Is there a way to take a url like old.reddit.com/r/sub/comments/abcdef/the_post_title/ and get the post text body and the comments (at lest the first couple of levels) via rss?
The first entry is the post with the content and the next ones are the comments (all). Of course there is no nesting structure in the RSS, you need to go to reddit for that.
EDIT: There most probably be a limit in the number of elements of a feed, so if you try that with a post that already has a lot of comments, you will probably see only the last N ones. But if you add the RSS Feed of the comments of new post to your RSS Reader, it will most probably store all the elements over time, so you will have all of them there (and not only the last N ones)… unless the comments are posted too fast and/or the updating frequency of your RSS Reader is too slow.
So I'm on the /r/Disneyland mod team and we decided to move here to @Disneyland / !Disneyland during the blackout. We're still directing users here in the subreddit's sidebar, although the mod team collectively decided to reopen the sub on Reddit after the admins started threatening mods directly.
There were a couple options floated when we were considering the move:
Make our own instance. Traditional forums like MiceChat have survived for decades; we'd effectively be a fediverse version of MiceChat. The main subject would be Disney, but we'd have Disneyland communities, WDW communities, Marvel communities, Star Wars communities, etc. This was shot down because we didn't have the funding, time, manpower, or legal expertise to host things ourselves at any kind of scale. All us mods have day jobs and we don't want to take on a full-time admin role; other Disney subs likewise didn't seem terribly excited about joining in. Shout-out to /r/startrek for starting https://startrek.website and /r/Android for https://lemdro.id/, but it wasn't in the cards for us.
Join a Lemmy server. This was before Lemmy.world existed, so our options were limited. We basically had Lemmy.ml, Beehaw.org, or sh.itjust.works. We disagree with the admins of Lemmy.ml on a fundamental level; Beehaw doesn't allow new communities; sh.itjust.works was maybe doable but we didn't want to deal with that URL for a Disney-themed community. Waiting for a new general-purpose instance to appear (what Lemmy.world became) just wasn't in the cards since I wanted it to be open during the blackout.
Join kbin.social. At the time, there were no other Kbin instances - fedia.io didn't exist yet. But Kbin seemed very flexible (direct Mastodon integration is a plus!), the admin team was just Ernest (but he had a good head on his shoulders), it was my personal fediverse site of choice, and it was growing quickly. At the time we made the call, federation didn't work as expected but it was promised to be fixed (and it has been; we now federate rather broadly).
We've gotten some organic activity on the Disneyland magazine over here on Kbin, which is nice because it shows we don't need to keep the community on life support. The big downside to Kbin (and Lemmy!) is that mod tools basically don't exist; it's going to be tricky without AutoMod long-term. Once Kbin has an API it should be trivial to remake AutoMod for Kbin though, assuming the API has moderation actions.
The content porting really only means something when it’s not overwhelming and the person doing the content porting is actively planning to participate in the submissions.
The easiest way to get someone to not comment on something is a wall of submissions with a fair number of upvotes and few to no comments. At this point, it’s just a glorious RSS feed rather than an actual community.
Driving user growth actually requires putting in the leg work to make meaningful submissions, following-up on them, commenting on submissions, and upvoting content. All of this takes actual effort though. A bot content porting content from Reddit to Lemmy doesn’t do much and for a number of people, looks much more like artificial engagement rather than any meaningfully sincere attempt at growing a community.
Some of the (World/US) News and Politics related communities are so barren of comments despite the deluge of content porting submissions, while other communities have blown up into their own distinct thing because people are making sincere, organic (enough) submissions.
Very insightful points. I totally agree about the intimidation factor of spamming posts with no comments or organic interaction. But it's also a fine line, someone needs to be posting something to get the ball rolling.
I also want to continue spreading the word about federation issues. I've been on Lemmy for a month now and it's going great. But that whole time, it's essentially been impossible to comment on kbin magazines. The comments simply don't show up. I'm not seeing most of your comments when browsing here from Lemmy, but I am seeing Lemmy comments.
I obviously have this account, but its annoying to keep switching between accounts, plus I haven't really gotten the hang of the kbin interface yet.
Point being, I suspect much of the sluggishness of organic growth is not due to a small userbase, but rather due to the fact nobody can actually find the threads and comment on them efficiently. We need to remain steadfast and trust that the developers will fix this stuff up soon. I really feel that simply making Lemmy and kbin federate perfectly would immediately make this platform 10 times more active. We have plenty of people but right now we are fragmented into parallel communities. This isn't even getting into the server overload at a number of Lemmy instances.
I just don't want people to write off the platform before we can see how it's actually meant to work. I've seen a ton of brilliant comments on kbin and I haven't even had the chance to really mix it up with you guys yet.
HE will not concede - it's jut not in his nature. There is a remote chance that he could be forcibly evicted by those that he must report to, but it would take a sudden and rather dramatic drop in the quality of content (hahaha I can't even say that with a straight face) amount of money they receive from advertising to make that happen. Thus that is unlikely to happen either.
