Supposing that they, y’know, try to keep their setups secure anyway. With how much you see about breaches of different sites, it’s hard to imagine individuals and smaller groups being able to keep their stuff secure....
The vast majority of self hosted users would not be able to respond effectively to a coordinated or sophisticated attack. You might block off large swaths of domains, blocking big IP blocks, etc; but unless you are serving a very small number of users (White lists vs black lists) you’ll be fighting an uphill battle if someone decides to start going after your instance.
I tried one called Lemmur that I downloaded off F-Droid, however, it can not find this instance (lemmy.world). I want one that’s open-source, and preferably from F-Droid (because screw Google). Which one do you guys use?
Honestly, using wefwef.app as a web app is hard to beat right now. It works very smoothly, and I finally understand why all the iOS users mourn the loss of Apollo so hard. Granted, using an iOS-esque interface on an Android device is a bit odd, but the gestures and the layout are just chef’s kiss.
The biggest issue with it is that it’s getting hammered on the primary domain, so I’ll probably move to self-host it sooner than later.
The primary incentive that comes to mind is improved availability. Often, instances can become slow, so I use another. By hosting a local instance I could always have a smooth experience....
If you host your own instance you are your own admin. That gives you personal control over content and settings. However, you need to pay for a domain name and you need a 24/7 server so there’s some expense involved. Then there’s maintenance like software updates and user needs if you take them on.
I think most admins take on an instance simply to contribute in building the Fediverse and create something to take some pride in. You get some clout in the community for doing that.
I know this is not a feature oficially on lemmy as of now (at least the github github.com/LemmyNet/lemmy/issues/2397?ref=privacy… the issue is still open)...
Yep, it would give much more control to the user, also it’s a feature already present in mastodon (called block domain over there) so it’s not a foreign idea to the fediverse.
I joined the fediverse like 2 weeks ago. I’m trying to find the answers to all my doubts reading discussions around, watching videos etc, but there are still some questions I’m looking an answer for. Here they are:...
Up to you, I would just avoid big instances like .world or .ml. People do congregate on big instances in most of the fediverse, so IDK that "professional" enters into it. It's not as if you're running a law firm on a @hotmail email address. I like hosting stuff for myself, so I am running my own instance.
For yourself you could get away with spending around $5-$10/mo, plus ~$10/yr for the domain name. More users/load would need more resources, .world is spending >$150/mo for the server(s) alone, and that will only grow as the instance grows.
Big thing would be site-wide moderation and managing federation. Dealing with reports, illegal content, communities that break server rules, users that are harassing others, etc. If you slack too much on that (or have overly lax policies) you may end up defederated by instances. Making the decision to defederate other instances. Etc.
Entirely gone.
Mostly just changes what you'd see on local. Federation can be wonky/slow at times, but that is true of federation between big instances as well, it's just something you have to get used to when using Lemmy.
Super new, like…10 minutes ago account. Click on my name and it just brings to home page. On Connect for android. Also do you get notifications when someone replies? Are there private messages?
Not sure about lemmy, but I'm viewing your post on kbin.social, which does provide this functionality for users both on and outside the instance with the following link (remove the first @ and domain if you're looking at a kbin user):
I mean, I am more than a bit shocked that a seasoned internet user who signs up for betas would have difficulties understanding the concept of domain names, but I assume your friends are less tech savvy.
But the thing is: no, you don’t have to understand federation any more than you have to understand how DNS servers work or MTU sizes. What you know is that you pick a “server” and then have access to the entire (federated) Mastodon.
To those self-hosters who are out there curious if there exists a faster Nextcloud-like alternative without all the bells and whistles. I present to you, OCIS! This howto assumes that you’re running a Linux OS and that you have a reverse proxy like caddy running. To the guy who I suggested checking out OCIS, I wrote this guide...
Fediverse is not ready yet, that’s for sure, BUT we don’t need it to be “ready” to take on big tech giant backend to be usable user dispersion. IMO, smaller but high quality user that cross critical amount to sustain the community is good enough. I don’t need to engage with another 20k people, I just need to engage with maybe 1~2000 high quality post/comment(not lurkers) in different domains that I am interested in. All the rest can have their own thing and we never really cross each other and that is fine.
