There’s a lot of factors to consider, enough factors that there’s no consensus on how you make this choice and at the end of the day you have to pick one and run with it.
A random list of some factors you could potentially consider before yolo’ing:
Is the admin team good? Are they power-tripping jerks? Are they ideologues who are likely to defederate the world for no sensible reason? Do they have a good head for policy? There’s no easy way to evaluate this, you have to look at the sidebar to see who the admins are, stalk their posts a bit, read the modlog for banned users (but he aware that moderation decisions are federated and anonymous so it can be hard to tell what mod did what), and you yourself have to be good enough at these things to recognize quality (or at least alignment with your own values).
Is the instance well-funded and is the admin team prepared to deal with the serious stuff like child-porn reports and subpoenas? Again, this is hard to check for. Basically, if an instance has been pretty big for years (there are only like 2 or 3 Lemmy instances like this and they’re all overloaded) or has the admin team run some other big service before?
Are the instance rules compatible with your topic? Don’t run a porn sub in an instance that bans porn. There are vibe concerns as well, like an edgelord meme community is not going to do well on a hyper-moderated safe-space-oriented instance.
Is the community topic geographically based? You might want to pick an instance homed in that geography. This can be eval’ed by using ip-lookup tools of the instance doesn’t advertise its geography.
Is the instance homed in a jurisdiction that has favorable laws for your topic? It’s better to host a community for sex-work or bourbon on an instance in a jurisdiction where those things are legal, rather than in the UAE.
Is there a topic instance that specializes in your topic? There’s a pathfinder TTRPG instance and a star trek instance, is there one for your topic? Note that topic-based instances can fail some other and more important criteria like being an experienced admin team. It’s possible that a topic instance is NOT the right choice, but it’s worth considering.
Is the server overloaded already? Mebbe pick a different one.
Is there already a well run community on another instance? Help that one grow, don’t splinter the community further.
There are many more factors to consider, and no one considers them all. Eventually you have to pick an instance that’s “good enough” and run with it. But those are some of the major factors one could consider if you’re willing to put in the non-trivial amount of effort required to evaluate them.
There’s a lot here I’d not considered so this is helpful, thanks.
The splintering is an issue I’ve run into already. When I searched for squaredcircle on the assumption the subreddit community had started moving, I got results for five ‘squaredcircle’ communities across five different instances and none of them have a significant membership. I don’t want to further splinter the community by creating another community as you say, so I figured I’d just have to subscribe to all of them and wait to see which one takes off. I guess it’s going to be down to the subreddit mods to say “this is where we’re going”, if that’s even what they want to do. Until then it might be a bit daunting for those making the jump but it is what it is.
The splintering is an issue I’ve run into already. When I searched for squaredcircle on the assumption the subreddit community had started moving, I got results for five ‘squaredcircle’ communities across five different instances and none of them have a significant membership.
Yeah, I blame Lemmy’s fairly terrible cross-instance community discovery and just being young. Reddit had overlapping communities as well (tons of DnD subreddits, tons of aiti subreddits, and there were plenty of high-profile community split events over mod policies). But because it was so well established in recent years… most communities had standardized on one well-run subreddit.
But Lemmy’s community search is so poor, I think folks legit fail to find bigger/better off-instance communities and so no single one gets a toe-hold to gain critical-mass… they all just kind of smoulder with catching fire. Hopefully better community discovery will come and the well-run communities start to rise to the top.
Were you a subreddit mod? In this case my advice would be to contact the existing mods of the lemmy communities / kbin magazines and see if one of them is willing to hand the community over to you (add you as mod, they step down). If so, you've found your new home!
(you may want to re-make your account on the instance that you're primarily spending time on, for convenience, in case federation doesn't work for several hours at a time here and there, etc)
At the same time as keeping an eye out for "power tripping jerks" you want to watch for poorly moderated instances as well. Instances with little to no moderation are at risk of being defederated by other instances if they can't stop their users from trolling/harrassing/evading bans/blocks, etc. You don't want to set yourself up on what seems like a big instance only to have it disconnected from the rest of them because bad actors decided it was a safe haven for acting up.
The fact that Relay can stay free of charge while "exploring subscription options" means Reddit modified their terms with some developers. The original deal announced at the end of May meant devs would incur charges starting July 1, although they wouldn't have to pay for those charges until August. That would mean racking up potentially millions in costs right away.
Reddit said they would work with developers who kept communication open, but then they wouldn't answer emails. If a deal was made with Relay it would have been very last minute and therefore rather unprofessional.
I used Relay but will not reinstall because it is temporarily free. I am done with Reddit. They don't respect their users or recognize where their value derives from.
I also suspect that there were inconsistencies between pricing based on the 3rd party app in question. I don't mean that Apollo was being charged more (in proportion) for having a larger userbase compared to apps like Relay or narwhal, but that Apollo was being charged almost double per unit to access API than Relay or narwhal. I am reading between the lines of articles published two *weeks ago about this because it didn't make sense to me why these smaller apps would be able to afford the business model if Apollo had a $20M bill to pay in August.
