Wow I didn’t think hexbear was that large. That’s unfortunate…
The fact that Lemmyworld is like 40% of the pie is NOT good. People are clearly not understanding or not caring thay the point of the fediverse is to prevent any one instance from having too much power. People need to leave lemmy world and join other smaller instances. If lemmy world were to shut down, imagine how many of the most popular communities would be gone.
The problem is most likely people that are new to the fediverse/lemmy just not understanding it and choosing a “default”, popular instance. I was going to pick it as a safe option when I first came here but it was under load and wasn’t accepting new users, where I then had to find another instance and settled on feddit.uk.
It would be good if lemmy instances could have the option of “load balancing” new users, so if the current instance has way more active users than it’s federated wtih then it disables registration but recommends other, smaller instances to the user.
We just need a way to make it easy to seamlessly transfer both users and communities to another instance then it really won’t matter if one gets disproportionately large because a shutdown won’t affect anything. Ideally the inner workings should be as invisible to the end user as possible.
They’re an explicitly leftist comm, a lot of people take offense to being called out on right-wing assertions, and the .world’ers whip up myths without having ever seen or federated with Hexbear themselves.
That’s all really - Take a glance at the site if you want to know what it’s about, rather than take people at their word on it.
They openly state that their primarily goals in federation is to be obnoxious trolls, and boy howdy do they put a lot of energy into it. They are first and foremost, just obnoxious. It’s like 20% teenagers going through their edgy anti establishment phase, and then the rest are right wing, Russian, and Chinese trolls playing soggy waffle with each other. They pretend to be super serious about LGBT issues but then simp for Hamas, Iran and Russia. And one of their tankie leaders just got caught calling trans issues “western pink washing.”
It’s just a mess. It’s probably a bit overblown, but the community is legitimately annoying if nothing else.
Lemmy.world has no lock in on their “power”. They have the most volunteer labor, money, and infrastructure. That’s makes them stable, so people aren’t worried about their data suddenly going offline (like kbin) and they don’t worry about the service being flaky.
The same can be said about gmail and it is the same kind of problem here. Yes lemmy.world is not a profit orient it giant, but it is still a problem when one actor has this power over a federated network. (the scale of the problem is of course a lot larger with gmail)
I agree in principle that .world containing most of the fediverse’s activity kinda isn’t great for the idea of the democratic nature of the fediverse. However, the point of the ‘verse is that anyone can spool up an instance if they dislike it, or start more communities on existing instances. If .world were to disappear it would suck, but that’s part of the problem with any instance in an informal community. Any of them can disappear.
While spreading out is good, this isn’t something like cryptocurrency where it’s specifically bad if you have over 50% share. Each instance is the source of truth for their users and communities hosted there. It’s not like a block chain where something with over half can suddenly define their own truth for everyone. So it’s not necessarily a massive cause for alarm.
When you enter “how to join Lemmy” in search engines one of the first results is this Reddit thread, which explicitly suggests people join Lemmyworld.
In fact, when I point people to Lemmy via Reddit, I use that post also because that suggestion actually makes it way more approachable. I think most people, myself included, are intimidated by multiple servers and feel like they’re “intruding” into private spaces. The size of Lemmyworld might help people feel like it’s more anonymous and a little easier to join as a result, especially since they are being asked to wait for “approval”, which is pretty unusual on the modern Net, let’s be honest.
There’s a bit of choice paralasys when joining Lemmy. Even if you know how the fediverse works you won’t have knowledge of the culture and relationships of different instances.
I joined Lemmy.world because it advertises itself as the vanilla flavour of the fediverse, so it makes it an easy pick for someone like me who didn’t quite understand how it all hangs together.
But I do agree with you, and I’m looking to migrate after some concerning things have come up about the lemmy.world owner.
Edit: confused the owner of lemmy.world and lemmy.ml.
The choice paralysis is real. I chose lemm.ee because it was easy to type into the address bar, and I’ve stuck around because the admin seems pretty level-headed.
Thanks for asking, made me go look again. I had mixed up Lemmy.world owner Ruud and the creator of Lemmy itself and admin of lemmy.ml. Ruud seems chill, lemmy.ml less so.
I started on a small instance that fortunately gave a heads up when they decided to shut down. When I moved to a second, small instance where I ported all my community subscriptions, it shut down with no warning. It’s a shame, because both instances were topically-focused and small enough to avoid defederation drama.
I love the idea of decentralized infrastructure, but now I’m on .world because I just don’t have the time or willpower to move every few months, and I definitely don’t have the wherewithal to run my own instance.
One amusing bit re: hexbear, it’s been around almost as long as lemmy.ml and lemmygrad.ml, but it seems was only added to the tracker last year, as it shows up as 12 months old, I have to imagine it’s including posts/comments from before that timeframe because bozhe moi:
Right because this corner of the internet is so important and well-visited we gotta spend our state funds on a propaganda network, planting the seeds years in advance of it being able to germinate and fill it to the brim with emojis. Do you even know what a good bot costs nowadays? Vladimir Putin would have our heads.
Oh come on now. Think a little. What is hexbear all about? LGBT and Communism. Now, guess which two things Putin heads the most? Do you really think that we have money to fund people LARPing as gay commies, on an isolated instance, in an obscure social network, in a country that’s already extremely short on cash because of war? Get your head out the arse.