What I think Fediverse currently lacking is the following:
subscription can be abused, I don’t know the underlying detail, but if one user from small instance sub to another instance that have really big traffic, I guess it won’t deal well with that. There should be ways to tier or tag posts/comments so good informative one can be kept longer, but shitpots, meme, etc can expire quicker and not even archived. We really don’t need to keep all the stuff like tech giants do. (heck, even email provider starts to trim your old emails if your account exceed certain amount of storage(cause 80% is spam/notification mail that no longer serve any purpose.)
easier way discover existing community. I really don’t like to checking “All”, search community function is updated to a bit reddit like so it’s really mixed up with post/comment and actual community. And low traffic community can be buried really far down the list. ie. I created Rocket League on lemmy.ca, and periodically searching for another to see if there are better ones. Then I found out there is none and my community link keeps “sinking” in the result list. There needs to have better filter for searching.
there should have a say, a common bestof or community of this week community. Which helps with discovery as well. (up to instance admins decision of course.)
the web interface can still be improved. One thing that’s very hard to keep track of even on reddit is how the branching thread and responses can be all over the place. It’s still kind like that here on lemmy(but less user make it more bearable. I am not smart and do not have a better alternative, I hope someone can come up with a better more readable one.
I was able to do that back in 1990 on FidoNet, again on usuenet in the mid-late 90s, on IRC in the 90s and 00s and using google to search forums in the 00’s until the centralized systems killed them. IRC, usenet and others still run, I can still email people I want to talk to as well.
What you are arguing for is a smooth, slick, paid for, UX. Minimal UI’s and typing “@” in names is too much. Looking at lists is annoying so you want it curated for you. VCs dumped money on private UX and now people think its essential. We have always been able to communicate directly, there is no technical limitation.
Its in the minds of the users and the unwillingness of some to see a different domain name or try a new UX flow.
Get some VC money drop 20m or so on Fedi UX and all of a sudden people will see very little difference.
Or just wait, I remember when the linux desktop was a joke too.
i don’t think people “want” them IMO, I think you have a lot of people that aren’t understanding the concept of federation. I am “that guy” trying to explain that letting instances get too big creates the same “reddit” problems again. Its better to move control over your space to something more local IMO.
there are also plans to add some scaling so I do expect there to be support for big instances.
I haven’t seen a single advantage of being on a big server (i have accounts on a lot of these systems). My small instance of less than 100 users currently loads pretty much everything I have no issues posting or getting replies, there is an odd issue here and there but you get the same big instance to big instance as well, its more in the servers impl that needs smoothing.
Small instances are fast and you get A LOT of control over your All and other pages.
Most internet users that started using the internet in the last 10 years or so think a centralized internet is a normal internet, they think domains rule the world. We need to teach them how this really works and how we don’t need to bend knee to people to communicate.
Most internet users that started using the internet in the last 10 years or so think a centralized internet is a normal internet, they think domains rule the world. We need to teach them how this really works and how we don’t need to bend knee to people to communicate.
Which is funny, since federated systems have existed for a long time. Prime example would be e-mail. And people seem to mostly understand that.
email, usenet, fidonet, irc, phpbb, invision, bbses say hello
i ran forums of 10k users and “paying for it” was never the problem
we didnt stop hosting these because we got tired of it, we stopped because people ran off to centralized networks because so many were convinced being on the “same domain” is the best idea via marketing.
two big lies have been perpetuated on the modern internet:
running your own server is hard
only big companies can do it
nothing was wrong with the old system other than the fact that individual forums are not going to spend money to out-market valley VC’s
people either want systems that represent them, or they want to be on systems that represent others first. I don’t think they realize these are the decisions they are making, since most have no knowledge of what the internet truly is.
