The problem is that the user-hostile trends of current Reddit (e.g. locking the user out and prompting them to install an app) make it apparent that most of these workarounds and such are going to be made invalid in, say, the next 5 years. Even if they do survive, they will be mothballed and largely inaccessible to someone who is starting to use Reddit today. As it IPOs, these user-hostile patterns driven by people who focus on next quarter's returns to the exclusion of all else are only going to increase.
So I agree with Karl's conclusion here – don't contribute anything relevant to forums that aren't decentralized to start off with.
What do I suggest as an alternative?
This is just my personal opinion, but I think email lists the most accessible decentralized substitute. It's 2022, and we have much better techniques to apply to spam filtering. I will take the tradeoff of the occasional spammy email for having my conversations with others archived under my own control without a ton of effort (I can just use regular old OS tools like Mail, Outlook, and such instead of the more complex information management efforts built by more dedicated folks.
>This is just my personal opinion, but I think email lists the most accessible decentralized substitute.
Yeah, and IRC is the best web chat. We kept hearing that myopic old-school-dev-centered view on things for ages. What did it result in? People now beg FOSS projects not to use Discord (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29712098). New generations of people, even software developers, aren't accustomed to old featureless technologies; and they consider them crappy. No, they aren't going to tinker with setting up an FTP server, they will just install Dropbox contrary to what HN users were commenting on that thread when Dropbox was announced (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9224).
After all of that happening can we at least agree that email is not a good substitute for Reddit?
Nice! Evidence #835 that ageism is still socially acceptable in tech...
To your point, though. Nobody is asking you to use IRC. The "older" people are only giving a warning: don't build your house on someone else's land.
Sooner or later, the land owner will take notice of all the nice things that are built there and will find a way to extract rent and/or take it from you. It has happened before and it will keep happening until all the coming generations (i.e, the young know-it-alls who think have everything under control) learn the lesson.
IRC is "old"? Fine. Go help build a better alternative, in any small way you can. But please don't continue to build your house on someone else's land.
I love that warning, it speaks to the issue on so many levels.
Today's technology market is built around rent-seeking for services that individuals take for granted while starting 'the next big thing' and then suddenly when they blow up they're charged an arm and a leg for these 'basic' services.
I would personally refine the warning to say "don't build your factory on someone else's land." because in most cases the landowner isn't concerned about houses so much as they are about groups generating revenue that they can get a cut of.
> in most cases the landowner isn't concerned about houses so much as they are about groups generating revenue that they can get a cut of.
It goes beyond that. "Houses" or "factories", the rent-extraction doesn't have to be from you. Following the analogy, the reason you shouldn't build a house is that the landowner might find someone else interested in building a lucrative shopping mall in the area, and you will get evicted mercilessly.
No, it's not. "People" didn't build Discord. A company built it, then sold it to Microsoft for more than $10 billion. There is nothing guaranteeing that it's still going to be around in the next 5 years, let alone the next 10 or 50 or 100.
Remember the last "better alternative" that was also very good, worked on all major platforms, also got sold to MS for multiple billions?
To go back to the OP's point and the article. If you are a neophyte who cares about nothing but the immediate convenience, sure, stick with whatever Big Tech is pushing you. But if you want longevity and stability, DO NOT BUILD YOUR HOUSE ON SOMEONE ELSE'S LAND.
We're in all-caps italics territory so I'm not sure how helpful I can be, but I just want to stress the fact that as a modern human we all have to rely on organizations and companies outside of our control. Things like IRC, in 2022, are for software developers to talk to each other. Things like Discord, are built for my mid-twenties friends to talk to each other. If I moved to IRC for the control, I would have no one to talk to!
I have been using IRC as a means to stay in touch with the people I actually care about since the 90's, and it hasn't let me down yet. Many of my friends are in their 20s, and only a few are developers.
Maybe you should have asked him how many friends he has.
When MSN Messenger existed, I pushed hard to get people on XMPP. "It's no problem, there are multiplatform, multiprotocol clients anyway". I had more than 200 contacts on MSN Messenger. Most or all of them, people I met in real life.
On XMPP? Maybe like... 10? Out of which perhaps only 2 I met in real life, and the rest I met on Linux forums. I was really aggressive on getting people to XMPP to the point I eventually closed my account and told people to reach me on XMPP. Nobody gave a fuck, of course they didn't. The world doesn't revolve around me.
Look, we get it. It's sad that corporations are realising they can hold users hostage for profit, but unfortunately that's the tradeoff with ease of use.