Stuff like becoming “General Secretary” for life, concentration camps for Uighurs, hostility with Taiwan, India, and Indonesia, takeover of Hong Kong, and Document 9 of 2013?
You like how LGBT aren’t allowed to marry or adopt? You like that China are a corrupt capitalist oligarchy run by a militaristic dictatorship hand in hand with Billionaires because they at least claim to be communist?
The only place you can find tens or hundreds of people singing the praises of an actual living dictator is in a place they own.
Most instances block them so most communities on those instances won't see them either. Once you find certain communities on instances that don't block them you suddenly see half the comments being from hexbear, which likely quickly makes you block those communities fairly quickly.
Other comments hit on this but I’ll add a little more. There is a good bit of trolls/trolling, some extreme views, and authoritarian government praise. Things like that.
Lemm.ee (my instance) is still federated so I see hexbear post/ comments. It’s definitely a more problematic instance imo.
You only got replies from hexbear haters so let me balance it out a bit. Hexbear is by far the most LGBT+ friendly instance in the fediverse and has a supermajority of queer users. They’re aggressively anti-bigotry in all its forms and are extremely happy to educate and engage in discussions as long as you approach them in good faith.
Most people who go out of their way to shit talk them in the wild are just mad hexbear banned them for saying some racist or homophobic shit
It’s not “almost every instance,” it’s largely Lemmy.world. hexbear defederated from some other instances, but most major instances are, in fact, federated with Hexbear.
Hexbear was not federated with any instances at all for years until about a year ago in the first place.
It’s a leftist server. LW defederated from them months ago because they have some, well, interesting takes on things like the war in Ukraine. I can’t recall the exact cited reasons for defederation but I’m sure you could find the defederation post on lemmy world’s announcements page.
Most instance defederated from because they are tankies that talk a lot of bullshit. However, im not entirely sure if I would really call them leftists. More like communistic Authoritarians, yes, communism is something mound mostly in left communities, but not to sure if their takes on human rights for people with other opinions and stuff like that makes them really left.
.world never federated with Hexbear from what I remember. I’m pretty sure they were on the block list before Hexbear got federation completed. There was no single incident as far as I know.
Wrong. They federated with them then had a big discussion on if they should defederate (you can probably still find it in meta). It’s why I left - I prefer to make my own defederation decisions (and I like Hexbear, and Piracy too).
It's essentially where reddit's old Chapo Trap House community went after reddit banned them in 2020. It started federating with the rest of the fediverse some time last year, but there was a bit of a culture clash between it and some other larger instances and several of them defederated it
To be fair, that’s because liberalism is closer to fascism than any sort of leftism, and many of these instances have a strongly liberal user base because many were with Reddit longer than most leftists were.
I really don't think the specific date of reddit departure is what shaped the politics of either community, especially not when the one you're saying was less shaped by reddit was born out of a political subreddit
Hexbear's site culture is full of in jokes and big on dunking. That's always going to be abrasive to outsiders, even without the whole thing where all of their many emojis were enormous on other instances
Horseshoe theory is essentially Latte-Flavored horseshit
The horseshoe theory does not enjoy wide support within academic circles; peer-reviewed research by political scientists on the subject is scarce, and existing studies and comprehensive reviews have often contradicted its central premises, or found only limited support for the theory under certain conditions.[6][8]
My guess is that they just needed to have their own community for a lot of stuff because so many instances are defederated from them. Though I am not sure...
I guess it's also natural that subcultures that tend to be banned elsewhere are early adaptors of alternative platforms.
We're lucky we didn't exist when the Trump extremists on Reddit went looking for a new home, or they would probably have been one of the biggest fields in this figure. Hopefully when the right wing extremists arrive instance admins will have the good sense to defederate.
Nothing wrong with beehaw as far as I know, but a while ago they defederated lemmy.world because the instance is to big and not moderated enough, or something like that.
Yeah I can’t say I was bothered when LW defederated. I’ve gotten in way fewer stupid arguments since they did the same with Lemmygrad. IIRC LW didn’t even let hexbear federate in the first place.
I don’t like defederations. I prefer to see everything, every post and comment and then block users/instances on my own if it becomes too much.
Literally a second ago I blocked another tankie, from LW this time. Before I even managed to type this comment fully. But then I don’t shy from making comments that attract them if I disagree with something. So inbox always busy
Same here. I’ll curate my personal feed but I’ll occasionally scroll everything just to see what random new instance I’ll find, and to keep myself aware of what the current rhetoric is with the various groups.
Yes but this may be a side effect of turning off the points experiment. Instead of getting dopamine from points I only get replies. So it could be that I subconsciously make my comments in a way that is more likely to attract some kind of response.
My main goal for Lemmy was to break Reddit addiction and I feel gaining likes plays a big part in staying glued to the screen
Seems like a good strategy would be to not have every post and comment shown to you if your goal is to break your habit of spending too much time on your phone or PC.
I would much rather signup to an instance that handles that for me.
As long as the instance is clear about what they defederate from and their reasons, then I’m happy with that. And if I wasn’t, I could choose a different instance.
I’d already gone through blocking all of that stuff via my app before the defederation stuff happened, but if I were signing up to a new instance I’d appreciate it being blocked by default.
Our instance is federated with hexbear, lemmygrad etc. I want to be resonsible for what I see and block, I’m really not a fan of defederation unless it’s a last resort (i.e. CSAM or other illegal content).
