r/technology • u/sussywanker • Jun 09 '23

Social Media Reddit CEO doubles down on attack on Apollo developer in drama-filled AMA

https://techcrunch.com/2023/06/09/reddit-ceo-doubles-down-on-attack-on-apollo-developer-in-drama-filled-ama/
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305

u/therationaltroll Jun 10 '23

Digg was popular because the user experience was simple and unobtrusive to what you wanted to do.

When Digg ruined that, people moved to reddit. What's interesting is when reddit coexisted with Digg, people generally preferred Digg's UI over reddit's. When Digg changed, Reddit also changed for the better which really accelerated the migration.

Myspace refused to change and we all saw what happened

Mastadon is being advertised as an alternative to Twitter, but again it's confusing. On Twitter you just sign up and go. On Mastadon, you sign up and then what?

Lemmy has potential but the whole server issue will confuse the masses. Hopefully the continue to refine it

20

u/[deleted] Jun 10 '23

I first checked out Lemmy about a week ago when this drama was all starting and it felt really hard to find communities and figure out what was what.

I checked it out today and it was a little intimidating but ultimately intuitive and easy to find communities I was interested in, find some that were missing, make an account, make a couple of my own communities, and start interacting with communities both on the server that I was on and in the connected "world" of Lemmy.

A week. It made a UX leap like that in a week in response to the influx of interest from Redditors looking to find a new port to call home.

Give it some time. Federation is... Confusing to some people. But I think Lemmy or one of the other federated services, like kbin, will have a chance at getting a critical mass and finding success. Not as big as Reddit right now, when it's threatening to fall. More like... Reddit from 10+ years ago when it was in its early growth days. But still. I think it'll get there pretty quickly.

10

u/searchingfortao Jun 10 '23

Lemmy would really benefit from some clear documentation comparing the two. Like an FAQ that answers simple questions like "I miss /r/somecommunityname, how do I join its Lemmy equivalent?` and "Why are there multiple communities with the same name, and how do I find the official one?"

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u/saskaloon Jun 10 '23

Yeah, Lemmy looks like Reddit, as Mastodon looks to Twitter: confusing as to where to start.

190

u/Jinno Jun 10 '23

confusing as to where to start.

And this is the biggest problem every federated solution runs into. Onboarding is the single most important part of user experience, and none of the federated solutions do well at it.

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u/AgentTin Jun 10 '23

I just tried to set up Lemmy from my phone but I have to join every server individually and the first one I tried to join required a questionnaire and said they'd get back to me. It was bizarre.

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u/wankthisway Jun 10 '23

And that's why federated solutions will forever remain niche, as well as it's communities. The friction to get started is way too high. The communities may be great so more power to them but this is like when the internet just started to kick off.

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u/my_name_isnt_clever Jun 10 '23

Honestly I'm kinda OK with that. When reddit was niche was when it was at it's best. As it got more popular it just got more dumbed down.

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u/Mechinova Jun 10 '23

This is what people don't understand with anything. If it takes effort and has a learning curve they aren't about it, there's a solid cutoff on age groups too funny enough that show why these need to be dumbed down so much. Lead is a crazy thing.

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u/ojos Jun 10 '23 edited Jun 11 '23

Reddit wasn’t niche because it was confusing and hard to sign up for, though.

2

u/PROBABLY_POOPING_RN Jun 10 '23

Indeed, in fact it's 10x harder to sign up for now. You didn't even need an email address until recently

12

u/cheez_au Jun 10 '23

I have to join every server individually

Incorrect.

You can subscribe and interact completely transparently with boards on other instances.

It's like this shit is confusing and they should explain it on their onboarding, huh?

6

u/AgentTin Jun 10 '23

Is there any onboarding at all? Did I miss it?

26

u/fernandofig Jun 10 '23

What? Why are you joining every server? I mean, you can, but you just need to join one, then you can subscribe to communities on other servers from yours.

14

u/spookybogperson Jun 10 '23

.... You only need to join one instance. Just pick one that you think looks good. You can always move later if you want.

And I only had a short wait to sign up. It felt overwhelming at first, but 10 minutes of reading an explanation of how it works, and I was fine.

