Github redlib thread still unfolding. From reddit shareholder letter,
And a key piece of work to retain new audiences is shifting Reddit to a logged-in-only experience.
Most on lemmy know the privacy and bot-infested dumpster fire reddit is. So it’s very easy to think good riddance. But that misses an important point. IMO.
Inspite of the dumpster fire, it also contains a huge body of knowledge not found anywhere else. Example. Many times I have searched for a super obscure error message and the only good hits were a reddit thread in a tech sub. This is formerly open knowledge, accessible privately, now being closed and locked behind logins.
In old web forum days, weird niche info was distributed all over. That made it robust. Big tech social media displaced most of that world. It all got centralized. No matter hjow awful their algorithms are, no matter how toxic, those sites do have riches of knowledge.
We ARE losing something, if open access to niche info created by normal ppl is cut off.
“Ppl will figure a way around” you may say. There is no way to win that fight in the long run.
I generally agree with your sentiment. But let’s see some possibly positive sides at the same time:
- Maybe this will encourage or entice people within or outside that wall to come to places like Lemmy.
- And maybe will encourage people on Lemmy and similar platforms to share even more.
- As time passes, a lot of that knowledge and information there becomes obsolete. This is something I’m strongly noticing also on StackExchange for example.
It’s why I’m testing out piefed.
But I’ve also been in software dev for 20yrs and am not your average user…
Went from MySpace, to Digg, to Reddit, now looking for new place for news feed that isn’t tainted by the great algorithm.
Welcome!
Can somebody explain to me the differences between Lemmy and Piefed? It seems I am unable to access Piefed communities but they are amongst us. Has this to do with my specific instance not being federated with them or am I missing something else?
This page has a full list of differences: https://join.piefed.social/features/
tl;dr is that:
- It’s written in a different language, so appeals to different developpers, also claims to be easier to maintain and more efficient, but I can’t judge that.
- Has Post & User Flairs
- Has emoji reactions
- Has polls
- Has Post & User Flairs
- Has multicommunities
- A chat feature
- Better moderation
- a more feature-rich and (subjective) nicer default UI with stuff like consolidated comments,
I can access piefed communities and posts from my lemmy instance: PieFed link: https://piefed.zip/c/fedilytics@piefed.zip/p/1963727/growth-of-the-fediverse-20261102 Lemmy link: https://lemmy.zip/post/74312955
Most popular communities are lemmy ones, so it might just be that you haven’t seen one yet, they should be perfectly cross-compatible (minus the extra features), since they’re both threadiverse software.
I think I figured it out. Seems like due to my instance not being that active, many PieFed communities are not searchable because nobody interacted with them from my instance. After I input the specific community in the URL, and thén try to search, i can find it through the search function on my instance…
I just liked the piefed interface better. Still learning how it works myself. Hopefully someone knows more.
Maybe this will encourage or entice people within or outside that wall to come to places like Lemmy
People say stuff like this all the time. History tells us that will not happen. There was a sitewide protest when they killed the API but no one left. History tells us there is fucking nothing these social media corporations can do to get people to leave. Because they have tried over and over again in recent years and it always fails. Maybe 1% finds somewhere else to spend their time.
E: you people need to familiarize yourself with the concept of hyperbole. I wasn’t looking for your anecdotes.
I literally left when they killed the API.
Me too. There are dozens of us! Dozens!
Same :) At first I just wanted to have an alternative to Reddit. More like a backup in case it gets worse. Then I realized that I was browsing Lemmy more often so I deleted my Reddit account and here we are. I’m the first generation who was on facebook. Then our parents joined and we moved to Twitter. After Musk ruined that we fled to Reddit and now Lemmy.
How do we know for sure? The site is infested with bots that may create traffic to compensate the activity by the actual human users, who fleed their service. Afaik even spaz confirmed that most of the traffic on Reddit is generated by bots.
More recently, I’ve seen tons of comments about Proton that seemed like numerous copies of the same idea shared with less than one minute intervals. It detinitely felt suspicious when reading similar ideas time and time again.
Because despite what everyone says, bots are still very easy to spot, and aren’t capable of creating the type of high quality submissions that keeps users there. And because I talk to people IRL every day that still use it. I’m yet to meet anyone in person who knows what the fediverse is.
There was a sitewide protest when they killed the API but no one left.