In any case, does it matter? Now that we've all woken up from the spell - the illusion that things could be both "easy" and free while still being controlled by a for-profit company, just like with wikipedia but without the hassle of it needing donations to continue going forward - why would we ever want to go back, regardless?
Reddit is too popular and has too much group think, too many of the same types of comments that will get a lot karma, and too many comments that will just be ignored.
NEW is a garbage dump or a pile of duplicates. So why comment on a new post? It will never go anywhere. HOT is already full of comments, so your comment will just be lost.
The karma system also gamifies trying to find a variation on the same thing as always. You’re not trying to be clever or unique, or bring new perspectives to the conversation, you’re trying to be the first person to say the thing you think everyone else is going to think of
I’m constantly seeing posts about how much nicer kbin is, but I’ve also seen a “KYS” comment and personal insults towards people. I also recognize it’s possible that there are fewer nasty comments, that the ones I see are just outliers but I’m more likely to notice them here instead of just downvoting and forgetting because the posts about how nice kbin is are making the counterexamples stand out that much more.
thats crazy. im very active on here as my profile can tell and other than a run in with an alt right person on one thread, i havent seen anything bad. of course, as it gets more popular, this will increase, but for now its pretty nice
Communities are going to have to start actively moderating and removing blatant abuse like that. I haven't seen very much, but ultimately, we cannot rely solely on votes or people simply being nice forever. It's always a touchy question, but every community ultimately has some standards of acceptable behavior, and it'll take time for us to figure out what ours is.
To be fair some instances (like Beehaw) defederate for not being big enough to maintain a huge influx of users. It isn't always about Nazis although for sure Nazis suck I agree with that!
Sure, but anyone complaining about defederation in the context of "group think" probably isn't thinking about how much it sucks that small spaces can't moderate well enough.
Like literally these people are all like "FrEe SpEeCh" like dude if you wanna be a Nazi go be a Nazi I'm not gonna stop you but I'm definitely not gonna support you in it. You will get a hearty kick to the nuts if you approach me with it but like you do you
I would typically only engage with new posts, but in two places. One was some smaller subs where there was going to be more opportunity for discussion between everyone, and two in the larger subs would be breaking issues where new was by default and it was more group observation of the events going on in real time.
It was pretty clear to me, that’s why I stopped going.
It was getting toxic a long while back, but I was ok with that – I just deleted my account every few months so I wouldn’t get doxxed. But then I started to realize 2 things: First, many subreddits wouldn’t even let you post without a minimum amount of karma. Second, many subreddits would downvote you into oblivion for any sort of wrongthink.
Don’t get me wrong, I know I’m a wierdo and I have some bad takes sometimes, but you put bad takes out there to put them in the fire and then you get to see they’re bad or you hammer them until they’re good. But in the echo chamber, there was only one answer: Obey.
Anything new is scary
Reddit is complicated, they just forgot.
The digg users said reddit was ugly and they would never use such an ugly site.
I tried explaining reddit to a diehard forum user, why are all the replies out of order? why are upvotes changing the posting order? this is so complicated!
Don't explain, tell them where to start and how to start. then it explains itself.
As a forum user, it was absolutely crazy to me when I first signed up on Reddit a decade ago that the replies would be out of order and sorted by popularity. But I grew to understand that it was a crowdsourcing effort in most ways and that the cream rises to the top. It was really quite good to get the information you needed out of the thread.
Anything new is scary
Agreed. Most people just want to settle into something comfortable.
This is 100% it. Also some people have only ever used iOS with the Reddit app and Twitter and Tiktok which are so easy to use a literal 3 year old can use it
I think this is also the cause of the squabbles.io Vs kbin/Lemmy split. Squabbles is like new Reddit, kbin is like old Reddit. And people like what they know
This last sentence is the crux of the matter. People don't like change, but quickly forget that they spent time learning the site that they're so familiar with.
It isn't hard to sign up for. No one is saying that is the case. It gets confusing when people start talking about adding subscriptions from other instances and how you can copy and paste the link and subscribe. That right there is where 95% of the people on the internet stop caring.
If the developers of Lemmy and the wider Fediverse ever get that fleshed out in an intuitive way I think popularity will go pretty fast.
That and long term if there is a way for information to be collectively backed up so that if some owner shuts down an instance everything isn't gone.
Agreed. It still is a pain to follow subs on other instances, especially within Jeroba. I know you're supposed to copy the !sub into the search field, but it never comes up.
You don't need to do that if that community is already federating with your instance. If its not, it might take a little while for the federation to actually start after you make the search (based on the server infrastructure of your instance and the remaining queue). Try searching again after a bit and it should be there. These quriks should be solved as instances become more stable, and Lemmy/kbin gets further developed.
For Lemmy, if nobody is subscribed to that community on your instance you have to copy the entire URL. E.g. you need to search for https://instance.social/c/sub in order to find !sub.
Once one person on your instance searches for it, then you can find it by searching !sub.
I don't know why Lemmy works like that. Kbin doesn't have the problem; you can find things by searching @sub@instance.social no matter what.
@sota2077 When I first came over to Kbin that's the thing I got hung up on, everything else I got used to quickly. There's plenty of smart people in the Fediverse, I'm sure someone will come up with a solution.