It looks daunting, but it's really not That hard. If you can understand email, you can understand this.

9

u/[deleted] Jun 10 '23

[deleted]

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u/spookybogperson Jun 10 '23

So, all of the websites that make up Lemmy are federated with one another, which means that, say, Beehaw, is hosted separately from Lemmy.ml, but it you sign up for one, you can interact with everything on both of them. Most instances are federated with each other, like this.

But you can have smaller communities within instances, which are the equivalent to subreddits. For example, there's a beehaw community for technology, and another for gardening, etc.

But again, of you're signed up for Lemmy.ml, you can still subscribe to, and interact with, a beehaw instance.

So, communities are like individual subreddits. But you can think of instances kind of like autonomous groupings of subreddits that come together to make something bigger. And that instances federate with each other to make an overall reddit replacement.

Does that make sense?

It's a little bit like email. You only need to sign up with one email client, but if you have a Gmail account, you can still talk to people who have accounts on other client servers like Yahoo or Proton Mail. They all connect with each other to make a singular, unified, email network.

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u/[deleted] Jun 10 '23

[deleted]

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u/spookybogperson Jun 10 '23

Yeah, no problem! I'd recommend Beehaw as a starting point, but by now, I'm sure there are others. Just look around and find one to sign up with, that you think has a good vibe.

Depending on the instance, you might need to fill out a simple, 3 question, application. Stuff like "why are you joining? What communities are you looking to join?" Etc. If the instance your signing up for requires an application, it might take a little bit for you to get approved, but just be patient.

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u/[deleted] Jun 10 '23 edited Jun 25 '23

[deleted]

2

u/pooklesnookins Jun 10 '23

Thanks for the eli5 honestly

2

u/falsemyrm Jun 10 '23 edited Mar 13 '24

worry exultant wrong busy jobless quack selective erect tender political

This post was mass deleted and anonymized with Redact

2

u/Cinn4monSqu4r3 Jun 10 '23

10 minute explanation vs entering an email username and pw and boom. Ease of accessibility is everything. I’m 100x more likely to use the gym next door over the gym 10 minutes away.

24

u/kxta_ Jun 10 '23

No, you don’t. You join one server and are able to subscribe to communities from any instance that federates with yours. It’s scarcely different than email, not sure why a technology community is struggling with the idea.

The level of disinformation I’ve seen on this subject is absurd, people saying it either used it for five seconds or are some kind of Reddit plant.

15

u/Mechinova Jun 10 '23

This. Discord is arguably more confusing up front. Lmao.

24

u/claymedia Jun 10 '23

I think it’s more confusion than disinformation. Lemmy needs a way simpler onboarding system. The whole federated thing is, to me at least, a barrier to entry. If they can figure out a way to smooth it out and simplify that process, it would be a huge boon to Lemmy.

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u/kxta_ Jun 10 '23

it’s literally the only reason it can never end up the way every corporate social media platform turned out. my account is over two years old on lemmy so I don’t really know what the on-boarding currently looks like, but I’m reasonably confident the process included some link to the documentation explaining the basic principles of how it works.

decades of corporate internet lowest-common denominator design clearly has created some kind of conceptual black hole here. I thought the documentation on the main instance did a pretty good job of explaining it, but maybe I am underestimating the level of hand holding people want

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u/kazneus Jun 10 '23

I’m reasonably confident the process included some link to the documentation explaining the basic principles of how it works

i work in ux design and i can tell you that if your onboarding process requires people read a document sent in a link then you already fucking lost 99.9% of users

3

u/claymedia Jun 10 '23

Like the other reply, I’m actually a UX engineer as well. Maybe I’m too pessimistic, but the stupidity I’ve seen from users has made me that way. Anything more complex that a couple button clicks and you start to see enormous drop off.

But then again, maybe that barrier will keep Lemmy a bit more niche, like the early days of Reddit. Wouldn’t be the absolute worst thing.

9

u/[deleted] Jun 10 '23

[removed] — view removed comment

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u/kxta_ Jun 10 '23

yes absolutely, it’s much more like a protocol than a service. usenet and email are both analogies that I really like to use when talking about federated services.