Oh, and Discord does so much more than IRC. It has voice chats "well just use Mumble", yeah but... why? Discord already has it. Or desktop sharing "use Jitsi", again, Discord already does it. Or large file sharing "roll your own FTP server", uhhh... no? Discord does it?
And a web UI if you don't want to chat online. And reliable mobile notifications. And two factor authentication. And in-game overlays.
FOSS fanatics struggle to admit commercial tools are so frickin' easy to use. I used to be like that, I understand. And then I got a job :P
I would say, think again about whether this casual drive-by insult is necessary. Is anyone in the above conversation behaving like one?
> ...struggle to admit commercial tools are so frickin' easy to use. I used to be like that, I understand.
I agree, this is the usual tone of FOSS people. "Oh, it's trivial to set up an SMTP server".
But, crucially, that is not what 'rglullis and I are saying in the conversations above. It's more something like "It's not trivial to set up an SMTP server, but maaaaybe you should think of the tradeoff of that versus learning a new chat system and losing all your conversations every 5 years. And yes, we should strive to make open solutions as seamless as Discord".
> And then I got a job :P
Again, a casual drive-by insult by implication that you should really rethink. I think most of the people on this site have jobs as well. That does not prevent us from thinking about long-term robust storage at data. In fact, it might even be directly relevant to some of our jobs.
> as a modern human we all have to rely on organizations and companies outside of our control
While true, we should be striving to minimise that. The internet era radically accelerated the rate at which we pick up new "external dependencies", and we should be trying to bring this rate down rather than embrace it.
Ok. I stand corrected. Doesn't change much of the picture, does it? Do you think it is wise to concentrate so much power into one single corporation? What is Discord going to do in order to make enough profits to beat the return of a 10bi sale?
They did build a better alternative - Slack, then Teams came along and tried to rebuild Slack and then Skype and then Bluejeans came along... and then Zoom... and then Discord and the comms environment keeps evolving and the rent keeps going up. This is life. Another product will be along shortly, and another, and another, and another...
Whatever you build on will be ripped out from under you and you'll be forced to evolve, just as we all have had to since the beginning of software engineering.
One thing is true as has been since the beginning - the next generation always knows better than the previous until life bites them in the ass and they learn their lessons the hard way too. As sure as the sun will set tonight and rise again tomorrow. There's little point in complaining about it. What will be, will be.
> Slack, then Teams came along and tried to rebuild Slack and then Skype and then Bluejeans came along... and then Zoom... and then Discord and the comms environment keeps evolving and the rent keeps going up. This is life.
Well, you could equivalently say that the problems with IRC are just life. It's relatively easy to have data from my IRC from 15 years ago -- do you think that will be true for people who are using Discord today?
All I'm saying is, if you value your conversations and data, maybe explore the other side of that tradeoff where you don't have to keep moving from one platform to another, but keep working for 15-20 years on continuously improving an open platform; and get to keep all your data into the bargain. And it doesn't have to be IRC. It can be Matrix or Zulip or Mattermost (instead of Slack or Discord).
My main point still stands - subsequent generations always thinking they know better until life bites them in the ass and delivers them a new order of humility. Life has a way of teaching us all a lesson or two when we get too big for our britches.
Except that it isn't really, the protocol from what I gather is very convoluted which is seen in the amount of mature featured client and server implementations for it.
It also doesn't solve some of the problems that got in the way of IRC in the later years with regard to ease of use. Specifically in regard to onboarding new users.
I mean, it is "fine" but it isn't great. The most mature client is supposed to be Element and signing up is fairly easy (although explaining if you should use matrix.org to register your account or a home server is done by linking to technical documents).
Once you have signed up the client bothers you with a variety of onboarding attention grabbing blinky things that are really not relevant at that stage and only serve to confuse a new user. For example, there is a blinking dot on the + sign for creating spaces. But a new user will have not the slightest clue what they are and why they would make one.
Once you figure out that everything is loaded you might figure that you want to explore rooms, which seems sensible enough. So you click on it [only to be greeted by what amounts to effectively the exact same thing IRC would show you](https://www.creesch.com/dump/img/img_620a745a33dad.png) when you used the `/list` command but with actually fewer options to filter through the ridiculously long list other than searching by keyword. And if a new user is really receptive, they might spot the fact [that this isn't the only list they can get overwhelmed by](https://www.creesch.com/dump/img/img_620a7545a8517.png).
Just to be sure I wasn't talking nonsense, I tried some other clients listed on matrix.org and most of them show even less and give even less options. Some of them don't even allow you to browse lists and others make it even more confusing in many areas.
