Where are the RPG alternatives to Reddit? Edit this page or leave a comment if you know. Also, feel free to copy, edit and repost. This information wants to be shared. 😄
If there’s one thing I learned from Google+ disappearing, it’s that people need to be prepared for alternatives.
The list here shows the raw URLs, too. The Lemmy instances on lemmy.ml and lemm.ee are not the same.
Finding Lemmy instances:
https://join-lemmy.org/instances
Then paste the URLs of the communities below and you should be able to follow them. This is the joy of federation: you can follow the groups, magazines or communities from any fediverse account (including the micro-blogging instances like Mastodon and the like).
/r/rpg:
https://lemmy.blahaj.zone/c/ttrpgs
/r/Pathfinder2e:
https://lemmy.ml/c/Pathfinder2e
/r/DnD:
/r/DnDMemes:
https://kbin.social/m/DnDMemes
https://sh.itjust.works/c/dndmemes
https://lemmy.sdf.org/c/dndmemes
/r/faterpg:
/r/osr:
/r/traveller:
https://kbin.social/m/traveller
/r/ravenloft:
https://kbin.social/m/ravenloft
Other lists:
Unofficial Subreddit Migration List (Lemmy, Kbin)
List of Pathfinder communities
#RPG #Reddit #Lemmy #Social Media
(Please contact me if you want to remove your comment.)
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@lori writes about the need for federation:
Sites have to stay small, and there have to be enough of them spread out to spread out the financial load to hobbyist levels. Sorry that you can’t make a living running a site for your friends to hang out on, but it’s just how the math works out. – You can't just make the next Twitter or Reddit or Tumblr.
You can't just make the next Twitter or Reddit or Tumblr.
What this means is that you need to pick a small Lemmy or Kbin instance to make your account, and then follow the communities you’re interested in.
You don’t need to create an account on the instance where there community you’re interested in was created. Doing that would soon drown that instance.
– Alex 2023-06-16 12:05 UTC
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@chris writes:
👿 PSA: #Reddit is restoring deleted and overwritten posts to save what they consider “their data”. This is a new low and probably illegal at least in Europe. You can send a GDPR or CPRA request here: https://www.reddit.com/settings/data-request – Today, June 16th all my posts have been restored by Reddit without my knowledge or consent.
https://www.reddit.com/settings/data-request
Today, June 16th all my posts have been restored by Reddit without my knowledge or consent.
Oof.
I’m assuming the Power Delete Suite is how people are doing it?
– Alex 2023-06-16 12:33 UTC
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Thank you for this thread. I am completely inexperienced with federated networks and am here to learn about them because I appreciate, trust, and empathize with what you have to say about things like the internet, privacy, work, and all of the disappointing, difficult, and simply horrible things we must face in the world these days. (And about RPGs! Thank you for the Old School RPG Planet.) So I do not know how to evaluate what is in the following link, posted in r/osr a couple of says ago. It sounds really bad to me with regard to privacy and bigotry. https://raddle.me/f/lobby/155371/warning-lemmy-doesn-t-care-about-your-privacy-everything-is I just want to find a few places to talk about and share game-stuff without having to put up with or inadvertently empower awful people.
https://raddle.me/f/lobby/155371/warning-lemmy-doesn-t-care-about-your-privacy-everything-is
– 2023-06-18 02:40 UTC
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I think that both Reddit and Lemmy and all the others websites where users contribute in a public way fundamentally cannot protect your privacy against somebody who’s making a copy of the entire Internet. The only real protection would be private communities: Access needs a login and vetting, otherwise evil people can get a login and nothing is gained.
If a service offers private communication, it always has access to that private communication unless you use encryption outside that service. Famously, you can use GPG to encrypt your emails, for example. Even if you encrypt your emails the email service provider of both recipient and server know that you are communicating. The meta data cannot be hidden otherwise the communication cannot be sent.
If you are paranoid, you encrypt the data yourself, you use a service that provides anonymous accounts, you use Tor or virtual private networks to conceal where you’re from. This also means that you can only communicate with people you’ve been able to tell about your secret identity via some other secure channel or all is for naught (like uploading your phone number or email address to a chat service in order to find friends).
With all that said:
“Deleted comments remain on the server but hidden to non-admins, the username remains visible” → Reddit was shown to bring back deleted content users has deleted, so no matter what federated services do, Reddit also does it.
“Deleted account usernames remain visible too” → That is something that could be improved in the user interface.
“Anything remains visible on federated servers!” → That’s a bit like complaining that you cannot delete emails you’ve sent. Yes, some Activity Pub services allow you to edit or delete your messages but if they are no longer online, you can’t delete the messages on their disks; and if they modified the software to ignore requests to delete or edit posts then they’re just malicious actors and there’s nothing you can do about it; or if they’re alpha software perhaps they haven’t implemented editing and deleting messages so your request is ignored not out of a desire for surveillance but out of an inability to comply. If your messages got federated to other servers because somebody there is following you, or the group you posted it to, and their server is either malicious or incomplete or going offline, then not all the copies of your messages are not all going to get edited or deleted. So yes, there’s that. I also happen to think that the same is true for the big corporate services except there you’re placing all your trust in a big corporation that is both a rich target and whose main priority is making money, so I’m not sure that the federated solutions are worse in any significantly way.
“When you delete your account, media does not get deleted on any server” → Disc space is always a cost factor. In the implementations I know, media “expires”. A job runs every now and then and deletes media from remote users because messages always contain a link to the original server. The same job also deletes media that is no longer referred to by any messages. So if you delete the message, eventually the media attachments you uploaded along with it get deleted. There might be a delay. If this doesn’t happen, I’m going to suspect that the service is in alpha and needs to implement this, eventually. And when it does, all the unreachable media is going to get deleted.