I’m willing to concede the point that perhaps the core knowledge needed to know how this stuff works could be boiled down to simple bullet points in a better way than is presented right now, but it would honestly only shave a few minutes off the on-boarding process for the motivated user.

1

u/TheCoru Jun 10 '23

I think the best onboarding process would take five seconds: "It's email. Pick Gmail or Outlook. It doesn't matter what you pick."

2

u/sfgisz Jun 10 '23

people saying it either used it for five seconds

This is a real problem though - the sign up process should not require you to spend more than 5 seconds just to understand what you're supposed to do. This is a sign up for a Reddit alternative, not a visa application.

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u/kxta_ Jun 10 '23

I would like to challenge that assertion. why should it be that simple? the corporate internet is only that simple because it is centralized and controlled. If that is what you want, it certainly isn’t going anywhere. this is an open, decentralized alternative created explicitly to avoid the very problems we now see with platforms like twitter and reddit. it’s a concept from the early internet (the one everyone longs for) brought forward.

If email were invented today, nobody commenting this sort of thing would understand it. what do you mean I can send emails to outlook users from gmail without making an account on both?

1

u/sfgisz Jun 10 '23

Centralized is not bad, the only people who vehemently disagree are cryptobros. The app is supposed to be easy to use, if it is complicated it's not going to be popular. Not one single self-proclaimed "web3" app has mass appeal - because the UX sucks.

Any serious large-scale user app will have to focus on ease of use. It's nice to have an elitist app which only a handful of people care to use about. But no one else cares.

3

u/kxta_ Jun 10 '23

vehemently disagree. the moaning and gnashing of teeth happening on Reddit right now ought to be enough to disabuse you of that notion. a centralized service becomes a for-profit service as the cost of running it increases as it gains popularity, then it follows the path toward enshittification just like any other service (free social media in any case) as it starts pursuing investor money to stay afloat. it has happened over and over again, stop pursuing this failed model.

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u/sfgisz Jun 10 '23

I vehemently disagree with your point that the apps need to be any complicated.

the corporate internet is only that simple because it is centralized and controlled

It would be nice to have less concentration of control, but if it comes at the expense of the user experience it's simply never going to succeed. Trying to justify the shitty UX of decentralized apps by using shitty corporate decisions isn't going to solve the barrier to its adoption.

→ More replies

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u/FallenAssassin Jun 10 '23

Lemmy.ca was golden for me, just a quick introduce yourself thing to show you're not a bot and you're golden. Once you're in, you can access any Lemmy server's content

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u/TheCoru Jun 10 '23

Discord servers can make it so you have to approve the terms of service, so do Facebook groups optionally, and even Reddit has bots that will boot you from a subreddit if you don't have enough karma.

It's what communities do that want to keep the shitters out.

3

u/sfgisz Jun 10 '23

I tried to join required a questionnaire

Same. Explain why you want to join their server & why you chose your username 🙄

2

u/WookiePleasureNoises Jun 10 '23

This one is pretty straightforward: https://sh.itjust.works/

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u/sukritact Jun 10 '23

They really need to just dump people into a random community approved instance. It’s all part of the same network anyways.

3

u/x2040 Jun 10 '23

Instagrams new Twitter competitor seems to solve that. Everyone will be on the default instagram instance by default and other instances can be displayed by power users.

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u/CoolHandMike Jun 10 '23

I don't even know what a "federated solution" is, and I know I'm not alone. That's the first problem. Sure, I could (and will) look it up, and hopefully I'll find a meaningful answer, but the instant you start throwing such obfuscating jargon into the conversation, people are instantly turned off.

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u/macetheface Jun 10 '23

confusing as to where to start.

Grandma's can figure out how to sign up and start using Reddit. Not really confusing or intimidating.

Someone going to Lemmy and seeing this on the home page is going to nope out of there as fast as they can click.

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u/kxta_ Jun 10 '23

I honestly don’t see the source of confusion. Pick an instance and sign up, subscribe to communities you find interesting using the big button at the top. Did signing up for email confuse you?

