Did this site live and die in 4 days?
Did this site live and die in 4 days?
This place has roughly 3,000 people and was intended to be an entire replacement for DaystromInstitute and StarTrek as they were going dark indefinitely. Well, within 4 days the moderators have walked back those statements and opened both subreddits up. I see no incentive for people to come to this website now and while a few may come here in the future, most people will go to r/startrek with 600,000 people.
Nobody Goes There Anymore, It’s Too Crowded
Given the option between hanging out with 3,000 Trekkies who are willing to plunge headfirst into a strange new ecosystem and 600,000 Trekkies who find making an account to be an onerous process, I'll take the former, thanks
The irony of being a Trekkie but fearing strange new worlds.
"Starfleet was founded to seek out new life – well, there it sits, waiting!"
You'd be shocked at the amount of Star Trek fans who don't "get it."
It's analogous to the gamers who complain about The Last of Us being "too political" while listing, like, BioShock as their favorite game.
Not even "it's too confusing" or "I can't find things" (both viable excuses right now but being actively worked on) but Signing up for an account is too hard.
In today's world of literally an email and a password, and most browsers/password mangers will suggest and autofill and save... I just can't even.
Fine, stay there and absorb ads and promoted shit to your hearts content. Not saying the bar for entry should be high, but goddamn maybe we don't need the ones who can't be bothered to create an account.
Let me walk you through my process. Go to join-lemmy and then realize I can't just join Lemmy, I need to choose a server. So now why go to one place over another. I picked one initially that I didn't like and apparently isn't a big one. Then I try beehaw. Beehaw tells me I need to wait to be approved but I can't even tell if my application went through. Still to this day I am not 100 percent sure if it went through.
Then I joinn sh.itjust.works and hey, great name. Shit just worked. From there it's not terrible to figure things out but you quickly realize that Lemmy has some rough edges that are obviously going to be a barrier for the masses. Combine that with the fact that the communities simply aren't quite there yet and it just makes sense. Lemmy is a great start with a ton of potential but I can't fault the average user for not being ready to make the jump.
Startrek.website doesn't even have email verification turned on, it's literally fewer steps than it is to make a reddit account.
I think they bring up a good point and just like Reddit isn't going to die overnight, Lemmy and the like are not going to see widespread adoption until the product matures.
The difficulty of entry to fediverse will be the difference between being a reddit replacement and being a separate much smaller community. I don't fault a non tech minded person for not putting in the effort to learn a new service that they have no attachment to.
I've been a member of reddit for 17 years and it took almost a decade before it became popular with the masses. People weren't attracted to the format, didn't fully understand how reddit worked, or were unaware of it's existence for a long time, and as such reddit was more popular with the technically minded. I see the same thing here. I fully admit, I am completely lost here, and in fact, this is my first post. So it needs development, for sure, but I do believe that decentralised social networking is going to be the future ... we are coming in on the ground floor. It's just gonna take a long time before the fediverse is even seen by the vast majority, let alone accessible and understood.
I literally don't understand what is there to learn that everyone isn't already used to in one form or another.
Kbin, lemmy, pixelfed, mastodon, beehaw are all pretty intuitive to start using right away. The account creation process is no different than what is available on mainstream sites.
The federation system sounds a bit intimidating but in reality, it takes about one hour of using your selected service to get used to.
As long as we direct people to instances with a stable stream of content from a large enough number of regular users, they should be absolutely fine.
I agree with this, I didn't really notice it that much on Reddit, but since coming to Lemmy I notice how pleasant it is to have time to actually engage with content before a thousand new posts are churned to the top.
I for one am here to boldly go away from Reddit.
@dbeardius @zabraven @GuyFleegman
Welcome to the jungle
Reddit is dying. Its goals as a growth-oriented corporation are inherently contrary to its original nature as a community center. I have to give them props for dragging it out as long as they have (and will). All the factors that made Reddit possible and desirable still exist; in fact, the ActivityPub federation protocol enables an even more powerful form of collaboration that transcends a lot of the negative aspects of Reddit's design.
Give it time. Make content! Tell people about this wonderful new generation of media. Consider it an opportunity to engage with the glory days of a new form of internet media. Which it is.
Exactly, it's going to be a long slow process. This will have slow bursts like we're seeing now as reddit makes their app shittier and shittier, but we're never going to see an exodus like Digg again, Reddit is 100s of times bigger now.
It's going to look like Facebook, where over time people leave as they realize they don't need it anymore, and eventually all that will be left are stubborn people, the people in admin/mod positions that refuse to give up power, our moms, the people who think Minions memes are funny, and the thousands and thousands of bots talking to each other about how great lysol cleaners are.