I did end up blocking the lemmy.ml instance though, fuck that place. I haven’t even blocked hexbear or lemmygrad.
Our instance is federated with hexbear, lemmygrad etc. I want to be resonsible for what I see and block, I’m really not a fan of defederation unless it’s a last resort (i.e. CSAM or other illegal content).
Yes, that’s pretty much our take on it: we’ll defederate CSAM (and nonce-adjacent) instances asap, those with lax registration tend to become havens for spammers and trolls, so there is usually a wave of defederating, then someone reaches out to them, it gets sorted and we allow them back in. That tends to be the regular defederation and isn’t controversial. Defederating, for example, Hexbear over, for example, trolling would be a bigger deal and we’d try and speak to the other Admins about it before any permanent banning.
You’re not really using the fediverse until you’ve been told that you’ll get the bullet, too. Sometimes, it’s exhausting commenting something pretty uncontroversial and then seeing like eight notifications and realizing it was on Hexbear.
Can you truly say you’ve had the HB experience if you haven’t recieved emoji/sticker/gif spam from people who weren’t alive for 9/11, have never been outside their country, and refuse to listen to opposing views, but know with full certainty that all western countries are 100% full of genociders and colonial rapists who all deserve the glorious death the super benign, extremely peaceful and misunderstood countries of North Korea, China, and Russia who have never once been correctly accused of human rights violations…
And of course, if they point out that your country has dipped into those things in the past, well your entire worldview is shattered and their whataboutism has solved everything and proves you deserve the death they crave for you.
I am genuinely sad for HB. There are lgbt ppl there, generally dear to me. Seeing them enjoy such cesspit lured in by cultish atmosphere, supporting the very forces that can only destroy but not build anything. It is personal.
On the flipside there is the .World experience. Where Julian Assagne is a war criminal. And the destruction of Iraq, Libya and Afghanistan was good because it killed a lot of Muslims and liberated those savage hijab wearing women from being alive.
And the destruction of Iraq, Libya and Afghanistan was good because it killed a lot of Muslims and liberated those savage hijab wearing women from being alive.
Would you have link to such statements? Seems wild
Yeah, I’ve never once seen anything but criticism over the US’s involvement in the middle east.
The most I’ve seen is a couple people saying the equivalent of “well SOMEONE had to do something about X” And a bunch of others jumping on them to clarify that X either never existed, or was massively exaggerated and the US isn’t the World Police.
Genuinely would love to see someone link a good faith comment trying to argue the above, so I can tell them all about how they’re a fucknut
Julian Assange is a bootlicker and Kremlin stooge who sold us out to the American and Russian billionaires. The Mueller Report proved he was explicitly trying to get Treason Trump elected and working with Putin to push disinformation to that end.
I can see why folk don’t like hexbear as they come off as leftist 4chan, but you don’t need to make things up. They often talk about traveling. I agree with a lot of their content and disagree with some, I’ve been to 10 countries. In the plane to France, an African told me how their country is still enslaved to France. Personally I don’t see the value in the immediate destruction of the west, but with their leaderships ardent support for Nazi Germany, Apartheid, the Climate Crisis and assassination of climate activists, others, and now Zionism, they should lose influence through any means necessary.
has the largest weekly trans megathread in the entire fediverse, a supermajority of non-cishet users, aggressively bans racism, bigotry and transphobia on sight, has hard-coded mandatory pronoun tags
Didn’t mean it literally, only that it’s so shitposty that it can overshadow most serious conversations. It is a far better moderated and accepting community. It’s mainly their trans posts that made me better accept trans individuals. And I discourage writing them off like most should with 4chan.
I disagree with those comments, but they seem pretty mild to have been banned. I just don’t see how it’s productive to ban all liberals the moment they try to explain their views. All that does is push people away who could potentially have been a future ally.
if people steer clear of our buses and trains because they’re busy doubling as psych wards and homeless shelters.
is not tame at all it dehumanizes some of societies most vulnerable. Imagine someone who has been in a psych ward or a homeless person reads this, and keep in mind both can be found posting on hexbear.
We don’t live in a tame world, lots of people have deeply problematic viewpoints. When someone who expresses such viewpoints is otherwise well-intentioned it’s better to address them directly and potentially change some minds (or at least plant the seed) than to shun them and further entrench them into a problematic worldview.
Depends on the environment you want to foster. There are already lotsa places where these kinds of “debates” are had (lemmy.world for instance) but really no place where the people that are being debated about can relax and not have to be confronted with the dehumanization they already are confronted with in their daily lives.
For starters, all liberals have Reddit and Lemmy.world, which are large. Where do leftists have?
Secondly, this comment is indistinguishable from concern-trolling. I’d have to read through your post history or go back and forth with you to know if you were an honest actor or just a troll.
Thirdly, most of us know your views, and have rejected them. Why would we care to hear them? Ask the homeless people in any major city how important discussions of freedom are. So fuck your so-called “productivity.” If you were an ally you’d listen and be an ally.
For starters, all liberals have Reddit and Lemmy.world, which are large. Where do leftists have?
I agree that lemmy.world is a primarily liberal instance, but I haven’t seen the same level of censorship on lemmy.world as I have on hexbear, though I’m open to evidence to the contrary. You can create a space for a specific ideology without resorting to such an extreme level of censorship and lemmy.world is proof of that. Also see my home instance slrpnk.net, we’re a primarily anarchist instance and we haven’t had to resort to extreme censorship to achieve that.
