I don’t think those are good comparisons. The point he is trying to make is that when a user joins Lemmy and sees a two gaming subs, one on Lemmy.world and the other on a meta instance with more subscribers, that user will join the meta sub.
I do not want to see only corporations holding the keys to the majority of communities and if they are allowed in that will be their goal. Meta doesn’t give a shit if the 3dprinting sub has quality content, only that it is profitable for them. Corporations will choose profit over the users every time.
People will say “well if it gets bad or they start becoming bad actors then we can drop them” but that will just set us back to where we are right now. I would rather see us grow slow without corporations than fast with them.
A lot of people dislike it for the privacy nightmare that it is and feel the threat of an EEE attack. This will also probably not be the last time that a big corporation will insert itself in the Fediverse....
Competition drives innovation. If something from a walled garden fediverse comes to the broader world as a result, awesome. I mean, if we could federate with Reddit for example, and I could access their subs content but not be subjected to their 1st party app and ads and karma and that’s the stuff on top of their instance, I don’t care what they do on their server.
If anything it may introduce people as a gateway into the fediverse to begin with so when something happens on a corporate instance that pisses them off, they might feel compelled to look into the broader world around them. Not all, but some.
I guess the only big concern most people have here is the Microsoft EEE.
I used to browse Reddit 90+% of the time from my phone through the RiF app, so after June 30th, here is what I did and what I recommend as a starter pack for others in the same situation:...
Essentially, lemmy.world is an email provider right? Like Gmail.
And communities [or subs!] are forums. While these forum posts are made by people who are on the lemmy.world instance, every other provider [instance] can see them, provided the instance owner has not decided to block other providers [defederated].
As long as you are browsing ALL instead of Local [local only shows subs on your own instance], it’s effectively reddit.
It may be worthwhile to make an account on an instance which features your country for Lemmy performance purposes, plus the local communities [subs, remember] may be very relevant for you, albeit probably very small in terms of users.
Signing up for lemmy.world is like signing up for shit, monopolised, slow internet in America? It has lots of customers, but that new upstart fibre company [small, fast instance] will let you see the same pages as shitty, slow Comcast.
(I’m not knocking Lemmy.world, just using it for this analogy)
That’s what I make of the fed so far, pretty cool.
This already is a thing, see StarTrek.website, Lemmy.film and LemmyNSFW.com for just a few examples.
The admin paranoia is tough because it goes both ways. Yes, big instances mean huge losses if they get abandoned, defederated or the admin loses his mind. At the same time, smaller instances are often run by regular people who can’t or aren’t interested in running an instance long term, or don’t have the ability to have 99%+ uptime.
At the moment momentum is important to reach critical mass of users and it’s just not feasible to tell most Reddit refugees “Okay so go to look up the handful of instances closest to your geographical location. Research their uptime, the reliability of their admins, their funding, their rules and whether they’re defederated from any major instances. Just pick the one that best suits your needs! Oh, also remember to use !community (don’t forget the exclamation point!) when searching for communities because many small instances haven’t connected yet to everyone. This also means these subs will appear empty at first because old content doesn’t get propagated but don’t worry about it. Oh and also sorting topics by Hot is bugged on small instances currently.”
Found this post super informative as it relates to Mastodon, and thought Lemmy might also benefit from this perspective. I’m not sure I share his optimism, but his points seem sound to dampen some of the alarm bells over Meta joining the Fediverse.
I don’t know about everyone else here, but my social media use involves me actively trying to avoid The Algorithm™. I subscribe specifically to what I want to see, and actively avoid everything else. You can’t do this in the Threads app. So this is why I’ll be using Trunks or Megalodon over the Threads client.
Every social media platform, UseNet, BBS, and forum – and the planet Earth itself – has had it’s clique of garbage idiots, off in a corner, doing garbage idiot things. They’re inevitable. They’re even here on the Fediverse – in our own precious instances – already. If you don’t engage them – don’t follow that person you hate the most, or sub to the community that stands for everything you hate – things are actually pretty nice. All of this defederation talk feels extremely short-sighted, and is just going to torpedo the Mastodon platform we’ve started to come to enjoy.
If anything, the public declarations of political & social allegiances via choice of instance could just torpedo it all, and attract the trolling idiots like flies. But, we’ve already opened up that can of worms.
Lemmy is awesome - I’m really enjoying it. Like the early days of Digg, even Fark, etc. Quality stuff happening!
Performance has improved, but many niche communities need more growth and engagement.
