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/r/startrek/ migrates to lemmy (reddit.com)
192 points by PaulHoule on June 15, 2023 | hide | past | favorite | 196 comments



There was a brief period where the internet was shockingly stable. However, 'creative destruction' and churn is inevitable as the whole world continues to desire a better internet. If reddit cannot productively use this to come out with a better product and commitment to its community, hence destroy the bad within itself, it should fall apart in favor of new services.

I spent a decade+ actively on reddit, and I truly loved its hobby & local communities during that time. I deleted my account last week; I don't believe they'll change. Life is too short to spend it on things you don't love anymore.


While it's far from over, the Facebook-Twitter-Reddit consensus does seem a lot shakier right now. I'm excited to see what the more fractured/federated social space of tomorrow will look like but I also feel like we'll come to miss some of the more contentious features of the current megaplatforms (e.g. centralized moderation).


I agree, particularly because I think smaller communities are a solution to the moderation problems that have plagued traditional megaplatforms. That or developing better NLP tools that are able to better understand human nuance in a comment. The latter could be a dangerous tool...


> smaller communities are a solution to the moderation problems

Once I started to consider (because it's been pointed out) that Reddit outsourced their moderation to community volunteers this "fediverse" thing started to make more sense in principle. To use analogy phrasing I learned in school: "federations" is to "subreddits" as "fediverse" is to "reddit".

I've heard of, e.g., Mastodon having performance issues, even in a way that could be maliciously exploited, but that's in the implementation details. The theory seems rather sound for future internet communities. It's exciting in a certain way; it feels like the birth of a new internet.


The smaller you are the less it matters.

One thing that annoys me about Mastodon is that the medium amplifies angry toots, particularly about politics. I don't want to read anything where anybody active after 1945 is accused to be "a Nazi" or "a fascist" for instance.

Because there are so many toots to read I have no problems losing some toots so if the model rejects some stuff because it is about a topic that people frequently write angry toots about that's fine with me.

My smart RSS reader YOShInOn is already classifying 2000 articles on a good day, one of these days I have to update it so it can train more than one classification model. I'm pretty sure my model would work OK for angry toots if I can collect 5000 or so them which might be a lot to bear.

An advantage of content-based filtering trained by the individual (as opposed to a corporation) is that it will not be so controversial because the people being filtered won't know that it happened. Someone on mastodon pointed out that this doesn't give backpressure for people to improve their behavior

https://mastodon.social/@UP8/110526769345483257

but

https://mastodon.social/@UP8/110527273094994515


So what do you call white supremacists who adorn themselves with swastikas?


“Clowns” or “Dumbasses who want to get attention.”

That is maybe 5% of the people who that N-word gets applied to. Mostly it is an attempt at dehumanization that follows very much the playbook of Herr Hitler himself. If the antics of the occasional Nazi cosplayer get blocked that is not collateral damage, it is a very good thing even if it off target. That stuff gets amplified so much that somebody else is likely to show up to counterprotest and pelt them with a bag of little bolts (a tactic that the Spartacus League used to great effect when the KKK showed up in Auburn, NY.)


you can be a clown and a nazi at the same time https://cbs12.com/news/local/orlando-nazi-demonstration-flor...


This seems to miss the point of their comment. They're "clowns" or "dumbasses who want to get attention" because they're pretending to be nazis. (I clicked on that thinking I'd see someone with a big red nose, rainbow wig, and a swastika tattooed on their forehead; closed that tab in disappointment.)


A rare sight, not worth giving them the attention they obviously crave. The problem does not lie there, it lies in the abuse of terms like nazi/fascist/racist which get applied to people who simply don't hold with the labeller's narrative. It has gone so far as to make these labels meaningless - this is not the boy who cried 'wolf' but the girl who cried 'racist'.


reddit and steve are too overconfident to see and realize that joining federation is their path to survival.

fear and denial will drive them to build garden walls when they should be transforming to stay ahead of obsolescence. turning into tiktok is fad chasing and a means to end of times, destruction, and relegation to has been status. myspace and tumblr realized too latomethi/ng e, and their transformations were never positioned to restore former glory.

what i would like to see is federation separate itself into three components. identify, client, server. the identity system should be divorced from the other two components and allow me to sign into any server. (as much as typing this next sentence will lose some people, public blockchains are a good way to store identity, where different servers can collaborate to host a unified identity database.) anyone should be able to use any client with any server. adding servers to my client should be no harder than an rss subscription. my configuration, my subscriptions should be stored with my identity, (not in an instance) and instantly portable to new clients. having an identity protocol, many client vendors, and multiple standardized server implementations will create something long lasting and resilient. the firms who choose that path will be the leaders.

how could reddit monetize this? run an identity server, have a direct messaging path to customers. fracture and make many competing clients for different peoplebases and community types. some free, some not. build an open source server backend and go the redhat model, selling enterprise support to large firms that want to host a community, and sell development services to honor feature requests from those customers.

