this post was submitted on 12 Jun 2023
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Technology

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I run a few groups, like @[email protected], mostly on Friendica. It's okay, but Friendica resembles Facebook Groups more than Reddit. I also like the moderation options that Lemmy has.

Currently, I'm testing jerboa, which is an Android client for Lemmy. It's in alpha, has a few hiccups, but it's coming along nicely.

Personally, I hope the #RedditMigration spurs adoption of more Fediverse server software. And I hope Mastodon users continue to interact with Lemmy and Kbin.

All that said, as a mod of a Reddit community (r/Sizz) I somewhat regret giving Reddit all that content. They have nerve charging so much for API access!

Hopefully, we can build a better version of social media that focuses on protocols, not platforms.

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[–] [email protected] 6 points 2 years ago* (last edited 2 years ago) (11 children)

Used Reddit for 13 years, tried out Kbin and Lemmy yesterday and settled on Lemmy.

Long story short, I’m going back to Reddit.

  • There needs to be ONE site, Lemmy.com, that people goto. This entire thing about having .whateveryouwant is VERY off putting. Most internet users have been trained to be extremely wary of odd or unusual things, so having anything besides .com/.net/.org will turn away a huge portion of users.

I initially setup an account on Lemmy.world, then realized that I couldn’t migrate it to another server and that when I deleted that account on that server all my comments were deleted.

Deciphering the distributed nature of it took me, a relatively tech-friendly person, almost the entire day and several ‘What the fuck?’ posts. I now understand it more. There are some very low-level guides that have been haphazardly put together, but there absolutely needs to be a MUCH smoother guide/explanation to this whole thing. That learning process will turn people away for sure.

  • BECAUSE I understand it more now, I’m left feeling VERY uncomfortable about my data security. If this is going to become a mainstream thing, as it reaches and before it gets to that critical mass of users, there’s going to be SO. MANY. SECURITY ISSUES. There’s no 2fa at all, hacking and user-account hacking is just going to run rampant, and I’m left wondering ‘Where is my username and password actually stored?’. The answer, sadly, is wherever the dude who’s running the instance/server is. In the ‘Fediverse’ your server instance might be hosted in a US or EU data center with proper digital and physical security, or it could be Joe Blows basement in Iowa running off a NAS. The easy-to-see future here is that Lemmy will fail to attract a critical mass of people because they’ll initially arrive, after a few months their instances will just cease to exist/get shut down/the hosts will decide its no longer a fun hobby to do.

With a large corporation, they have the staff and resources to secure and maintain the servers physically and digitally, and keep staff up-to-date on current infosec threats and get out in front of them. Beyond that, if there IS a breach, they have the ability to recognize it, understand the legalities and requirements of reporting it, and can be held accountable by regulatory bodies. Joe doesn’t have the resources to really maintain and keep a server running, nor the knowledge of his responsibilities for keeping the data safe digitally or physically.

On top of that, if Joe’s basement loses power/gets hacked/Joe decides he’s moving to San Fransisco and can’t bring his NAS with him and the server goes down, and that’s where my instance is hosted well there goes my entire account/comments/data.

  • Finding and subbing to communities is painfully difficult. It should be one-click, but somewhere I need to goto an external list, find what I want, and then copy/paste the URL into the search… and then 50% of the time, it doesn’t work. This is an understandable growing pain and can likely be fixed by UI/UX upgrades, but for now it’s a definite turn-off.

  • There simply is no content. I’m not a creator, I want content aggregated for me, and I’ve gotten used to having a single place to get it from that floods me with thousands of different articles/memes/posts/etc every minute. Until the user base arrives in one single place and starts generating content, there’s no reason for most people like me to be there as by far the larger number of users never create anything at all and only exist to consume the content generated.

[–] [email protected] 0 points 2 years ago (2 children)

It’s funny; I know the usual advice is to stick to com/net/org, but I think there’s a certain crowd online that’s all about the wacky TLDs. I’ve definitely seen devs and artists with TLDs like .pizza and .rocks (not a portfolio, but https://stoneclub.rocks as example). I’ve seen enough of these sites that something like https://sh.itjust.works doesn’t make me blink and I trust I’d be able to tell a phishing site from folks playing with TLDs, but I can totally understand how that could be off-putting without that sort of background.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 2 years ago* (last edited 2 years ago) (1 children)

If I see a URL like this, I, and.... polling my coworkers here..... All 52 coworkers on my group chat would say these are highly suspicious and would not click on them. I imagine this is the general consensus for internet-savvy people.

  • I'm happily reading a post on Reddit, and see a link like that: clearly dangerous.
  • I'm happily reading a post on Lemmy, and see a link like that: probably dangerous, but possibly a Lemmy instance? Impossible to tell. I want to read Lemmy, not whatever "stoneclub" is.

It would be great if links to remote Lemmy instances had some kind of styling applied; a little icon, etc., that would make it clear this link is within the fediverse.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 2 years ago* (last edited 2 years ago)

Again, I think there’s a certain crowd of internet users who are familiar with fun domain names and enjoy playing in that space. My example is particularly innocuous (a club of people who love stone megaliths in the UK). I also think the fun and playful names aren’t difficult to tell from phishing sites, but maybe I have a gut instinct developed from exposure to the folks who do use playful domains.

My point is that thinking these quirky links look dangerous is specific to a certain social or generational group, and it wouldn’t hurt for them to keep an open mind about URLs/TLDs.

(Adding an icon to remote fediverse instance links is a nice idea too.)

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