Matrix has added some new features to the IRC experience but generally hasn't made it an easier experience to work with if you are starting out as a new user.
The server-to-server part of matrix has to be convoluted because it is poperly distributed and does encrypted group communication. Obviously, if you leave out security, you can come up much simpler protocol. Matrix has also protection again message loss, which is not in the IRC protocol.
Of course, if those are not needed matrix protocol is just overly complex.
The client-to-server protocol of matrix gets complex due to the large number of features matrix has. The advantage of matrix over xmpp is that those features are mandatory.
Of course, somebody could still try to come up with a very minimal text client. I think there are plugins for some popular messaging clients.
These days, few people are hardcore enough that they want the kind of minimal interface offered by IRC.
I'm not sure matrix should offer a lot of discovery options. Just like webbrowsers don't find web pages.
As you point out, the UX is not all that polished yet, but it seems to be making reasonable progress. The protocol is convoluted, but what it's doing is also a lot more complex than IRC. For me it's more comparable to IRC than discord in the sense that discord is completely centralized and exhibits all the problems we see from other centralized social media.
I've been running a private homeserver for communication with some friends (for when we'd rather not have the data stored with discord) and while I do agree with most of your points, even my non-technical friends managed to get in relatively easily. It wasn't as simple as with discord, but certainly not too far from what people are used to these days.
A simpler protocol with better decentralization and polished client can probably be done but it's obviously a lot of work. My biggest concern with Matrix is the conflicting incentive created by having the company that does most of the development also be the one providing the most popular homeserver. They're effectively incentivized to centralize the network even more.
Element really is not motivated to centralise. We're busy building P2P Matrix so that everyone can run their own server without thinking (by putting it in their app) - and matrix.org meanwhile is a huge cost which we ideally want to turn off (and will be able to once P2P lands).
It's not bad, and I use it/like it, but it's also exceedingly heavy compared to IRC. If you want to join large rooms, your server really needs a couple gig of RAM, and the "full featured" client (Element) is an Electron mess that uses an awful lot of RAM. A freshly launched Element connected to my server is idling with 200MB of RAM used, and it'll go up from there.
Yep, I completely agree with you on that. Making the client in Electron is somewhat understandable given the effort it would take to maintain a client for every platform, but synapse is really heavy. Synapse's heavy resource usage is one of the many issues the second-generation server - Dendrite - is intended to solve, but it seems like it's still likely a year or so out from being production ready.
A problem with IRC is that any individual IRC network is closed. Freenode shows how an IRC network can go rogue, and there is not much the users can do.
Matrix is a bit tricky. It is mostly there, but I wonder how many matrix rooms will survive if matrix.org would go down.
So, i can only give the view from the matrix.org server, but right now there are 248244 rooms with more than 2 users in them on matrix.org.
Of those, 124680 include users not on matrix.org. In other words, 50.2% of 2+ people rooms which exist on matrix.org are replicated and decentralised across other servers. Conversely, I'd expect there are tonnes of other rooms on other servers which aren't visible on matrix.org at all.
It'd be even more revealing to weight the stats by room size, as the bigger the room, the more likely it is that it'll be replicated elsewhere.
If a room only has a matrix.org name, how do new users connect to it when matrix.org is down? Maybe it is bug, but creating local aliases doesn't seem to work in element web. (Well, creating the alias seems to work, using it doesn't)
Then, how many rooms have admins that are not on matrix.org
In matrix, the act of participating in a room means your server gets a copy of it (with as much history as you choose to pull in). Anyone can add an alias to it, including after the canonical alias has died, if necessary. The alias setting UI in element web should be ok.
I can't do anything with a local alias, neither on element web nor on element android. The UI shows it exists, but search doesn't return it, joining doesn't work.
With element android I can publish the original name to the local directory, but that fails on element web.
I don’t understand why everyone is so hung up over IRC. It’s the very definition of a centralized platform. For a long time basically anything of relevance happened on freenode.
> For a long time basically anything of relevance happened on freenode.
Much did, yes, and when Freenode went belly up for insane reasons, everyone active moved their channels over to "What is it? Not Freenode! What's it like? Freenode!" and life went on as normal, because it doesn't take much to host IRC, and there's not much friction to move over.
But there are also an awful lot of quiet little backwaters IRC servers, with a few dozen users or less, floating around the internet - and that's where some of the most interesting content on the internet lives. You can host them on almost nothing (I ran an IRC network in college on a couple Mac SE/30s - yes, 16MHz CPU, 12-16MB RAM), and if the link to them goes down for a few hours, well, doesn't seem to bother anyone, you just wait for your client to rejoin.