Secondly, this comment is indistinguishable from concern-trolling. I’d have to read through your post history or go back and forth with you to know if you were an honest actor or just a troll.
By what method do you distinguish concern-trolling from legitimate concern? Concern-trolls generally want to shut down discussion, and the whole reason for my concern is that censorship shuts down discussion.
Thirdly, most of us know your views, and have rejected them.
They’re not my views, did you miss the part of my comment where I said I disagree with the comments that got them banned?
Blocking an instance is just equivalent to blocking all the communities on that instance. You’ll still see the blocked instance’s posts and comments in other instances and (maybe more importantly) the instance will still influence your feed via voting. So if hexbear collectively upvotes or downvotes some post, that will influence your feed. Defederation is the only way to prevent that kind of influence.
Downvotes are disabled on hexbear just fyi. One of the reason people leave a comment with stuff they disagree with. But upvoting yeah, very active userbase very actively upvoting means a lot of my feed on lemm.ee is from hexbear.
I mean, I don’t know enough about North Korea here but Lenin decriminalized homosexuality in like 1920. Stalin recriminalized it in 1932-33 but for a bit there the Soviet Union was the most LGBT friendly country in the world.
What’s going on with ppl that won’t even do simple google check before commenting something. I for example would be ashamed to peddle some bullshit that is one top search click to disprove or even common sense
Russia began to suck hardest when the US succeeded in turning it into a supercharged version of itself. Every bad bit about Russia you don’t like? It’s where the US is headed, thanks to its own imperialism. “Rainbow Capitalism” is as unsustainable as Rainbow Slavery or Rainbow Fascism.
Not really surprising. 10 out of the 10 most commented posts in the past year are on hexbear (the top 2 being the weekly trans mega threads). Granted, a lot of that is just the hyper-active posting of a few users. Regardless, if you want a trans community, there’s basically no active alternative to hexbear’s traaa here.
I’m subscribed to pretty much all the trans coms I know of and traa is 90% of the trans content that shows up. Another 5% are other hexbear trans subs. Traa has as many comments in half a month as mtf@blajah has had in its entire existance and as many in a week as trans@blahaj has made in total (the two largest non-hexbear trans subs afaik).
This reads like someone telling me that the nazi bar is the only place to go because the nazi bar has people there all the time and the other bars are mostly empty.
Cool. Being trans, not tolerating transphobia, and having emotes is comparable to being nazis?
Also, not suggesting people need to go there because its active. I could go to traa, egg, mtf, agender, enby, etc on reddit, but I don’t want to use reddit and a lot of those communities make hexbear look tame in terms of spamminess and immaturity.
Your data quality is questionable. You list only 2 communities for feddit.org. Lemmy Explorer has 148. I doubt that they’re all ‘suspicious’. And if they are, then that flag is itself suspicious.
There’s absolutely nothing wrong with a little centralization in your federation. It works well enough for email. The point is that you have the option, not that you have to use it.
You don’t have to trade one extreme for the other. In fact, I think this is the perfect example of that. Lemmy.ml is the developers’ instance, and by default would likely be the largest. Except… you know. Many, many people started there before going to other instances, especially the largest competitor.
The issue is that the kid that owns the ball sets the rules. LW could do something heinous, and the only choices would be to cope or lose half the Fediverse.
You mean like if they went all tankie? Or like AOL email? This has already happened several times before and it’s fine. Google could kill gmail in six months and we’d all move on.
I’ve run into issues where information I want access to just doesn’t exist anymore because of the Reddit fiasco. The people that did that were a small minority of Reddit, and Reddit as a whole was basically unaffected by the protest after it was quashed.
Imagine the type of chaos it would cause if it came out that the LW admins were getting a corporate kickback to destabilize the Fediverse, or that they were involved in some other equally shady enterprise. It would probably be the end of the Fediverse, either through the created schisms or the lack of will to stop the corporate meddling. It would at least cause massive instability and make us look bad to users who would otherwise think of joining. A lot of information would probably be lost as people tried to push back. I’m sure a lot of people just wouldn’t have the willpower to move their communities elsewhere and there would be a significant number of people supporting the admins’ actions through apathetic inaction.
Imagine the type of chaos it would cause if it came out that the LW admins were getting a corporate kickback to destabilize the Fediverse, or that they were involved in some other equally shady enterprise. It would probably be the end of the Fediverse, either through the created schisms or the lack of will to stop the corporate meddling
I agree that LW centralization isn’t good, but I’m not sure such event would be the end of the Fediverse, or Lemmy.
People would just massively move to other instances. LW communities usually have a non-LW non-lemm.ml alternative (such as !movies for !movies ), so that should be doable. A bit painful, but manageable.
Imagine my surprise to see you in here talking about LW centralization isn’t good. You came onto a support question (link) for a community I had started with one of my concerns being the LW centralization and you quickly told me to abandon my community. Extremely weird considering you run a generic fantasy community which already exists in many places so felt a little kettle/pot.
I’m actually happy to talk about LW centralization at large. It’s a topic I like to discuss on !fedigrow, feel free to join us there.
