1y ago

Discuit just went open source, could federation be next?

Announcement post here: https://discuit.substack.com/p/df5f002f-e27a-46a6-b30d-7641b266bd65

For those unfamiliar, Discuit is another Reddit alternative that's been floating around for a while. I was unable to find a MAU count, but I am honestly more interested in their software than their communities. Particularly curious what you all think of this stack. A consistent complaint around Lemmy is that a Rust backend makes contribution difficult, will a Go backend contribute to a lower overall barrier of entry?

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https://discuit.substack.com/p/introducing-discuit here they state explicitly they don't want federation. He also explains why he thinks federation doesn't work, however I don't find these arguments convincing
- Those arguments... I've read them before somewhere.
  The dev wants to become King over their domain and that's it.

Doesn't really matter if they open sourced, since many reddit alternative over the years have been open source: Voat, Ruqqus, Raddle, doesn't really make.a difference since they all failed one way or another. They either never hit that critical self sustaining mass of users, or they attracted the exact wrong type of users who drove out any reasonable users there.
Federation seems to be the only way to create that critical mass of users, and Lemmy is the only alternative that really succeeded (kbin is kinda...hanging on for dear life for various reasons but is alive only due to federation) precisely because it is not a website, but a platform inside of a greater ecosystem.
All Discuit really have is a pretty UI, as it is nowhere even near feature parity with a current defederated Lemmy instance, and Lemmy also has like a dozen different desktop and mobile UIs already.
- Actually a lot is changing in /kbin, and this recent period has brought the most changes in months. Slowly we are coming back to life, and this time I will be better prepared.
  https://kbin.social/m/kbinDevlog
  
  I would say take a moment to think through the site design philosophy and focus on clarity instead of rushing to add features, since I feel that kbin is trying to do more, but it is still rather confusing to navigate.
  Also, don't burn yourself out.
  
  I for one like the added features. Collapsible comments and new comment markers especially (although not the best visual representation maybe). There's lots of little quality of life things that are still missing. Foe example I would love to see a better handling of comment pages. Having to navigate through the pages is annoying, especially if you get a comment reply notification and it just sends you to the first page, without any indication on which page your comment and the reply is sitting at.
- Measuring "success" in a Federated system is somewhat complicated. I'm logged in through a site that's running kbin, and if this instance turned out to be the only kbin instance in existence it wouldn't really affect me; the Lemmy stuff is just as accessible to me regardless.
- Federation has its downsides though, there's less cohesion across the board. A lemmy/kbin platform may have 20,000 users (an example) but most of them might end up with interacting on instances outside of the one they signed up on. Whereas everyone on Discuit, for instance, will be only interacting on Discuit. There's something to be said for how a userbase is spread, not just the amount of users. If Kbin wasn't federated and its own thing, its user trajectory and interaction could've been different - although having only recently arrived, I understand that features had stalled for a long time.
  I think the long-term trend of federation is smaller instances simply shutting down due to lack of interest/money in maintaining it without any noticeable growth and a small bloc of highly used instances dominating, one main one, and probably some politically charged ones orbiting it. Yes, anyone if they're annoyed with a particular instance can just down their tools and migrate to another instance - but if you've got or run communities on that instance, it is a downside.
  Although in Discuits case, yes, it is really, really basic - and that more than anything likely stopped it growing before anything else. There was also administrative problems and other issues that drained users. It hypothetically federating wouldn't help it at all. Their users would just stop using Discuit and use the larger communities all across Lemmy.
- kbin is kinda…hanging on for dear life for various reasons but is alive only due to federation
  Mbin is promising, development is ver active: https://github.com/MbinOrg/mbin
- I'm on kbin. What's wrong with it?
  
  In the latest thing with Reddit's /kbin, it was still in the early prototype phase (and remains so to this day). Prior to this, practically only I and a few friends were using it. It wasn't ready to handle the sudden creation of dozens of instances or accommodate thousands of users. Additionally, real-world issues emerged that demanded my immediate attention. I made the decision to take a step back instead of getting caught up in a race, opting to build solid foundations, which is exactly what I'm doing now. In my opinion, this will be better for the project and potential contributors, ensuring that their work will be utilized to the best possible extent.

If it's not ActivityPub compatible I don't care anymore. Interoperability is a hard requirement at this point.
- Well that's exactly why I'm bringing it up here. Lemmy didn't start as a federated service.

Their users hate idea of fediverse
https://discuit.net/Fediverse/post/1uXgawfH
- 5 replies in 7 weeks, with 14 upvotes on the most popular post? I don't know how representative that is of the whole site...
- If it's open source, does that matter? Fork it.
- Even the main devs didn't like fediverse
  Federated social platforms, I don't think, will ever become mainstream. They may work in certain niches or perhaps among a subset of tech savvy people, but I'm highly skeptical if regular people will ever migrate to them.
  https://discuit.substack.com/p/introducing-discuit
  
  Not tech savvy regular moron reporting for duty

I couldn't find a MAU count either, but the largest, default community is Discuit with current 4,594 members, which I suspect is not too far below lifetime active users.
As a point of comparison, the largest Lemmy instance, lemmy.world has 12k MAUs out of 143k lifetime users. If this ratio is the same on Discuit, would imply about 400 MAUs.
- Yeah they're vastly smaller than Lemmy, which is probably why they felt the need to go open source. But without federation, open source doesn't do much to change things.
  I do like the site and the userbase, so if they were open to federation I think it'd be a nice little boost for us.

Its website is looking good.
- Right? The website looks really nice! Does anyone have any more info about this?
- Seriously asking, not being snarky, but that looks good? It's just a clone of new.reddit and every other SNS layout of the past 20 years.
  
  Honestly, I think it looks substantially cleaner than the new reddit. Also, a lot more performant, which goes a long way towards the overall vibe of the UI.
  
  Yeah, the only reason I'm still dabbling in Reddit is because they still have old.Reddit. As soon as Reddit goes to new.Reddit-only, I'm gone for good. I hate that UI.
  Lots of people seem to like it, though, so I guess more power to them if they want to use it. One of the great advantages of the Fediverse is not having gatekeeping on the interface.
- Do you know about https://phtn.app/, the alternative frontend for Lemmy?

The more communities and services that federate the more appealing it becomes to federate. Hopefully we reaxh a point where u canot survive without federarion.

There's already a PHP backend, kbin, though judging which is a better language for this sort of thing is outside of my wheelhouse.
- The best way to tell if php is the best language for something is simple. It isn't :-p
  But at least it's not perl running out of cgibin.
- https://github.com/MbinOrg/mbin has more active development
  
  Are they still calling communities "magazines"?
  
  Oh, interesting, I hadn't heard of this. I hope this fork is amicable? Ernest has struck me as being a reasonable dev from what I've seen of his public interactions, I'd hate to hear that there's drama afoot.

Fed up with alternative bs, lemmy is the only sensible reddit alternative.
- "everyone should use the thing I use"
- I prefer kbin over the tankie shit.
- Meh, I use Kbin fork and like it more then lemmy, I don't think that your opinion describes everyone
  
  Ofcourse, it's my opinion

Is it really that tough to make changes on rust? I'm not even a web developer and even I've been able to figure out how to fiddle with lotide's back-end code. I added a feature (I need to add back in) for stuff without a title so it'll just pull the first line of text for when I'm pulling from friendica communities and the like.
- I suspect it actually has more to do with the organizing principles of Lemmy's code exasperated by a relative unfamiliarity with rust. Just giving the codebase here a once over I think I would have a pretty good idea of where to jump in while I've had no such luck with the Lemmy codebase. Worth noting I've done a fair bit of work in rust but not in go.

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