As for why people are hung up over IRC? I can't speak for others, but as a long time IRC user who still uses it:
- Native clients for everything that aren't a hot mess of Electron, because IRC predates that. I don't need a high end modern system to connect to IRC, I can connect from a terminal, from a gutless wonder, from an old [whatever] system, etc. xchat/hexchat/(is mIRC still a thing?) just don't take much memory or CPU.
- It requires almost no bandwidth to connect. If you're on a crappy connection, IRC will work just fine. Not all of us live on high bandwidth gigabit fiber.
- It's not constantly changing. It does what it does, does it well, and pretty much hasn't changed meaningfully in 20+ years. It's stable, and I don't have to worry about some company suddenly deciding they need to growth hack and adding Javascript confetti or whatever to try and excite me into doing some action more.
- Most importantly, it's filled with the sort of people who value these things. It's a good filter for technically minded people who aren't up to their necks in the latest consumer electronics nonsense. I like talking to those people, as I'm one of them.
> For a long time basically anything of relevance happened on freenode.
Until the powers-at-be tried to take advantage of their position, and then everyone else just left and continue their lives peacefully on libera.chat
The point is not IRC. The point is about open standards and freedom. Use IRC, XMPP, Matrix. I don't care, as long as it not something where the landlord can come and take it away from us.
I think you are combining a few things in order to say (essentially) "You're antiquated" – which is fair, but let's tease those apart for a bit:
> Yeah, and IRC is the best web chat. We kept hearing that myopic old-school-dev-centered view on things for ages. What did it result in? People now beg FOSS projects not to use Discord (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29712098)
I...don't see how this negates my worldview exactly. Yes, Discord is cool-looking and easy to get started with; and IRC has quite a few problems since time immemorial. This does not negate the fact that Discord is a proprietary platform that can eat your data and show you the door at any second, which is precisely why people are begging FOSS projects to not use it.
> No, they aren't going to tinker with setting up an FTP server...<link to curlftps comment>
I think you might have overlooked the part of my comment where I select email precisely because it uses boring old technology that is already available as native applications. No one has to install FTP servers to use email, they simply have to use their existing email setup. Guess what you also have to use to reset your Discord password -- that's right, email.
> After all of that happening can we at least agree that email is not a good substitute for Reddit?
Overall, you appear to be replying to a comment I didn't make -- something like "Just set up an email list and an IRC server, it's real easy!". On the contrary, I don't think any of these things are easy, I recognize that Discord and other proprietary platforms have significant UX advantages. But I am suggesting we make an effort to highlight their risks as well, and focus on improving the UX of open platforms if we don't want our data to be easily locked up in walled gardens.
>, but I think email lists the most accessible decentralized substitute. [...] my comment where I select email precisely because it uses boring old technology that is already available as native applications. No one has to install FTP servers to use email, they simply have to use their existing email setup.
If you're talking about pure email-clients-to-email-clients (p2p) as an implementation of a "mailing list", then yes, no extra software or host server has to be installed. However, this type of p2p setup is not scalable for adding new contributors. (E.g., many users would not want 1000s of email addresses of people they don't know in their personal address book just to facilitate FOSS discussions or bug reports.)
Instead, the typical mailing list requires a server to host the messages for people to subscribe to. Most programmers (e.g. leaders of a FOSS project) would only have "existing email setup" like Thunderbird/MSOutlook _clients_ and therefore missing the mail _server_ architecture. This means your assumption of "already available native apps" doesn't apply.
If a FOSS project wants to use a mail server, they need to figure out which software/service to use and how to pay for hosting.
Compare the decision tree, effort, and costs for email server -vs- Discord "server":
> If a FOSS project wants to use a mail server, they need to figure out which software/service to use and how to pay for hosting.
I think that even when using a third-party server, like, say, Google Groups or https://lists.sr.ht/ for this, the amount of control you get over your data and conversations is much higher than something like Discord. All of the conversations on the list during your membership of it are trivially archivable and searchable using software that is probably built into your operating system.
This is not to say that the server-side component of it, i.e. setting up an email server is easy. On the contrary, I'm saying that we should work to make it so. The link you post is a good example of the contrast, and I think that a Discord-like FOSS email list solution would be a great project.
>I think that even when using a third-party server, like, say, Google Groups or https://lists.sr.ht/ for this, the amount of control you get over your data and conversations is much higher than something like Discord. All of the conversations on the list during your membership of it are trivially archivable and searchable using software that is probably built into your operating system.
