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
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.
If i’m understanding the last graph right, it’s showing the total number of active monthly users per instance’s top communities, filtered by the overall top 100 communities?
So if an instance has activity spread out over many niche communities, that activity isn’t represented on this graph?
I would think having a diversity of smaller communities is more in-line with the spirit of the fediverse, I’m not sure of the value in slicing the data in this way.
It uses the lemmy API, so it is plattform specific. AP has no metric for active users in the magazine yet, only instance wide. So for mbin only total subscriber count would be a metric
No, it’s just a big community by itself already. So while some big instances have it blocked, they have enough users to just have activity from their own instance.
It isn’t big though. They just get kicked out of everywhere else they go for being disruptive assholes, so for every community there’s a hexbear duplicate
Depends, the /c/[email protected] is politically charged as expect at any game community, what I found more interesting is the hatred for gamers(this one is deserved).
Hexbear (if you disagree with their politics) is basically like a white american from the deep south. They’re perfectly reasonable to talk to as long as it isn’t politics
Games is the largest games com by far in terms of posts and comments (150k comments and 15k post vs 71k comments and 3k posts on lemmy world…
News has most posts than any other news and about as many comments as lemmyworld.
Politics has the most posts of any politics coms, but far less comments than lemmyworld’s.
History basically has no competitors (150k comments vs 7k for the next largest)
Movies also has no competitors (75k comments vs 9k for the next largest).
Videos has 56k comments vs lemmyworld’s 13k
Music has 45k comments vs lemmyworld’s 6k
Urbanism has 44k comments vs fuckcar’s 19k
Granted, given Hexbear has been around for 4 years, the number of comments/posts is largely a side effect of age. But it also means calling them duplicates is probably misleading. OTOH, the main trans community there has been very active recently, dwarfing all other trans communities combined.
When you say “It isn’t big”, you’re comparing it to reddit? That would basically dwarf all Lemmy instances combined lmao.
This post was comparing Lemmy instances with other Lemmy instances. Hexbear was its own website for a while, and only decided to start trying federation like a few months after the whole reddit thing. They’re fine on their own even, so I don’t know why people keep acting as if they necessarily want to be federated.
If you read the rest of that sentence, you’ll (maybe) figure out that there isn’t any comparative statements there- just pointing out that hexbear mostly originated from users banned from Reddit, for being toxic and disruptive.
If it wasn’t a comparative argument, then what’s wrong with my original statement?
Edit: I think I understand what you’re coming from, but it still doesn’t make sense? They were self contained, and they didn’t just make those communities because they were defederated? It’s because there was demand. If some random instance with one user makes like 100s of communities, will it count in the graph?
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.
You mean the spread of the communities you are subscribed to? If so: probably yes, but not an easy one as you have to have access to the data (or more easily: the database)
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