To come back to your questions, there are different types of communities depending on how popular the topic is
very popular topics (tech, news, memes, politics) exist on Lemmy on a lot of different instances. !technology, !technology, !technology, etc. They are all active, no need to worry about those.
moderately popular topics: in this case, usually there is a large LW community, and then a smaller non-LW community. A mentioned “movies” above as an example, there is a whole list at the end of this post.
low activity topics: here, there is only one community, and it’s not that active. It is on LW, but the community is already so small that getting it active is a higher priority than bringing people to another instance. Examples: !football, !parenting, !television, !avatar
I feel like StarGate probably belongs in the third group, which is why I suggested you to consolidate with the existing LW communities.
Also, lemmy.ml have faced some powertripping complaints:
Extremely weird considering you run a generic fantasy community which already exists in many places so felt a little kettle/pot.
Interesting, I had actually forgotten about that community, which is why the last post there is 2 months ago. I’ll probably close it in the coming weeks and redirect elsewhere, after asking the community feedback.
On the other hand, I actively post to all of the following communities, to try to keep them off LW
The thing is that the value is in the communities and not in the old content. So most likely the mods would just post we move to a new instance and a lot of users would follow. We just saw that on the German speakin lemmy instance feddit.de, which was abandoned and now most of the users and communities moved to feddit.org, which is already one of the larger ones.
What lemmy really needs is the ability to easily move accounts and communities. Mastodon has that for users already.
The problem with this is trust. If you could seamlessly migrate like this, there’s nothing to stop someone faking a long post/comment on their own instance, making them look very legitimate and then migrating that account to a trusted/legitimate instance.
Duplicate instances are a problem imho. You can see the network effect synergy working by how many communities flock to the biggest instance lemmy.world.
There also need to be tools to merge two communities on separate instances, or move them.
Two of my niche instances tried to leave reddit, but then there were two versions, one on .ml and one on .world. Confusing. Maybe there need to be reviews for communities or instances.
There also need to be tools to merge two communities on separate instances, or move them.
The issue is not the tools, more the people. I contacted mods of !android and !askandroid a while ago to see if they wanted to merge, both sides wanted to stay on their own communities.
There are plenty of other examples, usually a large LW community, but with a more active non-LW alternative. LW wants to keep their community open, and the non-LW doesn’t have much power besides showing they are more active.
I wouldn’t mind so much if there were a way to see duplicate posts across instances. I guess it’d be hard to implement but as it stands unless it’s specifically a crosspost you can’t find other discussions of the same media
Oh yeah absolutely, lemmy definitely needs better cross posting. Currently crossposts are kinda yanky with quote blocks. I’d also love to see reposts that are detected automatically.
Seems like lemmyverse doesnt have the instance listed at all for some reason, assuming a crawling issue. I reported it on their repository. Would be new since I remember it showing the instance before
You can check in programming.dev/communities that programmer humor has way more active users than most communities here
It sometimes does that when the crawler hasn’t had time to fetch a large proportion of the instances in the last 4 hours. the data should be pretty recent still. I’ll check on it now :)
Manually counted communities in the top 100 per instance and threw it into another pie chart (for active users / month)
This also seems to be different than the results gotten from lemmyverse as the lemmyverse data hasnt been updated in 11 days according to that site
A bunch of instances gained or lost some coms in the top 100 from variance of things happening in the last week
(the eight instances that it decided to not give labels to that have 1 community are feddit.uk, lemmy.zip, beehaw.org, lemdro.id, ttrpg.network, lemmy.wtf, lemmy.blahaj.zone, mander.xyz)
edit: updated graph to be more accurate users/month counts
I looked at the community list in programming.dev (from programming.dev/communities) sorted by active users per month and noted down the instances for the top 100 communities
its using google sheets
going to recount with lemm.ees community list in a sec since theyre federated with hexbear
I used recharts
Though one rendered it with google charts and that did look a lot nicer, but if one fine tunes it, then it will probably look equally good
If you’re willing to post your code somewhere or send it to me somehow, I might have to find some time to integrate it on lemmyverse - also welcome to submit a PR if you have the inclination github.com/tgxn/lemmy-explorer
anyone have any guesses as to why lemmy.world is so big? Scale/size advantage? Reliability advantage? Name recognition? What do we think is the culprit here.
And whilst i’m here, anybody want to explain the source of lemmy.ml to me? I only know it as the instance where mad people yell at me from lol.
perhaps a more “ambiguous” federation system would be better. having community instances is nice and all, but having one literally just be lemmy.world seems a little bit antithetical to me.
About lemmy.world - when running from reddit, it was literally first on the list of advised ones everywhere. Also, biggest, so it had most communities. I am actually pretty much only aware of .world, .dbzer0 and sh.itjust.works. From the normal ones anyway.
lemmy.ml is basically an instance made by creators of lemmy from what I know.
Lemmy.world has kept open signups open during every large Reddit exodus while many others didn’t. It’s also decently reliable, has decent moderation and is well known. The reason why people didn’t move after is probably because instance migration on Lemmy isn’t possible* so they just stick with what they use.
*Yes I don’t consider exporting/importing followed communities a migration
Defederating from Hexbear probably didn’t hurt. I remember when the users were literally flooding .world my inbox circlejerking about being the biggest and best instance and that any instance that defederated from them was full of transphobic Nazis.
Edit: I have a shit memory. I don’t remember what instance it was, but the circlejerking and the defederation slander definitely happened.