(i know the fediverse is close to a lot of this, but the way identity is tied to instance isnt something i see as ideal. a lack of nomadic identity / identity portability makes the fediverse as fragile as any other centralized site. the fediverse being grafted onto existing dns, and having identity owned by a specific downstream host is problematic. identity should be distributed above the dns layer, not below cnames. the same applies to communities not being able to push themselves to new instances in an .. instant. serving of data is too centralized, and a p2p cdn layer /ipfs would help. the instance and the client seem too closely tied together as well. the way i see the current instances is the opposite of portability. im sure there is a lot of fast moving development going on, and hope someone can correct me. top answer here is a bit of a dealbreaker https://www.reddit.com/r/Mastodon/comments/134oud8/are_there... and where a blockchain ecosystem could help.)


Seeing things change is honestly really exciting - I didn't realize how stale things had started to seem. Fragmenting into a bunch of smaller communities honestly seems kind of ideal.


A bit elitist take, but I would be happy if the people who don't want to take a stance stay and the rest move on to more interesting places. Reddit can be reserved for ads and memes.


> There was a brief period where the internet was shockingly stable. However, 'creative destruction' and churn is inevitable as the whole world continues to desire a better internet.

It's not at all evident the world actually desires a better internet.

Even without corporate involvement, it's extremely obvious that a subreddit's size is inversely proportionate to the quality of its content and discourse (with perhaps extremely rare exceptions)

In other words, when the "normies" start flooding something, the value of that takes a nosedive, because experts don't want to fight another battle on top of the battle of producing good content (which is hard enough by itself).

> I spent a decade+ actively on reddit

I've spent roughly ~5-6 active years, but then the combination of censorship and nosedive in quality of discourse that started ~2015, made me lose all interest in actively participating.


Forgive me for picking on the phrase, but I believe this is result of Reddit owners engaging in destructive destruction.


What are the current solutions for discoverability in Lemmy? Having a tombstone on Reddit pointing people towards a specific instance is good but it’s still hard to be the definitive community when the namespace isn’t as restricted any more. Maybe that’s better?


There's a third-party indexer here: https://lemmyverse.net/communities

Much like any true decentralized system, there can be as many star trek communities as there are trekkies. But this is not a technical problem, it's a social problem: when wanting to discuss, they will naturally converge towards the same space(s). If there are multiple, that's not a problem, just like it's not a problem to have multiple linux distributions. Each space will have its rules, its technical background. You can be part of both.

This situation can't be solved with technical tools, only with a human consensus. That's as good as it gets.


Oh hey that’s EXACTLY what I was hoping for! A board of boards. Human consensus works pretty well for sorting a list like that. Thanks!


What's the intended workflow, once I see a community I want to subscribe to? I've created an account on lemmy.world, but I see a community from lemmy.ml..... what do I do?


Subscribe to the communities you want on lemmy.ml from your account on lemmy.world?


Ok, I've done that, but it involved switching away from my tab on lemmyverse.net, going to lemmy.world in a different tab, and manually searching for what I found on lemmyverse. Is there an intended workflow that involves clicking something on a result I see on lemmyverse.net?

edit: i've just now noticed that I can click the label under the title to copy the text that I can then paste into lemmy.world search.

There should be something like a chrome extension that captures lemmy links and redirects them to the lemmy instance that i have an account on.


I had the same idea re browser extension, just haven't found the motivation to build it yet.


The problem is that you don't know if the link you're clicking on is a lemmy link or not.

We are slowly approaching the limits of web browsing, where the document and the application are intertwined. We are limited by the tools at hand, unfortunately.


I don’t see this approach as a viable one, but time will tell. I never subscribed to the Startrek subreddit, but having it on an isolated website instead of been agglomerated on a solution like Reddit will have an engagement decrease, especially when people who subscribed to the sub still participates in other subreddits.


> will have an engagement decrease

That's great! A community should have interesting discussion, not engagement!


Well unless it’s lack of engagement from the most valuable users.


Yea, there's definitely advantages to everyone being on Facebook. Many of us are focusing on the disadvantages of a single platform ruling all communities, though.

Software wise (Lemmy/Kbin/etc), it's definitely not for the faint of heart currently but that will improve in time. For me though the biggest thing is "One platform to rule them all" is not viable. It will have issues, users will suffer, and this isn't some unique thing we've never seen before.

The more quickly we can regain some aspect of "the web" in favor of users, the better. In my book.


I think we need a federated facebook replacement and a federated image server, but I don't know how to go about building this myself.


Disclaimer: I know next to nothing about ActivityPub. I'm in the process of learning it now for some software i'm writing, but take everything i say with a lethal dose of salt.

I'm venturing into ActivityPub myself, though focused on UX of link Aggs, mostly. One issue i've seen so far with Mastodon/etc, is that AP works decently for cheap stuff, but expensive stuff like Images and Video still have significant cost. I believe with Mastodon it's all hosted from the source location. Ie you run `tinymastoinstance.com` and one of your "Toots" with videos/images goes viral in federated instances, i think pretty much everyone is pulling the image from your instance. Not sure how much they try to federate the heavy stuff.

Hypothetically they can of course.. but i'm just not sure what the AP spec says about that. It's of significant concern to me, though, since i'm wanting to build software for micro-AP instances and hotlinking files on a micro instance will almost assuredly burn the instance down.

Facebook on the otherhand though, seems totally viable. Identity duplication is probably the biggest issue AP has with a more identify focused application like Facebook. Notably as i learned the other day there's nothing in the AP spec for persisting identities across instances. No private key you can reuse on new instances to identify yourself as the same user, etc.


