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.
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.
As the Fediverse grows more and more, rules and regulations become more important. For example, is Lemmy GDPR compliant? If not, are admins aware of the possible consequence? What does this mean for the growth of Lemmy?...
GDPR Art 4.(1) ‘personal data’ means any information relating to an identified or identifiable natural person (‘data subject’); an identifiable natural person is one who can be identified, directly or indirectly, in particular by reference to an identifier such as a name, an identification number, location data, an online identifier or to one or more factors specific to the physical, physiological, genetic, mental, economic, cultural or social identity of that natural person;
Posts in the Lemmy instances contain information relating to an identifiable natural person (by their user handle), as they contain the person’s ideas and opinions. Therefore the Lemmy instances are handling personal data and must comply with the GDPR.
Mostly answered in my other comment but for visibility and completeness, I’ll try to answer it here again.
The content may look different on the surface but that’s mostly because the different applications present them differently. Under the hood, it’s almost identical. Users create posts, other users can reply or like. What differs is the details. Mastodon posts are by default limited to 500 characters, Lemmy/kbin posts can be a few thousand, Plume posts can be even longer. Mastodon and Plume only have likes, Lemmy and kbin add dislikes (downvotes). Posts and comments that come from a different application may look a bit weird in whatever you use but at least they show up in your feed and you have the option to click a link to see them in their original form. In facht, @eatyourglory’s reply to your comment came from a Mastodon instance and they will see my reply in their Mastodon feed.
As for the difference between kbin and Lemmy, they’re two different pieces of software that interact with the Fediverse in a very similar way. When someone wants to setup a Reddit-like fediverse instance, they can freely choose between them based on personal preference (I chose Lemmy for my instance because kbin is harder to install and update). Imagine them like being able to choose between a phone by Apple, Samsung, Huawei or Nokia. All those phones have their own specific pros and cons but because they communicate through the same protocols, they can still talk to each other. An instance would be analogous to your Samsung phone or my Apple phone or my partner’s Nokia phone. There are many fediverse instances that use Lemmy as their software same as there are many Samsung phones in the world. The fact that most of them have very unimaginative names (looking at you, lemmy.ml and lemmy.world) doesn’t help but as positive examples like beehaw.org and feddit.de. Both use Lemmy and can talk to any other Lemmy instance but their names make it clear that they are their own thing.
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:...
I can’t answer them all but I’ll try the ones I can as a solo/small instance
I don’t know about suggested, but I’m someone who likes to tinker and look behind the scenes a little so that’s why I made my own instance, plus being in control of everything. Also having my name @va11halla.bar is pretty cool
The account is gone, no migration. Part of why I made my own instance is because my old was deleted. Due to federation you can still find content you posted at least, assuming it was federated beforehand
You’ll have to federate everything yourself if its your own instance. The all tab takes into account the subscriptions of everyone on the instance, so you’ll see a lot less if you have a lot less users on your instance. The local tab takes in to account communities on that instance only.
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.
I understand that a user on any instance can subscribe to any community in the fediverse, but I have been a bit confused when searching for communities to join. Sometimes there are communities on different instances, with the exact same name....
If the descentralization of social networks continue, we will have to prepare for the eventual rise of the instances wars, where people will start to fight about which instance is better and which one is weird to be in and so on, but that’s for the future of us all.
i have to say as well that freedom breeds freedom and better and more intelligent people as well.
I have no objection to freedom itself, I object to that freedom being used to turn vulnerable people into domestic terrorists.
The reality is that this kind of absolutism simply doesn’t work. While on paper it would be wonderful if we could scrap every law to maximise personal freedom, we all know that doing so would just hand society to arseholes.
I don’t think that we need witch hunts or bulllying to build safe instances, just intelligence.
While it’s technically possible that it could turn into a witch hunt or bullying, it’s more likely to be used as an excuse by the arseholes.
There’s no shortage of people on social media claiming “the left just call everyone who disagrees with them nazis” while simultaneously spouting opinions that perfectly align with the opinions neo-nazis have held for 40 years. Only the vocabulary changes, morphing from “undesirables” to “SJWs” to “woke”.
Often, it’s not a honest mistake either. One of the most popular topics in far-right Discord channels is “how to redpill people”, which involves strategies like obfuscating their actual opinions and playing the victim.
Now my opinion about your last point is that there’s hate speech everywhere, not just from your right, your left is pretty extremist as well, and pretty full of assholes. Assholes are everywhere.