Are you from another dimension as everyone else where this happened? Because they never federated in the dimension I live in. Very interesting you’re able to cross this gap, does the name Nelson Mandella mean anything to you?
Yeah, it must have been on a different instance. I have a terrible memory for places, which probably bleeds over. I distinctly remember the circlejerking and getting lots of messages about how people who don’t like Hexbear are transphobic, though.
It may have been after someone proposed defederating from them, but I’m pretty sure it didn’t happen because I’ve seen users around recently. I have the instance filtered, but I still need to block the users, same with ML.
They can be oriented to some type of content: For example, the many feddit.something are targetting people by countries or langages (.it, .uk, etc.). slrpnk.net is solarpunk oriented, mander.xyz science oriented. Litterature.cafe is books, reading and writing oriented.
And they can offer different moderation policies: People on lemmynsfw.com probably want to see NSFW content. lemmy.world has a policy against it. lemmy.dbzer0.com allow for open discussion about piracy that many instances forbid and so on.
It you don’t see the difference in instances, it is probably that you are about fine on your local instance. But if one day, you hear about a community you can’t access, maybe that is because it is blocked by lemmy.word and you could access it from another instance
If the dbzer0 instance allows piracy talk but I’m signed up to an instance that doesn’t allow it, can I talk in their community or do I risk being banned from mine?
In other words, are my comments stored on their instance or on mine?
You can talk on their instance. If the moderator of your instance dis not wanted you to interact with this other instance they would have block it.
are my comments stored on their instance or on mine?
That I’m not sure. But I think there is a copy of the content you accessed on your instance. Maybe someone administrating an instance could answer you better than I did.
Lemmy stores your posts and replies on both your host server and on the server of the community.
One interesting behavior to note here that is different from reddit is that while comments on reddit belong to the profile of the person commenting and is then imported to view in the subreddit (this is why you can edit comments after being banned, and why there visible in your profile even if removed from a subreddit), on lemmy the target community is instead authoritative and your host server will by default respect a deletion by community mods on different servers by also removing that comment from your profile.
Your comments are stored on both. The “canonical” version would be on your home instance but every instance that is federated with your instance would get a copy of your comments. I think it’s even possible to have your content removed from one instance but not another. One of my posts shows as removed in the mod log but isn’t actually removed.
Alright. I wanted to verify something to double check. Here is the flow of how my comment gets to your instance and is visible by you. It helps when you realize that all communications you do are with your instance. I might get inbox/outbox terminology reversed or wrong.
Because lemmy.world is federated with programming.dev, they scoop up my comment from programming.dev’s outbox
Because jlau.lu is federated with lemmy.world, they get my comment from lemmy.world.
When you view !fediverse through jlau.lu/c/[email protected] you will see my comment from your server’s copy of it.
I say the canonical copy is on my home instance because imagine a scenario where lemmy.world is NOT federated with programming.dev but for whatever reason programming.dev didn’t defederate back. I could still see and comment on !fediverse. Other users of programming.dev could see my comments and reply, but nobody else.
This is how I understand federation to work but it might be incorrect. It’s a complicated topic. It might be that your instance directly gets the comment from mine.
I need to take time to read you comment quieltly. Honestly, I start to be confortable about how federation work from a user perspective but I have no technical knowledge about it.
You can change that as a server admin, so comments would remain visible to other users on your instance.
I think your instance is authoritative for content of comments, but the community hosting instance is authoritative for which comments are approved (other instances respect such removals by default)
That’s a good way of putting it. While my instance holds my canonical comments and the communiy’s instance holds the canonical list of comments on a post, if the community’s instance isn’t federated with my instance (or the pair temporarily cannot communicate) then my comments won’t show in the list.
Only insofar as some instances block communication from some other instances. Not mine though, that’s actually one of the reasons I picked it. That and it being by an org that’s older than the web and runs a public unix server and a bunch of retrocomputing type services as well as fediverse stuff. They started out as a dialup anime BBS.
Yes but not so much. The fediverse is a big place and everyone can open a community in the same topic in a instance that is not block. Look how many zero waste there is !zerowaste!zerowaste!zerowaste!zerowaste!zero_dechet. And they may be more on instances I don’t know.
For what I have witness instances blocked each other over divergence on political activism. If you don’t plan to go discuss with people who really want to convince you to become communiste, you should be fine.
Go on [your.instance]/instances for the list of block instances.
an instance can be thought of like a reigonal server for a game, but for a community interest instead. dbzer0 is more on the fringes partaking more actively in piracy and AI shit, as well as other shit like anarchy and personal liberty/freedoms at a more broad scale.
Sometimes they’re regionally specific, like the midwest instance, other times they’re global like the .world instance.
you do have instance specific communities, and users obviously, but it’s also open to the broader “fediverse” as well. The only technicality is that i’m tied to dbzer0 since that’s where my acc sits, though i can still poke around outside of it.
When I first got on Lemmy I signed up for a small instance my friend was on. Mostly ended up lurking. Before ditching that account, because I forgot the password, and was looking to go to a different instance anyway, I looked up what instances had the most federations. world had a lot, and no hexbear. It also has a old style interface, and blocks NSFW content, so I can more safely browse in public/at work. So I switched to it with my main and then separately logged into places with open NSFW content.
yeah, personally i’m a user of dbzer0 because i prefer the more back alley stuff (it also bans porn so that shit doesnt show up in my feed)
It’s up most of the time, there are a few instances where it’s slow or doesn’t want to load, but that’s usually resolved quickly enough, just internet instability i think, reddit has the same issues for me.