> isolated website

Did you hear about federation?


> Did you hear about federation?

I feel like we're not getting nearly as many /r/startrek jokes as we should be at this point.


I understand it is federated, apologies. What I meant was, to engage with the new StarTrek Lemmy you need to know their address. On Reddit everything is at https://reddit.com/. It is frictionless.


I'm not sure if you're aware, but only the first remote user needs to know the address. After that the content gets federated to the feeds of other instances automatically, including the new/hot pages where popular upvoted posts from the star trek instance can show up on the front page of other instances, allowing new people to discover, join the "sublemmy", and comment often without realizing it's hosted on a different server.


Based on my mastodon experience, it's a little more nuanced than that. You are on a server (not the star trek one). Someone on your server needs to follow stuff on that star trek server for it to show up on your server. So if your community is mostly about fishing and no one likes star trek but you, you'll never see it unless you go looking for it.


What? That sounds like a great way to pollute the tightly focused fishing server... There's got to be something more to it, right?


It seems you just got used to Reddit. I don't see how knowing the subreddit is (much) easier than knowing a website.


No? Why would you need to know the address? Also, that is not even true on reddit: you don't need to know whether it is /r/startrek or star_trek or trekkies or whatever; you just search, done.


Go check out join-lemmy.org, it's a lot more user friendly than you might think!


https://startrek.website is the third Google result for "star trek lemmy". "Star trek discussion board" shows many other discussion boards, so discoverability seems fine to me.


You can go to Communities -> All in your preferred lemmy instance to see all communities that instance has federated with

https://lemmy.world/communities/listing_type/All/page/1


> Having a tombstone on Reddit pointing people towards a specific instance is good but it’s still hard to be the definitive community when the namespace isn’t as restricted any more. Maybe that’s better?

I don't think that's much different than reddit itself tbh. So many subreddits splinter into "Foo"/"TrueFoo"/"TrollFoo"/"Foojerk" etc as it is, as groups have fights and run off. Often the original "Foo" is dead, with no tombstone marker to the real active subreddit. Lemmy and kbin will involve a lot of the same, with just different instances with their own "Foo" instead of "xxFooXX".



HN being endlessly contrarian is really weird sometimes. You are in real-time witnessing the rebirth of community hosted and run forums. The thing HN has been lamenting the death of forever.

This isn't some "migrate from walled garden A to walled garden B", this is the community setting up new-age phpBB except it's federated and interoperates with any and all ActivityPub.

You can subscribe to /r/startrek from your Twitter account. You can add people on Twitter and blogs to your Reddit feed. If this ends up not succeeding I wouldn't gloat because this is the endgame us tech nerds have asked for forever.


Just to be endlessly contrarian: "HN" has always loved reddit. Even during the protests, there was a lot of talk about how wonderful reddit is. If this sort of thing becomes more widespread, their karma points might be seriously devalued!


It's like HN is actually multiple people or something...


Pssh, everyone but me is a bot. Pretending that HN doesn't have a prevailing orthodoxy is naive. And it's disappointing because in this thread the force of comment sections being contrarian is overpowering the force of the news being something that a lot of people in this community have wanted for a long time.


The prevailing orthodoxy will not necessarily emerge within the first hour of a post being created. In a few more hours, the opinion you expect will have appeared, and your comment will make no sense.


I hope that it will work. I loved the forum days---there was a real sense of community there that does not exist on Reddit except for some very small subs.


No central logins, no unified feed of messages and subscriptions, no customized compact view.

This just isn't going to fly. I have literally hundreds of subscribed subs on Reddit - I'm not going to a different site for each.


Yes central logins, yes unified feed. How do you think federation works? Click on the "All" to see posts from all different servers. Then click into some comments and see that people are posting from other servers.

Your "frontpage" on whatever server you choose to call home is the amalgam of all the content you follow everywhere.


The cross-server logins are broken right now.


Tangentially related, is there any way for me as an end user to make Lemmy look more like old compact layout reddit instead of a clone of the new reddit layout with all the wasted whitespace?

Edit: Currently, on my 1900x1200 monitor I can see ALMOST 6 posts on the default landing page.



I'm torn on /r/startrek moving.

On the one hand, I have had lots of good constructive talks with people there over the years.

On the other hand, I don't want to follow those mods over to lemmy. Over the last few years they have gotten heavy handed with the temp-bans for anyone that doesn't fall in line with their excessively positive views of Trek. Which has not only resulted in some quality conversation being completely removed from the sub, but started to make the sub feel like a shill for CBS/Paramount.


Do you expect that new /r/startrek mods will behave better?


No. /r/startrek/ passed a critical mass of users necessitating a certain heavy handedness to the moderation. While I might not like it, I do understand the need.


I decided to try Lemmy(vlemmy specifically) a moment ago.

WOW! It was incredibly responsive. What the heck? That was so weird, there was no delay in clicking.

I didn't even realize this was a thing until it was so fast that I came here to talk about it.

Not going to speculate, just impressed.


Lemmy's backend is written in Rust using Actix Web and Diesel.

https://actix.rs/

https://diesel.rs/

Lemmy's frontend uses the React-like InfernoJS library that claims to be faster than React however I really doubt it's frontend rendering that is the bottleneck here.