Sure, but let’s not pretend they’re in the same league.
Tankies can be assholes, but they’re pushing communism because they believe it would be a better, fairer society for everyone, despite it usually ending in corruption, starvation and executions.
Meanwhile over on the far-right, genocide is the point. They think that society would be better for them if they could kill and enslave minorities and women. That’s a level far beyond calling people names.
As always, the rule of thumb is think for yourself and don’t be an asshole.
Sounds good, doesn’t work. That’s why COVID saw reactionaries pushing conspiracy theories that could have come straight from Elders of Zion and spitting in peoples faces.
The wider net you let them cast, the more vulnerable people they’ll catch.
The big problem is going to be when someone decides to start spamming and vote manipulating with bot populated private instances that automatically re-spawn themselves under a new name whenever they are blacklisted. Eventually, the standard will have to move to whitelisting over blacklisting, and once that happens the whole premise of federation starts to fall apart.
Consider a wireguard network of many clients which all interact with each other through a central hub server on a cloud VPS. One of the clients is a desktop used for SSHing into the other various clients–again, through the central hub. If the “terminal” client connects to another client through the wireguard hub using SSH...
The services should be able, to talk to each other via ssh?
Or do you have groups of servers?
How many we are talking about?
They are all virtual servers?
Where is the hub located?
In our company we have many services and many servers. We are talking about hundrets of services and servers. Snd they are very secure.
So we have the servers on a big esxi (more than one) in 3 datacenters.
There is one jumphost (high available... several instances). Direct connection from our workstations to a server is not possible. We have to use this jumphost. Login on the jumphost is not possible, only for jumping (ssh option -J).
On the jumphost is for each user the publickey from a hardwaretoken. (Yubikey, etoken, nitrokey, name it) on its user in authorized-keys file. Only one pubkey.
So you are not able to jump over the jumphost to a server, without a valid hardwaretoken.
A NAT-Rule gives each user a individual source-IP...
Then you can see in auditlog on each server who did the shit... even if he made sudo su... the source-ip is individualized for each user.
And services run in different subnets and VLAN without connection to each other. So only services can talk together, who must talk.
Another server is an ansible machine. This can connect to every single server too and fo good and really bad things... so this ansible-machine and the jumphost are in a physically secured zone in the Datacenter.
You need an extra permission and an extra physical key, to come to this machines...
And if one Service gets compromized, maximum the servers in the same vlan or subnet can be affected too. And the servers, which got an extra firewall-hole.
So... if you are afraid of using ssh in your environment...
Use hardware-keys for the ssh privatekey. No softwarekeys! If machines need to talk together via ssh, make smallest possible jails with subnets or vlans around them. Think about allowed commands in ssh-config/authorized_keys file!!! Think about a jumphost and allow different users only machines which they need. Think about physically protection about the jumphost. Think about serverinitiated backups...
Why YSK: Because some people may want to use old reddit’s interface and might be used to it’s look. To choose the instance, put a /[instance name] after that url, or use the option given by the site itself...
Hey folks, the title says it all… I am on the brink to open my own Lemmy instance and I’m looking for a name. I already own the following unused domains:...
To anyone surprised at this: welcome to the fediverse, please treat everyhing you do or say as public.
The way to achieve privacy around here is by following the long forgotten arts of the old internet before Facebook was a thing: use a Nick name and don’t tell strangers on the internet your real identity.
Your home instance will act as a proxy and only they have access to your email and IP address. That does stay private.
So, as long as you trust your home instance to not leak or disclose your connection or sign up data (which would be illegal in EU countries), just sign up with an alias.
A very positive aspects of this is that it should allow us to detect voting manipulation by correlating the activity of certain potentially malicious actors. If Lemmy instances take vote manipulation seriously and do their best to block bots this has the chance to make Lemmy / Kbin much more transparent and credible than Reddit ever was.
Kbin is another open source link aggregation program with a different developer that uses the same protocol as Lemmy (ActivityPub), so kbin and Lemmy instances can communicate with each other. If you see anyone with “@kbin.social” after their name then that’s where they’re from. You can check it out yourself here as well kbin.social
I get the impression that we’re headed for the same issues that pop up when we put all our eggs in one basket with Reddit/FB/whatever. People flock to the largest instance, and someday that instance could go down due to cost or the host losing interest....
It’s a decent bandaid, but I don’t want to block all NSFW content, I just want better controls around it so I’m not fighting an onslaught of creative new community names around anal whenever I open the site or an app.