Honestly the only people that will remain there are, as you said, either very stubborn, or too young to give a damn. There's a community that I was a part of for a long time that I loved deeply, it was a very warm and inviting place. When the sub went on blackout and took a poll to extend indefinitely, I made a passionate plea to the sub to really consider what's at stake, even though so many of them felt like it was pointless. I wasn't rude, I wasn't callous or pessimistic, I just wanted people to know that whether something seems hopeless or not isn't the point at all, but rather taking a stand for something you believe in should be the point.
I was promptly met with a barrage of downvotes and someone replying to me spewing vitriol and telling me to touch grass, with another person just shrugging and saying they just want things to go back to the way they were (by ending the blackout). It's weird but I was honestly pretty hurt by that response. This community that I came to know and love turned on me the moment I suggested we take a stand.
There really is no persuading people like that unfortunately. But, hopefully, slowly, change will still happen.
people who think Minions memes are funny
Wacky Tic-Tacs!
I don't know if reddit it's dying but it will be a worse place for sure (and it was quite shitty since years)
Yes, I regret using the sensationalized language. Reddit is not "dying" so much as it is "continuing its transition into the same homogeneous para-social media service as the other tech giants in that space." The elements that made Reddit special are continuing to slip away in a series of predictable corporate moves. Everybody taking out their frustrations on Huffman is par for the course, but it's not his fault. This is just the way of the Eternal September. It will come for the ActivityPub systems eventually. The people who created ActivityPub (the federation protocol underneath Lemmy, Kbin, et. al.) have actually already moved on to the "next next" generation of social media architecture: https://spritely.institute/
I wasn't subbed to either of the communities that the op said this was originally for, and I found kbin whilst searching for a Reddit alternative. I like the whole federation thing, it's new and interesting, for now at least.
I cannot speak to the internal decisions of /r/StarTrek, but I can speak to /r/DaystromInstitute's decisions.
As of yesterday, noncompliant moderation teams are under threat from /u/Spez and his lackeys. We reached the decision to reopen, in a limited capacity, to prevent the community from facing a hostile takeover by those who do not properly appreciate its use or its value, and to hopefully funnel traffic here, and we intend that soon those will be the only purposes of the subreddit. In coordinating this move I trust my collagues on the other subs to act in the best interests of the community first, this instance second, and the profiteering bastards last.
Man, what a shit situation for the mods. Either open or you get removed and it opens anyway.
I can't believe the negativity coming from the /r/startrek community regarding the blackout and the idea of switching to Lemmy. Forging a new brighter future free of corporate control should fit into the Star Trek ideals of every fan.
I mean, Lemmy if FEDERATED. If that's not Star Trek, idk what is.
I also find that very strange. If you look at the upvote/downvote ratio on the original threads announcing the subs would be going dark, it seems like most are/were in favour. But probably the ones who are still commenting the most were against it because they are still there? Idk. Anyway, I prefer our c/startrek over r/startrek -- especially atm.
maybe if you're a federation citizen, but for a
redditorklingon, it's about the empire!
That's rather up to us, isn't it?
I don't have any data to support it, but it seems like there are a number of throwaway accounts on Lemmy posting about how the protest was a failure and how we should all go back. Feels like astroturfing.
This place is definitely not dead. Quite lively, in fact. I'm not sure why there being a bigger star trek community somewhere means that this one would be useless
That is true. You got start somewhere.
i hope it does grow, as i hope all other lemmy instances grow. but this site was intended to replace the subreddits because of the protest, with both startrek subreddits redirecting here. i dont think there will be much growth here but im interested to see how things go down when 3rd party apps shut down.
I generally am happy if the instance provides enough conversation at a reasonable pace on the subjects that I want to talk about. Beyond that, it growing doesn't necessarily make it better.
When r/startrek went dark, thought at the time to be forever, I came here. I wasn't looking for a new reddit. I was looking for a new home to talk with other Star Trek fans. And, that is here. Now that r/startrek is back open, I'm still staying here. I like it here. I don't see a need for an us versus them showdown. How many r/startrek accounts there are isn't important to me. How active is c/startrek is important to me. And, I think c/startrek is doing well. With more Star Trek fans finding their way here.
Do I think c/startrek is sustainable and will continue to grow? Yes. Because Star Trek fans tend to love interacting with other Star Trek fans, and with those new to Star Trek. I have my doubts about there being an all out rush back to r/startrek because the initial reason for leaving wasn't a temporary oopsie, like a technical issue. It was, for me and likely others, because of Huffman's actions and reactions. That was an eye-opener.
