[rglullis]

Looks like it's time for me to plug my fediverser [0] project. It can help people migrate away from Reddit by letting people sign up to a Lemmy instance [1] with their Reddit credentials and automatically subscribe them to the corresponding Lemmy alternative. The alternatives are crowdsourced. There is a "flagship" deployment at https://fediverser.network but if you want to fork it, you just need to run your instance and manage it as you see fit.

The project got a (small) grant from NLNet a couple of months ago for me to work on having the functionality built-in into the Voyager client (a PWA Apollo clone). If more people or companies would like to help/support, hit me up.

[0] https://fediverser.io

[1] https://portal.alien.top

[seabass-labrax]

Congratulations on the NLnet grant! I'm one of the 'silent' contingent on Reddit - frequently reads, but never posts. It is possible to use Mastodon or another ActivityPub application to interact with Lemmy (and vice-versa) to some extent, which will hopefully allow the two types of social networks to help each other grow.

Would it be viable to add a setting for your own Fediverse account so that you could click on the communities to redirect them to your own server? For instance, if I search for /r/switzerland, there would be a button by the Fediverser suggestion of [e-mail] to open it on my own Fediverse server - like the 'Take me home' button on the Mastodon web client.

[rglullis]

Thanks! Something like what you want is in the works, but I'd like first to be able to authenticate Lemmy accounts in a way that does not scare users.

[seabass-labrax]

Sounds exciting :) I do want to point out that the way Mastodon does it doesn't require authentication from your home server - it just creates a URL redirect that points to it.

[pbronez]

I would really love for a Lemmy constellation to reproduce the peak Reddit experience. So far the activity isn’t there, but I’m trying to show up and be part of the solution.

[rglullis]

That's the spirit!

[stiltzkin]

Its the most active out there of alternatives, like forums with reddit style using Voyager or Sync for Lemmy. not going back

[remram]

The problem with Lemmy is that subreddits ("communities") are tied to a specific instance. So basically every instance has its own separate c/linux, c/funny, c/technology, c/anime, etc. This makes it really hard to use.

[rglullis]

This is absolutely not true. As long as your instance is federating properly, you can follow communities regardless of where they are rooted.

If your problem is in discovering the "canonical" community in case there are duplicates, then I'd invite you to take a look at https://fediverser.network

[remram]

Being able to "follow communities regardless of where they are rooted" just means that I can follow each one of the dozens of c/linux, c/opensource, c/funny. Each with their separate comment threads on similar submissions. Why would I want to do that?

Sure, you can pick a random one like fediverser.network apparently does. Looking at one line from the list, I see that r/manga points to ani.social/c/manga which has 561 subscribers, when lemmy.ml/c/manga has 3,480. What?

[Figs]

> Why would I want to do that?

Differences in policy. There are wildly different ideas about what is and isn't acceptable.

> Sure, you can pick a random one like fediverser.network apparently does. Looking at one line from the list, I see that r/manga points to ani.social/c/manga which has 561 subscribers, when lemmy.ml/c/manga has 3,480. What?

That's not random. There was drama. The lemmy.ml admins are hostile to a lot of anime-related content and drove off most of the community that was accumulating there last year. ani.social is where the active, non-tankie communities are now. It's run with what seem like fairly reasonable policies and actually welcomes the subject matter. If you were relatively happy with the handling of anime-related content on reddit a few years ago then the communities on ani.social are probably what you're looking for; it's a good recommendation.

[remram]

> That's not random. There was drama. The lemmy.ml admins are hostile (...)

That just makes it worse. Not only is it too large a field to bring a community together, but it's a minefield?!

[rglullis]

Your parent is exaggerating. The admins from .ml are not persecuting anyone, not exposing anyone and not even kicking out the existing subscribers that are ok with following the rules of the instance. The "drama" is just that they were clear they are not interested in hosting NSFW content and are not interested in providing a space for the hentai/loli/furry crowd. They defederated from ani.social because ani.social communities were posting loli, and that was it.

[rglullis]

Because number of subscribers does not mean activity momentum, and recommendations for communities on topic-specific instances are preferred over communities on the "larger" instances.

Lemmy.ml was the first instance, so naturally many people created communities there before. This does not mean that it's still where the anime fans want to congregate. The admins of lemmy.ml also said that they want to promote decentralization so they want as few communities there as possible.

[bitcharmer]

Does this address the problem of power-tripping mods?

[rglullis]

I'll be honest with you: I have been having more trouble finding mods than with the mods themselves. Also, I've always stayed away from the controversial/political subreddits, so I never experienced much of "power tripping" mods.

The one thing that I have noticed is that I have been reaching to quite a good number of mods on Reddit to see if they would be interested in migrating their communities, but the absolute majority of them seem to really act like "landed Gentry", they complain about Reddit, but are downright apathetic to any type of change. They keep saying "being a mod is not fun/thankless/source of abuse", yet they refuse to let go of the position.

[EasyMark]

I left all "popular" groups when I posted in a "anti-vaccine" group pointing how how one guy was so far off into the weeds that he might circle around to be being right someday. The mere fact that I posted in there over some ludicrous article/comments got me banned in 9 different "popular" groups, some of which I'd never even been in because I dared to post somewhere "unapproved".

[bitcharmer]

I have similar experience with reddit. First few times I got banned it actually impacted me. I thought I really messed up or did something wrong, even tried to have a conversation with the mod team. Then I realized being banned from most popular subs should be worn like a badge of honour because it just means you're not part of the circle jerk.