Again, your statements above emphasize the advantages of client side tools but not the tradeoffs of various server side options for the FOSS admins. You've listed the positives of your use case in multiple messages but surely you'd know that the tech audience of HN and the FOSS admins are already aware of them.
To make progress, we need to dissect the server landscape from the admins' perspective. Consider your proposals of, "Google Groups or https://lists.sr.ht/"
- lists.sr.ht : Costs money. It's not a lot but it's more than $0. (https://sourcehut.org/pricing/) This is also a small hosting business and some project may be uncomfortable basing their discussions there rather than a bigger company like Microsoft/Google/Discord/etc. The sr.ht owner likes to emphasize the infrastructure's "alpha" status which seems like a "caveat emptor" : https://drewdevault.com/2019/01/13/Backups-and-redundancy-at...
- Google Groups : $0 cost but a lot of projects are dissatisfied with GG and want to switch to more modernized[1] discussion software. (And some for ideology reasons would rather avoid using Google services.) Examples:
(Yes, Github/Microsoft is a walled-garden but that didn't seem to be the biggest concern. Their immediate desire was to switch from GoogleGroups. And Github Discussions being free $0 probably helps.)
(You don't have to read that whole thing but here's an example comment[2]. The tldr is they eventually decided on Discourse self-hosted. Now they have a new complication of how to pay for ongoing server costs at Digital Ocean for the Discourse server: https://talk.tiddlywiki.org/t/paying-for-discourse/289)
So what project leaders are trying to do is find the optimal tradeoffs on the server side :
- ideally $0 cost
- ideally zero setup and maintenance. E.g. click "+" button to create instant server in Discord rather than install phpBB or vBulletin or mailing-list software
- ideally have modern features[1]
- ideally open source if possible. Discourse is open-source but then you have to decide on SaaS hosting at $1200/yr (https://www.discourse.org/pricing) -- or pay for self-hosted costs.
- ideally avoid massive scope creep by not developing a "Discord-like FOSS email list solution" even though some users envision an ideal world where such software exists. In that spirit, I thought it was amusing that in TiddlyWiki discussion to migrate to different forum software, they toyed with the idea of extending TiddlyWiki itself (aka dogfooding TiddlyWiki) to handle the forum discussion. They abandoned that idea and just went with Discourse.
Ultimately, whenever an end user is frustrated that "FOSS project leaders don't do what I want them to do!" and wonder why they end up choosing Github Discussions or Discord ... it's the result of tradeoffs above. The hypothetical forum discussion software that makes all clients and admins happy doesn't exist.
[2] a comment excerpt : >[...] One new deal breaker for me with google groups is that now I can't reply from the browser on my phone. This is some new change that happened in recent months I guess. Yes, I can subscribe to emails and reply that way, but my gmail is already clogged enough as it is and this list is very high traffic. For forums like this I prefer to read and interact with it on the web, or else use discord/slack. [...]
- ideally zero setup and maintenance. E.g. click "+" button to create instant server in Discord rather than install phpBB or vBulletin or mailing-list software
Zulip has a topic-threaded model that threads the needle between email threads and instant messaging in a way that's much better than Slack threads: https://zulip.com/help/streams-and-topics
- ideally open source if possible. Discourse is open-source but then you have to decide on SaaS hosting at $1200/yr (https://www.discourse.org/pricing) -- or pay for self-hosted costs.
> Ultimately, whenever an end user is frustrated that "FOSS project leaders don't do what I want them to do!" and wonder why they end up choosing Github Discussions or Discord ... it's the result of tradeoffs above. The hypothetical forum discussion software that makes all clients and admins happy doesn't exist.
It's a bit hard for me to understand why Zulip is so lightly represented in these discussions – for example I saw it mentioned in the TiddlyWiki thread you linked, but the talk seems to have tailed off and mysteriously settled on Discourse. Someone seems to have the incorrect idea that Zulip requires running your own instance of it; that's not the case.
My hypothesis here is that there's a decent level of groupthink which tends to reject perfectly available FOSS solutions in favor of equivalent proprietary ones because FOSS solutions have (perhaps rightly) gained a bad reputation over the years as being difficult to use and operate. My thesis in this thread is that it's high time we began re-evaluating that, and giving FOSS tools a fair chance rather than prematurely declaring them to be bad; especially in light of data portability concerns.