I think on some level many people know that they are just commodities to for profit social medias. The end goal is to gather valuable data, and concentrate eyes on certain spots to sell ads. Monetization. There's a facade in place. I think problems arise when that facade is frayed and torn. For me, Reddit's facade is shredded.
I like that here the main goal isn't to target me with ads. And, I'm thoroughly enjoying the interactions here. Yes, there's a lot to Lemmy I haven't learned. Truth be told, I may never learn all or even most about it. However, it only took me a few minutes to figure out the most important things to me on c/startrek -- how to read and make comments.
Reddit is gonna Reddit. LLAP, c/startrek.
It is incredibly refreshing to not be inundated with ads. Reddit absorbed all the web 1.0 communities one-by-one, then changed just slowly enough to boil the frog. The recent changes went overboard, rushing for the ipo. They showed their real hand. I won’t be going back.
But at the same time, I don’t begrudge anyone who wants to stay there. Hopefully, they’ll find their way here, but if not I wish them all the best.
This was just the dress rehearsal, it seems like people forgot that. The protest isn't the event, the policy changes are the event. The protest was just to let them know that the users do care about the impending policy changes. When those changes take effect, lots of people are going to discover that the app they use to browse reddit doesn't work anymore. Some will install the official [cr]app and go on with their lives, but some won't. It won't be a mortal wound, but a lot of users will be lost at that moment. That's when a wave of users looking for a new permanent home will arrive. Since Lemmy has been mentioned all over reddit, and in articles about the reddit drama, a lot of the trekkies among them will end up here. All we have to do is wait. Lemmy may not be the site/network with the biggest trek presence (yet), but i'm confident it will grow to a healthy size in short order.
It's also worth mentioning that there are users, such as myself, who want to set up their own instances and play with the technology. The stats of what you see for user volume and using that as a metric to determine engagement is pre-federation thinking (both literally and figuratively). More numbers = more safety in a false scarcity environment right?
Anyhow, this site is federated and it's not alone. I'm excited to be here.
yes, but i would like to add that the thing most people will get is bad moderation. I dont think the people will change 180° on the moment the changes happen but it will be a malicious long term effect where spam, shitposts on good communities and co will get stronger. And when people realize this they either have to accept shitty reddit or come over to an alternative.
At least i think the long term is the worst part for reddit.Edit: as you can see on the stats below the growth of lemmy slows down at the moment but they dont sink so there is a deciline of new new users but there is less hype because: we cant reach anyone, some of the blackouts are going online and we already joined.
https://lemmy.fediverse.observer/dailystatsYeah not all at once of course. I think there will be a noticeable wave right away, but greater numbers will trickle in over the following months. And hopefully in that time there will be some more mobile apps popping up that work with Lemmy.
Just have to be committed. Also remember that it's not just your site, it's all of lemmy that can participate.
I'm a strong supporter of decentralized stuff so I'm of course really hoping all of this works out. By the way, this is my first post, it seems that its visible on [email protected] when viewed on Lemmy.world, but when going to the actual startrek.website, my post isn't visible. Did I post it incorrectly?
Looks like it's all working as expected to me https://startrek.website/post/26854
Seeing you at kbin
Roughly 3,000 people in four days...
And yes the subreddit reopening was not part of the original plan, but there's not much we can do about it besides make this a better space that users will feel comfortable signing up with.
didn't reddit backtrack on the threats? Not that I expect them to hold to their word but I think they walked back. I tried searching but tbh federated subs are a pain to search I think.
I first joined r/startrek over 12 years ago when it was about 3000 subscribers. I had a lot of fun. Every post could be seen and not drowned out. No troll issues. Those early days were really nice.
You know what day it is?
A good day (for Reddit) to die.
Qapla'!
Die? I just found this place!
Let's fucking engaaaaaage
More people probably will stay on Reddit, but I like startrek.website so much I joined the patreon which I've never done for anything before.
Lemmy is new and a bit confusing to start with but I really like it. It aligns with my morals and techie side much more than Reddit ever could.
I checked r/startrek last night at was a bit shocked at the hate the mods were recieving for doing what I consider to be morally correct. To each their own I suppose!
The people still using reddit are the ones that don't gaf about morals. It's better that they stay there.
@astroturds @samus12345 not necessarily. Some people may be stuck because they don’t have software for anything else.
The change hasn't even gone into effect yet. Let people deal with the ads and shittiness that is the official app. They'll be looking for alternatives.
