Not sure how lemmy implements this, but I suppose it’s not a trivial task in such decentralized environment. Imagine 10 users from instance A subscribed to instance B and then instance A went permanently down. If B holds number of subscription requests it’s now out of date. If B has to poll every instance it’s federated with it’s additional arguably unnecessary load. So yeah local subscriptions are a low hanging fruit. I guess one way to solve it is to have some independent authority that keeps track of sub counts in case those are (made) public and queryable
If two of the same topic is posted, the one in the instance with more people will be higher on the active list than the other, so if you’re subbed to both, you’ll see that one first and interact with it. I’ve seen duplicate topics across several of my subs on Reddit regularly.
This is how it is supposed to work, yes. However. i will say one suggestion going forward might be some sort of voluntary community sub-federating. The idea is that communities from different instances that are considered similar in topic enough to be under the same umbrella would federate or group with each other. A person who subscribes to one might see content from other communities that have voluntarily opted into this feature. It would connect the scattered communities of topics while also allowing these communities to “defederate” on their own from other communities of the same topic, in the event that malicious communities attempt to joing where they do not belong.
This could also be given to the user, the ability for users to group their own subscriptions together, but this would put way more work on the end user and may not be as intuitive.
For example, I am subscribed to one Silent Hill community, and I think I am the only member beside the mod, with no posts. It would be nice if I could see content from other Silent Hill communities in that feed.
Like many others, I created accounts on a few different instances to try things out. Using apps like Liftoff and Jerboa make it very convenient to switch between accounts, but I’ve noticed that I get different posts showing up when browsing All, even with the same sort settings....
No one knows if corporations have a way to mess this up yet, which has in turn fueled the push against META joining the space.
But by design it is safeguarded, it is all about horizontal growth, instances aren’t thought to grow indefinitely so it is encouraged that people make their own instances to spread the load. As long as we have this option a corporation can’t take over since as you said everyone can just defederate, or if they are part of an instance that has been corrupted by corporate instance you can just move over to other instance. This is the key difference with a centralized service, in reddit yes you have different subs with different rules and moderators , but at the end of the day you are all under the whims of reddit and have no sub to escape to once reddit fucks ip. Here if the equivalent of reddit where to fuck up, start banning people or defederating with everyone once it grows big enough, you can just move to other instance inmediatly and aboid the problem.
That is why I’m not really that worried of corporations making instances regardless of how big they get because as long as the protocol remains unchanged we can all just flee with no issue.
The “all” stream would be all of the posts from the combined subs of the users on the instance. So if there’s a community nobody is subscribed to, it won’t appear on all. This is true of all instances. Many smaller ones will employ bots to crawl Lemmy and sub to communities to give the large instance “all” feeling.
That being said, yeah it’s all preloaded onto your local server. There is no difference in speed. Doesn’t matter if it’s active/subed or new/all they all load the same
I’d highly encourage everyone to find smaller instances and leave lemmy.world for the immediate expats. Find something that aligns with your values. Or if you are technically literate enough host your own instance. If you have an old desktop computer you’ve already got everything you need.
Long time reddit is fun user and now I feel lost but I feel moving on is the right thing, I was wondering how do I find community spaces like there were on Reddit?
Heads up, it’s ideal to link like !newcommunities (without the auto generated link format – why does it do that??). Markdown: [email protected]. That way the link is relative to whatever instance any particular reader is on. The link you posted goes straight to lemmy.world and thus any reader who isn’t a lemmy.world user will have a barrier in usage (they won’t be able to subscribe or comment and any relative links in that sub will also have usage barriers).
There’s a user on lemm.ee who has been making hundreds of communities over the last few days, but it seems like a flag-planting operation more than anything else. It would be impossible for one person to moderate all of these communities, and they have zero post or comment history....
Don’t sweat it. You’d have to create a profile on each instance and then create all of the subs on each. And some have decent bot protection, so that is tougher. Then if they’re not active and you want one, start/find it on your home instance and petition your home instance’s admins for mod control. They’ll probably see whats going on and cut that power(-crazy) user off.
It’s not like Reddit where there’s only one version of a community. It’s a double-edged sword, this feature, but in your case it’s a clear benefit.
I think you think you could probably write an entire textbook on internet culture and how the two end up different in practice.
