty similar for me, but I never did Fark. Funnily enough after digg was sold and relaunched I started using the new digg pretty regularly. It isn't old digg, but it does find and aggregate decent news and entertainment links.

I hope so, but I'm not a believer yet.

Had almost the same journey, except I've never heard of fark before.

Newgroups on AOL>Too Many to List

Still on Fark, fam

I checked it out today and ngl, it's actually really good.

As someone who grew up speaking German: GiMiX => XiMiG => Heise forums and ALL of the IRC => Reddit => Lemmy

Fark, now that's a deep cut.

Fark's still running just fine

Can’t leave out irc.

It's like that scene in Chocolat with Johnny Depp where the woman feels the wind blowing. Nothing we're not used to, always a bit of a bittersweet goodbye.