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!
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.
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.
My concern is that he will use his admin powers in relevant subs (worldnews@lemmy.ml) to suppress relevant topics there. I don’t think that requires forking in itself, but might justify defederation to help alternative groups grow.
Why the hate against lemmygrad? Just let them have their opinion. Have they done anything wrong to you personally? No? Then let them be. At least this is how I like to think about it.
Also, are we really going to start witch hunts for instances that federate with an instance that you don’t like?
