- cross-posted to:
- tech@pawb.social
- cross-posted to:
- tech@pawb.social
Some of the planned blackouts will be temporary, others plan to shut their subreddits down indefinitely in protest.
Some of the planned blackouts will be temporary, others plan to shut their subreddits down indefinitely in protest.
Not surprised to see /r/ProCSS in that list. It was founded in response to another of Reddit’s terrible decisions. Speaking of which, I wonder if Lemmy could be made to support community-specific CSS stylesheets like old Reddit could? That’d be neat. Of course, it would need to support user-created communities first.
I also wonder if any of those subreddits will direct people to the Fediverse. Hope so.
@argv_minus_one Oh yeah, I remember when they promised that CSS support was coming… 7 years ago. As for redirecting people to the Fediverse, some of the apps like RedReader are openly considering it.
https://www.reddit.com/r/RedReader/comments/13ylk42/update_3_reddit_effectively_kills_off_third_party/
“Right now I’m considering the possibility of modifying the app to connect to a Reddit alternative such as Lemmy or Mastodon. There would be something very satisfying about some of the bigger Reddit apps driving their userbase to alternative sites too, and if this helped one of those platforms gain traction then that would be a step in the right direction.”
Personally I think it wouldn’t be a bad idea if some of these app creators hosted their own Fediverse instance and sent all their users to it.
Problem: millions of redditors currently use third-party Reddit apps. Abruptly sending millions of people to the Lemmy instance you just deployed is a sure-fire way to break it, and maybe bring down the whole federated network of Lemmy instances. Lemmy currently has issues scaling above a few hundred users, as Beehaw has recently discovered, let alone millions.
Problem: Lemmy is a completely different protocol, and there’s less than a month left before all third-party Reddit apps become useless and everyone uninstalls them. That’s an exceedingly tight timetable and an exceedingly unforgiving deadline.
That said, it’s now or never; death or glory. We’re not going to get another chance to bring over that many people to Lemmy all at once.
@argv_minus_one Is that scaling problem a software issue, or a hosting issue? There are other Fediverse platforms like Akkoma that use Elixir, so maybe they’d fair better? Could also pick several federated instances to distribute users to.
Lemmy is written in async Rust. The language isn’t going to create a scaling problem. Well-written async Rust applications have handled vastly heavier workloads than Lemmy without a hitch.
There are, however, some serious performance bottlenecks that need to be dealt with, and it remains to be seen whether any more bottlenecks remain undiscovered in either the protocol or the implementation. To be honest, as someone working on a Rust+Postgres application myself, this is the sort of thing that keeps me up at night.
Hosting can of course be an issue as well. I’m under the impression that Beehaw had to go up several tiers in its hosting plan in the last few days in response to the surge in demand. I assume this was done to work around the aforementioned bottlenecks by simply throwing more hardware at the problem, but I don’t know.
@argv_minus_one I see. The more I look into it, the more I think Lemmy should still be considered beta software like kbin, TBH. Some important features are still missing and the optimization is lacking.
I do consider Lemmy to be beta software.
But it’s currently the best option.
@ericjmorey You ever look at kbin? It already has the follow user functionality implemented so you can get content from the rest of the Fediverse.
My biggest concern with kbin is its in alpha, very little time in use to smooth things out, there’s more likely to be major changes to its functionality, possibly breaking changes. I’m olso not too interested in following individuals outside of my Mastodon account.
Yep. It works 🥳 and has all the basic features you’d expect of a Reddit replacement 🥳 but will no doubt have the same growing pains as early Reddit did.
@argv_minus_one I still remember when Reddit was 503ing on the regular.
Wasn’t that just last week?
I still get that stupid “You broke Reddit!” screen all the time.
For now admins can already add custom themes to their Lemmy instances. Its described in the docs.
@argv_minus_one Oh yeah, I remember when they promised that CSS support was coming… 7 years ago. As for redirecting people to the Fediverse, some of the apps like RedReader are openly considering it.
> Right now I’m considering the possibility of modifying the app to connect to a Reddit alternative such as Lemmy or Mastodon. There would be something very satisfying about some of the bigger Reddit apps driving their userbase to alternative sites too, and if this helped one of those platforms gain traction then that would be a step in the right direction.
Personally I think it wouldn’t be a bad idea if some of these app creators hosted their own Fediverse instance and sent all their users to it.