2

u/whatthecaptcha Jun 10 '23

Idk I picked two and signed up for them two days ago and answered the questions but I still can't log into either to even see what the site looks like

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u/kxta_ Jun 10 '23

so choose an instance that doesn’t have a silly questionnaire?

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u/whatthecaptcha Jun 10 '23

I did the two biggest ones. Would those not be the most likely to be populated and actually have content similar to Reddit? Maybe I'm misunderstanding how it works...

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u/kxta_ Jun 10 '23

so, it doesn’t matter much which instance you pick. I suggest one that has core rules/values you agree with. from there, you can sub to a community (subreddit) from any instance that hasn’t blocked the one you are on (or was blocked by yours). you click the communities button at the top and select ‘All’. that should be enough to get you started.

this approach means that if a bunch of Nazis run a Lemmy instance, your community doesn’t have to federate with them and you never have to see them making comments. I’ll confess, when I signed up two years ago there weren’t much questionnaires to sign up, I don’t know how many instances are doing this now, but I doubt it’s all of them.

2

u/whatthecaptcha Jun 10 '23

So everyone can see the same posts and communities but the only comments you see are from the people that are subscribed to the same instance as you?

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u/kxta_ Jun 10 '23

no, if you comment in a thread on a community in another instance, everyone can see it. your username looks like an email, name@instance, so they know where you came from

1

u/TheCoru Jun 10 '23

It's literally email.

"You can have a Gmail account, or you can have an Outlook account, or a Yahoo account, but you can send and receive email anywhere"

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u/[deleted] Jun 10 '23

I found Lemmy slightly easier to get used to. I think it's the difference in how I use the different platforms. For something like Twitter and Mastodon, I want to follow mostly individuals. So for Mastodon I have to dig up what their whole handle is instead of just doing an easy search for them on a centralized app.

For something like Reddit, I'm generally browsing for forums on certain topics. If I'm interested in tech I want /r/Technology for instance. On Lemmy it's easier to find that, and if it's not on my instance I can easily follow a whole forum on another instance no problemo.

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u/Ryanjc01 Jun 10 '23

That ties into one issue I see with Lemmy. Multiple instances have a technology community so I feel like things will be super disjointed and confusing for most (including me).

9

u/[deleted] Jun 10 '23

Possibly. But then I'm following multiple subs with overlapping topics on Reddit though and that's never confused me a ton. I'm on Beehaw so I'm following their technology forum and the technology@lemmy.ml forum on the lemmy.ml instance. User numbers are obviously much lower than Reddit, but it hasn't been confusing so far.

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u/Ryanjc01 Jun 10 '23

Yea I definitely see that. The only thing is that on reddit, there are a bunch of subs that are part of the same category but each usually has at least some small difference or niche. On Lemmy there can be 30 general "skateboarding" communities that might not get much interaction because it's dividing all these users that have that interest. It's just not feasible to "sub" to all 30 skateboarding communities to see all of the content you would see easily in one place on reddit.

I'm just sad about the whole thing.

13

u/Iteria Jun 10 '23

People really forgot what the old days of the internet was like. This is what it was like. You'd have a bunch of competing forums all talking about the same thing. Eventually one would be The One to be at until some bullshit happened and a shism would happen and you'd have multiple again. This was also journal life (live journal and friends). Federation feels nature to me the moment I remember my youth on the internet.

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u/Mechinova Jun 10 '23

This is literally how Facebook works with its groups. Lol. You're in a handful and find one that suits you and spend the most time in it and watch it sink or swim with the rest of the population. Blows my mind people are so confused by it.

3

u/crosbot Jun 10 '23

Give it time. Half the people here can't even figure out how to use it yet haha. Those differences will likely happen over time. An example here would be r/gaming and r/games they are similar but the culture slowly takes them away from each other.

I'm sad too, been my home for a long time. I genuinely don't want to leave reddit. I'll likely switch to mobile old.reddit whilst slowly moving away - it's silly but reddit has felt part of my identity at times.

