pinwurm

At some point, the apps here will be as good or better than Apollo. Give it time.

Just a few things to keep an eye out for:

memmy is in very, very, very early Beta and incorporates Apollo's gestures and scroll style. It's missing pretty much every feature. However - scrolling, voting and commenting is a breeze and there's a lot of potential.

mlem is also in very early beta and has several developers working on it. My understanding is there's a goal for a 6/30 App Store release to coincide with the 3rd Party Kill date for Reddit.

The famed RIF Developer is working on a Tildes app that federates with Lemmy. It will be available on iOS and Android.

Great video, always a fan of Rossman (even if there's a few times where I disagree with him).

Blackout absolutely needs to be indefinite and I'm glad to see massive communities like r/funny, r/aww, r/science, r/music still going strong with r/gaming and r/pics set to private.

We have about two weeks until the 3rd Party App kill date. Meanwhile, numbers in Lemmy have been booming, indie developers are actively working on apps - all great news.

Personally, I'm not quite ready to delete my Reddit Account and leave some of the niche communities I grew to love. I suspect that after the blackouts, I'll be using both Lemmy & my old.reddit (with adblock) until there's enough migration of users.

I also agree with your other responder

For clarity, I appreciate the points and don't disagree!

As a fact, I don't know the demographics of this place, other than seeing what the most popular communities are currently - and making assumptions informed by my experiences with emerging technologies of the past.

I would find it very difficult to believe that Lemmy is closer to being representative of the general population than Reddit. Clearly there are going to be plenty of people that don't fit the 'archetype' of early adopters, which is a great thing! Diversity is a requirement for us to thrive.

understanding Federation isn’t a huge learning curve if you’re already using email

The reason I don't give people credit is because.. well, it's like this.
Skype has been around for 20 years. Zoom pops up in the pandemic. 3 years later, people still can't manage their zoom calendar invites, someone is always unmuted when they should be muted, "how do I screen share?" or "how can I turn my camera on?". This is like 1/3 of all meetings. And if there are breakout rooms... it gets worse. People aren't good with tech..

I would go a step further and say that understanding the Federation isn't actually relevant. Most people just want a convenient product that does the thing they want it to do. Whether it's getting breaking news or a cat picture.

the reason that communities have grown to be safe places is because of the unpaid work of moderators,

100% agree.

If users appreciated why moderators and 3rd party app devs are pissed off, they would understand that the power of their community comes from the bottom up and moderators hold a lot of influence.

I really want to believe this, but I'm more pessimistic than you. My experiences would tell me they don't understand and don't care. They just want the thing they're comfortable with to work.

I've tried to explain it clearly and simply. I've gotten, "I never even heard of 3rd party apps before this. I've been on the official app for 8 months and it's just fine. It'll be fine, sheesh!". If you try to explain that they indirectly already benefit from independent developers like Imgur, they won't care.

When r/NBA went dark during the Finals, mods were receiving threats. They opened it up to public comment and people really couldn't comprehend why any of it had to inconvenience their ability to have a dialogue during their important event.

As an NBA fan, I'm empathetic to those frustrations. But is the average Reddit user empathetic to ours?

Going full circle - that just means we have to make this place great. Great third party tools and apps, great dialogue and simplicity. I'm hopeful that Federation is the future of online communities. The timeline will depend on how fast Reddit implodes,

Forgive my comment for being a bit... crass.

Lemmy & the Federation are emerging technologies.

Early tech adopters are never "average people", they are disproportionately geeky 18-to-35 year old middle-class white males with spare time to tinker around. Or basically... me.

It's less likely they are ethnic, religious and sexual minorities, disabled individuals, elderly, women and/or other disadvantaged groups. So Lemmy is at a demographic disadvantage right now.

It took a very, very long time for the "average person" to accept Reddit as an accessible & safe online platform for anyone that doesn't fit the 'early adopter' archetype. Heck, I still know folks that think of Reddit as a sort-of 'radical' space where Hackers cosplayers use tech-jargon to communicate all day. And it wasn't that long ago where this was more true than lies.

In any case, there's a reason why Lemmy's most popular communities are things like Technology, Gaming, Linux, Piracy. There's waaaaay less human-interest stuff. Way less stuff that appeals broadly.

An example:
Do you know how many subscribers there are in /c/relationship_advice right now ? There are four. There are zero posts.
Meanwhile, r/relationship_advice has over 9 million. And it's pretty close to 1:1 ratio for men and women contributors.

Over on Reddit, I help mod a regional community of 65K subscribers. It's a casual place with casual people. People hop in asking for tourism advice, recommendations for school districts, questions about traffic or local quirks, etc. These people aren't always tech-literate.

So the thing that prevents me from moving my community off Reddit is... they're not ready for it yet. I suspect a lot of mods feel the same.

In the meantime - we can focus on making Lemmy into the best space it can be for when those users are ready. We have meaningful dialogue, we respect our differences, we keep the place clear of ads & spam, and clear of bigotry.

Once there are high quality, extremely simple apps that allow everyday users to browse Lemmy without having to explain any advanced tech jargon, I'm hopeful the Federation will take off. The demographics here will shift, and with that - communities will be more eager to move over. We might see things like "Hi Lemmy, I'm an old Korean War survivor. AMA!" instead of "Plex is giving me an unsupported codec notification, did I download the wrong DLLs?".

Hope that rambling made sense.

YouTube is a bit of a different animal.

YouTube allows creators to monetize content - so there's a sense of shared success. Channels from Tom Scott or Captain Disillusion are amazing, because their production in part relies on that revenue model.