I think one of the things that "old school" people completely miss, is convenience. Your examples of Discord and Dropbox are two very good examples of that. They just work. They work on workstation and mobile devices alike. I totally get why people choose that.
I think the sad thing is that the free tools could be close to that and with careful open standard planning, it could even have for-profit companies participating. Email is one such example. Chat and screen sharing should have been another.
> it could even have for-profit companies participating
Why would they?
edit: "Old school people" don't "miss" convenience, they would love convenience. Instead they have standards and platforms that are sabotaged or abandoned when convenient by companied building lock-in. What we get was built by people in their spare time, or chiseled out of academic funding, and though it often sucks we should be thankful for it.
I think the chance that anything on Discord will exist in 10 years is probably about 2%. If Discord exists (25%?), they'll have blanket deleted old data multiple times by then. Not that it matters much, because finding anything old on Discord is impossible anyway.
If tech heads valued convenience enough we would see some solutions in the space. Instead they spend their free spare time on a million other things - and that is okay. But they really shouldn't be surprised when non tech people use Discord over IRC, or even when young techies do to work on other things they find more interesting.
I don't understand this. Older protocols don't keep any state. Many people were quite upset when old Usenet archives came online. IRC, XMPP, by default, servers don't keep any state.
So why is that Discord would be required to keep state?
And then the freenode story shows, even if you effectively lock up all meta data. People still think IRC is great and move to the next network.
Discord is the core product for the company that owns it. Skype was just another product for Microsoft. So the owners of Discord have a much stronger incentive to keep it functional.
Why can't we stop this perennial cycle of "let's act like minions who follow the one with the shiniest object while they drive us all into destruction" and start taking responsibility for our choices and actions?
This whole thread started because someone took at jab at "old developers", and I'm really trying to avoid a rant against Gen-Z... but man it's unbelievable how conformist this generation is.
One would expect that a site called Hacker News would have an user base that does not accept the status quo, but here we are in a thread where defending "convenience" is the rule when it should be the rare exception.
>New generations of people, even software developers, aren't accustomed to old featureless technologies; and they consider them crappy
Right, so an underlying problem here is the optimization of our tools for "fun" and stimulation and little dopamine hits, instead of actual work. Remember Clippy? That's all tools now. Bright colors and blinkenlights, flashing popups, offers to "help". How can a boring utility tool like a text editor or an IRC client compete?
The trend is undeniable, but I don't think it's one that should be embraced. Let FOSS be the "serious" software.
Reaction icons on Slack/Discord posts are actually useful. Adding a "+1", "agreed" or "done" react on a message is far less intrusive than a reply message to that effect, especially if you don't have threading (like IRC). You could even use them as an additional input/output signalling channel for automation or bots, if you were so inclined.
That aside, communication tools facilitate human to human communication first and foremost. In natural person to person communication, there are many additional information channels than just the content of your speech. There is your tone of voice, body language (however overrated that might seem), gesturing, scribbling a quick diagram on a napkin, laughter, winking, and whatever else. A good communication medium will strive to let you communicate as many of these things as possible, by analogy if needed. A reaction GIF can communicate a great deal about the non-tangibles of the other person's state of mind, and help you both understand their intent better, and know them better as a person.
If you want to keep your communication serious, establish channel rules that forbid certain types of expression to change the tone of discussion, or use a client that doesn't implement such features/lets you disable them. Don't limit it at the technology or protocol level.
> Right, so an underlying problem here is the optimization of our tools for "fun" and stimulation and little dopamine hits, instead of actual work.
It’s really not a question of fun, but of flexibility and convenience. Of being able to send message and have them not look like garbage, of being able to send a file and not need to open ports on your router, of sending a graph and it actually showing up.
That’s why tools like notebooks are valued. Or even godbolt: your way is that I tell you to install gigabytes worth of compilers (half of which you might not even be able to get let alone know how to use) and provide a program listing you can’t even paste properly.
I think there's an even more understated value here: being able to send a file and the server never running out of space and you, the user, never having to worry about it and wonder "should I have just uploaded this somewhere else and linked it?"
> New generations of people, even software developers, aren't accustomed to old featureless technologies; and they consider them crappy.
20 year old who uses SFTP/FTP and IRC, and has never touched Dropbox + barely touched Discord checking in.
While there is some truth to what you say, it's not the full story. Even people from my generation can look around at the state of tech and see what does and doesn't make sense.
>After all of that happening can we at least agree that email is not a good substitute for Reddit?