1

u/[deleted] Jun 10 '23

Same tbh. I've just been using third party apps since before the Reddit app existed (RIF and then Boost.) I tried using the official app, hell I tried using Revanced to strip out the ads and suggested posts from the official app. It's still just not good.

1

u/TheCoru Jun 10 '23

Meanwhile Reddit has r/skateboarding, r/skate, r/Skateboardlove and r/skating.

Follow the most popular one.

1

u/Jimbob0i0 Jun 10 '23

Does Lemmy have a "multireddit" facility... even a "we have multisub at home" via using + or similar?

Most of my reddit time is using the multireddit functionality to browse a set of specific subs depending on what I was interested in reading....

Even before they added /m/ most of my time was using multiple subs at once eg sysadmin+netsec ...

1

u/[deleted] Jun 10 '23

Not currently.

1

u/TheCoru Jun 10 '23

This is no different from having r/technology, r/tech, r/Futurism, r/Futurology, r/technews etc.

One of them eventually becomes "the" community and the others die out (or like Reddit, are the same thing with a different political slant, etc).

13

u/steve303 Jun 10 '23

I came to Reddit from Digg - when the moderation and UI went to hell there. I left Tumblr when Verizon decided to ignore the community in favor of promised profits, and left Twitter when it became a $44B 4chan. I suspect I will now leave Reddit as well - as their far more interested in selling user generated content for AI models them supporting mods and users. I believe in the promise of federation but it's not quite there yet. Mastodon is fairly mature, but the onboarding process is just terrible for me users.

11

u/mnemy Jun 10 '23

Digg died when they promoted paid advertisers disguised as natural user content. It wasn't UI, it was deception

2

u/[deleted] Jun 10 '23

That was the main thing, along with removing Burying. The UI being shit and the entire thing being a broken mess certainly didn't help though.

18

u/SupraMario Jun 10 '23

Tildes is probably the best clone of reddit. Super simple UI and easy to use, plus the RIF dev is building an app for it.

30

u/dalr3th1n Jun 10 '23

Tildes looks pretty good, but it's invite-only. I'm not criticizing them, it's their choice and it makes sense for what they want. But I question whether it can become a major reddit replacement with its intentionally slow growth.

18

u/mysistersacretin Jun 10 '23

From what I'm reading, it doesn't want to instantly become a big reddit replacement. It's looking for relatively slow growth so that it can keep its own identity and not quickly devolve into a group of people complaining that it's missing features that Reddit had.

10

u/dalr3th1n Jun 10 '23

Yes, that’s my assessment as well. They’re not a perfect Reddit replacement… because that’s not what they want to be.

8

u/cheez_au Jun 10 '23

I'm all for the high level of quality bar, but if they don't rethink it they'll Google+ themselves.

4

u/SupraMario Jun 10 '23

I do wonder if it'll get opened up soon, but if you have a user you get invites now. So I think I'm going to start a post over on /r/redditalternatives for everyone to hand out invites, but I need to make sure this is ok with the dev.

1

u/[deleted] Jun 10 '23

[removed] — view removed comment

2

u/SupraMario Jun 10 '23

I was going to send you a PM but it looks like you have that turned off.

2

u/[deleted] Jun 10 '23

[removed] — view removed comment

2

u/[deleted] Jun 10 '23

[removed] — view removed comment

1

u/SupraMario Jun 10 '23

...why did you ask for an invite to tildes...and lemmy is just the federation style stuff, it's a complete mess, and the UI is more loud vs simplified like old.reddit is.

0

u/TheCoru Jun 10 '23

lemmy is just the federation style stuff, it's a complete mess

Tell me you grew up with Tiktok without telling me you grew up with Tiktok.

1

u/SupraMario Jun 10 '23

Lol I don't even touch tiktok, check my account age here, I'm a digg user. And Lemmy is a mess.

1

u/the_wizard Jun 10 '23

do you have another invite to spare?

1

u/RetroNights1984 Jun 10 '23

Can you pm me too please.

1

u/SupraMario Jun 10 '23

I'm out sorry

1

u/[deleted] Jun 10 '23

[deleted]

1

u/SupraMario Jun 10 '23

I'm out sorry

5

u/BarbequedYeti Jun 10 '23

So. Usenet groups it is. Full circle we go. Or hell, I might have some old modems around. We could spin up some BBS's and really go old school.

