I wanted to get an outside perspective on my Lemmy experience, so I go on /r/redditalternatives and bring up my experiences that I’ve described elsewhere here (tl;dr Lemmy communities are either filled with non sequitur ragebait or completely empty).

I get plenty of responses echoing my sentiment and offering suggestions like blocking and filtering. Plenty of others pointing out how Reddit sucks in its own way and how Lemmy addresses those issues (no creepy AI bots pretending to be real people). I feel my OP and the ongoing discussion is constructive and in good faith, and most people myself included express a desire to see Lemmy and the fediverse succeed despite our frustrations. But oops out of nowhere I get muted and banned with no explanation.

Fun times.

This is a sequel to this rant. I came to the realization that Lemmy and the broader fediverse aren’t really fun for me. The constant ragebait and politics shoehorned into everything was dragging me down, and the only communities without ragebait are also without content in general.

So I caved and made a Reddit account after 3 years and it’s gotten so, so much worse. First is probably the “gamification” of everything. Reddit already had karma, which had its own problems, but it was simple. Monkey brain like number go up. Now they show you analytics on your posts and comments, and encourage you to improve them, as though you’re meeting a metric rather than trying to connect with other people. It’s gross and cynical.

Then there’s the notifications. I get a notification every time a post is upvoted, not just for replies. It feels engineered to squeeze every drop of dopamine out of you and keep you feeding the content machine.

This one’s more subtle. The simple Reddit gold awards that existed when I first joined in 2012 had already ballooned into a myriad of different little trophies when I left in 2023, but they’ve redesigned them and now they look like assets from a free to play mobile game, with the way the awards shine when you mouse over them to that particular bright plasticky round art style. It’s not damning on its own, but combined with the above points it’s another nail in the coffin.

Sponsored posts I think were already a thing when I left, but now there are ads in the comments as well. There used to be one ad on a specific dedicated spot off to the side. It was unobtrusive without being hard to find. I felt that was fair. But it’s not about keeping the lights on anymore, now the whole things screams “You’re the product!”

But worst of all are the bots, AI masquerading as real users that make superficially genuine posts and comments. Discriminating between AI and human content is probably a skill that I could hone with time, but I shouldn’t have to go on a witch hunt every time someone compliments me. I’ve even been tricked into wasting my empathy on them, all so they can farm me for content.

So yeah, maybe I should just throw away my router and go outside.

A huge upshot to using a laptop is you have a built-in UPS and KVM.

Maybe I’m overthinking this. I want something with a drag and drop interface that then gives me a link to paste into discord or a forum to show the image directly, as Imgur does.

I could just use a bare web server but I’d have to scp the images over every time.

In my wiki roundup post I complained about DokuWiki’s reliance on plugins, but after scouring the landscape of FOSS wiki offerings nothing else offers exactly what I need. So I settled on DokuWiki with a bunch of plugins. I have plugins for tagging pages, moving pages, blogging (which I use as a place to quickly catch ideas as they come to me before pushing them to the wiki proper), listing orphaned and wanted pages, among others.

The reason I initially disliked the idea of relying on plugins are that they may interfere with one another, interacting with the different plugins is inconsistent, and updating and management become more complex. But like I said, they get me what I need.

On the other hand, I’ve also been working with BookStack for another project. In many ways it’s the opposite of DokuWiki. It looks modern, it has a noob-friendly wysiwyg editor (important when you need people of different technical skill levels to use it), and tries to be “batteries included” in the dev’s words. The problem it’s missing some features I consider essential for a wiki, chief of which is the ability to link to nonexistent pages. There isn’t really a centralized way to manage uploads, either. And since it isn’t extensible, you’re stuck with those features unless the dev decides to add them later.

So I can see why people may prefer one approach over the other, but how about you?

I know everyone here loves FOSS, and for good reason, but let’s not pretend it doesn’t have its own issues. UX and accessibility are two I whine about regularly, but another big one is project abandonment.

I can’t tell you how many old forum/reddit posts I’ve run across of a lone developer hyping up their latest project, only for me to go to the github page and notice the last commit was 7 years ago.

If you’re not familiar with the Gemini protocol, it’s an updated alternative to Gopher, which in turn was an early competitor to the WWW back in the 90s. Gemini itself I can’t speak to, but if you go down the list of gemini servers and clients on geminiprotocol.net, you’ll see 404s, broken links, and expired certs galore. There was a flood of developer interest 5 or 6 years ago when the protocol was new, but everyone wandered away once the shiny wore off.

My recent foray into wiki software has turned up a few corpses as well. Wiki.js development seems to have stalled, and Pepperminty wiki has been abandoned for three years now.

And yes, I know this is because FOSS devs are often doing this on their own time for little to no money, so passion is the only thing driving them, but passion can only get you so far.

Besides loss of developer interest, community schisms can cause a project to sink. Remember what happened to Audacity? I think it ended up surviving but there was a real concern for a while that the forks wouldn’t be as well supported.

All the FOSS offerings I can think of that are “too big to fail” have big corporate support, like the Linux kernel.

I’m guessing most of us are self-hosting as a hobby, and we can afford to risk a loss of support when a project is abandoned, but businesses don’t have that luxury. That’s why they use proprietary software.