Duplicate communities across Lemmy instances are a bit of a nightmare in some ways - although by design, and also have advantages.
r/all on Reddit looks pretty different now, unless that’s just my perception. A lot of subs I’d never seen, more low quality stuff with less engagement.
Generally I like it. It has a lot going for it. So for some constructive (uninformed probably, I only signed up today, but I have been lurking for about a month) criticism:
I don’t really like how there can be 10 “Official Linux” subs, because 10 self-hosted servers can create it locally. But Okay, I can deal with it, searching for subs I can see where everyone has mostly subscribed to for a particular topic.
Which leads me to, Although its distributed, it should be distributed with common “global subs” which sit on all instances of self-hosted. This would allow me to see that “/g/Official Linux” is the main one (others might exist and that is fine but they are local self-hosted and accessible globally but might be more niche). This would eliminate some small popup Lemmy’s self-hosted since they would need a reasonable amount of storage. But I’m not sure this is good or bad, if you want to self-host and not participate in sharing/storing that data, then fine but your local subs are not replicated to the distributed network. I don’t know in my own mind if this is all good or bad, but something like this should be explored.
Currently, it appears to me in my limited usage, some sub on some self-hosted (lemmy.cheapdomain.for.fun) could blow up and that self-hoster cannot afford to maintain it, and shuts down. Boom, sub gone? (see previous, note I have not explored self-hosting a Lemmy server yet).
Server blocking/banning: This one concerns me, since its hardest to manage and deal with. Firstly, IMO you are going to get bad actors setting up bad servers with ‘nazi love’ subs or worse, and they should be filtered from the main distributed service. However currently this is in a terrible state of affairs and needs to be addressed, since free speech is what its about. People may disagree with things and even reddit had dubious subs. But you could choose to ignore it and not subscribe. There needs to be a way to inform users of a selfhosted site, and *why" the decision to block it was. So not just a federated list of “blocked” but with clear reasoning as to why it was blocked by lemmy.world or lemmy.me . Users could then at least identify a site that is blocked and if the reasoning for the block is against their belief they can at least go and check it out for themselves.
While being distributed, perhaps there can still be a self managed tagging system for subs and guidelines for how to tag your local sub, for global acceptance. You dont have to tag as the system says, but not doing so may prevent you from being shared across the federated net.
Everything else is great. Most of the reddit communities I had anything to do with exist here, albeit smaller. The Jerboa app is great (and another that I tried which I forget the name of off the top of my head).
I even like that the fanboys of Apple, Raspberry Pi, Docker etc are here to downvote the crap out of anything remotely negatively said, against their favourite thing… (That one might be a bit facetious, but that is what freedom of expression is).
signatures were very dividing, a community usually had them or they didn’t and there were sometimes huge complain threads about them so they kind of just fell out of favor. You can still find places that use them.
badges reddit adopted and put into the profile page similar to steam which was not a bad idea since people with a lot of badges created new UX issues.
then you have status flairs and tags, these I really wish had come back, some subs enabled user flair which in some cases replicated the old forum style through CSS mods. Some of the styles you might have might be that your name glowed or had a small animation among other things. I always really liked these though I suspect at scale they have exploitation issues.
I think some of these features could make a come back on smaller instances. Not sure we should go entirely back to the way it was done in the 00s though.
When I sub to a community, I don’t see all the posts if I’m logged in to my instance. If I go directly to url of the community I can see all the posts....
Oh, so it’s a matter of my logged in instance needing to pull down the posts? As the first on the instance to sub to that community? I get it now. I’ll wait and see if it changes. Thanks
How is a fediverse user supposed to find communities? I can’t find a way to search across the fediverse, which pretty much kills the concept IMO. I was browsing All via Lemmy.world - Mlem - iOS and my feed is half anime porn, with some pictures depicting underage and others not blurred as NSFW....
I don’t like to browse All timeline. You can search community using tools like browse feddit, Lemmyverse or others to search community. Then you can aggresively subscribe any community you fancy. After that you can never open All timeline.
There are no algorithm to give you a good community to subscribe on All timeline. It is just amalgation of all subs your instance-mate subscribe to. And given you are in .world, all kinds of people exist here, hence All timeline filled with weird things.
I don’t know how I didn’t think of this be for, but the Lemmy bean posting could be a psyop that reddit is trying to get people to return to them after switching to Lemmy
Then you lucked out on good subs over there, and the reverse for here. It's definitely new, and definitely a different experience. Lemmy/Kbin is not for everyone - for instance in the very recent past at least it has leaned more towards technically-minded people so many of those needs are covered, and also early adopter mindsets who are comfortable to watch things grow & evolve rather than looking for an already-established setup, but depending on where YOUR particular communities of choice are, that's where you'll need to be.