I’ve seen a few posts today mulling over possible solutions to some of the issues caused by Lemmy’s explosive growth in the past few weeks. I’d like to walk through the situation as I see it, point out a few differences I’ve noticed in the federated model vs. what users of other social media may be used to, and offer a...
I have to check this… As that would the best way to have control of the account without risking that the instance were I am suddenly dissapears although I guess I need to setup cloudfare or something on my domain to avoid direct attacks to my dedicated server I guess as the instance where I am would be public to other users.
That and some domain provider with privacy protection which most have nowadays so my name and address isn’t public directly on my domain info.
Reddit kills third party apps (and drives away moderators, making some subs ridiculously terrible permanently, eg. /r/IAMA, in case no one’s up to speed on that drama), Imgur bans NSFW content and deletes everything not uploaded by registered users, Twitter just goes fucking crazy (although that can really be attributed to one idiot), RARBG dies, Google kills sells off their domains to SquareSpace, Gfycat is just getting rid of everything, Netflix kills password sharing and plays a major part in holding back negotiations with the WGA, Zaslav kills HBO Max and turns it into reality TV central, Red Hat pulls a Canonical, Mastodon is in a potentially precarious situation with Meta…
That’s just off the top of my head. There’s probably a bunch more I’m forgetting.
2023 is fucking wild. Might as well get ready for the next “We Didn’t Start The Fire” cover. There’ll probably be enough crazy tech/social media shit for every verse before the end of the year.
This may be more of an “out of the loop” thing, but I’m new to this site and I’m noticing that lemmy.world seems surprisingly bereft of any substantial NSFW content. I’m surprised! Isn’t the adage that porn motivates technological progress?...
Spinning up an instance is akin to setting a web server. There’s a lot of personal information that gets tied to ownership of both domain and the hardware itself. This data is publicly known for those who know where to look at. Without the typical layers of privacy that shield anonymous users in big corporate services. Mostly due do payment information, whether you rent hardware or selfhost using some DNS registry rental from an IP provider. You’re out in the open hosting CSAM. You’d have local security forces in your home within the week in most developed and developing world countries.
On top of that, your instance would be immediately defederated by all other instances. So you’d be the only one on the hook for that crime.
I’m not sure if you’ve tried this PWA called Wefwef but it feels like a fully featured Apollo client for Lemmy already. You just go to the site and add it to your home screen. No beta to sign up for. No TestFlight link. Just add the PWA....
As an Apollo user I was very (happily) surprised at how familiar this feels, thank you! Interesting note about this app is they have a Dockerfile available which means you could host the PWA/app in your own domain. Looking at the Dockerfile this would be super easy to deploy and update.
I think companies have seen what happened with Twitter and it has convinced them that they can try more drastic revenue generation strategies with little repercussion. They have all become strong monopolies in their respective domains and users who have grown up with the current offerings are not willing to put up with lesser alternatives.
The internet is basically ~10 websites for most people, only occasionally veering off the path to find some one off information. The casual user sees no reason to put up with the growing pains of alternatives and will put up with a lot from Google and friends if it means not having to create a new account on another website with no content.
How can you possibly replace YouTube and Reddit? Their value is in their user base and it's impossible to replicate that type of "success" overnight.
Not any list. A government provided domain blocking list.
A reasonable way to balance safety and freedom could be to require including some malware blocking list, and let browsers choose whether to offer this as opt-in or opt-out.
This way users could easily protect themselves, or just disable it if there's over-blocking. Browsers could choose which blocking list provider they include (government or independent provider).
Im copying/pasting something I said on another thread but it applies here. Its what I would like to ultimately have in the federation:
I am a free speech absolutist and I want pretty much anything to go but I want the tools for users to be able to block it in any manner they want from blocking users to blocking magazines to blocking domains and I want it to include comments and actually go both ways (joke not intended but right after I wrote that I liked it). When I block something I don't want that person, place, or thing to see any of my comments or posts. If I blocked them its a good chance its folks that might try doxing or some shit. I would like blockers to know who or what they blocked so they can undo if they choose but I don't want blockees to know. I would like profiles to be only seeable by logged in users and I would like usernames and such masked for folks not logged in. I realize this is a lot and its not here now and that some folks may hate the idea of what I write here but that is how I would like to see something like this go. As much power as possible brought to individual consumers to prune their feeds and as much freedom as possible for creators.