I see all the .world shit anyway, so it makes little difference to me at the end of the day lol.
In my case, I went to the biggest one after leaving beehaw.
I left beehaw because it was clear there was a double standard for one admin between minorities and the rest of us where an admin overlooked someone from a minority acting like a total ass and starting a fight… and blamed me simply because my opinion half agreed with an article that was posted.
Which was such a pity because they other admin there is awesome (and I loved the idea of the instance), but I’m worried it will become a echo chamber eventually unfortunately where you simply can’t discuss things, but only agree with people
yeah this is definitely a big concern with smaller instances, there are a couple of tricks to this general problem from what i’ve thought/seen of over time.
The obvious one is a democratic vote, literally just ask people in the instance, the second obvious one is to vet people in that instance specifically and personally. And if they cause problems just yeet em. You’re the dictator after all. The most common option is to have a decentralized moderation team made up from the general community, which is extremely common and generally works, though suffers from the opposite problem, ironically.
I think if i had to moderate a lemmy instance i’d probably do a mix of heavier vetting (although most of it would likely be after they initially joined, a vibe check i suppose. As well as just being a literal direct dictator, depending on the size i might have “chaos control” mods, just to keep goofy shit from happening while i’m away, or to provide some support, who knows. And naturally, i’d focus on community votes, i’d be curious what the community instance itself had to say.
yeah that makes sense, i never went there because i didn’t want to move to a community specific instance only to join a globally federated instance anyway lol.
I remember I picked Lemmy.world to create an account only because I had no idea what I was doing and it seemed like the only one which had merit at the time (I know how things work better now.) Now that I know how decentralization works I’ll probably open a new account on another server when I get time.
I was a reddit Sync user and was super bummed when (large scale) API access was shut off, so I jumped on the chance to use Sync for Lemmy. It defaulted to world for signups, presumably for ease of use for migrating reddit users. Knowing that Sync already had a loyal audience that was willing to put in a little effort to migrate, it seems the dev opted to make everything as similar to the reddit UX as possible, including registration.
Now that I’m more familiar with the fediverse, I’ve been considering migrating to a more specialized instance that matches my interests. Truthfully, though, it seems unlikely that much of anything would change if I did since I’m going to keep using the same app, so I’ve been slow to move.
To compare this with my experience with Mastodon, I was absolutely overwhelmed by the idea of instances and really had no idea which to join, nor did I have a familiar app to work with. I figured it out eventually, but a lot of the artists I follow didn’t or didn’t have time to, so overall I haven’t spent much time on it. I’ve spent way too much time on Lemmy so far.
yeah that makes sense, i think the problem with migrating normie users is that there isn’t quote the comprehensive explanation of things needed. A more thorough and complete overview would be required i think.
everyone goes to the most popular one because they think that’s the one with all the things on it that’s how the internet works that’s what everyone’s doing
I’m curious what this looks like for Mastodon. Of the top X accounts listed by followers, what proportion are on instances run by the Mastodon organisation?
Oh nice! I also saw the other one showing almost half of the followers of those accounts are on mastodon.social.
I guess Lemmy finds it a little harder to get communities set up away from the big instances because to get a community off the ground you need eyeballs, and the biggest instances have the most eyeballs in the All feed.
Everyone goes to Lemmy.world because unlike most instances it has (effectively) open registration and some popular Lemmy apps use it in their signup flow so new users don’t have to understand the intricacies of the fediverse they can just hop straight in.
I think it would definitely be nice to spread users (and communities) across more instances. Doubly so since I’m on an instance that is struggling with the volume of content from Lemmy.world because of what is effectively a limit of how much you can get from one instance at a time.
But if we want people on Lemmy who don’t know what Linux is, then we need to avoid that massive barrier of asking users to pick an instance. And the second massive barrier of registration applications.
A good compromise I think would be to have multiple trusted servers with open registrations that the app randomly defaults them to when they go to sign up for an account.
Doesn’t that say they default new users to a server owned by them? That’s the same kind of thing as defaulting to Lemmy.world for Lemmy apps.
What I mean is a larger list of trusted instances. Including ones outside the control of one organisation, though I get that this is risky for Mastodon because they don’t want to default people to somewhere that’s going to shut down or have some drama and ruin a hard earned brand.
We probably have more leeway to do it in Lemmy apps since (with the exception of Jerboa) they aren’t developed by “Lemmy”, and Lemmy.world is also not run by “Lemmy”. But for this same reason, " Lemmy" has no control over what these apps default to.
You have the "easy" buttons for users that just want to sign in and don't think about it and then you have the "choose your own" button underneath it. I still am not a fan of this design, but I really care for decentralization and they want to attract "normal" people as well
But if we want people on Lemmy who don’t know what Linux is, then we need to avoid that massive barrier of asking users to pick an instance. And the second massive barrier of registration applications.
How so? Those things do not have anything to do with each other. The concept of Lemmy instances can literally be explained in less than a minute.
When a user (say, my mother) gets to a page that says pick a server, she would immediately close the page and go do something else. How do you even begin to choose a server? What if you get it wrong? What should you consider when picking a server?