I would say to BE part of the change that you want to see in the world, but yeah, if it's just you and a moderator here then that's not much of a "community". Feel free to do whatever is best for you!
Also remember that you can curate your experience here - like if you did not like the shitpost community, then you have to first visit it by clicking its name, and then click the "no" circle with line through it, and from then on you won't see posts from it on the main/all page. I've been doing that for all the foreign-language magazines, but people can do it for whatever - nsfw, memes, tech, shitposts, showethoughts, anything.
Start following the main boards on your instance. Make the community yourself and start a topic about that subject on a general/main board and add a link to your community. The niche subs on Reddit didn’t come out of nowhere either.
I don’t see how Google killed XMPP. They removed it from their own application which is the exact same effect as not speaking an open protocol in the first place. Nobody forced other XMPP-based applications to change. You know what made me stop using XMPP and not keep my Jabber instance when I moved to a new server? Clunky applications and the fact that everyone I had in my contact list was also on another more comfortable platform (at first ICQ and MSN, later Discord) and prefered to contact me there.
If we federate with Threads, they may use their power to push changes to ActivityPub but nobody forces any of us to implement them, making them effectively irrelevant. If they do something that’s incompatible with the rest of the fediverse, they effectively defederate from everyone else. So either way the end result is two separate sub-fediverses and the more popular one will win out. Hint: it’s gonna be the one with billions of dollars of funding. If we let them in as long as they play by the rules, we have a chance to educate people on what’s beyond Threads, it gives Meta something to lose if they defederate (their users’ ability to talk to people in their friend lists). At least we don’t lose anything that we wouldn’t also lose by not talking to them in the first place.
So considering there’s a substantial push to get away from places like Reddit and Twitter, as an outsider I’m wondering how the fediverse is going to actually provide solutions to some already bad problems within higher resource platforms:...
Admin abuse: yea, but unlike reddit you can just move to another instance.
Reposting: you don’t have to subscribe to all communities. And you can block communities if you don’t want to see them in your local or all tab.
Privacy: depends on which instance you choose. Do your research.
Server: I am not sure about this, but I think the server strain is placed on the subs who generate the most content / have the most users. More users means more potential for donations, which means the devs can buy better servers.
Hi all, I tried hosting my own lemmy instance to take some of the load off lemmy.world, but a lot of the posts do not get synchronised to my instance. When they do, they never got more than a couple upvotes....
“Allowed Hosts” is white listing btw. You should leave it blank if you want more than just lemmy.world and lemmy.ml
And I wouldn’t say it reduces the load on those sites. It would kind of add to them in a way if you post from your instance or sub from your instance solo. If it’s just you on your instance, it’s barely a blip. May save them some photo hosting if you post.
SOME of the out of sync upvotes/comments are fixed in 0.18.1
You don’t even have to comment to get profiled by upvotes. I’ve never commented or even subbed to a local community, but in the past I had occasionally upvoted.
If it was just the home instance’s admins having access to it that would be normal. Having it be completely public empowers doxxers of both the malicious and marketing types.
This question may be moot but it’s something I’ve been thinking about. I’ve only recently jumped into this brave new world so you’ll have to forgive my ignorance....
So I'm on the /r/Disneyland mod team and we decided to move here to @Disneyland / !Disneyland during the blackout. We're still directing users here in the subreddit's sidebar, although the mod team collectively decided to reopen the sub on Reddit after the admins started threatening mods directly.
There were a couple options floated when we were considering the move:
Make our own instance. Traditional forums like MiceChat have survived for decades; we'd effectively be a fediverse version of MiceChat. The main subject would be Disney, but we'd have Disneyland communities, WDW communities, Marvel communities, Star Wars communities, etc. This was shot down because we didn't have the funding, time, manpower, or legal expertise to host things ourselves at any kind of scale. All us mods have day jobs and we don't want to take on a full-time admin role; other Disney subs likewise didn't seem terribly excited about joining in. Shout-out to /r/startrek for starting https://startrek.website and /r/Android for https://lemdro.id/, but it wasn't in the cards for us.