Before the API protest, Lemmy had less than 1000 Monthly Active Users. Right after the protests, it shot up to just under 70,000 and then settled down to around 38,000 users. It currently has around 31,000 Monthly Active Users with another 7,000 between Piefed and Mbin.
then:
Waving from PieFed!
I feel like someone needs to create a bot farm to advertise Lemmy all over Reddit. Not specific instances, just Lemmy as an alternative. What’s one more bot spamming the site.
Oh well only a hundred million to go!
A lot of us don’t want to be in a community with millions of people. Some people like stadiums, other people like cafes.
Well then why are we having this conversation?
i left
Cool!
There was a sitewide protest when they killed the API but no one left.
I’m no one important and I left. I think a lot of people are fed up with being monetized at every turn.
If there really are more bots than real people participating as others claim, then the real people are going somewhere. Maybe they will stumble in here.
Nothing?
I have been on Lemmy for years after they blocked apps.
It is called getting a spine and sticking to their principles.
I lost sympathy for those that keep persisting with that shit hole for all kinds of excuses.
That is not true. I made a Lemmy account around the time they started fucking with the API, if I remember correctly. I wasn’t that active here because I felt like the content was very limited and the people too radical.
Now that my Reddit account has been restricted because “you need to verify your age” 🤡 Not just NSFW stuff restricted, the whole site is restricted for my account. Can’t even access my account settings anymore. (I really should figure something out but alas I care too little).
That’s why I have become more active here. No other options.
I hope people learn. Stop using reddit.
How does that fix the issue OP is writing about? The knowledge no longer accessible from a simple web search?
Someone posted the question on reddit and someone answered. This happened on the wrong platform, so now they (or other people) have to do it again on a (hopefully) better platform.
Sure, it sucks that reddit has stolen our archive, but this was always in the cards for them, and we willingly played along. It has been clear for a long time that reddit’s top interest is profit, so you don’t even get to be surprised.
Whoa.
You don’t fix, you learn and in the future you try not to make the same mistakes. And Reddit is not the only example.
I’m replacing missing knowledge with local LLM. Fuck google, fuck reddit fuck the sponsored search results, fuck all
LLM is not knowledge.
Exactly. That knowledge has to come from somewhere and if it can’t scrape the sources, like Reddit, the LLM is not going to have the answer either.
Yes it is. It makes mistakes somtime, but vrrifying information is much, much faster then searching for it with nothing
If I type any subject into Google, followed by the word Reddit, I still get Reddit threads in response.
What if you click it without being logged in?
Yes, even if not logged into Google (and logged out of Reddit), it will still give Reddit tread responses if I mention a topic and then type Reddit.
Running a android OS on a 6 year old 5g phone, could be the reason. Perhaps a current model phone wouldn’t 🤷♂️
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Yah I think it mostly hasn’t hit yet. Might be isolated cases where it has.
Anyway they usually don’t do major changes like this all at once. They’ll roll it out to a few ppl. See if it worked like they wanted. Then broaden. And repeat.
There is a self-hosted app you can run to pretend to be a Google bot and bypass paywalls and forced login. https://github.com/wasi-master/13ft
This is a good reason to delete posts and stop contributing to reddit.
If people want old info they can use old archives that harvested all the content. It’s easy accessibility of content that has led to people putting up with reddit becoming anti user removing third party apps, making UI worse, and login requirements.
If using reddit just lurk and delete content. Don’t contribute.
While I do agree, reddit has been shown to un-delete comments that were mass deleted in the past if the user used a script
That’s why you don’t delete your account. You rewrite then delete and keep your account to monitor it.
Either way, it is new content that people mostly use reddit for that is keeping the site alive.
I got permabanned, when I delete posts/comments it just shows deleted on the username area, keeps the content up
If you can edit them, use some bot to edit every post to random garbage.
banned accounts can’t edit
In addition to the more utilitarian aspect of Reddit soon-to-be wallgardened, I’m sad that the cultural, community aspect may be as well. While one could argue that certain communities could theoretically be replicated here, it’s just very difficult without significant mass.
I’ll miss the Arthurian and Latin subreddits in particular. Not sure if they’ll ever be here, and I am often busy with school so not sure if I can do moderation. Plus I’m not the most knowledgeable in those subjects.
Yah, there is that too.
I’ve looked for some niche communities on lemmy. Actually not even very niche lol. Many of them are MIA, or have a bare group with a single post from 2024. You need some mass to get any engagement.