Yeah, it seems pretty obvious that their end goal here is to get people off of 3rd party apps and off of old.reddit so their eyeballs will be exposed to more ads. I now no longer really care how many more people there are on reddit. I'll do some silly shit to avoid looking at ads. It's almost like a religious thing for me.
You're right, as of now it seems that a majority of users and moderators have gone back and using Reddit like normal but after the deadline I wonder what both sites will look like
There will likely be another influx when 3rd party apps die, and further trickling in if more and more moderators hang up the towel and reddit becomes more unmanageable with spam. It is difficult to migrate a whole community at once but I'm sure it will happen slowly, as more people become used to the concept of federation (you would think r/startrek would understand this "federation" though).
Well I'm not going back to Reddit after everything they have pulled, I'm hoping other people also feel the same way.
I left Reddit a few months ago and I missed deeply r/StarTrek, so I certainly hope [email protected] will not die !
I’ve been visiting Reddit since 2006 and had an account there for nearly 17 years. I remember it before subreddits were a thing. It was for tech nerds and other associated weirdos before entering a genuinely charming period for a few years, but those days are long in the past. I’d rather try out something new with a smaller group of interesting people who are also into trying new things, and I hope this site is able to keep chugging along regardless of whatever is happening at Reddit.
Make sure you follow lots of folks in order to fill your feed. Easiest way is often to start by following hashtags... might I suggest #StarTrek as a starting point :)
"We are smart."
Well I’m not going back to reddit even if this place fizzles out. Reddit has become way too corporate
This community seems to have grown exponentially over the past 4 days. I'm super confused by your observation.
I'm here, and as long as this community keeps going, I think I probably will remain. Especially since my login is through a community that I am trying to actively participate in growth of.
Yeah, a rapid uptick and downtick makes sense. This platform takes some learning. As long as we post content and make this interesting people will stay and grow.
Doesn't seem to have died to me. It's actually dramatically more active than it was even days ago. Not sure what you're responding to other than "this thing isn't the same as that thing and I still like that thing".
Keep in mind that they just set new rules that allow them to replace mods who are participating in the blackout. Subs will open again very soon whether their original mods want to or not. The end goal of a protest is to affect change. Not being a part of their system is change. When the content is created by the users, the users have power.
The only way I'd go back to reddit at all is if they entirely walk back their new API rules and if Spez steps down.
I’ve undocked from Reddit for the last time. “Second star to the right…Warp Speed.”
I was incredibly proud of the trek community for boldly going into the new frontier of the internet. Taking the entire subreddit for the ride could have really helped mass adoption of decentralized social networking. I expected the sub to reopen eventually, but I'm pretty disappointed by the reaction of those currently posting in that thread. If any fanbase should be willing to move forward with the times, we should.
Same thing happened with the Twitter migration. It reveals those who get it and those that don’t. We all differ in our values in these things. It kinda sucks but undeniably. Some of us care and are willing to sacrifice for something better. Others need their convenience and fail to see bigger picture morals.
All we can do is build what we want to see. That’s how the world gets changes.
Only issue I have is I’m not clear on how committed the mods are to maintaining this instance??
It's going about as expected. Mastodon experienced many waves of new users coming in. A lot of them don't stay, but at lot do. I expect the same thing to happen here.
Unless I'm missing something, but creating an account on this website here was incredible easy.
I wouldn't worry. It's not a foregone conclusion that this place is going to suffer and die because the subreddits opened back up.
@Nmyownworld, I’m still not able to reply to a reply with Mlem, I’d like to say the same - for me it’s been about trying to find a new place to have conversations in a board that’s diverse, well moderated and values keeping a balance of different perspectives that don’t shout down others.
Being in a conversation with hund of thousands isn’t my main goal. Being in a place where fans of diverse demographics and perspectives can respectfully interact is.
Us vs them, lack of openness to other perspectives seems to have always been where Star Trek fandom falls apart, going back to the early mimeod fanzines. I’m glad you flagged that in your comment.
I’ve been finding the conversations in the fandom increasingly challenging to join into, and had been wondering where I should continue to participate or not. (“The cancel this to give us that because all true fans want what I want!” demands in less well moderated social media have been accelerating.)
Star Trek wasn’t what drew me to Reddit as much as I have enjoyed the conversations there. I wonder where I will be able to have conversations about other hobbies or my local community. So, being motivated to join Lemmy and look around for those from a safe home base is a gift.
No worries. I don't even know what Mlem is, heh.
" “The cancel this to give us that because all true fans want what I want!” demands in less well moderated social media have been accelerating."
