Seconded on a HN-style site for writers. I would love that. Aside from tech, I am also an aspiring author and seeing what others are up to helps me develop my own voice.
And even if you want to give an elitist vibe to your community by making it invite-only, you can set up Lemmy to be without federation and with restricted applications.
Running a Lemmy instance is a nightmare. Putting aside the questionable Lemmy community, the software takes an enormous amount of resources and is incredibly finicky, always some new bug. The end-user UX is rough, and god forbid you ever want to try to improve it by adding a new feature or improving any existing ones. Not to mention federation woes - it doesn't work reliably in the first place, and you either have to only federate with a select few strictly moderated instances (and abide by their rules yourself), or risk spam and illegal content getting stored on your server.
I'm bitter because I really want to love the fediverse. I fully support the principles behind it, but making an ActivityPub-based server is less like adding RSS to a site and more like running a WordPress site with a bunch of iffy plugins. The relative popularity of the fediverse shows that there's a market for non-corporate social media, but the protocol has fundamental issues that really limit it. Hopefully someday the community can rally around something better.
> Hopefully someday the community can rally around something better.
I don't disagree, but at the same time I always feel like users keep this infinite laundry list of requirements just to conveniently excuse themselves of any commitment.
Case in point: I can host a Lemmy instance for customers (up to 100 users) for less than $20/month. I manage all the software, security and deal with the inconveniences of alpha software. People need "just" to bring friends and make sure that everyone there behave like decent human beings. I also pledge to give 20% of my profits to the developers.
In theory it's a win-win-win. In practice, people just prefer to stick with Instagram or going to Bluesky because that doesn't require anything from them.
Security vs. Liberty. My country claims to want the latter, but gives up the former everytime for something convinient and "it just works".
Most people don't care if it's a black box leeching your data and causing national disrest. they just want to do a simple thing and forget about it. This is partiially why we're heading to doom.
All your issues just sound like "Lemmy is buggy", not necessarily "federation as a concept doesn't work".
> Hopefully someday the community can rally around something better.
It's hard because if no one adopts it, it will improve slower. I'm sure Lobsters has its share of issues and bugs too, but there's simply been less peoeple to battletest it.
If we moved to whatever Bluesky uses it'd probably have the same growing pains. It's just a shame Open Source is slowly corroding and we only "really" fix such issues by paying developers full time to do the boring stuff (which ofc, most OS cannot afford).
Is there a mechanism for applying, or were you able to ask via a friend? This is right up my alley — I like the Lobsters format, and have long wished for a game dev-specific take on it!
I love the idea, unfortunate the way this site is presented is such a incredibly busy and noisy way, it makes it so uncomfortable to look at I couldn't use this.
I think hacker news aced it with the clean look, although sometimes I wish for a dark theme.
A few colour changes and it would look fine. I don't know if it's the same software as lobste.rs, but it looks almost identical apart from the colours.
As a sibling commenter said, I think the background texture is the most distracting.
Other than that, I also think the tag density is higher than on Lobsters, where they seem to be using mostly one, or at most two, tags, whereas this website's front-page is using around three for each post.
Maybe the color scheme as well. And perhaps more negative space can be removed by making the column wider, like it is on HN.
As a gamer though I immediately noticed how easy it was to visually filter the content by tags and drill down into the details at will. It's an uncommon texture but it works for me.
For me, it's the fact that the tags overflow to the next line on mobile. Some posts only have tags on the right, some only have tags on the next line, some have both.
The inconsistency makes it impossible for my eyes to settle into a reading pattern.
They've also gone with the sadly-ubiquitous "tiny fixed width column of content with heaps of whitespace on either side" pattern. Real HN does have whitespace borders after a certain width, but it mostly allows the content to scale to fit your browser window. Nothing worse than having a nice gigantic monitor and then having web content constrained to a 5" vertical strip down the middle of it.
I called it a clone because it's the same software with the same look and feel, the same features, and the same invite rules. It's an obvious clone of lobste.rs the website, only even more exclusively tailored to a niche audience.