YouTube also understands that without paying for popular content, you won't get the consistent cavalcade of medium content from people that want to earn a living or notoriety through YouTube. And that include anything from videos of cats falling over, blogs about life in remote places, DIY home improvement or niche guitar technique lessons.

Meanwhile on Reddit, if a user gets thousands of upvotes and a million page views for a short story they wrote exclusively for the platform, Reddit won't pay them a cent. The very thought is laughable.

The other thing to consider is that the technology just doesn't exist for there to be a viable 'federated' YouTube. YouTube has 800 million videos - many in HD and many are hours long. That's a big ask in terms of storage and maintenance - even several thousand videos.

Video compression has a long way to go before that changes. For now, it makes sense for leave that storage to the companies with resources.

Text, however... well, all of Wikipedia can fit on around 20 gigs - 60 million odd articles. And for the record, that can pretty much fit on an iPod from 2002.

I do wish that YouTube wasn't a monopoly. Twitch is the only thing that's close, and it has it's own special lane for live streaming. Back in the old days, there was some competition - including Google Video. But that went away when Google bought YouTube. I guess there's Vimeo, but they've got a very different approach.

I mean, the Justice Department is suing Google for monopolizing ad tech - and I think we could see antitrust laws used in the next few years to breakup YouTube. Maybe the successor companies would federate - like when Bell was broken up into what became Verizon and ATT - who now directly compete for customers.

It would've made the users happy, but ultimately Apollo is not profitable for Reddit. It would need to be retooled and redesigned to extract data and push advertisers. as a free version...

Of course, Reddit could sell it as a "$2/mo Premium Reddit Experience" app that keeps what it is. And I'm sure there's a ton of folks that'll pay the benefit of that, particularly mods and power users.

Apollo's paid subscriber base is 50K. Assuming they maintain that, it's $1.2M/year revenue. The question is.. is that worth it to a billion dollar company? To maintain and support all that?

My gut would say 'yes'. Although goodwill is unquantifiable, keeping the community of volunteers placated is an investment in Reddit's longterm health. Same reason the Mafia bought turkeys for uninvolved neighborhood families on Thanksgiving - so they'd look the other way when shady happenings go down.

But Reddit doesn't want to spend money on turkeys. So we'll see how well that works out for them. I'm not optimistic.

My city’s subreddit is/was a prime source of local politics, infrastructure projects, restaurant openings and closures, activity recommendations, and even making friends. I also loved popping in to give tourism advice and steer people to the best of what the region has to offer. I got a lot of value out of it.

While there is a city community here, there is no engagement or any posts really. So this is why l’ll probably be using both Reddy and Lemmy for a while.

Lemmy also isn’t super diverse… yet. I think this is going to be an advantage for Reddit for a long time.

That is, Lemmy is an early emerging technology - and users are disproportionately young middle class white men interested in tinkering with unfinished tech. To be clear, that’s not the criticism. That’s me (except maybe not young anymore)!

It does, however, mean communities will steer towards Technology and Gaming… and less Relationship_Advice or AITA or something. Less human interest stuff.

The mobile apps will be key to building this place into a better Reddit. And that’s if the developers can make a streamlined, simple experience that doesn’t overwhelm new users with jargon like “instances” or “servers”. Just sign in, quickly find a community and join a conversation.

The day I get to read something like, “Hi Lemmy, I’m a 75 year old Venetian gondolier. Ask me anything!” would be the mile marker for a dead Reddit.

Reddit will survive. But without some if it’s most active users, and without proper mod tools - what’s left will be a wasteland.

No mod wants to open a janky app riddled with ads to delete spam. Which means that Reddit will get more ads, more phishing, more OnlyFans bots, more instances of hate speech and abusive content. All the while, the app will be continuously redesigned so you click on those ads rather than seek information and engage in communities.

Effectively, Reddit will turn into Facebook. That’s the business model they’ve been trying to emulate and that’s what they think is going to generate them money.

It might work and become profitable. And if so, then hey - Spez technically did his job. But at the cost of the world’s great community platform, it’s so damn short sighted.

Reddit is a space where you can learn languages, learn about other cultures, learn how to fix things around the house, share personal music, share art, share stories, make friends, find love, find housing, find recipes, find a fetish, sell stuff, buy stuff, become a celebrity, make a great travel itinerary, find health and fitness resources, adopt a pet, etc.

Pretty soon, all it’ll be good for is validating your racist uncle - all so a few Silicon Valley execs could afford yet another golden toilet.

Please keep in mind that Reddit was around for almost 10 years before an App was created.
I'm sure the developers of Jerboa are working hard for a full & stable release, especially before Reddit's 3rd Party Kill Date of 6/30/23

The best option for Android will likely be Tildes App by the 'Reddit is Fun' developer. Source. While Tildes is not Lemmy, it does Federate with it and you'll be able to access Lemmy.ml communities.

Swipe to Vote app applied for TestFlight approval today for a beta test. I'm not sure if this will be iOS only or have an Android counterpart.

I'm using the beta for mlem on iOS - but there is no Android version.

mlem is planning a stable iOS release by 6/30, and using Apollo for inspiration. You won’t need to wait long.

If Subreddit -> Sub...
Then Community -> Commune ?

Seems apt given the developer's political leanings. But it wouldn't be as inviting to neutral users, so 'sub' seems to be fine to me.

It doesn't have to be complicated. It can be patreon pages for servers & instances you support, which is enough to keep the lights on. Especially if it unlocks a little cosmetic token or icon.