zero_iq

Signal comes from the “chip-on-board” under the black epoxy blob. Looks like a circuit for simple sample or electronic tune playback. You press the (now damaged) button, and it plays a tune or sound sample(s) out of the speaker.

In that case the admin of the instance you registered with has disabled community creation for some reason. You can either contact the admin where you registered, or sign up with another instance that does allow community creation

If you’re on desktop, click Create Community at the top of the page.

If you’re on mobile, click the menu icon (top right), then click Create Community.

Best case scenario for reddit, I think, would be for its IPO to fail, spez and investors call it quits, and it eventually ends up maintained by a not-for-profit foundation in the way that, say, Wikipedia or Blender is.

Either that or it dies, its database published or scraped, and ends up accessible through archive.org or something similar.

EDIT: or a crowdfunded buy-out by John Oliver 😆

I took a brief look at the code for this recently.

Hot is similar to the old reddit ranking. A combination of upvote score with a decay over time, starting from when the post was made.

Active is essentially the same ranking, but the fade away is based on the time of the most recent comment on the post. Any new comment will bump it back up, resetting the timer. There is a 48 hour cut off, so posts don’t keep getting bumped up indefinitely.

When you look at Lemmy as a whole though, the growth is significant, but the total is not that huge.

The number of Lemmy users has increased from ~50K at the start of the month to ~135K today, so a bit under 3x. (For comparison, that’s approx. 0.002% of reddit’s active daily user accounts, or 0.00008% of reddit’s active monthly user accounts.)

That we are seeing technical, trust, financial, and social/management scaling problems leading to defederation, servers being overloaded, etc. at this relatively tiny level of engagement is a bit worrying, but also kind of encouraging in a way. Better to encounter these things and address them early on, while the system is up and running.

The good news is that there seems to be no shortage of people willing to help out. Lemmy is working for now, but these rumblings of future scaling problems need to be tackled. We have a growing user base, and there seems to be no shortage of motivation for creating a viable reddit alternative.

I’d never heard of kbin at all until I actually signed up to a Lemmy instance.

I’d heard Lemmy mentioned somewhere before (I’ve searched for reddit alternatives a few times in the past as I got increasingly annoyed by their pushiness towards the app), but only really took notice of it a few days before the blackout when I saw it mentioned many times on reddit.