Join a Lemmy server. This was before Lemmy.world existed, so our options were limited. We basically had Lemmy.ml, Beehaw.org, or sh.itjust.works. We disagree with the admins of Lemmy.ml on a fundamental level; Beehaw doesn't allow new communities; sh.itjust.works was maybe doable but we didn't want to deal with that URL for a Disney-themed community. Waiting for a new general-purpose instance to appear (what Lemmy.world became) just wasn't in the cards since I wanted it to be open during the blackout.
Join kbin.social. At the time, there were no other Kbin instances - fedia.io didn't exist yet. But Kbin seemed very flexible (direct Mastodon integration is a plus!), the admin team was just Ernest (but he had a good head on his shoulders), it was my personal fediverse site of choice, and it was growing quickly. At the time we made the call, federation didn't work as expected but it was promised to be fixed (and it has been; we now federate rather broadly).
We've gotten some organic activity on the Disneyland magazine over here on Kbin, which is nice because it shows we don't need to keep the community on life support. The big downside to Kbin (and Lemmy!) is that mod tools basically don't exist; it's going to be tricky without AutoMod long-term. Once Kbin has an API it should be trivial to remake AutoMod for Kbin though, assuming the API has moderation actions.
Someone suggested that we should use this to find instances nearer to us. I did that and it has been running a lot smoother on my end apart from the occasional loading issues on subs in Lemmy.world.
There’s definitely some getting used to for new immigrants like us from Reddit. The nature of Fediverse forces us to give up on the concept of “karma” and be ready to hop from one instance to another at any given time. The good thing is we’ll be seeing much fewer karma-farming bots, which I assume would be an even much bigger issue on Reddit now that so many of the genuine users have left. Shitty mods, rampant bots, subs going dark/NSFW. What a shitshow.
It’s something reddit was actually good at. Tons of people used to find reddit way too confusing because they didn’t understand subreddits, so reddit responded by making a list of default subs for the “don’t know don’t care” crowd that makes up 90% of users in practice.
Sure, it opened a different can of worms in that it tanked the quality of those subs when most users didn’t really get the pount of subs, but it massively lowered the barrier to entry on the platform.
We have a much higher barrier to entry with instances, and I really think something should be put in place to lower it.
I think it will be hard. However I still have junk lemmy will be valuable, successful and fun. At the end of the day though, if lemmy.world or another instance is to reach 3 million subs (for example), that is a lot of costs for the admins. We’d probably need a combination of ads, subscription revenue, or third-party backing. Once investors get involved, then data selling and algorithms get involved.
The way to delay that as long as possible is to guide new users to different instances that are federated to spread the load and costs among all servers and admins.
I would greatly prefer a subscription versus ads or investors. $20-$30 annually for a fun community is very little in the overall scheme of things.
It feels like they’re two different roles. It might be better to have user-orientated servers that prioritise federation of content and only have a couple of meta-style communities, and other servers which prioritise being the go-to place for discussion on a particular topic and less a place that manages a large number of user...
I mean it is different from reddit in that now instead of 1 server with arbitrarily divided communities, now you have as many as are popular and it is more visible because there isn't enough content. If there are tons of users are all in one place it might make sense for something like /r/bees , but here I think it'd be better served with a tag like #bees for all instances ( ̶t̶h̶o̶u̶g̶h̶ ̶m̶a̶y̶b̶e̶ ̶s̶o̶m̶e̶t̶h̶i̶n̶g̶ ̶d̶i̶f̶f̶e̶r̶e̶n̶t̶ ̶f̶o̶r̶ ̶s̶e̶r̶i̶o̶u̶s̶ ̶b̶e̶e̶ ̶d̶i̶s̶c̶u̶s̶s̶i̶o̶n̶/̶m̶e̶d̶i̶a̶ more serious than I thought, but you'd need to bookmark that tag unless there are other features I'm unaware of). Whereas beekeeping does make more sense as a community.
I could also see it being interesting for unified communities. It would be mostly the same as now in most ways except posts would be visible from all instances (if federation is on and that community is not blocked). Mods would moderate their own instance (and nothing would stop users from posting to a different instance of the community if they so choose) though limited mod sharing could be a thing. So really it's just something to make things less annoying than subbing to 3+ communities (hopefully with link/story merging too as my first comment mentions).
Also with divided communities in mind, why not make posting to multiple communities in one go (tied together thus not cluttering new, and possibly allowing community-specific versions) a thing?
Meanwhile, here on lemmy, our choice of instance is largely irrelevant.
Only if you’re on an instance that already has users subbing to a ton of communities. I’m not sure how this is much different than the federated timeline on Mastodon. If I joined a small lemmy instance it would be a similar experience. I’d need to reach out to find external communities that interest me.