Mastodon did not, and does not, have a unique selling point for most users
The ability to follow and interact with content creators and users on a wide variety of platforms all from one account on one platform is something I can't do on corporate social media. On Mastodon, I pull in dank photography from PixelFed, tech threads from Lemmy, text posts from Mastodon/Calckey/Akkoma, and video content from PeerTube. Contrasted with having to manage separate accounts and feeds for YouTube/Reddit/Twitter/Instagram, it's way more convenient once you're past the initial hump of setting up your feed (which does need UI/UX improvements).
Decentralization is not a selling point for 99% of people
I mean, true. I've never heard any non-tech person be super hype about how email is decentralized and that they can host their own email server. They mostly just like that they don't have to produce a physical letter, mail it, then wait for it to be delivered. They should care that some rich prick can just buy their social media site of choice and run it straight into the ground, but convenience and functionality matter more to them.
Most people don't give a thruppenny fuck about their freedom to view and edit the source code of the software they use, which they would not know how to do even if they cared
They should, considering that even if they can't do it personally, this means that other people who can have the ability to add any desired functionality and ship it out for them to use.
Most people are not ideologically opposed to the notion of proprietary software and cannot be convinced to be because it is simply not important to them and cannot be explained in terms that are important to them
They should, since companies are routinely putting them through the ringer and have no incentives to stop otherwise.
When given the choice between a tool that is immediately useful for achieving some sort of goal but conflicts with some kind of ideological standpoint and a tool that is not as useful but they agree with ideologically, they will probably choose the former
Only an issue when FOSS alternatives don't achieve feature-parity, so we should make sure that our stuff is on point.
Decentralization makes the user experience worse
Eh, not really. The bigger issue is that the Fediverse platforms copied the design of centralized platforms for the most part without adequately adjusting for the different UX that a decentralized federated system provides. Some things I think should be standard that currently aren't:
I want to be able to send search queries to other instances from my instance and have the results displayed back to me.
I want to be able to browse the timelines of other instances from mine.
PeerTube has a "remote subscribe" option where you fill in a little box with your @username and it'll open a window on your instance where you can follow the channel; I think this should be polished and then it'd be great.
Every platform should support hashtags and instances should be aware of each other's hashtag usage so the search can be smart and recommend sending queries to instances where the hashtag you're looking up is most commonly used.
I don't think this is a fundamental problem with decentralization, but rather the implementation just needs some work. I think the above 4 tweaks would fix a lot of issues.
As a brief explainer (without wanting to turn this into yet another technical explanation of the fediverse), if you start up a fresh new Mastodon instance, it will see no posts. Its "federated feed" will be blank, the search will not find anything, searches for hashtags will show nothing, and it will ingest no posts from other servers. For the instance to start seeing posts, you must follow people.
.
Either way, an instance will then only see the new posts of people who someone on the instance is following. This means that the more people on the server, with the more diverse follow lists, the better things work; the more hashtags will get useful results, the more the federated feed becomes useful as a means of discovery. Conversely, if you are the only user—of one of only a few users—on your instance, your federated feed will just be basically your follow list, so your means of discovery is limited to things your followers boost.
This means that for new users to Mastodon, objectively the best experience is delivered by joining a big instance, e.g., Mastodon.social. .social's large user base means that its users follow more accounts on more instances than any other, which means it sees more posts than any other, which means new users have a rich source of other users and posts to find and follow, and thus infinitely better discovery options.
However, new users are also encouraged to join small instances and often explicitly not to join Mastodon.social, typically in service of avoiding centralization and pursuing a properly decentralized fediverse. Sometimes this works, in that the user joins a smaller instance that is still reasonably active and has enough active users following enough active users. Often it doesn't. Often users get frustrated and leave because they're not seeing any posts that they've not seen before, but if they were on .social or another massive server, they'd be seeing all sorts of content and have a reason to stick around.