What gets my goat is why didn't reddit ever just headhunt Christian or other 3PA developers and bring them into reddit corporate to build out their native app? That's what Google or Microsoft would have done to quash competition. Or, to be truly evil, hired Christian and then never let him work on apps again with both an NDA and a non-compete in place.
Huffman regularly calls reddit unprofitable with a heavy dose of ire, but I think there could have been a way to bring a reputable 3PA dev into the fold to keep the reddit native app at least comparable in UX.
They DID do that, when they bought Alien Blue. Then they promptly destroyed it. Good UX != profits. So they butchered it into some sort of zombie app where everything was designed to make them money. And that’s why they are pushing so hard to make EVERYONE use it.
If anything, they hate 3PA devs because they show users what the experience could be like - how good and clean it could be - if they didn’t have a greedy corporation trying to sabotage everything.
They don’t need to hire anyone to pacify them. Reddit doesn’t gaf what happens to the devs, whether they are pacified or not. It’s like a tiny baby fish cursing the ship that just harvested 120,000 fish in a net. The ship laughs, and sails away.
Hopefully things will be better once federation grows in popularity. I know I’ve been using it daily since this all started. But sadly I have to augment with reddit because there just aren’t enough people here yet.
Content quality and the rate of submission has clearly plummeted. /r/all has become stagnant, and completely filled with memes and shitposts. Comment quality has amazingly gotten even worse (4chan level in a lot of cases), and there are definitely less participants on threads.
In comparison, I've found commentary in the fediverse to be more active, engaged, and positive than Reddit has ever been - and I was there since before Digg. My kbin feed, with a bit of tweaking and expansion out to other instances, is more useful by far than Reddit ever was, and it's activity level is beginning to match what used to be common on Reddit.
I think that Reddit was banking on not having a competing centralized corporate entity to absorb their users, and that it would prevent a Digg style exodus from their site. And to some extent, they were right - users, primarily readers still came back to reddit and have continued to do so because it's still the easiest place to find content on the internet. But, as you can see from the slow heat death of /r/all - that's changing.
What Spez didn't count on was that their moderators and content creators - the real engine behind Reddit - would leave. He assumed the thrill of having a large audience would be enough of a carrot to keep them participating while he made the site more difficult to use. This was a significant miscalculation, as anyone who's ever run a forum knows. Only about 2% of your users on a site will post, which means that if you alienate that 2% by any significant amount, you'll see a following degradation of non-participating readers as the content dries up.
Huffman should have realized this, as in Reddit's early days, he and the other admins on the site would regularly post with sockpuppet accounts to keep the content flowing enough to maintain readership. This mess is clearly of his own making, and one that he personally should have anticipated given what he and the other admins had to do to build the community in the first place.
But what's more interesting to me is what this (and the Twitter debacle) has done to illustrate the flaws of relying on centralized media. It's created a discussion about the wider internet and an interest in expanding it that hasn't been really talked about since the last decade. There was no reason to expand out from the centralized services as long as they were working well, fairly, and with an eye towards fostering their communities. It's when they moved into looking at their users as profit centers, and their moderation of content as a means of social control that it became clear that this contract of social responsibility had been broken.
And when that contract was broken, it broke the soul of Reddit's community. Nobody wants to contribute to Reddit, because Reddit isn't about creating a good space for the internet community to grow anymore. It's about how much money it can make Spez, and most of us really don't feel like working for him for free.
Content quality and the rate of submission has clearly plummeted.
I’ve noticed this too. Almost all of the subs I regularly go to have been filled by obvious “seed”-content posting by brand new and never before seen in the sub accounts, with upvotes equaling some of the highest voted (for the sub). It actually pushed me to migrate to Lemmy more.
I’m really fascinated at how in the lead up to this they consistently alienated moderators and users so into reddit that they looked up 3PAs. Like they really went ham on the users that make their site work and go all shocked pikachu when people leave/disengage/protest. That’s a level of social incompetence I can’t conceptualise when the stakes are this high.
Extremely well said, and I would repost you to the bestof magazine if I didn't think bestof communities were lame.
As I keep reading about all of this unfolding, a phrase that keeps rattling around in my brain: oppositional defiance disorder.
I am not a doctor or psychiatrist so I am not being too serious by bringing it up, but I am facetiously curious about who has the worst ODD among all the players of this drama.
Is it Steve Huffman and his refusal to back down? Is it the rexxitors who jumped ship on June 12? Is it the redditors who stayed to troll Huffman and his edicts? Or is it the redditors who stayed and are crafting a bespoke cesspool in snoo's carapace?
Huffman has always been a narcissist, and notoriously thin-skinned when it comes to people challenging him - the fact he'd go in and edit other users comments critical of him speaks volumes as to both his sensitivity to criticism and the levels to which he'll stoop. I think these tendencies and Reddit's slow turn towards autocracy were exacerbated with the Tencent investment, and has only accelerated as the site attempts to become profitable.
So, I was on reddit for over 11 years, but I didn't arrive there from Digg. I remember a big kerfuffle surrounding Huffman and his willingness to change critical comments, but I was fairly oblivious to the ramifications of all that. I think I was just largely enjoying the halcyon days of Pao where you didn't have to think about reddit's corporate structure too far beyond how skivvy Conde Nast was.