A few key differences:
No algorithm on mastodon means you see what’s posted or reposted by someone you follow, not what the algorithm thinks will piss you off
Different instances and defederation mean that certain communities don’t cross paths. There’s an iron curtain between certain sets of instances. Those blocks are all one-way, because for the most part dark fedi doesn’t block. There’s also all sorts of intra-instance politics unique to the fediverse and not related to Twitter in the least. All kinds of fedi deep lore because people have been living together in the space for years independently of big tech.
Theres specific cultures that are intentionally unintuitive to outsiders. For example, lots of users on the so-called dark fedi are intentionally crass. People will look and see they’re using slurs and Nazi imagery, and while there’s no doubt actual bad people out there, most of it is just meant to scare off the establishment types which most of them deeply mistrust which is why they came to a decentralized self-hosted platform in the first place. There won’t be anyone getting banned on those dark fedi instances because their admins are in on the joke and don’t want establishment types hanging around either. That’s just one fediverse subculture of many, and they were here long before Elon Musk owned Twitter and long before spez said a word about any APIs, so their way if being has been. Independently evolving for a long time.
There is no big brother controlling everything that anyone can appeal to. Mastodon.social is by far the largest instance and for much of the fediverse it could defed from them and they’d barely notice. New Twitter users get this ideological vision that everyone will defederate from the bad people, but being decentralized and run by all kinds of different people so nobody agrees who the bad people are or whether they should be defederated from. Ultimately your instance chooses its own path and that’s it. That has a big effect since what is possible determines what will be done.
There’s no fediverse-wide search. There are searches on different platforms, but unless your instance is subbed to everyone everywhere, you can’t search for everything. You can only search for what your instance knows which is almost always a tiny fraction of the fediverse.
That’s a few examples of the big cultural differences. There’s a lot more and authors cleverer than I have written about it in the past.
I’m fairly new and don’t 100% understand it yet, but instances are run on servers that require money. Are we heading towards seeing ads or subscriptions to raise funds instead of relying on donations to cover overhead?...
Perhaps what we need is a backup code or some kind of exportable file with all our data (subbed communities, interactions, yadda yadda) which we can port over to a new instance if necessary.
Why YSK: Beehaw defederated from Lemmy.World and Sh.itjust.works effectively shadowbanning anyone from those instances. You will not be able to interact with their users or posts.
It's important to note that the admins of beehaw are not happy about this solution, either. And they hope to refederate once they have better tools and enough mods / admins to deal with it.
They point wasn't to shadowban, that was a side effect. The point was to protect their member--who specifically wanted a certain type of safe friendly instance--from hostile weirdos sending dick pics and stuff like that. Nobody's happy with the situation, but it's the best they could do under the circumstances with the resources they have.
I also don't think it's wrong for instances to have their own strong rules and preferences. This is one of the GOOD things about the Fediverse. The software features and how people use lemmy will catch up eventually.
As for the confusion / chaos around multiple/redundant/competing communities and so on...that will get better over time as people figure things out. Honestly it's not that different than reddit with all of its splinter subs like "true-" whatever.
Regarding Beehaw defederating from lemmy.world and sh.itjust.works, this post goes into detail on the why and the philosophy behind that decision. Additionally, there is an update specific to sh.itjust.works here.
For now, let’s talk about what federation is and what defederation means for members of Beehaw or the above two communities interacting with each other, as well as the broader fediverse.
Federation is not something new on the internet. Most users use federated services every day (for instance, the url used to access instances uses a federated service known as DNS, and email is another system that functions through federation.) Just like those services, you elect to use a service provider that allows you to communicate with the rest of the world. That service provider is your window to work with others.
When you federate, you mutually agree to share your content. This means that posting something to a site can be seen by another and all comments are shared. Even users from other sites can post to your site.
Now when you defederate, this results in content to be no longer shared. It didn’t reverse any previous sharing or posts, it just stops the information from flowing with the selected instance. This only impacts the site’s that are called out.
What this means to you is when a user within one instance (e.g. Beehaw) that’s chosen to defederate with another (e.g. lemmy.world), they can no longer interact with content on another instance, and vice versa. Other instances can still see the content of both servers as though nothing has happened.
A user is not limited to how many instances they can join (technically at least - some instance have more stringent requirements for joining than others do)
A user can interact with Lemmy content without being a user of any Lemmy instance - e.g. Mastodon (UI for doing so is limited, but it is still possible.)
Considering the above, it is important to understand just how much autonomy we, as users have. For example, as the larger instances are flooded with users and their respective admins and mods try to keep up, many, smaller instances not only thrive, but emerge, regularly (and even single user instances - I have one for just myself!) The act of defederation does not serve to lock individual users out of anything as there are multiple avenues to constantly maintain access to, if you want it, the entirety of the unfiltered fediverse.