Anyways, point was… Everyone I know who actually stuck to Mastodon… Have mastodon.social accounts.
I’ve been pretty happy on noc.social. I’ll concede that my local timeline has a skew to it due to the server I’m on but the federated timeline is a bonkers firehose from all over the place.
Regardless, my point whenever this conversation comes up is to say that yes, I agree there’s a learning curve for new users going from a monolithic service to a federated one. But I don’t think the solution is to emulate a monolithic service (i.e. everyone on mastodon.social). I think the solution is to improve the on-boarding process and provide resources so that those new users are eased into the change and can learn how to find the content they want.
I actually ran into this while setting up this account. Made me triple check I was subbing to a community that was going to have any activity (first person from my instance to search it apparently)
Meta will kill small instances! Please read.
I just read this point in a comment and wanted to bring it to the spotlight....
What should we do about Threads?
A lot of people dislike it for the privacy nightmare that it is and feel the threat of an EEE attack. This will also probably not be the last time that a big corporation will insert itself in the Fediverse....
Disappointed ex-Reddit user after the APIcalypse - starter pack
I used to browse Reddit 90+% of the time from my phone through the RiF app, so after June 30th, here is what I did and what I recommend as a starter pack for others in the same situation:...
Mastodon's Founder & CEO Gives His Thoughts on Meta's Threads (blog.joinmastodon.org)
Found this post super informative as it relates to Mastodon, and thought Lemmy might also benefit from this perspective. I’m not sure I share his optimism, but his points seem sound to dampen some of the alarm bells over Meta joining the Fediverse.
Reddit Refugees on Lemmy, how are you guys liking lemmy so far?
The sad truth for all of us (i.imgflip.com)
Some posts not showing up when logged in to my instance
When I sub to a community, I don’t see all the posts if I’m logged in to my instance. If I go directly to url of the community I can see all the posts....
How to find communities in fediverse without getting spammed with offensive porn?
How is a fediverse user supposed to find communities? I can’t find a way to search across the fediverse, which pretty much kills the concept IMO. I was browsing All via Lemmy.world - Mlem - iOS and my feed is half anime porn, with some pictures depicting underage and others not blurred as NSFW....
Lemmy bean posting could be a reddit counterattack to get people to return to reddit.
I don’t know how I didn’t think of this be for, but the Lemmy bean posting could be a psyop that reddit is trying to get people to return to them after switching to Lemmy
Why I probably won't defederate from Threads (plume.helios42.de)
The fediverse is discussing if we should defederate from Meta’s new Threads app. Here’s why I probably won’t (for now)....
Don't federated instances just exacerbate already existing problems with places like Reddit, Tumblr, and Twitter? Specifically admin/mod abuse, excessive reposting/cross-posting, server lag/issues?
So considering there’s a substantial push to get away from places like Reddit and Twitter, as an outsider I’m wondering how the fediverse is going to actually provide solutions to some already bad problems within higher resource platforms:...
Self-hosted lemmy not receiving all posts or upvotes
Hi all, I tried hosting my own lemmy instance to take some of the load off lemmy.world, but a lot of the posts do not get synchronised to my instance. When they do, they never got more than a couple upvotes....
YSK: Your Lemmy activities (e.g. downvotes) are far from private (i.imgur.com)
Edit: obligatory explanation (thanks mods for squaring me away)…...
Is there 'etiquette' for choosing which instance your migrated subreddit is hosted on?
This question may be moot but it’s something I’ve been thinking about. I’ve only recently jumped into this brave new world so you’ll have to forgive my ignorance....
Lemmy.world has grown by about 66.6% since reddit's API shutdown (lemmy.world)
Lemmy.world grew from about 51k users when third-party reddit apps started to shut down to about 84.8k users at the time of this post....
Do you believe Lemmy/Mastodon can become mainstream and fully replace their centralized counterparts?
What the title says. I think there is still a long way for that to happen but i’ve been hopeful. What do you think?
Does it seem like we’re mixing two concepts, having servers for users and content?
It feels like they’re two different roles. It might be better to have user-orientated servers that prioritise federation of content and only have a couple of meta-style communities, and other servers which prioritise being the go-to place for discussion on a particular topic and less a place that manages a large number of user...
As Twitter flounders, Mastodon refreshes its official app for Android users (techcrunch.com)
YSK: Subscriber count on communities only show the numbers of users subscribed from your specific instance. The real number might be much larger than you think.
You can use lemmyverse.net to check actual subscriber numbers....