I don't think there is something like that for music specifically, but there are still many traditional forums with interesting discussions. See for example these:
Ahhh, speaking of traditional forums, I personally like https://www.skyscrapercity.com/, it's still surprisingly active. It's also the only where I can get the most updated news about public transport/infrastructure in my country (Indonesia).
Also I just remembered that rateyourmusic apparently have their own forum too: https://rym.fm I've never taken a deep look at it, but it's surprisingly... active?
I'd love there to be a HN for high-impact medical articles. Or alternatively for someone to build a tagged layer on top of HN with clear 'biotech' and 'medical' tags.
I've seen many "HN for X" projects for various niches now, and they all suffer from the chicken/egg problem of getting a critical mass of participants.
For example, SDL 3 was officially released last week, which I think is significant. It was posted on HN, but it didn't get enough votes to be visible to me.
> I've seen many "HN for X" projects for various niches now, and they all suffer from the chicken/egg problem of getting a critical mass of participants.
With the rise of LLMs, the fake-it-till-you make it would much easier. Even just having an automated program to scan for relevant URLs on other aggregator sites and cross posting them as new content would give things a bump.
Idk if dang was in charge back in the day, but I remember HN used to shut off sign-ups whenever Reddit went down (very frequently like 10 years ago) so they didn’t get a flood of users looking for a low-effort Reddit like experience. Those are the kinds of things I’d never think about but are also what has kept HN so great. Genuinely glad this bit of internet has been so well maintained over the years.
the post clearly implies that opting for independent hosting instead of creating a subreddit (the admittedly easier route, for community building as well as technologically) for a niche forum indicates a "sense of grandeur"
You might be kind of young, so there was this time when "Facebook for health" and "amazon for X" were used as legitimate pitch items as a way to frame the potential of whatever CRUD app someone was selling as a billion dollar visionary idea. It was very tiring. The modern equivalent is something like a "DALL-E 0llamma MLA is all you need" post about a random arvix article about ML
What if such feeling is justified? Everything else equal, I'd rather have a community not belong to Reddit, and I'd be horrified if HN somehow "migrated" to being a sub, the difference between communities is enormous.
Building a community focused on something isn't hard, you grab a few people you know with shared interest, and they grab and invite their friends. Small game development communities everywhere thrive, I've never been a part of one that wasn't doing well.
Building a large community not focused on anything is much harder.
Dead subreddits, dead forums and abandoned meetups might disagree with that assessment. Building a community is far from easy and there's a lot of effort involved to keep it going as an organizer or moderator. Setting it up initially is easy, keeping it going for many years is hard.
I've set up, moderated forums, irc servers and organized a regular meetup for many years and I've seen that all the time.
Well you said it yourself. the beginning and short term is easy.
maintaing is very, very, hard. As a website, you fight for attention against decades of algorithms, SEOS, trillions of dollars of ad revenue, and you still gotta be picky to not pick up trolls. IRL, you're fighting for time in a person's schedule to travel and incentivizing them to keep coming in person while people are more overworked and less compensated than ever. Even the most benevolent, well mattered communities that attract high quality participants will decay naturally. So maintaning is a never ending, thankless job.
Do you think your considering HN a clear exception to being “Reddit with a sense of grandeur” might have more to do with your vantage point than your ability to gauge the value of online communities?
I mean that referring to "HN for X" is like (more than a decade ago) "Facebook for X".
I consider HN a clean exception to most (all?) online communities in which I have been participaing; in all other cases, the quality tanked, they became ghost towns, or they just changed from their original goal.
Sure, there are many wonderful forums and special interest groups, and it is good that new ones have been created. Just HN is not something you start at, it is something you become.
Yes, honestly i think this is the largest contribution to HNs successful place in its niche. Every other website turned from articles to images to infinite scroll politics and gifs. They all did that because it sells more ads. HN has never made a design change that prioritizes anything over articles. And even when it does conform to the greater trends of most people reading comments over articles (increasing bubblifiation of popular beliefs) the comments are much huge quality here because we're all the kind of people who like a site with articles, and thus more people actually read the articles, and the feedback does not include the internet ubiquitous "social credit score" seen on numerical stats around every comment on nearly every other website.
and yet, because social networks degrade in quality over time (popularity brings about the riff raff), it's essential to start net social networks to maintain quality discourse.