In the end, I think speaking online, organizing online, teaching each other things online provide a great benefit to us – and empowers awful people. And if we don’t speak and don’t organize and don’t learn, that is a great loss to us – and still empowers awful people. Fighting awful people requires political action in a different arena. In the mean time, we can try to minimize the exploitation, of course. Which is what my Butlerian Jihad tag is all about. There, I consider the question: As a user and as a system operator, what can we do to be as unhelpful to awful people as possible?
On Mastodon, for example, you can decide to not be listed, you can opt out of search engines (only works against the search engines that play by the rules, of course). On Campaign Wiki (also a kind of social media site, if you think about it), I disallow all indexing by bots (only works against the search engines that play by the rules, of course) and I block IP numbers that browse the site too quickly (probably bots).
– Alex 2023-06-18 17:08 UTC
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Here’s another thing to consider: What if awful people are owning the server of the recipient of a message? If you hate Google you can’t really write an email to a Gmail user. Your email will be stored on Google servers, ready for all the things you hate them for: data mining, AI training, targeted ads, and so on.
The same is true for recipients of posts on the fediverse. If Facebook enters the fediverse and one of their users follows you, they are a recipient of your messages. Your instance will send their instance a copy of your message and it will be stored on Facebook servers, ready for the things you hate them for: data mining, AI training, targeted ads, and so on.
@dredmorbius wrote a long post explaining why Facebook is not to be trusted. He argued that if the US and EU antitrust or competitiveness authorities cannot secure compliance from Facebook and Zuckerberg for existing and longstanding orders, then the fediverse will be powerless. His conclusion was that Facebook “are manifestly bad-faith and untrustworthy actors. Preblock, now.”
Facebook is a repeat violator at the FTC. There was a consent decree that goes back close to a decade, which the FTC in 2019 found that they violated. The recent news suggests that they may have also been in violation of this latest consent order. And that is really prompting a step back and a close look at: What does it take to make sure that firms across the board are actually complying with the law? ... I think when you have companies that are repeatedly before a law-enforcement agency, you need to ask serious questions about whether these companies are recidivist and whether they have a challenge in abiding by existing laws. – Lina Khan, Chair of the US Federal Trade Commission, interviewed by Kara Swischer,15 May 2023, New York Magazine
So before one would trust them, we’d first want to seem them in full compliance with existing antitrust actions, sanctions, consent orders, and the like, for a period at least as long as noncompliance. “…four years in the case of the 2019 order” he added, and then @jdp23 clarified:
In 2019 FB settled charges that they had violated the 2012 consent order, paid a $5B fine (without admitting guilt), and signed another consent order. Now the FTC’s saying they violated the 2019 consent order as well.
See also:
the following instance admins/mods have agreed to block the hell outta project92 – Anti-Meta Fedi Pact
Project 92 is Facebook’s fediverse move. @rostiger has this to say:
Every and any interactions with the “free” service are tracked to build a digital identity that describes a person in more detail than they would describe themselves with. – Stop Using Facebook
It’s going to be a hot summer. 🥵
– Alex 2023-06-19 12:26 UTC
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Thank you for your lengthy replies. I thought I had commented with that link because I was simply trying to find out if it’s ok or not to use this Lemmy thing because maybe it’s relevant that it sounds like the guy behind it is, politically, a bad actor. But actually I already knew that things are much more complicated than that, that larger issues are involved, because, well, I read, including here a I said. After feeling very daunted but deciding to keep at it, I get to your comment to your Butlerian Jihad post from February, with the quote about despair, Arendt, and totalitarianism, and it’s too much. I have to stop for tonight. And trust that tomorrow I will be “as unhelpful to awful people as possible.”
– 2023-06-20 03:05 UTC
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Sure. In the mean time, I’m going to keep collecting interesting bits and pieces.
This roughly corresponds to my guide “My 12+ steps to improving your Reddit experience”, but in this case is written as a brand new Lemmy user – My WIP guide to understanding Lemmy & The Fediverse
My WIP guide to understanding Lemmy & The Fediverse
– Alex 2023-06-20 06:19 UTC
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@atomicpoet@calckey.social weighs in favour of Meta, arguing that there is no point in blocking them:
In the end, what will federation via white label achieve? Not a whole lot, except make certain people believe they have done something substantial to fight Meta when they haven’t. At a certain point, we have to accept reality: Meta will use ActivityPub, and most people using the Fediverse will talk to them. – To review what I've said elsewhere, it's important to acknowledge five important realities
To review what I've said elsewhere, it's important to acknowledge five important realities
– Alex 2023-06-20 07:36 UTC
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The Apollo dev adds:
Apollo’s existing subscription users use on average 473 requests per day. … Under Reddit’s API pricing, those users would cost $3.52 monthly. You take out Apple’s cut of the $5, and some fees of my own to keep Apollo running, and you’re literally losing money every month. And that’s your average user, a large subset of those, around 20%, use between 1,000 and 2,000 requests per day, which would cost $7.50 and $15.00 per month each in fees alone, which I have a hard time believing anyone is going to want to pay. … And remember, from some basic calculations of Reddit’s own disclosed numbers, Reddit appears to make on average approximately $0.12 per user per month, so you can see how charging developers $3.52 (or 29× higher) per user is not “based in reality” as they previously promised. That’s why this pricing is unreasonable. – I want to debunk Reddit's claims, and talk about their unwillingness to work with developers, moderators, and the larger community, as well as say thank you for all the support
– Alex 2023-06-20 09:43 UTC