If you don’t mind selfhosting, miniflux is pretty nice.

Really lightweight, downloads the full text if possible (instead of just the first paragraph), etc.

There is 0% chance this man is neither on drugs nor having a severe mental breakdown.

He’s not even good at using his puppet.

I really don’t want to sound snobbish, but people are really entitled these days.

“Omg you have to pick a server?! I’m going to have to spend more that 30s figuring out how this works? There is no alternative!”

When did everyone become a spoiled toddler? Just calm down, take some time to figure things out, and be patient.

/rant

The Facebook bit is my concern as well.

However, I’m not so sure we’d be able to avoid it, even if big tech did not get involved.

For example, beehaw.org does not federate with a lot of other instances. How long until a few big lemmy instances decide they are important enough to block every new instance by default? Probably not going to happen anytime soon, but it could be a foreshadowing.

I think people should be incentivised to join the smaller instances. But I guess most new people coming to the fediverse don’t know that you can talk with other instances.

There are not as many as before, but not as few as you might think. A lot of them are hidden these days (you have to inspect the page source), but they are still there.

Readers like feedly are able to find them if you just provide the URL to the website.

Feedly is a pretty user friendly reader (but not open source, unfortunately).

All feed readers aggregate the results in one page if you want.

Most websites provide a feed (even YouTube channels), but it’s often hidden under the surface. You can inspect the page source, or you can pass the URL of the website to feedly (it’s usually able to find it for you).

The cool thing about RSS is that it’s open. If you don’t want to use a particular reader anymore, you can export your feeds as an opml file and import it in another reader. You’re not locked in.

Probably even with a CS degree.

It’s just a hassle to maintain, and too mission critical to have it go down.

I wonder if the same won’t happen with the fediverse, if we let some instances get too large.

Agree on RSS.

Don’t have enough experience with XMPP.

IRC is not a secure protocol, I think matrix takes the cake there. (although I really miss IRC)

Lemmy and Reddit do have an upvote feature and aggregation across different topics / communites, which I think it’s what old school forums lacked.

I hate this notion that a platform isn’t successful unless it has a billion users. As long as there’s a critical mass of people, it’s fine. One thing I’ve realised browsing lemmy for the past week is just how much of my Reddit experience was defined by the same handful of Twitter screenshots and rehosted tiktoks being reposted over and over again like every week.

I agree, I just don’t think lemmy is at critical mass yet.

Maybe it’s just me, but it feels like most of the discussion is still centered around how bad reddit has become. Only after reddit stops living rent free inside people’s heads, will lemmy be able to develop its own culture, IMO.

Are there any plans to federate instances across both platforms? (i.e. allow for subscriptions)

Or has this been implemented, and I just missed it?

EDIT: Nevermind, found it. It is possible.

Yes, I’m fully aware of that, and I’m OK with waiting. I’ve been favouring the use of open-source software for a long time, and that’s not about to change.

Just pointing out some areas that could potentially have a large ROI when it comes to the devs’ time.

That’s true.

I use RSS feed to follow youtube channels, but if they happen to upload to odysee or peertube as well, I follow them there instead. Just to give a YouTube competitor a bit more traffic.

I tried sorting by “New”, and while that does show me new content, it won’t show me new content that the community thinks it’s good (that’s the whole point about having a voting system).

I’ve changed from the default (i.e. “Active”) into “Hot”, but the frontpage is still very stale.

One reddit feature I do miss is the ability to automatically hide posts that you already upvoted or downvoted. That would keep my frontpage relatively fresh.

Doubt it, it’s expensive to host and creators won’t have ways to ways to monetize it as easily as YouTube.

Also, I wouldn’t really call the Twitter and Reddit cases “exodus”. As much as I would like to see the fediverse succeed, the number of users on mastodon and Lemmy are just a blip on the radar.

I still see the same links on my Lemmy frontage days after they have been submitted, it’s far less active than Reddit.

It’s not ad-friendly, and does not force you to create yet another account in yet another walled garden for big-tech to collect your data.

My solution to this is to be more stringent with the feeds that I add. In this day and age, there’s so much volume, that the important metric is signal-to-noise ratio.

If I find myself skipping the articles from a feed more often than opening them, I just unsubscribe.

Sure they still pile up if I miss a few days, but not nearly as before.

I agree it needs to be more intuitive, however, I would argue that Linux is far more intuitive than it used to be. Still, people didn’t switch.

Another driving force is that people don’t like change, and people use whatever others use. TikTok bought another company just to get their userbase, it’s that important.

The fediverse is fighting an uphill battle. You’d have to provide a platform that is far more intuitive and engaging than the competition, while relying on volunteer labour.

To be fair, there was a viable and easy to use alternative (Reddit). And the community was largely tech savvy.

Today there are more computer users, so the average tech literacy is higher, but the tech literacy of the average computer user is lower. People want slick, easy to use, centralised solutions.

I’m not too concerned about this though. I think realistically the fediverse could achieve a critical mass to keep it going, but won’t be too large that it becomes just a bunch of noise (like Reddit).

Damn, that’s big. Was there internal conflict, or amicable? What does it mean for signal?

Also, does anyone know what Moxie might get involved with? He’s quite the interesting character (go watch his sailing documentary if you haven’t already).