The frontend reacts to a click quite fast but there's still a spinner for a lot of actions. The API goes over a websocket, request-response delay seems to be about 300-400ms for me so it's not super snappy, but not jira hell either.


Do you have a link to vlemmy? I tried to find it but didn't have much luck



If your entire market fit is on providing a platform for communities that are inherently platform agnostic, then you're probably wise to keep those communities as happy as possible. Reddit ultimately does nothing unique, it's a bulletin board link aggregator.


Hadn't heard of Lemmy. This seems pretty good. Reddit might actually be in trouble if other subreddits follow suit. Someone should make a dedicated lemmy site (or other site) that acts as a directory for "subreddits" to each lemmy site so it's easier to browse. An equivalent "frontpage" would be cool too if that was possible to setup somehow (seems like it should be with fediverse)


> dedicated lemmy site (or other site) that acts as a directory for "subreddits"

You mean this? https://lemmy.world/communities/listing_type/All/page/1



I know that Star Trek reddit community ≠ Star Trek wiki community, but I imagine there's a considerable overlap of users, and I would love to see the Star Trek wiki moved from Fandom to an independent wiki as well.


based on the reactions in r/gaming when they opened back up they either have to to do this or admit they are giving up and the entire protest was meaningless:

https://old.reddit.com/r/gaming/comments/149cq9f/reddit_were...


By definition the protest will always be meaningless, because ultimately the vast majority of users don't care. Reddit can weather this storm because most of the people who they make money off of are confused about what this is about and when it blows over will be otherwise ambivalent about all of it.

This was never going to work. Mods should have used this moment to get paid (percentage of ad revenue generated by the sub they moderate), not throw a tantrum about API access.


The people who care will move on, the people who don't can play with the leftovers. It's fine.

People still use MySpace after all.

Over time, the newbies will start to realize that they're using a hollowsite and start looking for more substance, and they'll come find us wherever we happen to be.


Yeah, and "wherever the community happens to be" will be Reddit. Mods have zero control over this.


What?

1: You didn't quote what I said, you quoted what you felt like I said. 2: Your wording is ambiguous. It could read as either reddit has already won and there is no use fighting it (which is some malarkey) or that wherever the people gather to have the conversations that they used to have on reddit.com will become reddit (which is weird but ok)

Which one do you mean? Malarkey or Weird?


People are really going to miss attitudes like yours on Reddit, because that is the critical part of what makes the community great...

Edit:

from https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html:

> Be kind. Don't be snarky. Converse curiously; don't cross-examine. Edit out swipes.

This isn't Reddit, we can both do better. I'm sorry.


Scoot on then


Churn in social media is probably good. Places get big, overly commercialized and stale, people's desire for socializing stays constant, so they'll constantly move and create new spaces. Changes and transitions suck, but finding a new place and seeing it grow is also great.


Pretty soon r/startrek will have its mods replaced, and most of the community will stay there, with some of the recent immigrants even migrating back because the community is bigger.

There simply isn't a good enough open alternative to reddit at the moment from most users perspectives.


And for those of us with no interest in following the mods, can /r/Startrek be opened again? If the old mods moved platforms, there’s no need to keep this private.


Something that Reddit admins and users constantly miss is: "its the mods that make a subreddit amazing".

People openly talk about this as the reason that HackerNews continues to be such a vibrant community.

Replacing the mods will change the community, full stop. Could be for the better , could be for the worse.


>"Something that Reddit admins and users constantly miss is: "its the mods that make a subreddit amazing"."

Conversely, the mods can also be mercurial and act like little tyrants over the subreddit. /r/StarTrek in particular is known for stifling criticism around 'new trek' and spinoff subreddits like /r/DaystromInstitute were created by people tired of the mods' actions.

It also raises an interesting question as to why the mods have so much power in the first place and if any community recourse should exist when subscribers do not like the mods' actions. For one thing it does seem weird that the mods of r/StarTrek are allowed to unilaterally close the subreddit.


I think there should be some sort of election for mods. Voted on by the community. Maybe have a minimum level of activity in a sub required to cast a vote.

I also don't think mods should be able to turn /r subs private. The private subs should be on a different path like /p. If you turn a /r sub private then it converts to /p and the /r subname becomes available again.

I suspect that some reform around private subs will be instituted in the near-ish future since it is the primary tool used by mods in the boycott.


Some people feel that way. Me, I'm all for basic site-wide rules and automated moderation, as little as possible, and let me decide on the rest. Open it back up. There's no way it should just re-direct people to a competing site because that's what the old mods prefer.


That community was run by the old mods. Without mods, no subreddit. You're welcome to start your own with your mod preferences, though.


That's just not true. If the old mods have left and set it to private before they did that, all that's needed is to simply make it public again. Admins can do that. No need at all to start a new one. They have no right to squat on this name to direct traffic to their new site indefinitely.


Seriously though, it's absurd that such a small group of incredibly privileged users (mods) get to speak for the majority and make decisions for them.

Reddit should be removing these mods, adding new ones, and reopening subs. Mods shouldn't get to hold entire communities hostage when they throw a tantrum.

Anyone can moderate a subreddit, these mods aren't special and they're completely replaceable. They should be reminded of this.