Its a simple concept that can be explained in a minute. But if you don’t have someone sitting next to you that understands it and can explain it, that user is gone.
Registration applications are an unrelated barrier but a barrier none the less. You don’t have to apply to Facebook and wait to be approved. People expect to just be able to sign up and immediately go.
For anyone familiar with the fediverse both of these things seem like non-issues. But for your average Facebook user. Hell, even your average reddit user, they will take one look at either a page telling them to pick a server or a page telling them they have to apply and wait, and unless they are familiar with the Fediverse already then they will back away slowly (or quickly).
When my instance turned on registration applications, there was a 10x drop in the number of registrations, and I’ve heard similar numbers from others.
When my instance turned on registration applications, there was a 10x drop in the number of registrations, and I've heard similar numbers from others.
The question is how much of these registrations are spam accounts. I have open registrations on my mastodon instance and ~70% are spam accounts that I delete within the first day...
Oh definitely some. At the time we were still in the tail of the reddit surge, we were getting plenty of valid registrations and spam was only starting to take off (which was the reason for closing registrations).
But to my point, I think back to my first Lemmy experience and remember trying to work out which server I should join even though I already had a basic idea about the Fediverse from Mastodon. And I just chose the biggest in the end bpecause how do you choose? Even today I would be wary about joining any server that didn’t have lots of people.
And later I remember hearing about Beehaw then finding a registration application page and not creating an account.
These happened well before the reddit exodus, and I never really got into Lemmy until that happened and I joined Beehaw.
It’s solidly managed, and the second largest instance, so All feed is going to be as populated as the LW one. Also, neutral name (sorry sh.itjust.works)
Yes they are a good candidate I think. Curious about their sign ups though. Lemmy.world asks people to write “I agree to the TOS” in the answer box. If you do, a bot automatically approves you, if you don’t, a bot automatically declines you. There’s no waiting time.
Lemm.ee states In the “Answer” box below, please state that you agree to follow the lemm.ee instance rules (found in the sidebar of our front page), which has no specific phrase you need to answer, so I’m guessing they manually approve them?
I honestly think registration applications are a huge barrier to anyone not already on the fediverse.
Just to be clear, I think registration applications are necessary for anyone without a team of admins across the world.
I’m not saying these instances requiring applications are doing a bad thing. Just that it’s a barrier to entry and given the non-commercial decentralised nature of Lemmy we will never be able to hire thousands of staff to handle reports like Facebook does.
It’s a new problem requiring a new solution, and while I think Mastodon hasn’t solved it yet, I think they are ahead of Lemmy.
Doubly so since I’m on an instance that is struggling with the volume of content from Lemmy.world because of what is effectively a limit of how much you can get from one instance at a time.
Are you okay lately? I had a look the other day, seems almost fixed:
We are fine, but it’s not fixed. I have a second VPS running in Finland, using this queue batcher. The Lemmy.world team kindly set up their server to point to this VPS instead of the actual Lemmy.nz server, then the VPS collects all the events and sends them to the Lemmy.nz server in batches of 100.
It keeps us up to date, but it’s cheating 😆
Last I heard Aussie.zone doesn’t have this setup, but they do have a prefetcher (or rather, Nothing4You, who made the queue batcher, is running a prefetcher for them). This basically takes the new comments and posts from Lemmy.world, and sends a request to Aussie.zone to fetch that post. Because this happens outside the normal federation queue it can be done in parallel. It means when Aussie.zone receives the federated activity from Lemmy.world, it already has it, so it can reply quicker and process more events per second. Lemmy clears out activities older than a week in a weekly scheduled job, which is why you will see Aussie.zone’s backlog drop a bit once a week. They won’t get that content from Lemmy.world, it’s just lost. Because of the prefetcher, it’s likely just up/down votes (which can’t be prefetched).
Everyone goes to Lemmy.world because unlike most instances it has (effectively) open registration
The registration page does not look different really to the lemmy.nz one, same for lemm.ee, sopuli.xyz, sh.itjust.works has even one less tiny hurdle to jump to register. Didn’t bother to check others. Or i am missing something here?
I explained in another comment to someone else, but to recap Lemmy.world has lemmy’s registration applications feature turned on, but behind the scenes they run a bot to approve everyone who types the requested thing in the box. You sign up, type the thing in the box, and you get immediate access.
Compare this sign up process to the instance that the Lemmy devs run on Lemmy.ml.
Now to be clear, I’m not saying it’s unjustified. Trolls and spammers are a problem on Lemmy and we need more tools to help. Most instances require registration applications and I think that’s necessary for anyone without a team of admins across the world.
But that doesn’t change that it’s a big barrier to entry. Facebook has thousands of people able to respond to reports in a short period of time. Decentralised non-commercial Lemmy instances can never meet this, so we have a problem that needs a solution.
As a user, I really rally don’t want to start “instanse hoping” for lemmy. I just want to sign in and that’s it. Fediverse decentralized nature is also it’s drawback
In a world of mobiles being more ubiquitous than monitors, consider inverting your rows and columns next time. Scrolling down is more expected than scrolling sideways.
It’s worth mentioning that when I first made this comment the tables were wider than they were tall. Essentially the axes were flipped. The columns were literally one character wide to fit everything on the screen lol. If the post looked like it did not when I made the comment then I wouldn’t have said it.
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