The question everyone was really asking was if will they will be able to make these quality of life changes before the Reddit API changes come into effect. The answer seems to be "no" unfortunately. It's a huge missed opportunity that may never come again.
Oh I have all the faith in the world that someone will come up with a solution eventually. I just assume it was never a major priority because of the userbase. With an explosion of users I'm sure they have a 100 things they want to improve and it is just a matter of time.
This can be alleviated a bit. If one person searches for an other-instance community by URL, it will become available for all other users through a normal search. So over time this becomes less of an issue, particularly if someone takes out some time to seed a bunch of these for their instance.
The first step is completely different from anything else you've ever done
"Pick an instance to sign up for"
This does not compute. What is an instance? Why do I have to pick? Which one should I pick? Compared to
"Create an account at reddit.com" makes sense and is something everyone has done before.
It doesn't matter how simple the answers to those questions are, the fact that the very first step requires multiple explanations is huge, and will always be a barrier to entry.
The first step is completely different from anything else you've ever done
This isn't really true, you already had to do this for email. Never heard of that being a barrier of entry.
My parents prefer to opt for local privacy/security focused email providers, while I go with gmail for the feature set and design. But I used to try out a few different ones to figure out which one works best for me. Still use a hotmail email for my Windows account.
I fail to see how this is different to the situation with lemmy/kbin instances.
What is this about having to copy and paste a link to find subscriptions from other instances? I literally just pull up the community browser and set it to "all" and then search.
Just be careful. That only works because your instance already knows about those other instances because someone already interacted with them. If you ever want to join a community on a non-popular instance, you might have to be the first person to search for it by copying and pasting.
Yes, that will show you all the communities/magazines that your instance has already discovered and have started federating with. But if it is a community that hasn't been discovered by your instance yet, you will need to search with the link for it to start federating. And once even a single user from an instance does that, the community will be visible to everyone else as well.
Yeah. Really, new admins should understand that they should be seeding their new instance, but the last couple of weeks have been... Kinda nuts? So, this won't really be an issue for most users long term. It'll be a thing for admins on small or niche sites that want to ensure they're discoverable and that their users can access the best communities.
On Lemmy, if nobody is subscribed to a community on your instance, it doesn't appear in that view.
In order for it to appear, someone with an account has to go to the search bar at the top right of the page and type in the URL to the community manually. Then it'll appear after an initial search.
On large instances like Lemmy.world, you can almost guarantee someone has already done this for most popular communities - but newer/smaller communities may not appear because nobody on your instance has searched for them yet.
For smaller instances, there are likely multiple communities missing and you'd have no idea until you went to look for them.
That's cause over time people have added communities to your instances repitoire over time. Network effect, essentially, making it easier for each new user. Tbh, if new users are on a bigger instance this should be a non issue.
Why use Kbin over Mastodon to post a microblog to the Fediverse? Genuinely curious!
There were so many times I was browsing reddit and thought to myself, "this didn't deserve a post of its own." Was it content related to the subreddit? Absolutely. But it was simple, trite, repetitive - for example, just someone having a halfway neat experience in a game, but with an incident for which the novelty had worn thin for long-term players long ago. (oh so your taming inspiration lined up with a thrumbo passing, wao sugoi moving on....)
On the flip side, I'd often want to share my inane thoughts about a topic with others interested in that topic, but I knew my inane thoughts didn't really warrant a whole post. Sometimes I just wanted to say "I thought this event story was neat" without adding a "what did you think?" and massaging whatever discussion thread followed.
So, in short, I had a higher standard for what counted as discussion-worthy and was dissatisfied when both consuming and producing content because of it.
The kbin magazine blend of discussion threads and microblogs is perfect for this sort of problem, in my opinion, which is why kbin is my ideal setup. You clearly define when you want to make a discussion space for everyone vs. when you want to just bounce a thought into other like-minded people simply by whether you create a thread or a microblog, and you don't need two different sites (reddit/twitter, or lemmy/mastodon) to do it.
Some subreddits already had a daily/weekly discussion thread pinned to the top to serve exactly this purpose. Kbin's just taken that idea and made it a default part of the software.
I was never a big fan of twitter/mastodon random personal ramblings that would fill my feed so I was naturally very skeptical of the microblogging feature in kbin, but honestly... it kinda makes sense here!
If I'm on a magazine for some game like elden ring, for example, it makes sense to keep threads for big threaded conversations while using the microblog for just small thoughts, tips, screenshots, for sharing personal accomplishments or smaller things like that which don't usually create big discussions. If I need to ask a quick question I can just make a microblog post and maybe get answers even from people using mastodon that aren't on kbin or lemmy!
I'm mostly repeating what you said, I know, but just wanted to gush about it a bit, it's a pretty cool idea.
I don't think a guaranteed replacement is the reason why warranties can contribute to something being BIFL: rather, the lifetime warranty is the manufacturer putting money on the durability of the item, which increases my confidence that they genuinely believe their product is actually durable.
It's still no guarantee and there are lots of other factors to consider, but I think taking a warranty into account is reasonable.
kbin.spritesserver.nl
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