Using federated forum solutions would at least partly solve the chiken/egg problem. Forum software like NodeBB and reddit/HN-type variants like Lemmy, opens the possibility of having a topic based communiy, while still being open for interactions from the entirety of the Fediverse.
This already works well for Mastodon and Pixelfed; I follow accounts on mastodon.art from my Pixelfed account.
The reach of folks at the art focused Mastodon instance is not limited to their community. The same is possible for reddit and forum like communities!
Look at it like this; every forum becomes a potential sub-forum in the global network.
It also gives you something hacker news mostly lacks (besides the occasional Ask HN) and that is discussing topics organically vs. just discussing what people elsewhere have said.
I think this is also an important distinction older type of forum software have before the newer "link share" type.
+1 for tags. As HN has grown, the topics here have become so broad that it might be months before a particular topic you are interested in like gamedev makes it to the front page. It would be awesome to click a tag and only see submissions about that topic. Or better yet, unclick a tag and filter out submissions about that topic. I'm so sick of AI this and LLM that and DeepFoo and ChatBar, it would be so nice to just delete that noise in my own view of HN's front page.
I think we don't see the special, as I never see anything untoward on HN, and since I know the general population has some... Colorful people; the key here has to be the moderation team, and the front page mechanism (algo, manual, whatever it is)
I think it's just the "Ways to make a living in business"[0]:
> Be First, Be Smarter or Cheat
A lot of the most popular communities were simply first. Most others cheated. There's very, very few communities I can think of that were truly smarter and successful as a result.
Are you telling me you don’t want to read constant updates on the state of AI and how it will obviously find AGI tomorrow so please give us a trillion dollars today?
New startup idea. Just get some big names to sign on like sama or whoever and then only ever state “we are the uber of AI”. Then wait for the spice to flow.
My first check on any "HN for X" is: does it look and feel almost the same. If not I get frustrated because apparently I’ve been promised something else.
I’m not sure why they not just copy an UI that’s working well already and that people know.
That site aims for it, but the front page goes back a month or more. That's not a level of detail or activity that will compel people to go there regularly?
I get the desire to have quality users and posts, but the whole invite system feels like an unnecessary gate.
I am not a gamedev professional but I dabble as a hobbyist and am interested and would love to participate on that site but I don't know anyone on the site to get invited, and I'm certainly not going to beg publicly for an invite (which seems to be how their system works).
I guess we've had different experiences on here then.
I've had really in-depth and fascinating conversations (or simply lurked the comments when I have nothing to contribute) on all kinds of game dev topics, or web dev, or others..
While the feed itself might be generalist, the people who choose to dig into specific topics on here are often experts (sometimes very notable ones) in their field, and it can lead to very enlightening and educational discussions.
> on all kinds of game dev topics, or web dev, or others
Exactly. Every day another topic. Great for keeping yourself informed and running into the occasional insider insight that will help you 2 years down the road.
Not enough for a domain you're really interested in, whichever that is.
I see your point.. I guess again we have different experiences, perhaps depending on how often we come to the site or how much content we're looking for.
I can barely keep up with the topics I'm interested in on here, I don't know that I could handle more... :-)
The other half of the chicken and egg is that hn is “hn for devs but actually just for techy people to cover all sorts of stuff” whether that’s the intent or not.
By limiting the surface area, it’s bound to never become larger than the restriction.
I think that after "this meeting could've been an email", we should start thinking "this website could've been a Lemmy instance".
Even if you don't want to federate, all the functionality is already there, you can have a selection of web/mobile clients and you can apply whatever moderation policies you find suitable for the community you want to grow.
And if you want to extend the reach and make it easier for other people to participate, you can open federation and get instance access to the millions of people in the Fediverse.