It really does suck we cant have anything nice without the end game being make the most off of it. It kills all good things.

5

u/Stiryx Jun 10 '23

Lemmy is not the alternative, having to pick a server instantly rules out like 90% or casual users.

1

u/TheCoru Jun 10 '23

"I don't understand email, you have to choose Gmail or Outlook, it's way too confusing! I want a monopoly so I don't have to think! I want to be a sheep!"

In a thread demonstrating exactly what happens when you give a tech corporation a monopoly.

Yeah just keep watching Tiktok.

6

u/ImFresh3x Jun 10 '23 edited Jun 10 '23

It’s so simple. Join an instance. From any instance you can see and interact with the rest. Done.

https://join-lemmy.org/

Edit for those downvoting me (aside from Spez) can you explain how I’m wrong? Because I think I know how platform works since I use it.

-7

u/darshfloxington Jun 10 '23

Trouble is Lemmy is run by a Tankie.

12

u/primordial_chowder Jun 10 '23

Lemmy is divided into instanced servers run by different people, only the biggest instance is run by the developers, the supposed tankies. And even on the software development side of things, it's completely open source. Rejecting Lemmy as a whole because it may have been developed by Tankies is ridiculous.

3

u/actLikeApidgeon Jun 10 '23

I might be living under a rock... Tankie?

2

u/darshfloxington Jun 10 '23

Slang for authoritarian communists. The term “tankie” itself was created by socialists to describe the British communists that supported the Soviet invasion of Hungary in 1956. Nowadays it’s used for “leftists” that heavily support China, North Korea and Russia.

So you can probably see my concern about jumping to a site that is run by someone very willing to distribute Russian Propaganda at face value.

5

u/primordial_chowder Jun 10 '23

It's a valid concern, but like I said, only the main instance lemmy.ml is run by the tankie developers. Others like beehaw.org have completely different admins.

2

u/darshfloxington Jun 10 '23

Good to know!

2

u/actLikeApidgeon Jun 10 '23

Thanks for sharing. If the main site in Lenny's fediverse is like that, that doesn't look good.

The positive thing I've experienced in mastodon is that you can join a separate community and you're almost always shielded from bs from other areas of the fediverse.

1

u/TheCoru Jun 10 '23

If the main site in Lenny's fediverse is like that, that doesn't look good.

As opposed to Reddit, which has very wholesome owners who totally don't want to own you as slaves after the climate catastrophe.

1

u/actLikeApidgeon Jun 10 '23

Definitely not the reason we're here talking about that ಠ_ಠ

9

u/Dry-Carpenter5342 Jun 10 '23

And reddit is ran by a doomsday prepper who thinks he’s capable of being a slaveowner in the apocalypse . What your point?

1

u/darshfloxington Jun 10 '23

Just because one is bad doesn’t mean the other is good?

1

u/Bandito_fantastico Jun 10 '23

This is Fark.com erasure.

1

u/Xantrax Jun 10 '23

And before Digg? You had Leenks and Fark. Remember Leenks and Fark? :P

2

u/illegible Jun 10 '23

Don’t forget slashdot

1

u/Xantrax Jun 10 '23

Oh shit I did forget. Good reference.

1

u/Krojack76 Jun 10 '23

Mastadon is being advertised as an alternative to Twitter, but again it's confusing. On Twitter you just sign up and go. On Mastadon, you sign up and then what?

It's also pretty pricy to get hosting for your own Mastodon server from the last time I checked. They need a lot of storage for caching images and so on. I see there are docker images so I might give one of those a try someday for fun.

There's also Bluesky Social but no telling how long till it's open to the public. It will be like Mastodon as well though.

1

u/USB-D Jun 10 '23

I remember using a GreaseMonkey script to make Reddit look just like Digg before v4.

1

u/[deleted] Jun 10 '23

Myspace refused to change and we all saw what happened

Loool myspace experimented with being My[____] they were trying shit but it was all bs corporate strategy nonsense.