I could indeed join another instance, but figuring out which instances are federated to which other instances is a bit of a slog from a user perspective unless there’s a big searchable graph available somewhere (which is entirely possible, I’m still very ignorant).
And who knows, maybe the apps will get better and be able to grab a local-only feed for each instance you have an account on and can patch together a feed from them all mixed together, and that would get me close to a workable solution for the long run.
Add it all up, and the social web is changing in three crucial ways: It’s going from public to private; it’s shifting from growth and engagement, which broadly involves building good products that people like, to increasing revenue no matter the tradeoff; and it’s turning into an entertainment business. It turns out...
The missing out part is a real frustration of this format. I’m finding it difficult to find those niche communities full of passionate discussion like people keep saying exist. I’ve seen several communities of the same name, none of which are very active, but which would be active if there was just one of them.
The individualized instances and communities have their benefits, but they come at the cost of discoverability and activity-per-community.
I don’t think they will be the services that do it but maybe the next round will. We are basically waiting for boomers to die off and the portion of GenX that never took to understanding technology. After that we have a society that has basically always had the internet and then its just a matter of education.
Also i think the biggest obstacle is the naming and management of instances. Stop giving your instances stupid names. Midwest.social makes sense as its a social network for people who live in the Midwest. Fanaticus.social could be slightly better but still, made for sports fans. Lem.ee and lemmy.world and all those makes all non-tech nerds scratch their head as to which one to go to. Yeah its federated and people can access any instances but they wont get that if they never sign up. Pick a topic and have that be the gateway to other instances.
It really isn’t. It is literally easier than making an email account.
MAYBE for a few days after hairplugs used his apartheid emerald money to buy twitter it was a mess. But very quickly joinmastodon.org/servers was updated to the point that it is just scrolling for MAYBE 20 seconds, picking an instance, and making an account. And then the only difference between the instances is the URL and your account’s domain name.
That is the equivalent of picking a server in an MMO/live game.
People are just looking for an excuse to stay at twitter.
I made this based on the gripe about some of the silent failures with federation. Might help users choose other servers. Might help admins troubleshoot. Open to comments and criticisms!
kbin posts DO show up in the details table. you would need to know the ip they are coming from. they don’t include their instance host name in the header, which is why it’s not in the table and instance is null for some IPs. also I don’t scrape and subscribe kbin magazines like i do for lemmy ATM, so the traffic will be low. probably just a few from kbin.social.
It was obvious - the instances are not shown on sources like fedidb.org anymore, but if you went to the instances which were growing fastest, all the accounts on there had gibberish names with almost no user activity.
It would be great if Lemmy actually had 2 million users, but it just doesn’t, sorry. :(
I think the de facto community will take hold eventually for each subject, or we will simply have more than one. No big. Reddit had the same, each under different names. Here the name includes the instance.
That's what would fix things for me; make the federation 100% behind-the-curtain so that I don't have to think about it. I don't care about the backend, I'm not hosting, the value to me is ad views only, not cash.
Again, sounds like if we did have multimagazine support (as I described earlier) then things would be fixed for you. If I've missed anything, please detail that out.
The fediverse/threadiverse is not a drop-in replacement for Reddit.
So actually there's an active effort to re-expose lemmy's API as reddit's own API (allowing folks to use things like PRAW with lemmy and even kbin thanks to the magic of federation). In theory third party apps could simply point to a server hosting this API, instead of reddit's site, and just work with the fediverse.
I know that's not what you meant, but that is pretty drop-in.
Until it is, I'll keep one foot in spez's yard. If Meta's Threads product does become an ActivityPub community and solves this issue, I'll move there
It likely would because it seems like it won't federate with the rest of us and just either be a single instance or at best a group of instances controlled by fb that only federate with each other. Either way the number of duplicately named magazines is strictly limited.
. I'd argue a solid 80% of users on corp-owned social media wouldn't understand even if you simplify it.
You can search the Fediverse from one instance using the Magazines tab in Kbin to find places to sub, or sub to communities you find in all feed etc?
This is the first thing. I think this might not always be turning up everything due to the delays with federation. While we might be able to agree that this is good enough, I think another reasonable person can look at this and say that there's room for some technical improvements.
Is the issue to do with the duplication of communities at present
This is the second one. As others have also pointed out, reddit has the same issue so it's not unique to federation (tho this person seems to get hung up specifically on the precise naming to make it federation specific). I think we can adapt the reddit solution (multireddits) to here as well though to solve this (i.e. come up with a scheme for multimagazines).