Precisely! Why not support the technologies that exist especially when it comes to helping drive critical mass of users to both? Making this a Lemmy instance would be mutually beneficial to both.
I had to get rid of lemmy. I know some instances are better than others, but the volume of unstable, immature zoomers (particularly the US variety) pushing openly communist rhetoric (and brigading and just abusing anything that doesnt conform to that) made it completely unusable. I really gave it several tries as well as I liked the tech. It was useless for discussing anything unless you aligned immediately with the mob. Yes, I blocked some instances, but the app delivery means the culture bleeds between them. It felt like worse twitter.
I mostly agree with you (I'm staying on Lemmy despite the average user, not because of them), but this is not really relevant to the point here.
My point is that it would be really nice to have a gamedev instance that is able (but not required) to federate. Instead of creating yet-another discussion forum that is completely isolated from the wider network, they could simply set up a Lemmy server with federation disabled.
After the community is somewhat established, they could then start whitelist federation. Perhaps, they could open only with programming.dev. Then they could perhaps open federation to the Mastodon instances that are focused on indie developers/gamers.
The only way to get rid of this (current) scenario where Lemmy is only for frustrated tweenagers and keyboard warriors is by cultivating the alternatives in the Fediverse.
Feel free to remove my comment if it's not allowed.
I am _very_ disappointed with Lemmy. The community is full of echo chambers, and that's already bad.
But what broke the camel's back for me is the fact that one of the Lemmy creators one day literally posted what I will describe as a propaganda website. I had to double check, but nope, it definitely is a propaganda website. The fact that you made a software just to spread your dangerous ideology is _so_ disgusting. Malicious.
I used less and less Lemmy since then.
This also prompted me to contribute to PieFed[1], but at this point Fediverse for me does not feel the same anymore. That event left a bad taste in my mouth.
I also have had bad experience with Mastodon, but this reply is already long.
The word Fediverse has "diverse" in it, yet it feels like anything but diverse. It's full of people with same beliefs screaming the same argument every day. It's full of that open source purists forcing you to change to Linux or something like that[2][3].
> The fact that you made a software just to spread your dangerous ideology is _so_ disgusting.
Why do we keep making this mistake of looking at the character of a person to judge the merit of the creations?
Sure every creation is a form of self-expression, software is not an exception. However, it doesn't mean that using the software makes you aligned in every way with the expressed views.
Yes, the Lemmy devs are morons who still defend the most abhorrent regimes. Gargron (the Mastodon dev) is a self-righteous prick who thinks he can control civil discourse by putting up barriers that can be easily overcome by any malicious actor. The Pleroma devs are sociopaths who can't even stand each other. The developer from PixelFed has the attention span of a toddler on a sugar high, keeps talking about "the power of community" but then goes on tirades against anyone that attempts to build upon any of his projects.
But at the of the day, absolutely none of this matters to the users. The software is free. The power is given to the user, not the developer. No one is asked to use the software only in a certain way, or to subscribe to any ideology before getting access to the source code.
>This also prompted me to contribute to PieFed[1], but at this point Fediverse for me does not feel the same anymore. That event left a bad taste in my mouth.
Email is federated and can be used to spread knowledge and subterfuge alike. That's the cost of freedom.
Like any other community, you need to find what you fit with and stick with that.We can't hope to grow if we quick every last alternative over solvable problems. Every centralized website had solveable problems too at one point.
>The word Fediverse has "diverse" in it, yet it feels like anything but diverse. It's full of people with same beliefs screaming the same argument every day. It's full of that open source purists forcing you to change to Linux or something like that[2][3].
if we're being frank: this is an issue we will always deal with as people on the fringes. Quote I take to heart:
>The moral of the story is: if you’re against witch-hunts, and you promise to found your own little utopian community where witch-hunts will never happen, your new society will end up consisting of approximately three principled civil libertarians and seven zillion witches. It will be a terrible place to live even if witch-hunts are genuinely wrong
All the normal people will stick to Tiktok/Instagram/Facebook/Reddit/etc. no matter what. When you hear all this bad press they are not the ones will who use their energy to move to an alternative. So by that definition, we are already "radicals" for moving off. So yes, we will get a lot of "wtiches" on the way and it's up to our judgement to find the "civil libertarians" to form community with. It's simply inevitable and friction we need to overcome if we don't simply want to give up to the centralized sites.
