Subreddit Migration Directory

[unclekev]

Just went to the 'Programming' lemmy/beehaw and the first thing I see is a post about how they have had to defederate from some instances because of a lack of proper mod tools, trolls and bad actors.

The irony.

> https://beehaw.org/post/567170

> these two instances’ open registration policy, which is extremely problematic for us given how federation works and how trivial it makes trolling, harassment, and other undesirable behavior;

> unfortunate reality we’ve also found is we just don’t have the tools or the time here to parse out all the good from all the bad. all we have is a nuke and some pretty rudimentary mod powers that don’t scale well. we have a list of improvements we’d like to see both on the moderation side of Lemmy and federation if at all possible–but we’re unanimous in the belief that we can’t wait on what we want to be developed here.

[guywithahat]

One of the biggest issues with the fediverse imo is moderation. People will literally create blacklists of sites, and if you don't follow the blacklist you'll get added to it. You end up in these situations where there are completely separate versions of the fediverse and the largest instances will often not be able to talk to each other.

At least before Elon bought Twitter I know the most active (depending on how you count metrics) site was poa.st, and this was on a mastodon.social blacklist, which was one of the other major sites, and every site had their own list. I know people would sometimes have 4 or 5 accounts so that they could talk to everyone they wanted or as insurance in case the current admin got bored and closed the site.

I of course support the idea of a federated reddit, but there are a lot of problems that exist in the community

[lolinder]

Beehaw was around a long time before Lemmy took the spotlight, and they explicitly have tried to have a high-moderation community with a distinct character. It wouldn't surprise me if they continue to defederate any instance with open registration.

There are other programming communities on other servers that will likely become the actual replacement for r/programming.

EDIT: The "What is Beehaw?" post in their sidebar[0] is a really enlightening introduction to the community, and also quite interesting for developing an understanding of the fediverse as a whole. This isn't going to be a drop-in replacement for Reddit because the admins will all have very different visions of the kinds of communities they want to create. I didn't end up deciding to join Beehaw, but reading their post made me very hopeful for the future of the fediverse as a whole.

[0] https://beehaw.org/post/107014

[jakecopp]

That's a feature, not a bug.

Moderation in the fediverse (inc. Mastodon & Lemmy) means defederating from "problematic" instances, where problematic is defined in the rules of the server doing the federating server (which appears to be documented at https://beehaw.org/instances)

This means moderation happens at a community & instance level rather than global moderation.

Please correct me if I'm missing something - I'm quite new to Mastodon & the fediverse like I'm sure many are!

[dotnet00]

This has been my primary concern about federated reddit. With mastodon etc, the defederation stuff is tolerable because you aren't as likely to have any reason to care about the instance defederating from you anyway.

For instance, the free-speech instances weren't going to be interested in dealing with the typical Twitter refugee anyway, and both would be content in their own corner.

But with federated forums this changes, as now you're expecting users from other instances to form a community with your users, so you're heavily incentivised to only work with instances who place the same emphasis on the rules, and unless each "clique" is fine with duplicating all the common forum topics for their own users, the result is that a very small group of people gets to take everyone's content hostage to impose their own will on the community.

So we're back to the same Reddit issue of a few people controlling the majority of the content.

[kibwen]

There's nothing ironic about this, the whole point of a federated system is that instances have the power to decide who's a part of their network.

[Cthulhu_]

And there you have it. Reddit has solved both performance / scalability and moderation, and thinking it can be solved by going distributed / federated is naive. Every Reddit alternative has failed / is not as successful is because of this.

[smsm42]

That's what has turned me off on the whole fediverse thing. Too much time spent on figuring out who's not going to talk to whom and who is going to be banned from where. I am old enough to remember the old time internet forums. It wasn't always pretty. It wasn't always clean. There were trolls. There were flamewars. But people spent most of the effort to connect and build, not on banning each other and walling off. For me personally, a collection of 100 safe spaces, cross-banning each other, is not something I want to deal with, and defeats the whole purpose.