Absolutely not, I have Reddit blocked in /etc/hosts as there appears to be nothing of value there at all these days. Sorting threads by vote count is brain damaged and brain damaging. Also everyone has email and it works fairly well. Viacom can’t just come in and “buy email” so they can kick people off for having certain opinions like they did Reddit. Despite new people asking the same questions on mailing lists, new discussions are often the norm unlike Reddit where the same mediocre garbage is always pushed to the top and the same uninformed comments fill the comment sections.
Not to mention, every day the Reddit UI gets more and more awful and they seem intent on destroying the site over it.
> This is just my personal opinion, but I think email lists the most accessible decentralized substitute. It's 2022, and we have much better techniques to apply to spam filtering.
I contend that this isn’t true.
First of all, if it was true, there would not be so many deliverability problems with email.
But, more importantly, there are solid, definitional reasons why spam filtering can never be particularly good. Is it spam if a bot copies questions from one mailing list to another one with a similar topic, in an attempt to build out a reputation? The copied “spam” emails have identical content to legitimate traffic, but there’s no human at the other end, and the seemingly-good user is eventually going to “cash in” on their reputation by posting actual spam. Similar tactics can attack Bayesian filters, and IP address-based systems are getting less useful over time as CG-NAT becomes more popular.
Personally, I think “spam filtering” as a heuristic that you tack onto an otherwise spam-vulnerable protocol has been about as good as it will ever get for the last decade [1].
Email and traditional web forums share most of the same problems, but web forums have two big advantages:
* Forums can reactively remove spam, as can USENET [2]. Mailing lists have to filter everything before fanning out. ML archives can be redacted, but anyone maintaining their own personal archive has to do any post-delivery filtering themselves.
* Forums have somewhat more operational flexibility. You won’t see Reddit/HN-style voting in mailing lists unless you customize your local tooling to support it. Normally, all a ML can do is decide whether to block it entirely or not.
Generally email lists these days only accept submissions from those on the list. So general spam is not a problem as the spammers don't know who is on the list so that they can spoof them. Spammers could do bogus signups for open lists but they can do that for any type of forum.
The technology is not the problem here. It rarely is.
> Generally email lists these days only accept submissions from those on the list.
I always assumed that, if spammers were intent on exploiting mailing lists, they would sign up for the list or crawl the archives to figure out who's on it.
Most of the spam I've seen moderating a web forum seems to be aimed at search engine indexes, and not at the forum users themselves. This is why the spammer would start out by copying questions from a different website*, then start silently injecting their spam links later, after the software stops sending the spammer through the mod queue every time they include a link. They don't even want the forum users to see the link; it's entirely for Googlebot's eyes.
Obviously, this is just as applicable to mailing lists as it is to forums, as long as the mailing list has a public archive. We can assume that if mailing lists aren't receiving as much abuse as forums are, it's because the spammers don't think the ML archive has enough page rank to justify it. A lot of them even use human beings in sweatshops to solve CAPTCHAs, if you're thinking that would help.
Forums have the ability to remove all the bogus posts after someone notices the spam links. But how would you remove them from the locally-stored archives that mailing-list users maintain? I brought up USENET cancel messages for a reason: purpose-built discussion board software has needed this ability since the early 2000's at least. You can't just wish the need away by deciding that some sense of free speech is more important, and it makes no sense to advocate for it if your anti-spam strategy is actually to just remain unpopular enough to not be a target.
* or "spinning" questions with a markov text generator, which is sometimes obviously machine-generated gibberish, but sometimes just looks like the kind of gibberish a newbie who is totally lost would post
>but I think email lists the most accessible decentralized substitute
I strongly dislike the UX of email lists. I'd prefer to keep my email usage to registering accounts / resetting passwords instead of trying to shoehorn a chatroom onto the email protocol. Even if it may not be decentralized I much strongly prefer joining Discord servers due to it having a much better UX. As you said it's 2022 and I can't be bothered to deal with email.
I find it weird to say someone is "shoehorning a chat room" onto a protocol that was designed for one-to-many communication. If anything, we've shoehorned a notification system onto a chatroom.
that particular example is a matter of UI/UX. the protocol itself is not the problem, but the client interface is.
deltachat shows that it is very well possible to do an excellent chat over smtp.
it also shows that seamless sender authentication is possible, and we can extrapolate that a forum with voting and spam removal can be done over smtp too.
That's the trap. While reddit is still pushing awful UX practices (e.g., subreddits accessible only via app), we keep visiting it via the `old.` subdomain: net outcome -> we are keeping Reddit happy. Now imagine if we all stop visiting the `old.` subdomain... then we may have a voice, a chance to say "Reddit, stop doing stupid things or you are gonna end up with zero users".