I've noticed that, too. It saddens me. Star Trek is diverse, in many ways. And, there's a lot of different Star Trek shows and movies around. Civil conversing seemed to be becoming a lost art. Hopefully, genuine conversating makes a return, without hyperbole ridden shout downs.
Whether the original subreddit is reopened or not, there are going to be plenty of people that don't want to go back to reddit, or never were over at reddit in the first place. It's possible this one will die off, but hopefully it won't and will stay its own thing, regardless of the status of the subreddit....
I'm sticking around here, but then I wasn't on /r/startrek to begin with
People like you are a tremendous potential audience - there are plenty of fans who weren't on Reddit.
Tell your friends!
Me too!
What’s funny is I only found out about this place from the r/squaredcircle discord (the subreddit is still down at the moment, but word from the mods over there is that spez’s ghouls are threatening to do whatever it takes to re-open subreddits), so people are spreading the word out there in all sorts of places
As long as there's people contributing quality contents and discussions, this place won't die, although the culture will start diverging from the subreddits.
It's only been about a week. It'll take time to grow the community, and to find out if it's dead or not.
But for your part, posting frequently should help keep it alive until it gains more users.
"I see no incentive for people to come to this website now " Well, you are free from any more corporate BS here and back on Reddit you are in the same precarious situation that you were in before. If you go back, you will have to compromise.
I'm totally out of my element as far as this community goes and wondered in here from sorting by all, but I won't be going back to reddit for the reasons you said and then some.
It seems to me enough of the core/healthy users and mods have had enough that the site is going to devolve into a cesspool of hate, bots/spam, circlejerks, and more hate.
It's the core subreddit members who drive significant portions of content that are leaving. It's the users who actually go out of their way to report off-topic/rule-breaking content. The ones who always check for/report dropship scammers. These are the users getting fed up and leaving.
It's the unhealthy users who are going to stay. The kind of mindless drones who upvote content regardless of whether it's in the appropriate thread. I've witnessed an alarming trend over the years of anti-intellectualism and hypersensitivity mixed with aggression spreading on reddit. The site is already going down the drain.
Now the mods are about to lose most of their tools (from 3rd party apps of course!) and are being removed by the reddit admin to reopen subs. Many mods are maliciously noncomplying. Some talk about just not moderating their comunities at all anymore. When the mods leave in droves (which is already happening) is when we'll start to see reddit deteriorate more.
Reddit itself isn't going anywhere, and neither is most of their userbase. But their quality is going to plummet. Regardless, I'm happier here even if our communities are smaller for a while. That will just make them more close-knit.
One of the things that made the jump easy for me was that Reddit's kind of already devolved to that state. I've started to notice that most of Reddit's content is automatically generated. Bots even synergize to the point where one bot will repost an old top post while other bots repost the top comments from the old post. Lately I've been seeing weirdly generic and hollow comments that just look like they came from a pool of sentences, or like they were generated by Chat-GPT. And Reddit has long encouraged this trend such as by admitting they approve of free karma subreddits, solely because they make it easier for new users to circumvent spam filters. I don't think they care about quality as long as bots are increasing the total user count. It's a localized example of the dead internet theory.
Even if spez was ousted, all these API changes rolled back, and Reddit never made another decision based on corporate greed, I still just don't really care for what Reddit's become. These changes are the simple manifestations of what Reddit's been aiming to do for years, and I don't see any reason to stay and hope things get better when they're already so bad and get invariably worse.
Give it time for sure, OP. I’m new :) I actually made an account 2 days ago, but it was bugging due to server load so I couldnt stay logged on.
Today though, I tried again and it works great, and I’m finding so far, it’s not as complicated as some redditors made it out to be. I think that was the reason for my hesitancy, so I think because of the cautions, people will be slower to try it out
I've been enjoying this site for the past 4 days. Only time will tell.
I deleted my Reddit account during the blackout, so I had no idea the subs had reopened until I saw this post. I made the move for good - no going back. So hopefully there are enough folks here to keep things engaging! Judging by the three pages of comments on this post, I'd say there are!
I think for now if people know about this and they’re fans because of the spirit of Trek, they’ll come here, and maybe both places. But if they’re a casual fan, they’ll likely stick with Reddit. What’s nice about all the drama is the awareness it brought to Lemmy and the Fediverse as a whole. At least more people know they have a choice.
In short; The root cause of the protest wasn't enough for the mods to sacrifice their accounts for. Maybe one they'll find something they truly believe in, but this wasn't it.
Maybe, but also the mods perhaps saw that the only ones getting punished were the community, so they reopened and gave those subs back to the users.