On the other hand. Mass makes bigger groups go downhill real fast. So a tradeoff I guess.
Looking forward to freeing up a couple more hours of my week!
But seriously, finding search results of use is going to be even more painful.
I cant even getting a log in. I was banned about 18 months ago and no matter how I create a login (using a VPN/10-minute email) they still figured out it was me.
Then I discovered this place and thought fuck it.
My last resort was to buy an account on g2g or similar but I decided i don’t care enough.
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Need a new device. If they’re really serious about it they might start requiring you to loging through google/iPhone which require phone numbers to register.
But you should be able just to use a different nontainted phone and sign up just fine. I’ve done it on my pi and an extra phone through vpns and seemed to work. This hasn’t been recently but I got banned maybe 6 months ago and made a few burners.
You could maybe try a virtual machine too, just never log back in on your primary phone.
But I agree with everyone’s sentiment don’t go back.
they already shadow ban accounts not created with google or apple sign in
Even worse is the wealth of knowledge that exists in random discord servers…
At some point, we didn’t even notice, we stopped building a library. :(
I guess redlib could use a login cookie with a dumb reddit account ? Less privacy focused but still accesible without all the bload and stupid ads.
It would likely have to have a large pool of accounts and randomly pick one per request, to avoid Reddit noticing a too-high volume of requests from one account.
IMO, there might be something to that idea. It would have to be a huge pool, and it would be endless whack a mole as reddit etc get better at detecting automated traffic patterns. The more requests, the bigger the pool has to be.
Reddit is very good at detecting multiple accts using dev fingerprinting, which they could do here too. It might be hard to have a big pool and keep it alive.
In theory, I think it might work. Esp with heavy caching. In practice, IDK. There’d be challenges for sure.
I dont think that would work. Not a programmer in the least bit but I’m sure Resist would recognize when a single login cookie is pulling and unreasonably amount of request from the website.
I was referring to your own dumb reddit account cookie, but yeah this would take away the whole purpose of redlib however it would still grant access to important stuff present on reddit :). It was anyway inevitable…
There’s a fork that does exactly this already. It works but yeah it kind of eliminates the point.
Yah … I think it eliminates the point if it requires a per-user login. And if they try to put it all behind a common login, then brackled@lemmy.world’s point enters the picture. Reddit will cut it off. Or make it so rate limited to be useless for that.
There might always be some way to get a little data out. But it can become so painful, so limited, to be almost useless.
Thousands of people all browsing the site from the same account? Yeah Reddit would pick up on and ban that in a heartbeat.
The people capable of giving those answers aren’t gone forever, tech is prob the one case where lemmy should suffice already, ask the question, you’ll be the first now.
Why isn’t lemmy searchable?
It is. And many even popular search engine searches will give results from a lemmy instance.
We did this dance with Experts Exchange.
They managed the prefect balance: They left various work-arounds working, so that search would work, and they dwindled to irrelevance while presumably bleeding money.
As plans go, it is reliable.
This has happened to me on iPhone Safari and Firefox for the past few months. This will seal the deal for me against Reddit.
AI scrapers are the fire that consumed the library of alexandria.
it also contains a huge body of knowledge not found anywhere else […]
only good hits were a reddit thread in a tech subso FineCoatMummy, where’s !techtipsfromr@sh.itjust.works? Are you going to let those tips rot? 3-2-1 nothin? Did your online mentors unteach you the first rule of internet browsing?
weird niche info was distributed all over.
wait, so you do know the mirror rule. whe’re your mirrors?
I am confused by this comment. Could you explain it in a calmer tone so that uninvolved users can chime in?
Why do people read my rhetorics as anything but calm? I can rephrase it indeed for people unaware of early internet rules, when copyright was less instigated authoritatively.
Before the worldwide web, we had these distributed services called news servers. ISPs would copy messages across the globe, and people would copy books, warez, music, even early images! But soon after, predators started abuse the system, and in hopes to deter them, ISPs dropped USENET support. FineCoatMummy is referring to those pre web days, when BBS was king, dialup was a phreak away.I am questioning es resolve. What is seizing em from continuing the torch recreating es favorite /r/s?
Backups are essential internaut practice. Does e keep them, or do I have to do all the work?FineCoatMummy is referring to those pre web days
No I wasn’t.
then what even is this:
weird niche info was distributed all over.
Reddit was dead after it had a hit piece written about it all those years ago. Granted the hit piece was very justified but it was all downhill after that.