On that last point, another consideration at the individual level is - what do you want out of Lemmy? Do you want to find and connect with like-minded people, share information, and connect at a social and community level? Do you want to casually browse content and not really interact with anyone? These questions and the questions that they lead to are critical. There is no direct benefit to being on the biggest instance. In fact, as we all deal with this mass influx, figure out what that means for our own instances and interactions with others, I would argue that a smaller instance is actually much better suited for those who just want to casually browse everything.
Lastly, and tangential, another concern I have seen related to this conversation is people feeling afraid of being locked out of the content and conversation from the “main” communities around big topics starting to form across the Lemmiverse (think memes, gaming, tech, politics, news, etc.) Over time, certain communities will certainly become a default for some people just given the community size (there will always be a biggest or most active - it’s just a numbers game.) This, again though, all comes down to personal preference and what each individual is looking to get from their Lemmy experience. While there may, eventually, be a “main” sub for <topic xyz> (again, by the numbers), there will also always be quite a few other options for targeted discussions on <topic xyz>, within different communities, on different instances, each with their own culture and vibe. This can certainly feel overwhelming and daunting (and at the moment, honestly it is.) Reddit and other non-federated platforms provided the illusion of choice, but this is what actual choice looks and feels like.
For the time being I’ve just been using the filter and only displaying .world communities for easy subbing, it does say it should be possible for other instances but I’ve been running into issues finding them with the method provided
I think I’d rather pay $20 a month for unlimited movies instead of like $10 every time. Heck, even at $5 a pop it would still save me money compared to the sub. If we’re talking about a product we don’t need or use on a recurring basis I totally agree subscriptions are not optimal but in this instance i think consumers are getting a fantastic value.
Yeah that does make sense now that you’ve laid it out, but at the same time I couldn’t care less about seeing the instance info once I’m subbed to something. Even showing my profile as being @lemmy.world is just cumbersome, lame looking, and ultimately unnecssary for so many users. Could be a useful sorting tool for sure, but it would be cleaner to have the option to hide them altogether, y’know? I’m excited to see what all of the devs do with this new platform!
I’m very new here but I decided to check and compare the posts in a community on lemmy.world (where I have my account) and that same community on the instance where it resides and the posts were almost all completely different! Is that how it’s supposed to work or are they supposed to be synced? Sorry if this is a noob...
I don’t know if this is the same question worded differently, but I’m unclear about what is supposed to be synced when a community gets federated.
Let’s say I’m the first one on my instance to sub to a community on another instance. At first it is of course empty because it hasn’t been federated, but after a few moments the posts, old and new, start to show up. However, existing votes and comments appear to not get pulled in - only new ones created after the moment the community was initially federated.
Naturally, I don’t expect votes, posts or comments from blocked users or instances to sync. But the rest should be IMO - at least lazily (e.g. only when you visit a post do comments and votes on it get pulled in).
Appreciate the post. A fellow refugee with some questions..
So I have chosen Lemmy.world. I know I can browse cross instance and post wherever but I have some confusion with this too.
Each instance will have its own let’s say “news.” Some will be more popular than others of course but will likely have similar content. I then sub to “news” on whatever instance. But there’s still hundreds of other “news” out there with potentially different, but likely similar content. Isn’t this fragmentation bad for community?
Also, let’s say I am in instance xyz and that’s where I’ve registered my account. All of a sudden the admins no longer want to run things and shut it down. All those communities are gone? What happens to my user account?
I think federated content is great, but this is my first interaction with a service using it. Please help me understand what this ultimately looks like long term.
Edit: sorry this triple posted. I kept getting errors so I hit submit again… and then again. Deleted the duplicates
It's not the kids, not the lurkers, not the mods... y'all just nice people. Lemmy's got a good vibe going... or at least enough windows that we can close if the vibe gets shit.
If the sub is on the instance you’re logged-in to (lemmy.works for you, I assume), then you just need to expand the “Sidebar” tab and tap “Subscribe”.
If it’s on another instance, you have to navigate to lemmy.world/c/sub@instance. So the main sub for sh.itjust.works would become (lemmy.world/c/[email protected])[lemmy.world/c/[email protected]] THEN go into the sidebar and the “Subscribe” button will be there. I think of it as just using a different door to get to the same content. And at this door you know the bouncer.