I feel like it's not just instances, but also the groups. I've carefully selected a bunch of well-moderated groups that bring me content I care about, and I interact regularly.
But I know what you're talking about, because every time I go there, I'm logged out and I have to see the front page. If I make the mistake of reading it, I'm horrified every time.
Then, I refresh the page and I'm logged in, and it's basically just a well-tended forum again.
Also, yes, there's a bug that shows me as logged out, but if I ctrl-shift-R, it refreshes with me logged in again. A regular refresh doesn't do it. I cannot imagine what that bug is, and nothing I've done has cleared this in my Firefox. So weird.
Yeah, the default view is absolute horrendous (to me) after I got a couple of customers who seem to love 196 stuff.
There has been some discussion to allow admins to make a selection of communities that should be visible/hidden for non-logged users, let's hope this lands soon.
Regarding the login bug: what version of Lemmy is your instance on? After I upgraded my instance to 0.19.8 this issue has mostly gone away.
This is the main problem of the "Hacker News for [x]" type sites. Lobsters got lots of people interested, but it is itself mostly not interesting to read, because there is very little discussion. Sure, you keep out some noise, but you also keep out what makes hacker news great, and that is the comments from all sorts of people.
All these kind of sites serve is a curated link list, which can be nice, but they don't fell like a community if you see the same dozen people leave ~3 comments per article and can only participate yourself after groveling before the chosen.
While I do think a good community needs some type of gatekeeping, being invite only is not it.
Perhaps "interesting to read" does not correlate directly to "healthy discussion". It's a feature that Lobste.rs has low volume commentary, it leads to more authentic response less ad-hominem or passive-aggressive commentary like HN is constantly flooded with.
>While I do think a good community needs some type of gatekeeping, being invite only is not it.
Their verification method already seems to be enough of a gatekeep.
>if you don't know (or can't find) an existing_user from whom to request an invitation, you can make a public request for one. This will display your name and memo to all other logged-in users who can then send you an invitation if they recognize you.
And they ask for some personal website to verify as well that is visible. Given the volume at this scale, this could have been a manual verification by the creator for a while until there's enough scale to rely on invites (similar to Tildes).
The stats page is just a clone from the site it's code is forked from, you can tell because they even have the same text on their stat page about their pledge drive, which clearly they did not do, but was in fact on lobste.rs.
Website maintainer here, that's kinda what we are going for. I really don't want to have to moderate a big community, this is supposed to be something you check once or twice a week.
once a week may not really be enough to engage a community unless you are sure who you are recruiting will be very active.
But I respect the choice, nonetheless. It just simply does fit my ideal style where I could find at least 1-2 interesting posts when I check twice a week. Having niche interests can be a curse.
As someone who wanted to comment and was immediately prevented by the invite wall, I agree.
I even submitted for an invite but clicking submit triggered no notification or anything. I don't have the energy to look at the network request to confirm
Assuming this is your site OP, well done for getting it built and launched. I noticed other comments saying "why not lemmy", "why not filter on game dev topics on HN". I think the opposite. Forge your own path and who knows where it will take you.
228 comments
[ 3.0 ms ] story [ 237 ms ] threadI'd love if there's more "hacker News like" sites. You could probably use the format for many things, a hacker news for writing?
And even if you want to give an elitist vibe to your community by making it invite-only, you can set up Lemmy to be without federation and with restricted applications.
I'm bitter because I really want to love the fediverse. I fully support the principles behind it, but making an ActivityPub-based server is less like adding RSS to a site and more like running a WordPress site with a bunch of iffy plugins. The relative popularity of the fediverse shows that there's a market for non-corporate social media, but the protocol has fundamental issues that really limit it. Hopefully someday the community can rally around something better.