This is actually a solved issue via relays. Small instances should set up a few to get a content stream going.
The people who accept these trade-offs are not normal, and they’re in charge
Hey, when you give users control of their own destiny and the freedom to mold it how they want, it'll reflect their priorities. The Fediverse is no exception.
Mastodon doesn’t scale well, and its user base accepts no funding model other than charity
By design. We're here because we're fleeing monolithic sites with so much traffic that content moderation is a nightmare and that funding models basically guarantee enshittification. If you don't like that, then the Fediverse isn't for you.
But the reality is that all blocking Threads will do is cut the fediverse off from its most significant expansion possible.
Yeah, gonna be honest, not really interested in appealing to Meta chuds for growth at all costs.
In no small part, Mastodon’s culture is exclusionary
All of the above is tolerable if you want to keep Mastodon/fedi as a niche interest platform for people with niche interests, run for fun and/or based on the goodness of peoples' hearts. Or if, conversely, you want to make the learning curve deliberately hard and the UX deliberately obtuse so that only the people willing to put up with all manner of bullshit bother to stick around (what I'd like to call the "Arch Linux approach to community building"). It is, however, completely incompatible with mainstream adoption.
True, but also not a bad thing. Not everything needs to be for everyone. The Fediverse can be for people who are tired of corporate control over their internet socializing and the people who don't give a shit can just stay on Twitter while Melonbawler makes it easier for chuds to recruit and whatnot.
As for whether or not the migration panned out, well, Twitter isn't dead, but Mastodon and the Fediverse still have millions more users than it did prior to the migration and the MAU count has stabilized 8 months later, so I'd still call that a dub.
I started https://programming.dev because I am a moderator of several 100k+ subs over on Reddit and I didn’t want my communities to not have a place to go if Reddit crashed and burned (even though it’s incredibly unlikely). The main sub I moderated (/r/ExperiencedDevs) for years wanted user verification to combat the spam that was newbies commenting and posting about things they didn’t really know or understand. This will be possible to actually implement on Lemmy, whereas reddit was closed source, and didn’t really care about their communities.
I am also a strong supporter of pulling control away from megacorps. We need more small to medium sized businesses on the planet.
For selfish reasons? I wanted to work on something new and have true ownership over it, the ability to build a community that worked together to build something without capitalism standing in the way. It might seem strange, but one of the first things I did was bring multiple other people on board to help me maintain the server, even going so far as to add domain managers to the domain name. This was all to counter the major questions people were asking around “what if the host decides they don’t want to host anymore?”. Well hopefully the programming.dev community is willing to take that burden if the time ever comes, even though I hope it doesn’t. I also wanted to start something similar to a coop, where ownership is shared, meaning users have incentives to make the platform better. I have lots of ideas around this, but this will never be possible on Reddit. It is quite feasible here.
I also had the chance to buy an incredibly dope domain name! programming.dev! Why wouldn’t I jump at that chance? And I get to even use it instead of let it flounder. So many reasons to host something like this, to build a trusting community, a safe space to have to let people talk about a shared love/topic/hobby.
They need to do a better job surfacing ANY KIND OF user-generated content. Seems like this is failing due to Reddit being a fairly old site, thus being bumped up the search results. Lemmy, kbin, etc communities are on newly created domains, giving them minus points on Google’s retarded result ranking system. This system is now effectively hiding the internet from us by holding out good content that doesn’t satisfy it’s ranking algorithm. This system crumbles in the face of new changes because they are treating the internet like a town square rather than an organic community-driven living machine.
How do self-hosters or smaller sites handle security?
Supposing that they, y’know, try to keep their setups secure anyway. With how much you see about breaches of different sites, it’s hard to imagine individuals and smaller groups being able to keep their stuff secure....
Best Lemmy client for Android?
I tried one called Lemmur that I downloaded off F-Droid, however, it can not find this instance (lemmy.world). I want one that’s open-source, and preferably from F-Droid (because screw Google). Which one do you guys use?