Calling mods privileged is hilarious. It’s basically glorified janitor. You end up dealing with a bunch of crazy people and drama for zero compensation…and then get shat on because well someone is always upset regardless of what you decide.

> they’re completely replaceable

Not really. The pool of people both willing to do the above and are any good at keeping the peace is pretty finite

Above is why I stopped being a mod. It’s a pretty thankless task


> Calling mods privileged is hilarious.

They have far more power than regular users, they are by definition some of the most privileged users on the site. If a mod makes a decision that's it for regular users, there's nothing they can do about it.

> It’s a pretty thankless task

Reddit mods have earned their reputation. It's not surprising it's not only thankless, but generally despised.


> Anyone can moderate a subreddit, these mods aren't special and they're completely replaceable

You're volunteering?


Typically the users are voting in favor of this. Also mods aren't as replaceable as you think - who wants to work for Reddit for free while being treated as disposable?


I really wonder how many users are in favour. I keep seeing very critical/cynical comments about the whole thing and most users only casually browse to begin with.

It's hard to get a real idea how much support there is amongst the user base.

I standby what I said though, mods shouldn't have the power to take away entire communities.


I only saw one user poll about whether to go private, granted on a pretty small subreddit, and it voted like 70% stay open. But it was interesting that it was the only poll I saw.


>who wants to work for Reddit for free while being treated as disposable?

Any 'big fish in a small pond' personality type who gets a kick out of exercising what little power they have. There is generally no shortage of people signing up for that position


I'm sure they will. Just waiting for the whole thing to die down a bit to get less of a reaction.


Go start your own subreddit then if anyone can do it! I'm sure you'll have tons of users and it will be super popular!


Half the battle of a popular sub is getting a good name.

A sub like /r/startrek is going to be popular by default. That's why people are squatting on subs like /r/ps8 right now even though a PlayStation 8 is probably 20 years away from being an actual product.


It might get reopened at some point, probably under some arbitrary rule that demotes the current mods and choses a new team, but reddit corporate itself won't moderate any subs too soon because that would expose them to a whole new set of regulations and liability. They are currently just providing the technical platform and not being responsible for content.


It won't be an arbitrary rule. It will because the mods are inactive which is a well established rule that existed before the current outrage.

There are instances where reddit has given other users control of a sub because the mods were MIA. There is a whole subreddit where people request to be given mod rights for inactive subs - /r/redditrequest.

This was happening well before the boycott.


It was reddit's own mistake of allowing the same few hundred mods to moderate a significant percentage of the top 10,000 subreddits.


this is so sad. i understand the protest, but it feels like burning books. is all that prior information gone? or is the protest temporary way to get the community migrated away but content will be restored for historical purposes?


Not to be a jerk about it, but this is why you shouldn't have stored the books in a warehouse owned by a company that could lock the doors at any time. This is the opposite of why the 'net was invented.


What was the other option, realistically? There are barely other options today, never mind 15 years ago.


I guess it's fine that 15 years ago the users chose Reddit due to the lack of good alternatives. But today people should be aware of the problem and go to decentralized platforms.


Once you've built a community and a "library" though, as we see, it's hard to up and move it. At least, until the guy who owns the library threatens to burn it all down.


The whole damn point of the internet is that the "library" never ever ever actually MUST be "owned."


Since when? Every website on every server going back to the very first one at CERN has been owned by someone.


Seems like it should be relatively clear that when I say "owned" here, I mean "strongly subject to the whims of a possibly capricious owner."

Like, sure, university libraries are "owned" by the school, but one can generally reliably treat them as "public."


Every server is strongly subject to the whims of a possibly capricious owner. One cannot reliably treat any website as "public" because it really isn't. At the end of the day it's one or more boxes plugged into a wall you can't access one which one or more people other than yourself has admin and root privileges. It's someone else's property. Not yours, not "the public's."


That may be the intent of some of the early founders, and it may be your and my preference, but it definitely isn't what has ever existed.


I guess I’m horribly out of date, but why not go to the actual Reddit website or just use the official Reddit app? I don’t know why you’d be forced into a third party tool for something that doesn’t require it. I’d never even heard of Apollo until a few days ago.


No one's forced into the third-party tools. Reddit is trying to get rid of the third-party tools that people voluntarily prefer.

They've also been neutering/breaking the mobile version of the site for years trying to force people to use the Reddit mobile app.


They can transfer the information if they want, API changes don't go through for another couple of weeks and archives do exist.


And there is also the pushshift torrent backup.


If a link you click on a Google search result is dead, chance that the Internet Archive has it. Just put the dead link in the wayback machine and find out.


Social media is an endless process of migrating to a new place

It's writing a new chapter in your internet story.


more like building a new library


After burning the current one, books and all.

Granted this had to do with the fact that unlike any other agreed upon standard protocol, Reddit posts are not accessible except by indirect means, i.e. you can’t download the contents of a community the same way you would with a git repository or an email server and migrate it elsewhere.


If you can enumerate all of the threads in a subreddit, each thread is a blob of JSON when you tack `.json` on to the end.

Tangentially, https://old.reddit.com/r/DataHoarder/comments/12ucc9z/downlo... and https://old.reddit.com/r/redditdev/comments/c93rdt/how_do_i_...