[raincole]

Maybe it's my own problem, but I believe a lot of people have the same problem:

My biggest issue about this is that I'm too lazy to learn how it works. I don't understand what "federation" and "defederating" mean in this context. For Reddit I have terms like:

subreddit - a board, like in a forum

mod - a mod, just like in a forum again

karma - useless internet point

and that's about all I need to know. I just don't have the incentive to learn what federation, defederating, instances, etc are, but they seem to somehow can affect what content I can see or whether I'll get banned. This demotivates me even further.

Of course if it becomes a mainstream platform or all my friends are using it then I'll learn these concepts. But not before that.

[lost_tourist]

That's because beehaw is essentially a giant safe zone and they don't suffer trolls. They got too many trolls from outside so they decided to cut bait.

[bbotond]

Join the programming.dev instance instead. It’s really nice and starting to become an active community.

[jrflowers]

What does irony mean?

[lolinder]

Beehaw became a hub for the exodus largely through a misunderstanding—they were already active when Lemmy exploded, so a lot of the exiles found their way into their communities, but Beehaw's culture is in a lot of respects incompatible with Reddit's. It was only a matter of time before they decided preserving their community was more important than sheltering all of Reddit's exiles.

I highly recommend reading Beehaw's history that they link from their sidebar. It helped me better understand the value proposition of the fediverse, and goes a long way towards explaining their perspective on the necessity of defederating the large instances:

https://beehaw.org/post/107014

[camdenlock]

I read it. It’s bizarre. They’re so convinced of their preferred ideology that they refer to indoctrination as simply “becoming a better person”.

One doesn’t come across such intense blindness of self like that very often. Steer clear.

[Cthulhu_]

> Over time this platform, like many others before it, got infested with a group of people I like to refer to as rationalists.

I'm reading another instance of "eternal september" in this post.

[Semaphor]

Just remember, if you want to interact with both [email protected] and [email protected] (edit: and have an account on either!), you need two accounts, because beehaw.org defederated lemmy.world, funnily enough, because of lacking mod-tools (part of the reason of the Reddit uproar).

[neltnerb]

I mean, I have no huge interest in this battle but if you are on neither you can certainly federate with both.

This is a huge advantage of a large number of smaller servers, defederation as a policy decision by your instance administrator can be solved by moving to a new one without nearly as much trouble if you disagree with it.

The huge disadvantage (or advantage as it evolves) is that [email protected] and [email protected] (made up instances) have different membership and moderation.

It will be interesting to see how that goes, I expect niche topics to end up accumulating on one or two servers to gain enough membership while huge topics end up with more serious siloing by instance.

[groceryheist]

Can't you just follow them all from a 3rd server, even a mastodon server?

[quaintdev]

I think this is Reddit single handedly doing what we have been wanting for so long a.k.a. decentralised communities.

The only advantage(?) Reddit had over these was a user could have feed from all these communities which is still possible with RSS

Edit: I want to know where r/selfhosted ended up, anyone knows?

[lolinder]

[email protected] is very active.

[yardstick]

Devils advocate:

The poor showing of migrated communities - both low volume of migrations, and poor performance of the servers running them, isn’t helping the cause.

Like, I look at that list and the broken-overloaded lemmys running them and I can’t help but think this is why Reddit is successful and will continue to be successful. Because very, very few will put up with such a poor experience the alternatives offer.

Of course, if there’s some serious effort put in asap into the usability, stability and overall experience of the decentralised communities approach, then Reddit may falter. I’m not optimistic.

[fdgjgbdfhgb]

Tô be fair, Reddit had a long time to grow organically, it didn't just spawn with millions of users overnight - same for most subreddits.

Still, users now expect an active community and a fast and reliable website right now, not in 10 years.

Lemmy/Kbin/whatever is not going to _replace_ Reddit today, and I don't think they ever meant to replace it all at once... but maybe they can keep growing and eventually get there.

[oehtXRwMkIs]

> r/StarWars: Star [email protected]

Please tell me this is a joke.