I don't disagree, but at the same time I always feel like users keep this infinite laundry list of requirements just to conveniently excuse themselves of any commitment.
Case in point: I can host a Lemmy instance for customers (up to 100 users) for less than $20/month. I manage all the software, security and deal with the inconveniences of alpha software. People need "just" to bring friends and make sure that everyone there behave like decent human beings. I also pledge to give 20% of my profits to the developers.
In theory it's a win-win-win. In practice, people just prefer to stick with Instagram or going to Bluesky because that doesn't require anything from them.
Most people don't care if it's a black box leeching your data and causing national disrest. they just want to do a simple thing and forget about it. This is partiially why we're heading to doom.
> Hopefully someday the community can rally around something better.
It's hard because if no one adopts it, it will improve slower. I'm sure Lobsters has its share of issues and bugs too, but there's simply been less peoeple to battletest it.
If we moved to whatever Bluesky uses it'd probably have the same growing pains. It's just a shame Open Source is slowly corroding and we only "really" fix such issues by paying developers full time to do the boring stuff (which ofc, most OS cannot afford).
Because Lemmy is a bit too much like social media and kinda bloated for me. I wanted something simpler so I hosted it.
But is it enough Web 0.9? :)
In the long run, that's not HN though.
[1] https://lobste.rs
I think hacker news aced it with the clean look, although sometimes I wish for a dark theme.
Other than that, I also think the tag density is higher than on Lobsters, where they seem to be using mostly one, or at most two, tags, whereas this website's front-page is using around three for each post.
Maybe the color scheme as well. And perhaps more negative space can be removed by making the column wider, like it is on HN.
The inconsistency makes it impossible for my eyes to settle into a reading pattern.
The choice of colors is also rather unconventional and not exactly appealing.
It's the old school magic of nested <table>'s.
> You are free to use this code to start your own sister site because the code is available under a permissive license
From here: https://github.com/lobsters/lobsters#:~:text=You%20are%20fre...
https://lobste.rs/stats https://gamedev.city/stats
The only other website I know is https://lobste.rs, and this website looks like it uses Lobsters' software
https://forums.stevehoffman.tv/
https://www.progarchives.com/forum/default.asp
https://forum.metal-archives.com/
Also I just remembered that rateyourmusic apparently have their own forum too: https://rym.fm I've never taken a deep look at it, but it's surprisingly... active?
Isn't game development already discussed here?
I actually built a side project that categorizes front page articles so I can filter for topics. Here's an example for recent gamedev content: https://www.kadoa.com/hacksnack/d57360e8-1eb1-4800-a711-f0d5...
ofc sometimes game dev is discussed here, but imo I don't see it enough here that I wouldn't want a hackernews just for gamedev.
also very useful side project
With the rise of LLMs, the fake-it-till-you make it would much easier. Even just having an automated program to scan for relevant URLs on other aggregator sites and cross posting them as new content would give things a bump.
Starting one is easy, but maintaining both quality and popularity is hard - here, HN is a rare exception.
it's a bit sad seeing such a derisive comment about self-hosting on HN
HN has been around for 15 years, it has earned its place as a quality community through time and much effort (i.e. moderation).
So to call yourself "HN for..." as a brand new thing is like opening up a brand new coffee shop in your town and saying "we're the next Starbucks"...
Building a large community not focused on anything is much harder.
I've set up, moderated forums, irc servers and organized a regular meetup for many years and I've seen that all the time.
maintaing is very, very, hard. As a website, you fight for attention against decades of algorithms, SEOS, trillions of dollars of ad revenue, and you still gotta be picky to not pick up trolls. IRL, you're fighting for time in a person's schedule to travel and incentivizing them to keep coming in person while people are more overworked and less compensated than ever. Even the most benevolent, well mattered communities that attract high quality participants will decay naturally. So maintaning is a never ending, thankless job.
I consider HN a clean exception to most (all?) online communities in which I have been participaing; in all other cases, the quality tanked, they became ghost towns, or they just changed from their original goal.