A sibling comment mentions ArchiveTeam, which ends up in the Wayback Machine. Some work to be done around tools to make that corpus more readily available for consumption and perhaps backfill. Lots of existing tooling to query the Internet Archive's CDX servers to understand what coverage looks like and retrieve archived content.


Crawling is indirect. This isn’t a protocol like IMAP where each object exists inherently as specified by the protocol. The idea of a “thread” or “user” does not exist in HTTP, only “documents” do. Everything at this layer is made up by (and at the disposal of) the operator and is not standardized.


Rarely do optimal conditions exist unfortunately.


lets take a moment to remember that reddit was cofounded by the inventor of rss.


There's an archive available going all the way till March: https://archive.org/details/pushshift-reddit-2023-03

They could probably import the data to lemmy.


how do I access the content that was at /r/startrek?


Ask reddit, they used to have an API.


API is about programmatic access, not access to subreddits that have been made private.



books rot over time, and when there are billions of books being produced daily it's not reasonable to expect all of it to stick around


I’m a happy camper at Lemmy now — https://lemmy.world. It’s already getting a diverse set of communities. I’ve joined around 10 now, ranging from Formula 1 to Photography to a niche one on Stable Diffusion. Here’s hoping it’ll handle growth pains. I find it pretty simple to use and get started with. Easier than Mastodon because here, the community is waiting for you unlike at Mastodon where you are expected to somehow find good people to follow. It’s also far more welcoming to a growing community than a stale feed at Mastodon because the tempo in a forum is lower and more forgiving.

I love how you can simply subscribe to communities in other instances!

There are some weird issues though. Sorting by Activity is like old skool forum activity where posts are pushed to the top even if they just receive new comments, which has some topics remain on top for days.

And sort by Hot which is more like Reddit is apparently bugged right now and freezes too often.

I recommend sort by “Todays top” until at least Lemmy 0.18.


Account management is the big gap here and (IMO) one of the main reasons that stops a mass migration to lemmy.

I think what's needed is a decoupled account management solution that roams across all (federated) lemmy instances. You need to be able to log in once and interact everywhere (instead of manually copying URLs from one instance into another just to load the community).

Even if you're just a lurker, you want to bookmark, save, and maybe upvote / downvote. If you're an active contributor (even if the UX issues are fixed) you'd put all your trust into whoever manages the instance where you originally signed up from (startrek.website) to keep it around (and to protect your data). For me, that's a blocker. Sure, I'll create throwaway accounts to shitpost but that's not "building community" (think 4chan instead of reddit).


I remember being excited about Open ID and the idea of delegating my auth needs to a 3rd party, but retaining ultimate control by owning the domain. It’s too bad everything pushed to OIDC where big tech gets to gate keep via app registrations.


Big loss, I would google stuff like: "Why is there only one Negus in deep space 9?" and more often than not it was a Reddit thread someone submitted 8 years ago with in depth knowledge.

This is huge, hopefully more communities migrate away from Reddit. That platform got way too big for it's britches. Just don't move to Discord, Discord is terrible.

The major problem Reddit has and will always have is "power moderators". Losers with nothing else to do but become janitors and impose their will on very large forums. Imposing their politics, their culture, their sensibilities on 100+ subreddits.

I remember there was one site that had regular moderator elections and cycles baked into it's system. Whatever the solution is, it ain't Reddit.


For public discussion, places like Zulip, Slack and Discord are fucking abysmal since they can hardly be googled and usually have stronger circle jerking in them.


>Losers with nothing else to do but become janitors and impose their will on very large forums.

I agree. Wikipedia has the same problem, with possibly even larger impact.


Completely agree. Take for example that guy who wants to remove one word from Wikipedia. He has the hours and hours and hours necessary to navigate those polotiks and then the hours and hours and hours necessary to impose his sensibilities.


Is it a loss?

I've already described an easy fix to retain every single bit of that knowledge elsewhere: make links to individual topics followable from the web and from search, even if the sub has gone private.

Easy. Fixes 100% of the issues regarding knowledge lost. Mods retain their power over sub visibility for new content but get their balls cut off when it comes to the freedom of knowledge.


I believe Stack Overflow has moderator elections but I've never participated.


How exactly does lemmy work with federation? (I'm assuming lemmy outwardly presents itself as esentaially reddit.)

I 'host' a community on my lemmy instance? People can submit 'stories' for my community if it's problematic I can essentially refuse that story? If someone comments on one of those stories, do I as a community admin/owner can remove that comment? If there is a shithead user who's account belongs to another lemmy instance I assume I can ban them from interacting with any content hosted in my community, same with another lemmy server out there if there is a whole server of shitheads?


Under "Create a post"

> You are not logged in. However you can subscribe from another Fediverse account, for example Lemmy or Mastodon. To do this, paste the following into the search field of your instance: !startrek@startrek.website

The phrasing of the paragraph implies, to me, that putting !startrek@startrek.website in search on my instance is an alternative to signing up and logging in.

I tried on my social.librem.one search, nothing found. Is that me misunderstanding how it works? A missing feature on librem.one? Something else?

If that's not an alternative to signing up and I have to create a new account on every new Lemmy thing, there's just no way this platform is ever replacing Reddit.


