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What could Lemmy.ml do to avoid becoming the next Reddit after a decade?
We all know about how Reddit closed-sourced back in 2017 and will be killing off third-party apps this July, what will Lemmy.ml do to avoid facing the same fate? Reddit started off like this (open, aiming for freedom) and it all went downhill from there.
in reply to IverCoder

Anders Rytter Hansen
Anders Rytter Hansen
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I think Lemmy is different because what could you use the Reddit source code for? There wasn't any federation so it makes perfectly sense that a website which only runs at one company will close source their code to avoid competition. With federation it's different because the instances talk together so there is a difference between the protocol and the large instance. It's like making email closed source. Doesn't really make sense for such a protocol.
in reply to Anders Rytter Hansen

Anders Rytter Hansen
Anders Rytter Hansen
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And another thing is lemmy.ml would lose users from other platforms such as Mastodon etc. Myself included because I'm using Friendica, not Lemmy. Though I do often interact with Lemmy users and make posts on Lemmy instances.
in reply to Anders Rytter Hansen

comfy
comfy
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It's an interesting point, because I wouldn't see this as Lemmy losing users just because you're on Friendica. We are interacting just fine, and neither site is trying to hoard users to make money from, so I say neither loses!
in reply to comfy

Anders Rytter Hansen
Anders Rytter Hansen
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@comfy
What I meant was that if they closed sourced the lemmy project and stopped federating then they would lose users from Friendica, Mastodon etc. They could also closed source the project and keep federating but it wouldn't matter much because there are still other projects such Kbin. Federation really takes the power away from single companies so I think it's the perfect solution to the problems we have been seeing on the big tech platforms.
@comfy
in reply to Anders Rytter Hansen

naoseiquemsou
naoseiquemsou
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This is interesting. I'm new to the fediverse, and I thought that, for example, only lemmy instances could allow users to interact with each other.

Do friendica and lemmy share the same protocol, just implemented differently, or do they have some sort of gatewaway to allow interaction between each other?

in reply to naoseiquemsou

Anders Rytter Hansen
Anders Rytter Hansen
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@naoseiquemsou
They are both using ActivityPub. ActivityPub is not a fixed protocol in itself but a framework for making protocols and implement any feature you want. So that means that some features available on some systems aren't compatible with others. For example Misskey and Pleroma (and forks such as Calckey and Akkoma) have emoji reactions which aren't compatible on other systems and therefore can't be seen. But the basic stuff such as follow, post, comment, like is compatible with all systems.

If you search for ActivityPub Fediverse software, you will find which systems you are able to interact with. Lemmy is a bit more limited than other systems because you can only see posts posted in a Lemmy community. You can't interact with for example a Mastodon posts if it isn't posted in a Lemmy community. However I found Kbin to be a good mix. Has the same features as Lemmy plus the Mastodon stuff: a profile for posts, boosts and can interact with any post on the whole Fediverse.

@naoseiquemsou
in reply to Anders Rytter Hansen

naoseiquemsou
naoseiquemsou
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Thank you for the thorough explanation. I will research more about it.
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