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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Idk if you can transfer likes comments and posts, but you can go to your old account from a new one and star everything with the new account pretty easily. So that at least can transfer.
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
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