[treyd]

Yeah that sounds like it's a pending trademark violation C&D.

[Eupolemos]

A funny one at that.

[icapybara]

The top post on the most well known Lemmy instance (Lemmy.ml) is an announcement from the server admin that Lemmy.ml is now running on a dedicated machine, with 6 cores and 32 gb ram.

Good for them, but this is supposed to be the Reddit replacement? A forum that was, until recently, just running on some guy’s computer? I know there are other instances but are there any serious ones?

[jonathanyc]

Hacker News ran on a 2 core machine with 128 GB of RAM :) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9222006

[tomstockmail]

Another list: https://www.quippd.com/writing/2023/06/15/unofficial-subredd...

[czpl]

Can we go back to separate forums? That was a better time.

[bboygravity]

This.

Can't wait for phpBB and YaBB style re-replacements of Reddit.

[tech234a]

I find it ironic that selfhosted isn’t running their own Lemmy instance.

[lolinder]

The guy who's running lemmy.world is also one of the mods on [email protected], so they kind of are.

[udunadan]

Shameless plug: I have created https://infosec.pub/c/exploitdev, a community inspired by /r/netsec, /r/vrd and /r/ReverseEngineering (no relation to any of these and I am not the admin of infosec.pub either) dedicated to technical security research content. The instance also has other infosec-related communities which I hope will get traction as well.

[lexandstuff]

All the best over at Lemmy. I'm sure the community is more than happy to operate at a loss in perpetuity, unlike Reddit.

Please let us know when we can access our contributions again.

[jcz_nz]

Literally, the very point is that there is no “they”.

[fermentation]

Anyone know where the r/learnjapanese folks ended up?

[redmerchant2]

What value do you get out of that sub, out of curiosity? I found it to have good resources that have been aggregated but the most awful “community”.

So many weebs with minor proficiency attacking and berating posters.

[Thorrez]

    This site can’t provide a secure connection
    redditmigration.com uses an unsupported protocol.
    ERR_SSL_VERSION_OR_CIPHER_MISMATCH

I think for different people the hostname resolves to different IPs, and some IPs are broken. For me it resolves to 44.227.76.166 .

    curl -v https://redditmigration.com/ --resolve redditmigration.com:443:44.227.76.166
    * Added redditmigration.com:443:44.227.76.166 to DNS cache
    * Hostname redditmigration.com was found in DNS cache
    *   Trying 44.227.76.166...
    * TCP_NODELAY set
    * Connected to redditmigration.com (44.227.76.166) port 443 (#0)
    * ALPN, offering h2
    * ALPN, offering http/1.1
    * Cipher selection: ALL:!EXPORT:!EXPORT40:!EXPORT56:!aNULL:!LOW:!RC4:@STRENGTH
    * successfully set certificate verify locations:
    *   CAfile: /etc/ssl/certs/ca-certificates.crt
      CApath: /etc/ssl/certs
    * TLSv1.2 (OUT), TLS header, Certificate Status (22):
    * TLSv1.2 (OUT), TLS handshake, Client hello (1):
    * TLSv1.2 (IN), TLS header, Unknown (21):
    * TLSv1.2 (IN), TLS alert, Server hello (2):
    * error:14077410:SSL routines:SSL23_GET_SERVER_HELLO:sslv3 alert handshake failure
    * Curl_http_done: called premature == 1
    * stopped the pause stream!
    * Closing connection 0
    curl: (35) error:14077410:SSL routines:SSL23_GET_SERVER_HELLO:sslv3 alert handshake failure

[psychphysic]

I see Beehaw on there a couple times.

The defederation wars have already begun [0][1]

[0] https://beehaw.org/post/567170

[1] https://lemmy.sdf.org/post/69543

[michaelnoguera]

https://web.archive.org/web/20230616040357/https://redditmig...

[Gareth321]

This is great! There are obviously fewer users but I find myself preferring that.

[shostack]

What do I need to do to get access to all this content on my Android phone in an easy to use single app experience?