Posted: https://old.reddit.com/r/RealTesla/comments/14n7fhp/meta_announcing_realteslalemmyworld/

With the #RedditBlackout June event and /r/RealTesla opening back up, I think the community needs a meta-discussion. Iā€™ll make the first move with this post on Lemmy.world.

First and foremost: if a user wishes to choose the default option of staying on Redditā€¦ thatā€™s fine. This is likely the default choice for many posters and commenters and youā€™ll get no qualms from me if this is your decision. Alas, a subset of the community will need to think of migration options. Some of us simply do not find Reddit Administratorā€™s stance compatible with our morals and are seeking new internet homes.

I hope that this guide will open the discussion of migration (to where? Pros/cons?). Iā€™ve mostly played with Lemmy during the #RedditBlackout, so Iā€™ll be sharing my experiences here. I also have heard whispers of other options, that Iā€™ll briefly cover at the bottom of this post.

I have to imagine that people out there are on the fence about these migration options. Iā€™m here to answer your questions, based on my experience with Lemmy. Both the goods, and the bads.

[email protected]

https://lemmy.world/c/realtesla ā€“ This is where I, Dragontamer5788, have experimented with Lemmy for the past few weeks during #RedditBlackout. As a ā€œFediverseā€ community, it is accessible from many, many different servers:

https://lemmy.world is the ā€œhomeā€ server of !realtesla, while there are ā€œFederationā€ pacts with many other servers to smoothly allow the discussion (posts, comments, upvotes, moderator actions, etc. etc.) and keep the states all in sync.

The Fediverseā€™s goal is to provide a social media replacement in general. And the Lemmy and kbin sub-communities of the Fediverse are trying to replicate a Reddit-like discussion environment.

Federation adds a little bit of new complexity due to the different-servers. See next section for more details on that.

Musings on the Choice of Home Server

Users, and communities, should pick a home server which has a reasonable and trustworthy administrator. The good news is that most administrators are reasonable people in the Lemmy-verse. So you can mostly just pick at random andā€¦ probablyā€¦ be fine.

sh.itjust.works, lemmy.ca, lemmy.world are all fine picks. https://kbin.social deserves special mention: its part of kbin project, not Lemmy, but they seek some degree of compatibility, and https://kbin.social/m/[email protected] works. I donā€™t know how many bugs that federation has however, but it could be an option if kbin looks better to you!

I picked https://lemmy.world as !realteslaā€™s home because I was just following the #RedditBlackout crowds to this server. Upon my last few weeks of experimentation, Iā€™ve discovered Lemmy.world has become the frontrunner due to open-registration policy, and trust in @Rudd, the main administrator. @Rudd has successfully run the mastodon.world server through the Twitter Migration last year and still runs Mastodon.world today. Politically Iā€™d describe everyone here as moderate-left.

https://beehaw.org is a left hangout spot that is expected to refederate with https://lemmy.world eventually. Beehaw.orgā€™s closed community style means that only the administrators can create communities (aka: subreddits), making Beehaw.org the most curated of all sites in Lemmy. You will be cut off from https://lemmy.world/c/realtesla for the near future however, but the highly-curated high-quality communities (albeit left-leaning) are clearly an advantage and I suggest you to check them out too, despite the fact that they canā€™t access https://lemmy.world/c/realtesla . Long term hopes is that automated moderation tools of lemmy improve enough to give this small team of admins/moderators the ability to open back up to a big instance like lemmy.world.

https://sh.itjust.works seems to lean more right / libertarian than other servers. They also seem to be defederating from lemmygrad (aka: tankie-communists) and exploding-heads (aka: right-wing trolls), so their administrators seem to have a good grasp on decision making. I feel like a number of /r/RealTesla commenters would be more comfortable here, rather than the left-leaning other instances.

https://programming.dev is perhaps the largest programming-specific instance on Lemmy so far. There are other boutique servers, such as https://mtgzone.com, https://dormi.zone, and https://startrek.website, which have grabbed a large number of users and have successfully migrated to their own server-specific community.

https://lemmy.ca is a Canadian specific server. Today there seems to be glitches in the federation between lemmy.ca and lemmy.world however, but hopefully the administrators figure out the issue! I bring this one up to note that even when ā€œFederatedā€, software bugs can prevent posts, comments, and upvotes from traversing between servers, so picking your ā€œhome serverā€ has a degree of importanceā€¦ especially during bug-fixing times.

