this post was submitted on 15 Aug 2023
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[–] [email protected] 57 points 1 year ago (9 children)

I think once adding communities from outside your instance becomes a little easier we'll see that. A lot of newcomers had some trouble figuring out how federation works and went where a lot of the activity was

[–] [email protected] 49 points 1 year ago (3 children)

There’s also the fact that a bunch of instances immediately closed registration as soon as the Reddit refugees started arriving. They couldn’t handle the sudden extra load, so they all closed their registrations. Which is their right as owners, but it also meant that virtually all the new users were funneled to the instances that were willing to expand, with Lemmy.World being one of the only ones.

Hell, I still haven’t received registration emails for most of the “we’re filtering our registrations. Click the link in your email to verify you aren’t a bot” instances I tried to register with.

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[–] [email protected] 45 points 1 year ago (1 children)

The Fediverse requires federated thinking as well as federated technology. Critical thinking can be hard when its been so easy to just consume what you've been fed without question since you were born.

[–] [email protected] 5 points 1 year ago

Lemmy is not meaningfully federated You can't click /c/book and see the fediverse whole discussion space about books. It is a UI problem, Lemmy simply is not a federated application, it only has federation tacked on.

[–] drzow 42 points 1 year ago (11 children)

I started on one of the smaller instances, and guess what? They didn’t make it. I spent about two days setting up my account searching for all the communities I wanted, and had a great feed. Then about a week later, they were gone. I can’t fault the admin- they were doing a lot of work and running up a server bill largely for gratis, but I lost all that setup time. So when I had to start a new account I chose to go to one of the moderately large instances because I didn’t want it to go poof overnight again.

What I’m saying is there is safety in the medium to large instances.

That said, I do have some problems with some of the largest instances throwing their weight around in performing global bans on users from other instances whose world views differ from theirs.

[–] [email protected] 10 points 1 year ago (2 children)

I’m beginning to see that in order for lemmy to be truly federated, users must also become federated

[–] [email protected] 5 points 1 year ago (3 children)

User data needs to be exportable and importable somewhere else.

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[–] [email protected] 4 points 1 year ago

https://github.com/maltfield/awesome-lemmy-instances from this i used monyet.cc since they didn't need email discuss.online is good as well

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[–] [email protected] 32 points 1 year ago (11 children)

Let's put things in perspective. Lemmy.world currently has a "whopping" 127k users. That's fewer users than the moderately successful niche subreddit I created on Reddit has, which is just one of several thousand subreddits over 127k in size. Not to mention the tens of thousands of Instagram, youtube, facebook, tiktok, etc., pages with more than 127k subscribers. Saying lemmy.world has "a lot of power" at this point seems like a real stretch to me.

[–] [email protected] 49 points 1 year ago

The amount of power they have over the direction of Lemmy comes from the percentage of Lemmy users they have not the total user count.

[–] [email protected] 18 points 1 year ago

think about it relatively

[–] [email protected] 12 points 1 year ago

A lot of power within Lemmy.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

fewer than a successful niche reddit

Maybe by subscriber count (the bad count, never use sub count).

Truly niche reddits have 5k readers at most. And even then, readers includes lurkers, while lemmy users ONLY includes people making comments.

[–] prole 4 points 1 year ago

Their "power" would be relative to other lemmy instances, not absolute.

The comparison to reddit isn't really fair, as by the time they were getting thousands of subs with more than 127k subscribers, they had been bought by Conde Nast, and were also making money through ads.

These servers don't just magically run for free, someone is paying for it. And I don't know about you, but I don't want lemmy to change in order to appear more appealing to advertisers.

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[–] [email protected] 24 points 1 year ago (3 children)

I made an account on lemm.ee, thought it was a bad idea since all the communities were on .world. After this whole fiasco though, I'm happy with my decision.

[–] [email protected] 5 points 1 year ago

Same. All I want is to not miss out on content that is concealed from me because of defederation unless it's really harmful like gore or CP.