If you're on Mastodon, you need to use @startrek@startrek.website instead of !startrek@startrek.website


That works but I had already searched startrek@startrek.website without the prefix and followed it. Does that give me some way to post on the site without having to create an account?


No, the members of /r/startrek are vowing to not use Reddit anymore. /r/startrek will be considered abandoned and given to anyone who asks for it. Reddit will take it away from these mods and I don't blame them.

Maybe nobody will use it, but some people probably will, people who don't give a shit about stupid Internet wars and just want to read about and discuss things Star Trek.

...which, believe it or not, is most people. Mod wars are uninteresting to the 90% who don't even make accounts.


I came in here to say exactly this. The mods don't own the subreddit. Reddit isn't just going to go "well, guess we can't have a Startrek sub with the most obvious name for one because the mods of /r/startrek don't want to use reddit anymore."

The reinstated reddit sub will very quickly overtake the Lemmy sub in activity. Many of the posters who went to Lemmy will slowly migrate back to reddit. The mods will have lost their "power" over a very popular subreddit with nothing to show for it.

That's how the mod wars end. Many mods will voluntarily end the boycott once it becomes clear that there thousands of people who will happily take their place.

Maybe Reddit throws them a bone by allowing an exception for Apollo and a few other popular third party clients so the mods can save face (or maybe not).


> The mods don't own the subreddit.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36341470


The mods of Reddit are 100% replaceable, and not comparable to HN moderation, mainly because HN pays dang and he is specifically accountable for maintaining the site.

If dang did poorly enough for long enough, he'd be replaced (or they'd shut HN down).

Also, there isn't nearly as much special about HN as some people seem to think. It's prone to every one of the same issues Reddit has, the incentives are just aligned differently for dang.



See what? These aren't arguments, you're linking to the general discussion.


Mods are definitely replaceable, but the new ones will likely not be as enthusiastic and the community will suffer.


This is not solely about "mod wars" as you say. It's about being unable to use third party apps which are way better than the official Reddit app.


It will be interesting to see how this plays out. 3rd party apps is the primary way I consume reddit. I'll probably stop consuming them after the shutoff date (or lightly consume their data since It'll only happen when I'm at a desktop).

I'm not going to install reddit's official app.


> the members of /r/startrek are vowing to not use Reddit anymore

Oh, I don't see evidence of that. At best this looks like the *mods* of /r/startrek are making that vow.


Great point, mods are acting like the users support them, when in reality a tiny handful support them extremely loudly, but it's unclear how the vast majority of users feel.


What is/was stopping Reddit from doing this:

- Decide that you don't want third-party apps.

- Buy out all the big players (Apollo, etc.) and integrate some of their tooling into your own app/core.

I understand it would have cost a lot of money, but they could have found a middle-ground where everyone is happy. Instead, they're throwing a stupid tantrum that could end up costing them a lot more than it would have cost them to solve it the more traditional way.

Stinks like incompetence and lack of awareness to me.


Reddit buying third-party apps to adopt a few token niceties and then kill them wouldn't be a middle ground. Anybody who uses those apps would see exactly what the game was and be just as outraged. It would still be a tantrum, figuratively speaking, just a more expensive and passive-aggressive one.

"Incompetence and lack of awareness" is what you get when management starts taking their community for granted.


Much easier to say "subreddits can no longer be private"


"After a long and hard discussion together with the Snoos, we have decided to shut Reddit down. It wasn't us, it was you."


My question is why can't reddit provide multiple tiers of api access for different audiences.

* Want to scrape all of reddit for your fucking ML nightmare, that will be 1 billion dollars.

* Want to write a reddit 3rd party app without serving reddit's ads? Thats some price point.

* Want to write a reddit 3rd party app and display within some parameters the ads they place into the api feed? Thats cheaper than no ad serving.

* Just a personal api project maybe to help admin your sub or help you in some other way. Free under some kind of reasonable rate limit.


I'm recreating several of my old subs, that were stolen from me when Reddit suspended my account and stole all the subs I founded and built up over 10 years.


This lemmy site they have migrated to reminds me of something Matt's script archive would produce back in the early 90's.

Did they style this for nostalgia?


I couldn’t agree more. Lenny looks like it was designed and built by devs, for devs.

Given that a large proportion of Reddit users are likely not technical I think Lemmy will have a hard job of attracting and keeping those users. Maybe that’s by design I don’t know.

Would it hurt to have a designer look over it?


honestly, if someone could clone the functionality of facebook groups from a UI perspective and make content super searchable, this would be the ideal replacement.

I know there are tons of discord servers, but for older posts etc, it all seems to get lost in the stream.


maybe the rust devs aren't great at implementing modern designs built by dedicated art teams


Anddddd the new site is down.


I also got an error. Lemmy is distributed? No centralized login, so I need to give my email and create an account on every SUB?

So there's no homepage with all my subscriptions?

This is not a valid replacement unless we're going to bring back RSS and start up a local reader again that can somehow auto-create accounts and re-submit comments.


No, if you have an account on one Lemmy instance you can subscribe to or post on a community (sub) hosted anywhere. Your home instance also houses all your subscriptions.


I'm unable to login to any other server besides the original I signed up on.