I strongly believe they're going to remove old.reddit in the near future, and this problem will solve itself because most of us will leave for good. Every once in a while I'm thrown into the new layout and it's just awful. Unbelievably bad. I can't believe people accept it.
The problem is: I don't see a strong Reddit alternative. I really like the structure of nested conversations. I think it's a lot more efficient than forums and emails and chat rooms. Certain platforms like Gab are taking off, but that is more or less a Facebook clone. Getr is seeing enormous growth after Joe Rogan signed up, but that is a Twitter clone.
Honestly, just give me Reddit of 10 years ago and don't mess it up again.
Gab? Sure why not. I simply loooove mixing with neo-Nazis /s
Or at least that's the perception of the platform. Why should we have to mix with intolerant people just for the sake of a technologically non-hostile platform?
Looks cool but very small user base. I suppose I should be the change I'm asking for and participate.
Edit: "We are never going to remove the slur filter completely (or add an option to that effect), because we dont want to make it easy for right-wingers to use Lemmy." (https://github.com/LemmyNet/lemmy/pull/816)
I'm hardly right wing, but if the developers seek to suppress and remove anything they consider to be right wing, this is a hard pass from me. I am interested in discussion from a wide range of people with diverse opinions. I'm tired of echo chambers.
The devs do not suppress or remove anything. They just will not accept PRs for things that they don't want to change as most free software projects do, e.g. sway won't accept PRs for nvidia-eglstreams.
There are forks and instances that omit or adapt the slur filter. Maybe they will become the canonical lemmy fork in the future, maybe they won't, that's up to the contributors.
I mean, at some point. Well, yes, they're keeping the old users happy.
As much as I hate the new design (and I mean, I hate it). old.reddit is keeping a lot of people happy.
And as long as that fallback works (and it is an official fallback) it is hard to justify not using it.
And I think reddit knows the rejection to the new interface is huge amongst old users (and those who contribute the most). I hope they know that if they flip the switch they will digg their own hole.
Email is too socially antiquated at this point to be useful in that regard, and that's not even taking into consideration that because everyone uses gmail, you're trading one centralized service (reddit) for another (google).
> I think email lists the most accessible decentralized substitute.
Huh? Typically I land on reddit when maybe I google some question which has a community of people discussing the topic, say gardening or fitness for example.
How does an email list help get me a quick answer to my question that someone else asked 2 years ago (and there was a healthy discussion on it, voting, etc).
For email there's no discoverability, history, searchability for people who were not already on that thread
This absolutely happens on Reddit's mobile site; a little popup-overlay/link reading "Continue on the app!" blocks the content you're reading like you've run out of free Quora questions, can't be closed, and persists on reload.
Maybe they don't do that, but for sure they log me out almost every day from Firefox/Android and I'm willing to bet dollars to peanuts they don't do that on the app.
I even have freaking 2FA but they still don't remember the device and ask me every time for the code.
i think that happens because of cookies, if they're cleared you get logged out. do you have settings on firefox that do that? i don't use it so can't tell you.
Try it on Firefox. Plenty of things don't happen on Chrome because that's all devs test. That and Safari iOS.
Which does make things less of an evil intent and more of a "if our laziness pushes our users to where we make money, that's an unfortunate side effect".
This is one specific instance being unreasonable[0] rather than the software itself having unreasonable defaults (which could be modified if it is free). Having the whole network impose same filtering, like Reddit does, is significantly worse.
- But Reddit has an API, and lots of third-party clients!
- But you can just use https://old.reddit.com or https://i.reddit.com instead!
The problem is that the user-hostile trends of current Reddit (e.g. locking the user out and prompting them to install an app) make it apparent that most of these workarounds and such are going to be made invalid in, say, the next 5 years. Even if they do survive, they will be mothballed and largely inaccessible to someone who is starting to use Reddit today. As it IPOs, these user-hostile patterns driven by people who focus on next quarter's returns to the exclusion of all else are only going to increase.
So I agree with Karl's conclusion here – don't contribute anything relevant to forums that aren't decentralized to start off with.
What do I suggest as an alternative?
This is just my personal opinion, but I think email lists the most accessible decentralized substitute. It's 2022, and we have much better techniques to apply to spam filtering. I will take the tradeoff of the occasional spammy email for having my conversations with others archived under my own control without a ton of effort (I can just use regular old OS tools like Mail, Outlook, and such instead of the more complex information management efforts built by more dedicated folks.