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[–] [email protected] 21 points 1 year ago (3 children)

Yes please! Lemmy.world and lemmy.ml shouldn’t make up the majority of my feed.

I think best case scenario, you have themed instances based around art, tech, politics, news, gaming, food, etc, and the largest communities are hosted there. Then you have “catch all” instances like lemm.ee which federate with everything, there can be as many of these instances as needed as the user base grows. These types of instances should be where the bulk of the new user accounts go, assuming just an average user looking for a /all replacement. Curated instances like beehaw allow for a more fine-tuned experience, but should still function basically as a catch all and not as “hosting the content” instance.

However I understand that building up to that is damn near impossible with the current infrastructure. We would basically need a means to migrate an entire community to a new instance, while simultaneously updating everybody’s subscriptions to reflect the new home of the community.

[–] [email protected] 10 points 1 year ago (1 children)

I thought lemmy.world was a "catch all" and it was, for a bit. We really do need better migration tools, then you could just leave any fools.

[–] Blaze 4 points 1 year ago (1 children)

However I understand that building up to that is damn near impossible with the current infrastructure.

Lemmy is still in its infancy. Any community wanting to move somewhere (like lemdro.id did) can still do it as long as they clearly indicate the new home.

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[–] [email protected] 19 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Lemmy really kicked off when you see the drama you had on Reddit here but with instances.

[–] [email protected] 6 points 1 year ago

It's pretty entertaining tbh. It really makes you more tight knit with your community too. It's something I never really considered with federations, you're like joining a team.

[–] [email protected] 18 points 1 year ago (3 children)

It kinda makes me wish that instances were forced to be single-topic, or even single-community, and that authentication was key-based so that you didn't need to "make" an account on a single instance.

[–] [email protected] 5 points 1 year ago (1 children)

The key based (and content addressing based) thing is what bluesky is building. They're starting of with Twitterish microblogging, but there's people building forums on top the protocol too. Federated, of course.

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[–] [email protected] 5 points 1 year ago

User accounts being key-based/portable is one of the strengths of the nostr protocol and Bluesky/AT Protocol.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 1 year ago (5 children)

I think instead instances should have every community. There isn't one /c/books, every server has a /c/books. Your feed pages just pulls from the entire fediverse. No concept of "creating" /c/books, it just is.

Likewise, there isn't "a" moderator. Every user is a moderator. Whether you vote, or delete the post out ban the user (from your view), your moderation opinions are published publicly. Your local feed algorithm sees everyone's "moderation opinions", if the consensus of the community is delete, then it just doesn't show up in your thread

For each "moderation opinions" by a user, your client investigates their historical record to address credibility and likelyness of being a bot, a user's history is his credibility

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[–] [email protected] 17 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Think we need universal/transferrable accounts to make this happen. People, myself included will be concerned that if they sign up to a tiny instance someone's hosting on a raspberry pi or something that it'll just disappear without a trace one day and their account along with it

If accounts were made portable I think a lot more people would disperse

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[–] [email protected] 16 points 1 year ago (7 children)

3 words SINGLE USER INSTANCES

[–] [email protected] 18 points 1 year ago (2 children)

The amount of data that needs to be exchanged because of this approach is not scalable. Assume that there are 3 instances with 100 users each. Even if lots of users upvote/post/comment, the traffic is exchanged only between 3 servers. But if there are 300 single user instances, the amount of traffic/storage will be duplicated which can cause a huge load for everyone which might not be viable in the long run, for both the sender and receiver. PS: I am assuming that the instances periodically update content by fetching the deltas.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 1 year ago (1 children)

I am assuming that the instances periodically update content by fetching the deltas.

That's incorrect, so far no batching is set up for sending multiple posts at once and the exchange is initiated by the sending server, not the receiving server.