It's distributed, but the login can be from any site. You don't need multiple accounts, you can subscribe to "subreddits" (not sure what they're called over there) on different servers from your instance, similar to how a gmail and a hotmail user can email each other or join the same mailing list.


Does this mean that if I go to startrek.website, I will see posts and comments from other "subs" I'm subscribed to?


Yes, you'll see posts both from startrek.website as well as other instances on the home page. You can subscribe to remote communities as long as you do it from startrek.website (and don't accidentally follow a link to another instance where your startrek.website login won't work), and all of your local and remote subscriptions will be combined in your subscribed feed on your home instance.


> (and don't accidentally follow a link to another instance where your startrek.website login won't work)

I feel like there really needs to be a browser extension that does the appropriate redirects to make this problem go away. It's a really bad UX rn.


If a the only way to fix a usability problem is via browser extension, the entire concept should have been left on the cutting room floor.


I think it's a small price to pay for removing a single point of failure, such as a greedy CEO.


Correct!


I'm sure they have Scotty working on it, shouting "She canna take any more, captain!" as he goes.


He should try reversing the polarity on the magnetic drive, normally takes 10 hours but he can do it in 5.


I got banned from there because I didn't like Discovery.

You have a top secret ultra elite experimental ship with a spore drive... with what? Something something tardigrades?

But then your crew is a criminal, cadet Tilly?, everyone is unstable/untrustworthy, and a rather high concentration of LGBT people?

But you get banned for pointing this out.


> I got banned from there because I didn't like Discovery.

Was it for not liking Discovery, or being an a-hole about it? I didn't and don't like Discovery, I was pretty clear and precise in how I expressed that opinion. I saw many others shared it. I never got banned, and never stopped seeing people disparaging Discovery.

Basically on Discovery, people seemed not treat the ship as a workplace, and there was no emergency too critical to not interrupt it with an extended and heartfelt, emotionally cathartic interaction. But the level of vitriol people would bring to their feelings about that show was often very off-putting and quite unfamiliar.


Seems odd that you mention an 'unstable/untrustworthy crew' in the same breath as 'high concentration of LGBT people' as reasons you don't like it. I suspect that might be related to your ban, not the fact that you didn't like it in the first place.


>Seems odd that you mention an 'unstable/untrustworthy crew' in the same breath as 'high concentration of LGBT people' as reasons you don't like it. I suspect that might be related to your ban, not the fact that you didn't like it in the first place.

I also mentioned cadet and criminal, each of these attributes are separate entities.

You are the one associating untrustworthy with LGBT. Which in fact isn't the case.

I am referring to Voq / Ash Tyler who is untrustworthy because he's a klingon mole. I don't believe he is LGBT? OR Captain Lorca who was mirror universe and implicitly untrustworthy? Also not LGBT as far as I know.

As a trans person, I don't believe I would ever associate unstable or untrustworthy and LGBT. But alas here I am being downvoted for this.


I think they would have been less confused if you wrote it as "Tilly(?)" rather than without the parens, which makes it look like the end of a sentence and the following comma a typo. I'm guessing you were unsure of her name or the spelling of her name.


> You are the one associating untrustworthy with LGBT

No, the original commenter made that association implicit by listing the proportional presence of LGBT as a detractor alongside criminals and untrustworthy crewmembers.


While I was not banned, r/startrek felt for some time like its main purpose was to serve as marketing tool for Paramount and I wouldn't be surprised if mods got paid to keep some "standards" within the sub. The r/deepspacenine was more like a regular user-driven community.


I was never a regular, but I would concur with you here. It's practically the only notable subreddit I ever got banned from and it's hardly a controversial opinion. I felt like I never actually broke any rules.


It would make sense for the LGBT+ rate to continue increasing into the future, but I agree with the unlikable characters. They all seem scummy and that makes all the moral quandaries that were central to TOS and TNG really dumb.


I'm with you. Discovery wasn't watchable.


What does it mean for r/startrek to migrate to lemmy, would that just be the moderators? To me it seems like just an outspoken group of people from the subreddit are moving to lemmy, but my guess is most people would prefer to stay on Reddit.


Well that only makes sense for /r/StarTrek to join the Federation


It looks way too complicated for the average redditor-- it took years for the masses to adopt reddit due to UX complexity as is despite it having the strongest content for years.


I click on the link, and a bunch of posts are scrolling past on the Lemmy site. Is this intended? I can't imagine it's helpful to have the homepage live-update like that.


Good, as long as they migrate to their own hosted instances of Lemmy, Mastodon etc. and don't use the "default" or "official" instances.


A google search for [inurl:reddit.com/r/startrek/] shows 57,500 results, links that are now broken.


i very much doubt it will work

More likely they will migrate to r/starwars2 when users are fed up with this moderator madness


Trekkies migrating to /r/starwars2 would be either the most epic troll of all time, or the strangest about-face of all time.


Does something resembling the "Old Reddit" look & feel exist among the Reddit clones ?



Isn't that where a lot of the far right td/etc. subreddits migrated to? If so I think people want to avoid the worst of reddit.


Looks like the sub is public again, so this may not have the impact they wanted.


are there any popular apollo-like clients for aggregating lemmys?

i'm hoping all of my favorite subs move over and I can restrict my reddit usage to searching through archives for stuff.


Very snappy interface. Colour me impressed


hugged to death




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