Alternatively, the sorta short linked version within lemmy would be !sub@instance . So that would look like (!main)[!main]. You can type that into the search from your main instance and the first result should be a link. That link will take you to a version of the sub with the same “Subscribe” option under the sidebar tab. Hope this helps!
I think you just go to the top of the page and click “Create Community.”
Im brand new here as well, but my guess would be to start posting stuff about whatever your topic is, links etc so people who run across it have something to participate in. I imagine its kind of a labor of love in the beginning but if its not super niche I’m sure you’d show up on searches.
What are you looking to make? It may already exist on another instance and you can just sub there if it already has users.
As there are a significant number of unhappy redditors just now who might wish to join Lemmy but are discouraged, it would be good to confirm.
I really appreciate the simple pathway that was offered for users on r/startrek back before the subs went dark June 12th. It was a successful migration for me mostly, but I understand that there’s a largish crowd of frustrated folks who haven’t made it through.
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....
r/Android is now on the Fediverse! (www.reddit.com)
Android news, reviews, tips, and discussions about rooting, tutorials, and apps....
Is it a good thing if there are identical communities on different instances?
Is it worthwhile to try to get mods to combine them? It just seems like a bit of a waste when trying to grow a community and its split in two....
Why does /All show different posts in different instances?
Like many others, I created accounts on a few different instances to try things out. Using apps like Liftoff and Jerboa make it very convenient to switch between accounts, but I’ve noticed that I get different posts showing up when browsing All, even with the same sort settings....
Preparing for Future Corporate Influence
The Fediverse as it stands now is super ambitious, prospering, and honestly really exciting to see and be a part of....
Lemmy resembles the old reddit experience so well that they even emulate the old reddit server performance
I was wondering how do I find community spaces like there were on Reddit?
Long time reddit is fun user and now I feel lost but I feel moving on is the right thing, I was wondering how do I find community spaces like there were on Reddit?
How do we effectively report users and/or communities?
There’s a user on lemm.ee who has been making hundreds of communities over the last few days, but it seems like a flag-planting operation more than anything else. It would be impossible for one person to moderate all of these communities, and they have zero post or comment history....
mastodon's growth (mastodon.social)
Amazing - 4k per hour....
Any native plant communities?
I tried subbing to the one on Lemmy.world, but nobody’s home. Perhaps there is one someone can rec from another instance? Any help is appreciated!
So how long until the Fediverse is monetized?
I’m fairly new and don’t 100% understand it yet, but instances are run on servers that require money. Are we heading towards seeing ads or subscriptions to raise funds instead of relying on donations to cover overhead?...
What Reddit communities do you want most to see "migrate" to Lemmy?
Welp it’s July 1st, and I actually had to move from lemmy.world over to lem.ee because that instance is being verryyy overloaded right now, lol....
YSK: If you're on Lemmy.World or Sh.itjust.works you should not subscribe to any Beehaw communities
Why YSK: Beehaw defederated from Lemmy.World and Sh.itjust.works effectively shadowbanning anyone from those instances. You will not be able to interact with their users or posts.
Where do I find a nice index of communities?
I would like to find a list of lemmy communities to find similar to the ones i left behind on reddit...
The price of a cinema ticket in this day and age. No wonder people aren't going to the cinema anymore. (lemmy.world)
To all the new(er) Reddit refugees! (lemmy.world)
Welcome to the fediverse!
Boost for Lemmy is happening! (lemmy.world)
Are posts supposed to be exactly synced across instances?
I’m very new here but I decided to check and compare the posts in a community on lemmy.world (where I have my account) and that same community on the instance where it resides and the posts were almost all completely different! Is that how it’s supposed to work or are they supposed to be synced? Sorry if this is a noob...
Welcome all new users and Reddit refugees! [PARTNERED POST]
cross-posted from: https://lemmy.world/post/853004...
Lemmy is so good right now for no particular reason
It's not the kids, not the lurkers, not the mods... y'all just nice people. Lemmy's got a good vibe going... or at least enough windows that we can close if the vibe gets shit.
Lemmy active users grew by an astounding 1600% in June (lemmy.world)
From 2,997 active users across all lemmy instances at the beginning of June, the number increased to 52,797 by June 30th. Source....
UPDATED 9-3: StarTrek.website - Lemmy info, FAQ, Patreon info, future plans, and more!
https://startrek.website/pictrs/image/590456a7-0f95-4e61-968a-c688dd564033.jpeg...