This current controversy I guess seemed more relevant to me because I exclusively used 3PA to access reddit. Back when I had iPhones, I was paying for one of the tiers of Apollo because I liked it so much. I am pretty sure I used to use alien blue way way back in the day. I used these mainly because reddit didn't have an app on offer at all at these times and reddit for mobile was just inoperably clunky to use. As a share of the market, I was already brand loyal by the time reddit finally saw the writing on the wall that there was a need for an app. Now that I'm on Android, I was using Infinity (mixed feelings there about the fact that Infinity kept operating and I've since migrated and deleted my reddit accounts). I still feel resolved in my decision to leave reddit out of the principle of it all, and solidarity with Christian's mistreatment even though my app of choice is apparently staying online.
You refer to the Tencent movement as a notable moment that shifted the course of reddit. Any other pivotal moments that come to mind for you @arotrios ?
Brilliant work by that team! Either reddit has to violate its own rules (which sadly they can, by deleting all NSFW content and removing the flag), or let the mods go.
And if they let the mods go, other giant subs can do the same thing in order to safely go NSFW.
I mean ... I agree for sure but when I think of paid mods I think o f how shitty they do their jobs in facebook and snapchat and am like yea they should be paid to ru na functioning sub/site but not to just watch people be awful to one another.
It looks like the current plan is just to archive subreddits, turn off comments, and leave them public until the IPO.
Unless you happen to be r/programming of course and someone noticed the ChatGPT bots that seem to consistently be posting statements supportive of the admins. Then we got to force the subreddit to private immediately.
Unrelated segue, did you know that Sam Altman, current CEO of OpenAI, responsible for ChatGPT, was a long time reddit board member, and despite claims that he left last year, is still listed as being on the board of reddit?
Also, anyone else find it weird that in a lot of the threads talking about the protests on reddit... While the most upvoted comments usually favor the admins, if you look at the sheer number of comments speaking out on a lot of major threads and don't worry about the upvote/downvote ratio, the number of comments in favor of the protests near completely dwarfs the number of comments in favor of the admins. Just another interesting data point.
It's almost like there was a way for someone who owned the website to manipulate things in their favor and then call in a favor from someone with an interest in the company to help them do a very poor job of making it seem like it was all justified by the community.
I looooove watching reddit burn. Their CEO is so fucking incompetent but honestly, that's part for the course. Most CEOs are fucking morons fueled by nepotism.
Not just incompetent, but also just plain mean.
After making an incompetent decision (super high api costs) he didn’t reassess the situation, he just started lashing out.
First at the app devs, then at the mods, now at the users.
The dev announced they will be switching to a subscription model. However, Infinity is open source and someone is trying to make a lemmy/kbin version called Beyond. They don’t have a discord up yet but it seems like they plan to when an alpha is ready.
The funniest thing is that reddit is so shitty that they created all this caos and didn’t even meet the deadline!! 3rd party apps are still working because they fail to enforce the changes! aka they were bluffing! Reddit is a shit show omg
Third party apps that are still working are most likely going to get hit with a bill on August 1st they were not prepared for. Reddit knows which applications are using the API keys so they know where to send the bill. But the changes took effect on July 1st. The apps that shut down before the first did so because the developer killed their API key so they wouldn't occur any charges.
It will be working till new update, then the developer should revoke if current API key and create a new for the new version.
Aver that it should stop work
My understanding is that they're switching to a paid model. As in, you'll have to pay to continue using it, but if you do start paying, it'll work indefinitely. (Or at least until the makers of Infinity make the determination that even having users pay won't be enough to keep Infinity financially sustainable.)
Given that that's Infinity's plan, the theory is that probably the makers of Infinity have gone to Reddit and negotiated an extension of the non-paid API plan long enough for Infinity to implement a way for users to pay for it. I don't think there's any official word exactly how long that extension will be, but the expectation is that it will run out at some point and when it does, you'll have to pay to keep using Infinity.
One thing I'm not sure about, though, is how exactly that'll work given that Infinity is open source. Surely there's a "shared secret" or something involved. And for that kind of authentication method to work, the secret has to stay... well... secret. So they wouldn't be able to just commit that secret to the Github repo. Maybe it'll be some kind of OAuth2 scheme or something where Infinity-owned servers and Reddit servers will communicate behind the scenes to get you logged in.
My advice would be to not wait for someone else to create communities would like to see, but create them yourself and just start posting. If you are not interested in moderating I’m sure you will be able to find someone else to take over.
You can post them in !newcommunities to get some attention, but like minded people will find you.
My niche community /c/latteart@vlemmy.net (self-promo)
Do you need 3rd party tools to moderate on lemmy? Can you do it on mobile?
I have thoughts of starting some communities, but no point if I can't do it from mobile.
It depends on the different clients as most of them started developemnt just weeks ago, but all most popular ones support moderating actions. But Lemmy lacks some hardcore/automatic moderation tools at the moment.
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