You’re asking two questions here. One is about some kind of purity test, which… You gotta let that one go. The crowd isn’t here to pass judgement on you, and asking it to do so is a kind of psychological self harm.

The other is about whether using a particular Reddit front end supports Reddit. The answer to that is an unqualified “yes”.

The two together point to you wanting to use Reddit, but not wanting to be judged poorly for doing so, and that’s an anxiety state you don’t deserve to live in. You either believe strongly enough about not supporting Reddit for your own reasons to not use it, or you don’t. And that’s ok, because they’re your beliefs. You’re not some soldier in some holy war.

if abusive admins on a power trip will just arbitralily wipe my stuff “accidentially” whenever they feel like.

You’ve jumped to a lot of conclusions here.

You’re using a website that’s operated by volunteers, that’s seen a ton of abuse from spammers and bots, that’s run on software that’s pre-version-1 and that lacks advanced mod tools, and that likely has an admin team that’s using some hacked together third party scripts or tools to try and identify bad actors. It’s not only possible, but entirely reasonable, that one of those tools may have falsely identified you as a spam account, and someone either just ran a script that banned a bunch of people, or got into a flow state and just hit the wrong button out of habit.

Pointing fingers and accusing others of bad behaviour out of pure speculation while you’re both stomping your feet and having a fit because you feel hurt while simultaneously telling others that the lens they’re using is “pure speculation” is… Not productive, to put it mildly.

Here’s a google prompt for you: “raspberry pi police”

Are they still playing apologetics for the cops? Because if so, no thanks.

Honestly, the problem with discovery is not that there are not enough posts in a single timeline. Merging local and global feeds makes discoverability worse on Lemmy and kbin, not better, because the timelines display posts, while the space is organized by communities. This means that smaller or niche communities just drown seas of posts from large or highly active ones.

If you want a real “exploration” timeline, you need one that limits the number of posts from any given community. And that still seems like it’s well served by local/global splits, because the website you join should be meaningful.

We do not need, nor should we want, a network of “dumb terminal” Fediverse sites. We should be aiming for the local stream to be the big selling point for any given instance, with the ability to interact with remote communities being a value-add. A merged timeline kills local identity, and tells users that their hosting website is a 2nd class citizen in the Fediverse.

A lot of new Fediverse projects, too, misidentify who their audience is, too. Calckey has a really good UX (most of the time), and I had zero issues as just an account user on Calc’s server, but the support for would-be admins is… A chat room, and documentation that is half so far out of date that some of it is in Japanese.

That’s not going to grow the presence. That doesn’t get new instances online. That doesn’t get an ecosystem with good moderators and admins. That doesn’t get the infrastructure in place - technical and social - to truly take off.

That’s a shame. As an end user, it’s a really nice experience, but running my own private instance I kept running into issues that just made it really difficult to keep it online, especially once life started to put a lot of pressure on my time and mental health.

One thing I’ve noticed about a lot of small FOSS projects is that they do very little to actually educate potential users on how to use their stuff. The underlying motivator is often to provide alternatives to existing products, but they fall down entirely when it comes to actually making those alternatives usable for the users of the things they’re trying to provide alternatives for.

The big ones get big by creating their audience. The small ones look for the small intersection of people who use the mainstream product, care about open source, and also are fluent enough in that world that they already know what to do to make things work, and that pool of users often doesn’t reach any kind of critical mass.

I guess, but it also puts a lot of pressure on those small ones to be indistinguishable from the big ones, by having people treating them like they’re the same place.

I don’t think Lemmy scales the same way that Mastodon does. I don’t think this topic-based community forum model translates to federation the same way the individual-based microblogging space does. It’s a more complex space, with more layers to manage. It’s often mod or admin driven, whereas microblogs are entirely about average user behaviour.

I don’t think it replicates Reddit the same way that it replicates Twitter. I think the mental model just doesn’t fit the tech.

Like, yeah, letting users make personalized community lists is one thing, and I get the appeal, but it ends up functioning very differently in a space where multiple communities can have the same handle, you know? I can lump 5 different gaming subreddits together into a single stream, and be totally and intuitively aware that they’re different. They have different names, and they present differently, with different stylings, when you actually click through to a post. Without those signals, though, empowering users to lump communities together only has benefits to smaller communities if those communities are looking to grow for growth’s sake.

Mastodon has done a great disservice to its admins and users by trying to mask the federated nature of the fediverse. By trying to sell ‘Mastodon’ as a space in and of itself. By trying to make the actual website you’re using invisible. I don’t think we benefit from that in any way. Indeed, I think it’s only the platform developers who benefit, by making their product the only thing people really see. But the individual websites that make up these networks of social networks are entities in and of themselves. They’re like neighbourhoods, or towns. They have their own infrastructure, their own residents, their own characters, and their own needs. Treating them as interchangeable or invisible, ultimately, I feel, stymies the actual potential of the space.

Because this isn’t Reddit. It doesn’t work like Reddit. It can’t try to be “Reddit, but ____”, because it fails at the first word. The way forward is in recognizing that, and trying to figure out what this new space really is.

And one of the things it is is not one space.

community discoverability, […], and moderation tools

Those are big. But so is the lack of smooth interoperability with Mastodon. There’s a large population using Mastodon right now that could be participating in threaded discussions here, who are just totally blind to the space, and those that do engage have a super jankey experience.

And on top of that, it’s also a super jankey experience on the Lemmy end when Mastodon users engage.

Hopefully things get better on that front once Mastodon has implemented groups.

not being able to group communities together

I honestly see this being a continued expectation to be a bigger issue. Two communities with the same name on different servers could be very different spaces. Giving users the ability to group them together homogenizes them in a way that is likely bad for the ecosystem overall.

Like, it’s fine to have federated or merged communities, but I think that power needs to be in mods and/or admins hands, not end users.

This was definitely one of the cutest of the shots I got. Though, theyhave this feathery plumes on their fronts and backs that make them kind of adorable from all angles

No, that’s not actually reasonable given how federation works. You’re not viewing content on other instance, you’re viewing content imported from other instances. Copies hosted locally. This puts admins in the position of actively hosting content they may find objectionable if it’s allowable on other sites and they’re federating with those sites.

Your instance is not some neutral community browser for remote communities. It’s not the equivalent of Chrome or Firefox. It’s the equivalent of a website hosting guest authors, and the website admins are responsible on some level for what they choose to host.

If you want wide open freedom of choice, you have the ability to host your own instance. That’s how you get carte blanch to decide what you see and what you don’t.

Disagree. Indeed, I couldn’t disagree more strongly.

Instances are not just abstract server nodes in some overly wasteful recreation of some other website. This is the world wide social web as it should have been.

You may as well argue that websites should be indistinguishable from each other.

This isn’t Reddit. Full stop. And it’s not a drop-in Reddit replacement, either. It’s not “Reddit, but different”. It’s a whole new paradigm in forums and content aggregation. It’s very different from centralized social media, and we need to stop dancing around or trying to hide that fact.

It will never get to reach its potential if we decide it needs to be nothing more than a simulacra of what came before it.

Journos don’t lead, they follow. While ostensibly they’re on Twitter to promote their articles, in practice they’re there to follow politicians and keep an eye on trending hashtags.

Something buzzworthy needs to happen on the Fediverse first.