Sure, there are many wonderful forums and special interest groups, and it is good that new ones have been created. Just HN is not something you start at, it is something you become.
It has everything to do with the simple fact that HN was launched in '07, when Reddit wasn't that mainstream.
This already works well for Mastodon and Pixelfed; I follow accounts on mastodon.art from my Pixelfed account.
The reach of folks at the art focused Mastodon instance is not limited to their community. The same is possible for reddit and forum like communities!
Look at it like this; every forum becomes a potential sub-forum in the global network.
So far the most active community seems to be gamedev.net, but I feel it's in a long decline.
> Be First, Be Smarter or Cheat
A lot of the most popular communities were simply first. Most others cheated. There's very, very few communities I can think of that were truly smarter and successful as a result.
Maybe not the more general stuff you might be after, but those forums+ deserve a mention.
I’m not sure why they not just copy an UI that’s working well already and that people know.
I'd say not really. Not in the detail that this site aims for. At least on the front page.
I get the desire to have quality users and posts, but the whole invite system feels like an unnecessary gate.
I am not a gamedev professional but I dabble as a hobbyist and am interested and would love to participate on that site but I don't know anyone on the site to get invited, and I'm certainly not going to beg publicly for an invite (which seems to be how their system works).
HN is more of a collection of high level interesting facts about everything techy.
I've had really in-depth and fascinating conversations (or simply lurked the comments when I have nothing to contribute) on all kinds of game dev topics, or web dev, or others..
While the feed itself might be generalist, the people who choose to dig into specific topics on here are often experts (sometimes very notable ones) in their field, and it can lead to very enlightening and educational discussions.
Exactly. Every day another topic. Great for keeping yourself informed and running into the occasional insider insight that will help you 2 years down the road.
Not enough for a domain you're really interested in, whichever that is.
I can barely keep up with the topics I'm interested in on here, I don't know that I could handle more... :-)
Plus sometimes invite systems mean you just get the "usual suspects", friends-of-friends, etc...
It definitely has value in keeping out the spammers and trolls though, I agree there.
I suppose it depends on how you want to handle moderation in the long run.
//js code here.
```
And it formats as js, say. Formatting stuff on here, reddit, and other sites that support only partial markdown is painful for me.
https://twostopbits.com/news
By limiting the surface area, it’s bound to never become larger than the restriction.
Even if you don't want to federate, all the functionality is already there, you can have a selection of web/mobile clients and you can apply whatever moderation policies you find suitable for the community you want to grow.
And if you want to extend the reach and make it easier for other people to participate, you can open federation and get instance access to the millions of people in the Fediverse.
My point is that it would be really nice to have a gamedev instance that is able (but not required) to federate. Instead of creating yet-another discussion forum that is completely isolated from the wider network, they could simply set up a Lemmy server with federation disabled.
After the community is somewhat established, they could then start whitelist federation. Perhaps, they could open only with programming.dev. Then they could perhaps open federation to the Mastodon instances that are focused on indie developers/gamers.
The only way to get rid of this (current) scenario where Lemmy is only for frustrated tweenagers and keyboard warriors is by cultivating the alternatives in the Fediverse.
I am _very_ disappointed with Lemmy. The community is full of echo chambers, and that's already bad.
But what broke the camel's back for me is the fact that one of the Lemmy creators one day literally posted what I will describe as a propaganda website. I had to double check, but nope, it definitely is a propaganda website. The fact that you made a software just to spread your dangerous ideology is _so_ disgusting. Malicious.
I used less and less Lemmy since then.
This also prompted me to contribute to PieFed[1], but at this point Fediverse for me does not feel the same anymore. That event left a bad taste in my mouth.
I also have had bad experience with Mastodon, but this reply is already long.
The word Fediverse has "diverse" in it, yet it feels like anything but diverse. It's full of people with same beliefs screaming the same argument every day. It's full of that open source purists forcing you to change to Linux or something like that[2][3].