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[–] [email protected] 16 points 1 year ago (1 children)
[–] [email protected] 6 points 1 year ago
[–] [email protected] 15 points 1 year ago (4 children)

Which is why identities and communities on Fediverse should be cryptography-based, and an "instance" should simply be a sort of a supernode, or a caching node.

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[–] [email protected] 11 points 1 year ago (2 children)

Every country should have their own instance and people should sign up to the server that's closest to them or that best fits their privacy concerns.

I would love to see more federated social media servers in Switzerland for example.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 1 year ago (1 children)

government are shit then they would really liked to control it

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[–] wheeldawg 10 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (1 children)

If people would share the idea of the fediverse instead of saying "yeah reddit suck, go to this website instead", this would put a dent in it.

But since the concept is so alien and hard to describe, people find it easier to just share the site, and since that game keeps being recommended, and since even if they know about multiple sites working together, even those people are going to go to one that has a friendly name, so this is what happens.

I'm only not on it because I like picking less popular things in general, so I actively avoided picking what seemed to be the default at the time.

Also I believe it would help if the sites/instances had a way of distinguishing themselves more and communicating their differences. Even most of the instances' intro or about pages are mostly saying something like "hey I'm a general use instance, with mostly this language, pick me!"

Which in and of itself is fine, but it seems most of them are general use, so people have no basis for picking one. They may figure out different reasons to like one or the other along the way, but once they pick one initially, I don't think most people make another account.

I haven't done much of that either, except for making one my dedicated NSFW account and this one, but I plan on making at least one or two more just in case of downtime, or even to separate genres of content.

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[–] [email protected] 7 points 1 year ago (1 children)

This has its negatives. If someone makes twenty-seven different hate speech communities spread out over twenty-seven instances, it becomes harder to exterminate them like the vermin they are. If they all congregate on one overly-permissive instance, you can defederate them and call it a day. Much easier.

[–] [email protected] 6 points 1 year ago

Their recent actions have convinced me to move to another instance

[–] [email protected] 5 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Ive signed up for multiple instances, most don't accept new users, or wait for approval which gets denied I assume.

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[–] [email protected] 4 points 1 year ago (3 children)

If everyone was spread out onto different instances

Each instance with an owner/operator making rules... that the average social media user walks in, orders a drink, and starts smoking without any concern that neither one may be allowed. People can be loyal to their media outlets even when it is beyond obvious they are bad. People raised on storybooks that endorse bad behaviors and values, HDTV networks, and social media too. Audience desire to "react comment" to images and not actually read what others have commented - nor learn about the venue operators and reasons for rules is pretty much the baseline experience in 2023.

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[–] [email protected] 4 points 1 year ago

Can I move a community from one server to another or do I have to delete the old one and recreate it elsewhere? Because I have a community on .world and would like to move it somewhere else, probably feddit.de

[–] [email protected] 4 points 1 year ago (4 children)

Correct me if this is already a thing, but it would be nice if you could post to multiple communities at once and have users see comments across all communities and instances. So a user posts “A” on instances X, Y and Z all under communities run on those instances at the same time. When making the post, you select ehich communities the post goes to instead of just one. Users on instances X, Y and Z see it as a single post it appears in all of the communities the user specifies. A limit might be useful here to prevent trial spam. A user commenting on the post in instance X will be seen on the other instances and communities where that post was made.That way, you could remove the centralisation on instances and communities (one community or instance might remove the thread, but everybody else still sees it and each others comments in the remaining communities/instances.) This has a few advantages:

  • People are incentivised to post to smaller communities knowing that larger ones will also get the same post and everybody can see each others comments.
  • If a moderator of a community removes the post, it still disappears in their community, but not the whole instance. If the thread still exists in other communities in the same instance, users of that instance can still participate in the post on those communities.
  • If the post is banned instance-wide, it is banned across all communities in the instance at once. This could include non-local communities.
  • Users in other instances will still be able to see the post and continue contributing to it. You can only remove the post from your own instance.
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