I saw Jerboa while scrolling through random apps to potentially install, and became excited that finally there’s a REDDIT alternative as well, instead of just Twitter. Mastodon might be nice, but I don’t use Twitter, and I probably won’t use Mastodon, either. Reddit, on the other hand, oh man…
Reddit is honestly so important to the internet at this point that you’re trolling if you do web searches without “reddit” appended at the end (be it technological, physiological, historical, political, or any other type of topic that you’re looking for information or opinions about).
However… Reddit is going towards a terrible corporate direction, and something like Lemmy has been desperately needed for a while now, and I hope it can eventually somehow become the new “reddit” at the end of web searches eventually, as nobody knows what could happen to Reddit soon…
I find the most random, but also INCREDIBLY important and crucial bits of information deep within Reddit thread replies, since each one can go anywhere, no matter what the original post was about, such as finding out that fabric softeners are damaging for everything, especially humans, and that they should just generally not be used… on a gaming-related subreddit. Of course I start doing my research afterwards as well, now specifically regarding what I just learned to make sure and verify I know the correct information from multiple sources, but even just that initial random warning is great to start off with.
And the worst part? We might lose ALL of these things since we’re at the mercy of Reddit’s shareholders (even more so in the future, most likely), and these incredible resources and HUMAN EXPERIENCES that one shares, and MANY others learn from, could just… disappear…
A quick major policy change, and goodbye Reddit…
I’m looking forward to Lemmy taking off!
My worry is that Lemmy will one day be big enough to be targeted by astroturfing campaigns. There’s already a market for buying and selling reddit accounts so they can be turned into bots to advertise, or to push or control a narrative.
Reddit itself can most likely detect when this happens (whether or not they want to do anything about it is another story). But how would Lemmy, with it’s decentralized architecture, be able to defend against or even detect such an attack?
This definitely does not have a clear and easy solution. It will be a lot of work if we ever come close to it. The good thing is that there are always options to defederate an instance full of bots and ban the bot account on your own instances.
I hate wandering onto the bigger subreddits because it’s often impossible to distinguish what’s genuine and what’s not and my default is to just take everything at face value.