[1]: https://join.piefed.social
[2]: https://mas.to/@TechConnectify/112995177480955078
[3]: https://kevquirk.com/blog/linux-elitism-again
Why do we keep making this mistake of looking at the character of a person to judge the merit of the creations?
Sure every creation is a form of self-expression, software is not an exception. However, it doesn't mean that using the software makes you aligned in every way with the expressed views.
Yes, the Lemmy devs are morons who still defend the most abhorrent regimes. Gargron (the Mastodon dev) is a self-righteous prick who thinks he can control civil discourse by putting up barriers that can be easily overcome by any malicious actor. The Pleroma devs are sociopaths who can't even stand each other. The developer from PixelFed has the attention span of a toddler on a sugar high, keeps talking about "the power of community" but then goes on tirades against anyone that attempts to build upon any of his projects.
But at the of the day, absolutely none of this matters to the users. The software is free. The power is given to the user, not the developer. No one is asked to use the software only in a certain way, or to subscribe to any ideology before getting access to the source code.
Email is federated and can be used to spread knowledge and subterfuge alike. That's the cost of freedom.
Like any other community, you need to find what you fit with and stick with that.We can't hope to grow if we quick every last alternative over solvable problems. Every centralized website had solveable problems too at one point.
>The word Fediverse has "diverse" in it, yet it feels like anything but diverse. It's full of people with same beliefs screaming the same argument every day. It's full of that open source purists forcing you to change to Linux or something like that[2][3].
if we're being frank: this is an issue we will always deal with as people on the fringes. Quote I take to heart:
>The moral of the story is: if you’re against witch-hunts, and you promise to found your own little utopian community where witch-hunts will never happen, your new society will end up consisting of approximately three principled civil libertarians and seven zillion witches. It will be a terrible place to live even if witch-hunts are genuinely wrong
All the normal people will stick to Tiktok/Instagram/Facebook/Reddit/etc. no matter what. When you hear all this bad press they are not the ones will who use their energy to move to an alternative. So by that definition, we are already "radicals" for moving off. So yes, we will get a lot of "wtiches" on the way and it's up to our judgement to find the "civil libertarians" to form community with. It's simply inevitable and friction we need to overcome if we don't simply want to give up to the centralized sites.
But I know what you're talking about, because every time I go there, I'm logged out and I have to see the front page. If I make the mistake of reading it, I'm horrified every time.
Then, I refresh the page and I'm logged in, and it's basically just a well-tended forum again.
Also, yes, there's a bug that shows me as logged out, but if I ctrl-shift-R, it refreshes with me logged in again. A regular refresh doesn't do it. I cannot imagine what that bug is, and nothing I've done has cleared this in my Firefox. So weird.
There has been some discussion to allow admins to make a selection of communities that should be visible/hidden for non-logged users, let's hope this lands soon.
Regarding the login bug: what version of Lemmy is your instance on? After I upgraded my instance to 0.19.8 this issue has mostly gone away.
So I guess I just have to wait for them to update. Thanks for that!
All these kind of sites serve is a curated link list, which can be nice, but they don't fell like a community if you see the same dozen people leave ~3 comments per article and can only participate yourself after groveling before the chosen.
While I do think a good community needs some type of gatekeeping, being invite only is not it.
Their verification method already seems to be enough of a gatekeep.
>if you don't know (or can't find) an existing_user from whom to request an invitation, you can make a public request for one. This will display your name and memo to all other logged-in users who can then send you an invitation if they recognize you.
And they ask for some personal website to verify as well that is visible. Given the volume at this scale, this could have been a manual verification by the creator for a while until there's enough scale to rely on invites (similar to Tildes).
https://gamedev.city/stats
https://lobste.rs/stats https://gamedev.city/stats
But I respect the choice, nonetheless. It just simply does fit my ideal style where I could find at least 1-2 interesting posts when I check twice a week. Having niche interests can be a curse.
I even submitted for an invite but clicking submit triggered no notification or anything. I don't have the energy to look at the network request to confirm
[0] : https://saint11.art/