Ah, to be young and piss on reddit again. Back in my days, we had to use TamperMonkey and manually copy the scripts we wanted to use to delete reddit comments.
You young folks don’t know how good you have it!
Back in my day, our comments deleted themselves when the IRC or email server failed…
Come to think of it, what happens if an instance fails with Lemmy and there isn’t a backup?
With the instance itself? I suppose it’s the same procedure as any computer that crashes without a backup; you fucked up son.
I’m just joking, I know what you mean.
The content that has been federated and thus copied to other instances stay with the federated instance forever. Images are hosted at the original instance so they just disappear but the posts, text content and comments are “frozen” at every federated instance.
It will absolutely.
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The average non-tech savvy person will be extremely confused about how federated services operate. You say “join lemmy’, and they say, 'ok, what’s the site?” and then you need to explain, well, you need to pick one of about four thousand instances, and then only go there when you want to sign in. Now they’re already confused. That can then be explained 'It’s like e-mail, lots of different servers to get email, but they all work together." But this doesn’t hit as well because a website is not e-mail, and so interconnected websites are not immediately intuitive. And as soon as you start going into any level of technical details, the average person just tunes out and decides “I don’t want to deal with this crap.”
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If they pick an instance (Like Lemmy.world or sh.itjust.works) that allows free signup, they won’t have too much of a problem. If they pick one that has questions to answer and then a manual approval process that is COMPLETELY opaque, they will nope the fuck out immediately and not even bother to find other instances. Heck, I was turned off of Lemmy for several days because of this, and I’m very tech savvy, and have been doing this sort of crap forever. I signed up first at Lemmy.one, which eventually got my login active, but took 3 days. When I saw no indication of that signup working, though, I tried Beehaw. That STILL has not been activated and it’s been 5 or 6 days, and of course, there’s no indication of what’s going on during that time…it’s just a spinning wheel. Not until I went to an instance that didn’t have these ridiculous manual approvals did I begin using Lemmy. The average user is not going to bother with that.
These are going to be the biggest things that hold Lemmy back (there are also some serious usability issues with the main feed, concerning repeat posts showing for DAYS, and the autorefresh everywhere, which pushes content down constantly if you’re in the New feed).
Listen, I explained Lemmy to my 66 year old boomer Dad and even he understood. You join one of the Lemmy instances and choose it as your home the same way you choose gmail as your email provider. Then you sub whatever community anywhere. It’s not a big deal.
The way I see it, just like with many many many other open sourced projects such as Launchbox, or KeePass, or ShareX, or Libre Office, nothing starts out perfect. But you need to recognise there are hard working people trying to make this dream a reality. It’s being worked on. What you are looking at is essentially a website in it’s infancy still, and it’s being built by the sheer will of the community. If people have patience, and understanding, things can work out just fine. This place is a paradise compared to Reddit. The Reddit corporation does not give a fuck. It wants your data, and to squeeze you for cash.
Lemmy isn’t perfect, yet, but the best thing we can do is work together and make it the way we want it, and we can, nothing can stop us. It’s open source, anyone can contibute. Donate. Post. Help the devs fix the bugs.
I understand that…the average person is not going to. Also, you EXPLAINED it to someone (I also explained it to my wife, who is not a tech person at all, and she understood fine), but again, it takes explaining. For this to take off, it’s going to need to be accessible without a lot of explanation. Otherwise people just won’t care.
For what it’s worth, I’m not a tech person who didn’t have anything explained to me beforehand, knew almost nothing except seeing the words ‘lemmy instance’ (didn’t know what that meant, just that it was relevant so googled it and found a sign up page) and ‘jerboa app’ on reddit and figured out my way here lol. I probably have a bit more free time and patience than the average user and am not afraid to brute force my way through just to see if things work tho lol.
There needs some improvements before it’ll be mainstream accessible for sure imo, most of which I’ve seen pointed out a few times already on different communities. I’d seen mastodon mentioned before in passing by non-tech friends who were just twitter users tho even without ever using Twitter myself, so I suspect if an average user can understand mastodon the same could be true here right?
Agree. I had to do some reading to fully understand the fediverse. If there was a portal that just assigned users to a random instance and then put them directly into a community database for them to sub across multiple instances it would be a much easier on boarding.
Meta is joining fediverse and bluesky will hopefully federate soon. People will “get it” soon enough…
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The idea of Shreddit takes me back to when I first joined Reddit in 2011. At the time, I was in my mid 20s going to rock/metal concerts pretty often. A friend of mine encouraged me to sign up for Reddit and to check out the Shreddit community. It took me ages to figure out she was talking about /r/metal.
I bring that up to make the point that community discovery in my early days of Reddit was pretty difficult, but I eventually figured it out. In time, I’m sure the same thing will happen with Lemmy.
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How does Redact handle the current API rate limits on Reddit? I’ve been using Power Suite Delete the past few days to purge my footprint and help incentive myself to move on, but every pass consistently has comments that aren’t overwritten because it’s hitting limits and moving on instead of queueing actions.
Also, I’ve noticed apparently not all of my account’s content is listed consistently which is why I’ve been running it for a few days now. Every couple hours a few new posts or comments are shown that were just nowhere to be found before.
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Thanks. Just deleted all my comments, posts, and votes on my 12 year Reddit account.
I have no intention of going back. Besides the smaller subreddits the place has been absolutely trashed for years now. I’d rather stick and help grow smaller communities.
Is there some way you can copy your posts or guides here before deleting them?
I put in a request to download all my data. It was a GDPR request, so I’m not sure if anyone can do it.
you can probably VPN into europe and do it
If you use Power Delete Suite it has an export function.
On the one hand I lean into a hard disagree with this idea. I get wanting to protect ones privacy but on the other hand that’s so much information being purged that could help others. I use Google to search reddit for my problems everyday and id be so heartbroken to not be able to do that anymore.
My man, that’s exactly why you should do it. To inflict as much pain as possible on Reddit, especially if it disrupts them and others from problem solving. I too have used Reddit a great deal to solve issues. I recognise what you’re saying, but somethings gotta give my friend. Reddit is a evil coporation that’s feeding it’s users to the wolves. Completely sabotaging their website and transfering here is in my opinion, the way forward. It’s 10 steps backwards, in orders to make 100 steps forward.
Why not move your content here? Keeping it on reddit only really helps reddit in the long run, not its users.
There was an internet before reddit, and there will still be an internet after reddit. If everyone is avoiding to making a move, absolutely nothing will change.
Many new people are looking for new content here, so this is also the perfect time to start adding that valuable information to more than one place. This “blackout” is FAR from the only possible downfall of using reddit as a main source of information. Hypothetically, one day reddit could get shut down for legal issues, they could sell everything to someone who destroys it, they could decide to openly sell ALL user data on a whim, and more. Neither you nor I could stop those things if they happened. I don’t know about you, but I don’t like the idea of all of that information disappearing altogether suddenly. At least with this, we have a chance of saving that information beyond what reddit specifically allows.
I’m curious if anyone else can replicate this, but I used redact.dev to delete my post/comment history. Then I requested for the data download using GDPR as my reasoning.
At this point, my comment history et al was gone. I was about to delete my account too, but I figured I’d wait for the download link in my messages.
That was three days ago, I’ve checked for the link every day and instead of it appearing. All my posts & comments have been restored in a piecemeal fashion.
1 comment after the first day, 5 comments the next day, and so on.
These were comments that redact.dev had edited, then deleted.
Still no data download link tho
I used Power Delete Suite to do the same.
