Lemmy has a lot of obstacles that will prevent it from truly going mainstream:
The community browser is complete dog shit for discovering content on different instances, and trying to view another instance’s content from your own community is just needlessly complex. Discoverability is still a lot better than Mastodon though, where you’d look at all post and see nothing but hentai reposting bots regurgitating stuff that isn’t even allowed on NSFWLemmy…
Due to the nature of federation, you also run the risk of committing to an instance only for them to defederate entirely, or disassociate from content you want to see but they don’t agree with. Beehaw is a very good example of this.
As there’s no option (yet) to migrate to a different instance, and Lemmy is a FOSS project that cannot be monetized in the same way as a traditional social media site, what happens when instances start shutting down due to being unable to keep up with server hosting costs?
I cannot speak for the iOS option available, but Jerboa is barebones. For example, you can’t even tap on a post/comment reply in your inbox to go to that comment’s permalink and view the context. This is incredibly basic functionality for any social news aggregator. Even with the fediverse in general surpassing 150,000 users, I don’t see Lemmy getting the same level of third-party app support as Reddit had.
These are all valid complaints, but I feel like you need to put this into perspective. This platform has blown up in the last week, change is going to come but it’s going to take some time. I’m sure it will go faster now that it is really taking off though.
Server costs are not as high as Reddit made us believe. You can probably run a 10 user instance for less than 10€/month.
If the instance is good donations could keep it up forever, not even expensive donations. Certainly a fraction of what reddit is asking for reddit premium.
I studied something completely unrelated with computer science. I started with programming and then with general computer science and now I know a lot of things and I’m quite probably going to land a job in IT field next year. It’s never late to learn something new.
Coding is hard though, especially when you go past the basic tutorial stuff (Hello World, if statements, for/while loops, libraries, etc.) Actual computer science and understanding all the technical and mathematical aspects of computing is orders of magnitude harder than writing some C# or Javascript code.
Last time I actually tried to make an effort to learn how to code was back in the days when /r/CarlHProgramming was still active, long before Carl Herold was arrested on heinous child sex crimes.
It’s requirements will grow, but it’s still mostly text and some images. Mastodon is kind of big (not twitter big but bigger and more active than lemmy) and there are people still self hosting their instance and there’s lots of donation supported instances.
I think fediverse being instance-oriented should scalate well. As no instance really needs to hold the whole thing by its own.
4 is already fixed in the alpha of jerboa, and the functionality is there but got accidentally hidden in the current version. You have to hold-click in your inbox to see context. These kind of hiccups are normal in a very new foss browser.
Lemmy has a lot of obstacles that will prevent it from truly going mainstream:
The community browser is complete dog shit for discovering content on different instances, and trying to view another instance’s content from your own community is just needlessly complex. Discoverability is still a lot better than Mastodon though, where you’d look at all post and see nothing but hentai reposting bots regurgitating stuff that isn’t even allowed on NSFWLemmy…
Due to the nature of federation, you also run the risk of committing to an instance only for them to defederate entirely, or disassociate from content you want to see but they don’t agree with. Beehaw is a very good example of this.
As there’s no option (yet) to migrate to a different instance, and Lemmy is a FOSS project that cannot be monetized in the same way as a traditional social media site, what happens when instances start shutting down due to being unable to keep up with server hosting costs?
I cannot speak for the iOS option available, but Jerboa is barebones. For example, you can’t even tap on a post/comment reply in your inbox to go to that comment’s permalink and view the context. This is incredibly basic functionality for any social news aggregator. Even with the fediverse in general surpassing 150,000 users, I don’t see Lemmy getting the same level of third-party app support as Reddit had.
These are all valid complaints, but I feel like you need to put this into perspective. This platform has blown up in the last week, change is going to come but it’s going to take some time. I’m sure it will go faster now that it is really taking off though.
I am quite confident that the platform will go up in quality quick. Here is why I am confident:
GitHub Lemmy Activity Pulse (LemmyNet / lemmy)
undefined> what happens when instances start shutting down due to being unable to keep up with server hosting costs?
Well idk about you guys but self hosting is always an option. Not easy, but an option
You can, but only in the latest version. It takes multiple taps, though.
How?
Server costs are not as high as Reddit made us believe. You can probably run a 10 user instance for less than 10€/month.
If the instance is good donations could keep it up forever, not even expensive donations. Certainly a fraction of what reddit is asking for reddit premium.
It’s one of those times where I wish I learned programming/computer science and not History and accountancy.
I studied something completely unrelated with computer science. I started with programming and then with general computer science and now I know a lot of things and I’m quite probably going to land a job in IT field next year. It’s never late to learn something new.
Coding is hard though, especially when you go past the basic tutorial stuff (Hello World, if statements, for/while loops, libraries, etc.) Actual computer science and understanding all the technical and mathematical aspects of computing is orders of magnitude harder than writing some C# or Javascript code.
Last time I actually tried to make an effort to learn how to code was back in the days when /r/CarlHProgramming was still active, long before Carl Herold was arrested on heinous child sex crimes.
If the fediverse gets very big, won’t your instance need a lot of bandwidth and storage to sync all the content?
It’s requirements will grow, but it’s still mostly text and some images. Mastodon is kind of big (not twitter big but bigger and more active than lemmy) and there are people still self hosting their instance and there’s lots of donation supported instances.
I think fediverse being instance-oriented should scalate well. As no instance really needs to hold the whole thing by its own.
On 4, what’s up with this? Being fixed?
4 is already fixed in the alpha of jerboa, and the functionality is there but got accidentally hidden in the current version. You have to hold-click in your inbox to see context. These kind of hiccups are normal in a very new foss browser.