But I'm not switching between instances
This is the third one, but I think this is not valid. As you say, one can choose to have multiple accounts on other instances, but it's not needed to participate on the other instances. This person says it's their choice to have the other accounts - but then makes a big stink over the effort of having multiple accounts. Like if it's that much trouble then just don't do it.
long term there does need to be tools to allow communities to migrate base from one instance to another
I thought that this might be an issue but actually I raised this point and it wasn't responded to.
The fourth one is that this person seems to consider kbin.social its own distinct platform - which doesn't make sense in light of federation - and seems to prefer centralization in general (despite seeing the good from multiplexing BBSes), but I'm waiting on a response as to why this should be the case. Like what are the specific arguments to prefer centralization to a single server or a single instance?
It does occur to me however that if a paid shill were to try to promote a centralized service over an open source federated one, a way to win folks over might be to present oneself as a highly experienced technical person with direct expeirence in both kinds of systems, but who ultimately prefers centralization and has good technical arguments to back it up, including pointing out flaws or gaps with the existing federated system. And also insist that more people flock to the single overloaded flagship instance, perhaps causing it to overload and die off.
Not saying for sure that this is the case here, but food for thought.
The sad truth for all of us (i.imgflip.com)
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
Lemmy and GDPR - What is the current state?
As the Fediverse grows more and more, rules and regulations become more important. For example, is Lemmy GDPR compliant? If not, are admins aware of the possible consequence? What does this mean for the growth of 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)....
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:...
Are communities with the same name, but different instances linked at all? e.g., Does /c/[email protected] and /c/[email protected] have any relation?
I understand that a user on any instance can subscribe to any community in the fediverse, but I have been a bit confused when searching for communities to join. Sometimes there are communities on different instances, with the exact same name....
If Lemmy and Mastodon continues to get popular, we will eventually get Instance wars.
If the descentralization of social networks continue, we will have to prepare for the eventual rise of the instances wars, where people will start to fight about which instance is better and which one is weird to be in and so on, but that’s for the future of us all.
[Question] Is SSH secure in this scenario?
Consider a wireguard network of many clients which all interact with each other through a central hub server on a cloud VPS. One of the clients is a desktop used for SSHing into the other various clients–again, through the central hub. If the “terminal” client connects to another client through the wireguard hub using SSH...
YSK: There is an old.reddit interface for lemmy on a site called https://mlmym.org/ (as well as lemmy.bolha.one)
Why YSK: Because some people may want to use old reddit’s interface and might be used to it’s look. To choose the instance, put a /[instance name] after that url, or use the option given by the site itself...
I need help to decided on a name for my Lemmy instance
Hey folks, the title says it all… I am on the brink to open my own Lemmy instance and I’m looking for a name. I already own the following unused domains:...
YSK: Your Lemmy activities (e.g. downvotes) are far from private (i.imgur.com)
Edit: obligatory explanation (thanks mods for squaring me away)…...
Wouldn't the fediverse work better if it was like a drive array rather than independent communities on independent servers?
I get the impression that we’re headed for the same issues that pop up when we put all our eggs in one basket with Reddit/FB/whatever. People flock to the largest instance, and someday that instance could go down due to cost or the host losing interest....
YSK: You can block communities from appearing on your "All" feed. just go to the website of your instance, pull up the community, and click "block community" (On mobile click "Sidebar" first") (thelemmy.club)
Why YSK: You may dislike, disagree with, or be tired of certain communities and don’t want them in your feed.
So where are we all supposed to go now? (www.theverge.com)
Add it all up, and the social web is changing in three crucial ways: It’s going from public to private; it’s shifting from growth and engagement, which broadly involves building good products that people like, to increasing revenue no matter the tradeoff; and it’s turning into an entertainment business. It turns out...
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?
Federation Lag-o-meter (aftershock.lemmy.management)
I made this based on the gripe about some of the silent failures with federation. Might help users choose other servers. Might help admins troubleshoot. Open to comments and criticisms!
As Twitter flounders, Mastodon refreshes its official app for Android users (techcrunch.com)
ysk - your account doesn't exist on other instances and communities don't overlap
User accounts are fragmented and just because you signed on at lemmy.world doesn’t mean your account exists on lemmy.ca....
People in /r/redditalternatives are talking about a "Reddit 2.0" What website would fill that role? (kbin.social)
On Reddit at reddit.com/r/redditalternatives, people are talking about a "Reddit 2.0." What do you suggest?