What are the incentives for hosting a Lemmy instance?
The primary incentive that comes to mind is improved availability. Often, instances can become slow, so I use another. By hosting a local instance I could always have a smooth experience....
Is there any way for a user to block an instance?
I know this is not a feature oficially on lemmy as of now (at least the github github.com/LemmyNet/lemmy/issues/2397?ref=privacy… the issue is still open)...
Fediverse questions I couldn't find the answer anywhere
I joined the fediverse like 2 weeks ago. I’m trying to find the answers to all my doubts reading discussions around, watching videos etc, but there are still some questions I’m looking an answer for. Here they are:...
is there a way to see your past comments/posts?
Super new, like…10 minutes ago account. Click on my name and it just brings to home page. On Connect for android. Also do you get notifications when someone replies? Are there private messages?
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?
[HOWTO] Quickly get OCIS (Nextcloud alternative) up and running (i.ibb.co)
To those self-hosters who are out there curious if there exists a faster Nextcloud-like alternative without all the bells and whistles. I present to you, OCIS! This howto assumes that you’re running a Linux OS and that you have a reverse proxy like caddy running. To the guy who I suggested checking out OCIS, I wrote this guide...
So where are we all supposed to go now? (www.theverge.com)
But fediverse isn’t ready to take over yet...
Is it just me or did anyone else became a more avid poster since joining lemmy?
On reddit I was a lurker that posted like once or twice a year, but ever since joining lemmy I’ve started posting multiple times a day.
This website holy shit
This site feels extremely broken, almost unusable. I take it they wanted to release something in time to catch all the Reddit refugees
Suggestion and comments regarding the influx of troublesome users due to the current Reddit and Twitter issues.
I’ve seen a few posts today mulling over possible solutions to some of the issues caused by Lemmy’s explosive growth in the past few weeks. I’d like to walk through the situation as I see it, point out a few differences I’ve noticed in the federated model vs. what users of other social media may be used to, and offer a...
Fellow self-hosters of Lemmy, what is your domain name?
I hope this post is not too off topic. I thought that it would be nice to see the address of all the small self-hosted instances of Lemmy (1~5 users).
Lemmy resembles the old reddit experience so well that they even emulate the old reddit server performance
After September 1, 2023, all Gfycat content and data will be deleted from gfycat.com (gfycat.com)
After being purchased by Snapchat, it appears that gfycat has been abandoned....
lemmy.world doesn't seem to have many established NSFW communities; they appear to be in separate instances. Is there any benefit to this or anything stopping lemmy.world from having NSFW communities?
This may be more of an “out of the loop” thing, but I’m new to this site and I’m noticing that lemmy.world seems surprisingly bereft of any substantial NSFW content. I’m surprised! Isn’t the adage that porn motivates technological progress?...
Wefwef for Lemmy feels exactly like Apollo. (wefwef.app)
I’m not sure if you’ve tried this PWA called Wefwef but it feels like a fully featured Apollo client for Lemmy already. You just go to the site and add it to your home screen. No beta to sign up for. No TestFlight link. Just add the PWA....
YouTube test threatens to block viewers if they continue using ad blockers | Engadget (www.engadget.com)
French Gov Wants to Inject Domain Blocking Lists Directly into Web Browsers (torrentfreak.com)
Porn Historically Decides Tech Adoption... Fediverse? (kbin.social)
Historically, porn has organically decided which platform or formats become dominant. It's incredibly anti-censorship, but walks many fine lines....
Op-ed: Why the great #TwitterMigration didn’t quite pan out (arstechnica.com)
Don't like this article 😠 posting it in search of rebuttals. The word "moderation" is not to be found anywhere in it.
Why do people host Lemmy instances and how do they pay for them?
Google execs admit users are ‘not quite happy’ with search experience after Reddit blackouts (www.cnbc.com)
Google executives acknowledged this month they need to do a better job surfacing user-generated content after the recent Reddit blackouts.