pinwurm

joined 2 years ago
[–] pinwurm@lemmy.ml 3 points 2 years ago (2 children)

I've got two for Lemmy.

mlem is currently being developed for iOS with around ~20 contributors. It's in early open beta, and I'm psyched because there's supposed to be a massive update between now and tomorrow.

memmy for iOS looks promising. Really intuitive 'swipe to upvote/downvote/reply' feature and browses similarly to Apollo. It's very barebones right now, the project is just a few days old and there's one developer (as far as I know).

[–] pinwurm@lemmy.ml 1 points 2 years ago

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.

[–] pinwurm@lemmy.ml 3 points 2 years ago

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.

[–] pinwurm@lemmy.ml 2 points 2 years ago (2 children)

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.

[–] pinwurm@lemmy.ml 5 points 2 years ago (3 children)

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.

[–] pinwurm@lemmy.ml 4 points 2 years ago (2 children)

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.

[–] pinwurm@lemmy.ml 1 points 2 years ago

Sure, there will be one community that is the community for a particular subject. For example, there’s no good reason to subscribe to several communities for “Springfield Massachusetts”. The most popular one of going to be the standard.

But maybe different “Politics” communities will have different leanings and contributors that you value for different reasons - and they can each go strong.

The thing is, no single server should have all your subscriptions. You might get news from Beehaw, games from .ml and do a book club through Kbin.

Because no server/instance owns all of it, the federation checks and balances itself. If users are unhappy with mods or administrators, or whatever - there is a choice. They also don’t have to delete the app they use (when apps start rolling out officially. I’m beta testing some).

There is competition for users - and that’s a good thing. It means that user experience will come first.

[–] pinwurm@lemmy.ml 6 points 2 years ago

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.

[–] pinwurm@lemmy.ml 1 points 2 years ago

The average user has poor tech literacy. I mean, the pandemic began over 3 years ago and still people have trouble managing Zoom. "How do I share a screen? Where is the calendar invite? Oh woops, I didn't realize I was unmuted!". These are otherwise smart people. That's why the best apps are super simple and idiot-proof.

I strongly believe that a good Lemmy does not need to explain the federation.
It should not use the word 'instance', 'server' or any of that jargon outside of advanced settings. All that'll do is scare away new users.

All the app needs to do is say, "Hey, you want to connect with communities sharing memes, news and fun stories? Well - download this app!". Let the app point them to a list of communities they might like and keep it at that.

The user doesn't need to know they're commenting on Beehaw or lemmy.world. All they need to know is they're chatting about a cute kitten or whatever.

[–] pinwurm@lemmy.ml 4 points 2 years ago

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.

[–] pinwurm@lemmy.ml 1 points 2 years ago* (last edited 2 years ago)

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.

[–] pinwurm@lemmy.ml 2 points 2 years ago

My understanding is the version I'm beta testing now is actually pretty far from where they already are. Might be an update to the beta later this week.

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