If you haven’t heard the news, Reddit is making some drastic, user-hostile changes. This is essentially the final stage of any ad-supported and VC-funded platform’s inevitable march towards enshittification.
I really love the /r/rust community. As a community manager it’s my main portal into the latest happenings of the Rust ecosystem from a high-level point of view primarily focused on project updates rather than technical discourse. This is the only Reddit community I engage directly with; my daily fix of the Reddit frontpage happens strictly via login-less browsing on Apollo, which will soon come to an abrupt end.
This moment in time presents a unique opportunity for this space to claim its independence as a wholly community-owned operation. If the moderators and other stakeholders of /r/rust are already discussing possible next moves somewhere, please point other willing contributors like myself in the right direction.
I’m ready to tag along with any post-Reddit initiative set forth by the community leaders of this sub-reddit. Meanwhile, I’ve started mobilizing willing stakeholders from the fediverse, which I believe to be the path forward for a viable Reddit alternative.
Soft-forking Lemmy
Lemmy as an organisation has issues. But the Lemmy software is a fully functional alternative to Reddit that runs on top of the open ActivityPub protocol, and it’s written in Rust.
Discourse, the software which the Rust Users/Internals forum runs on also supports basic ActivityPub federation now, so the Rust Users forum could actually federate with one or more Lemmy-powered instances. As such, this wouldn’t just be a replacement to Reddit, it would be a significant improvement, bringing more cohesion to the Rust community
Given Lemmy’s controversial culture, I think it’s safest to approach it with a soft-fork mindset. But the degree to which any divergence will actually happen in the code comes down to how amenable the Lemmy team is to upstream changes. I’d love for this to be an exercise in building bridges rather than moats. I know the Lemmy devs occasionally peruse this space, so please feel free to reach out to me.
Here’s what’s happening:
- The author of Kitsune is attempting to run Lemmy on Shuttle, which in turn have expressed interest in supporting this alt-Reddit initiative.
- We’re also looking into OIDC/OAuth for Lemmy, which would allow people to log in with their Reddit/GitHub accounts. If anyone would like to take this on, let us know!
- Hachyderm is starting to evaluate Lemmy hosting next week. I personally think they could provide an excellent default home for a renewed /r/rust, as they are already a heavily Rust-leaning community of practitioners.
To facilitate this mobilization, I’ve set up a temporary Discord server:
I’ll gladly replace this with e.g. a dedicated channel on the Rust community discord. One big upside of having our own server is that we can bridge it to a self-hosted instance of Revolt, which we’ll do in the next few days.
Lemme know if this resonates with you!
This is essentially the final stage of any ad-supported and VC-funded platform’s inevitable march towards enshittification.
Nope, I think the enshittification started well before since the mid 2010s, with the new design and the slew of increasingly user-hostile changes that started rolling ever since. But now with the public trading attempt and VC capital drying up everywhere it seems that all the big tech corps are slamming the gas on the enshittification machine.
Either way as a budding Rustacean I’m all for migrating to Lemmy. It means future proofing the community thanks to fediverse capabilities.
Wow, didn’t know the people making Lemmy were that bad and deny genocides. But I also don’t have time to read and understand all the old posts, and I have no idea who the people are who are talking abotu this, so it is incredibly hard to say if it is trustworthy or not. Would be interesting to get a statement from the lemmy developers today about this, to see what they think about the uighur thing and north korea today.
I’m not about to defend their opinions but to me, I don’t see how they matter. It sucks that I wouldn’t find the devs to be ethical in that case, but I care far more about this federated platform. As long as they keep it to their own instance and keep developing an open platform for others, I don’t know that it’s relevant.
Where’s the actual questionable content? All I could find was a Mastodon thread claiming the devs have shitty opinions without any links to any actual people raising these opinions. The best I can do is guess they are referring to lemmygrad, which indeed looks like a brain dead shit hole of insanity, but how does that relate to the developers again? A bit more clear-cut presentation would be greatly beneficial, as this level of discussion is FUD as best.
Ditto, I see people everywhere but not actual evidence from the developers. Best I could find was some questionable essays in the main dev’s Github, but so what? If I buy clothes through Shein now I am some child labor apologist? If we keep rejecting people with good ideas for having shitty opinions we will die waiting.
Link to the said essays, so it’s clear what we’re dealing with here: https://github.com/dessalines/essays
Ok, so the guy likes his communism. I do find it weird (and a bit stupid), but he can’t control the instances he hasn’t started, and doesn’t directly benefit from them. So it’s very hard to see the problem here.
Yeah, I think people may be overreacting a bit, the whole point of federated social media (and FOSS software), is that nobody really owns anything. This is not like if the CEO of some company did shady business or something, personally I couldn’t care less.
I don’t think his political views are relevant in the first place. As long as he’s a great developer and nice to work with, there is no problem for Lemmy and its users.
People really need to stop doing this thing where they disagree with something someone says just to discredit everything else that person does.
I feel like it’s completely overblown and it’s just silly. Why can’t we let these people have opinions different from our own?
It’s like we are looking for something to fight about, instead of using the tech because it’s actually really valuable.
Divide and conquer… Every single time.
Opinion is one thing, spreading propaganda from terrorist states like China or North Korea is another.
“Opinions that are unacceptable to you” still count as opinions, by definition.
Also nobody is forcing their opinions on you or the whole community, they even sticked a post on top that says “it’s full here, don’t join”.
The enemies of lemmy are trying to slander the devs with ridiculous claims. They will always claim genocide because they want to associate everything with nazis and the holocaust. It’s an old tactic.
Are you implying that a piece of software has “ennemies”?
Well yeah, Lemmy has direct competitors
https://lemmyrs.org/c/rustlang seems to me a more reasonable instance and home for r/rust than lemmy.ml/c/rust
yeah fuck lemmy.ml, the guy behind that instance is also running lemmygrad
no and no