Not everything is pleasant. exploding-heads.com just caused an upstir as theyā€™ve proven themselves to be administrated by far-right wing trolls, and have been defederated from https://lemmy.world. Also on my RADAR is lemmygrad.ml, a far-left communist tankie server. They seem to mostly keep to themselves and arenā€™t invoking troll campaigns, but thereā€™s a number of instances that have already chosen to defederate from them purely on political grounds. (https://lemmy.world has kept this connection up).

I see defederation as a new tool in the toolbelt for administrators, where an entire server can ban all the users from another server en-masse if those users cross the line. Defederation therefore makes me optimistic: seeing the new possibilities available to handle online trolls and help moderate the discussion, and help build the communities we want. I recognize its not for everyone, but Iā€™m overall optimistic for this environment and want to participate.

Bugs and issues

Lemmy isā€¦ not the best written software yet. It reminds me of 2008-era Reddit thatā€™s constantly falling over itself as more-and-more users join (Digg migration event anyone?). https://lemmy.world in particular is the largest Lemmy today, and weā€™re seeing bugs here that donā€™t exist on other servers.

  1. Federation bugs ā€“ Lemmy.world requires thousands of background threads/workers to sync posts to-and-from other servers, due to its large size. If you use https://lemmy.world/c/[email protected] (ie: the Lemmy.world portal to [email protected]), your posts, upvotes, and comments could be delayed. In some cases, bugs with https://lemmy.ca has trapped my posts for days of delay. Iā€™ve notified the administrators of this problem, hopefully theyā€™ll figure out the issue.

  2. Lemmy UI bugs ā€“ Error-handling is poor. If you sign up for a new username and the email fails for whatever reason, spinning-circle forever. If you have a password thatā€™s too long, spinning-circle forever. If the topic is too big, spinning-circle forever. If the community is too big, spinning-circle forever (but your post/comments go through). Lemmy was in an alpha/beta state and isnā€™t quite ready for the #RedditBlackout. But if you are familiar with the bugs, youā€™re more or less able to talk to the home-server just fine.

  3. Lemmyisms ā€“ Pulling in a remote community is a manual job invoked by the search menu (!!!). This means that if you canā€™t see a community you know exists, you need to invoke a dance with the search-bar to get the https://lemmy.world server to federate to that community. I havenā€™t figured out the full details myself. But this, in combination with #1 bugs and #2 bugs makes for a frustrating experience.

A number of these bugs were trying to be fixed in .18, a new version of Lemmy aimed for deployment for the July 1st rush. Iā€¦ donā€™t think .18 will make it to Lemmy.world in time for the July rush though, so weā€™ll just have to live with these bugs.

How to Sign Up for Lemmy.world

This needs a guide because of how many bugs there are in Lemmy.

  1. Do not use an underscore in your username. If you do, the signup GUI glitches out and ā€œspins foreverā€.

  2. Do not use a password longer than 20 characters. If you do, the signup GUI glitches out and ā€œspins foreverā€.

  3. Pray and hope the verification email gets delivered. If the process of emailing fails, the signup GUI glitches out and ā€œspins foreverā€.

  4. If the verification email gets partially delivered, the GUI will succeed, but youā€™ll have ā€œspins foreverā€ problems when you try to post. If you have any issues, contact me and Iā€™ll try to relay a message to https://lemmy.world administrators to fix your account.

Other Migration Options

kbin, especially the https://kbin.social server, is another popular option. It is mostly compatible with lemmy (and indeed: https://kbin.social/m/[email protected] proves that they can access realtesla discussion). The main issue is that kbinā€™s frontend is entirely different, links written in ā€œLemmy-styleā€ will not work on kbin.socialā€™s UI.

Thereā€™s specialized communities: such as https://squabbles.io, https://lobste.rs, and https://tildes.net/. Unlike Reddit, these sites are aiming at smaller growth, so its more difficult to sign up for these communities. Like https://beehaw.org, without the hopes of future federation, they have strong moderator teams and seem to have built a good community.