this post was submitted on 13 Sep 2023
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Fediverse

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A community to talk about the Fediverse and all it's related services using ActivityPub (Mastodon, Lemmy, KBin, etc).

If you wanted to get help with moderating your own community then head over to [email protected]!

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[–] [email protected] 76 points 11 months ago (3 children)

I don't understand this. I cant even name a single community native to the instance I use. I picked one that hadn't defederated from anyone, and I block communities as needed. Also subscriptions are a thing.

[–] [email protected] 14 points 11 months ago (5 children)

How do you find out if they defederated from instances?

[–] [email protected] 45 points 11 months ago (6 children)
[–] [email protected] 8 points 11 months ago (1 children)

Do you have any plans to add support for showing when a Lemmy or Kbin instance has defederated from Mastodon, Pleroma, Peertube, Soapbox, Misskey, etc. instances? That seems to be the only flaw when tracking Lemmy deferations.

[–] [email protected] 10 points 11 months ago

Adding support for Kbin is definitely a priority. When I built that tool Kbin didn't have public defederation lists (yet?) though a pull request to implement that was in the works. Idk what's the status on that is, but as soon as it's merged I'll also add Kbin.

For any other software it's a little trickier. Unless there some way to check for this through ActivityPub of which I'm not aware, I have to go through software specific steps to scan those instances. This means that for Lemmy I go through an API that only exists on Lemmy, when I'll add Kbin I'll have to write some new code that will only write for Kbin and so on. This isn't really sustainable for EVERY fedi platform out there, I won't do that.

Moreover, as you saw there was a progress bar. That's your computer querying each one of those 300 instances looking for their defed lists. The more software I add, the more instances you as a user have to query, the longer it takes to run a search. All in all I don't think I'll add support for any other software aside from Kbin and possibly Mastodon.

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[–] [email protected] 14 points 11 months ago

https://lemmy.world/instances

Replace it with your instance domain.

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[–] [email protected] 57 points 11 months ago (13 children)

"Decline in overall quality" is a subjective metric, though. Does defederation reduce participation? Certainly.

But ya know, there's a reason people defederate certain instances -- usually because those instances have attracted people who are disruptive to discussion on other instances.

It's really been no problem at all for me to keep a foot in lemmy.world, kbin.social, lemmy.ml, and beehaw.org. And a few other instances that appeal to more niche audiences.

And if I really feel like discussion on an instance is offering something and I'm missing out, I can always get an account there.

Not that I'm arguing against better moderation tools, of course. By all means, lemmy devs should prioritize those as soon as scaling/stability issues are dealt with.

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[–] [email protected] 48 points 11 months ago (3 children)

I'm an example of a filthy casual reddit user who is really struggling to find value in lemmy. Finding an instance where local is of value is difficult, world may as well be "everything", and "everything" is a nightmarish hodgepodge of memes for teenagers, furry porn, really niche technical discussions, and star Trek memes. I never stay in the app longer than a few minutes and I feel like I spend more time blocking weird porn communities than I do reading interesting articles.

The other major issue is having to sort through the exact same article 60 times because people cross post not only to local communities but then also the same communities are duplicated on every instance. I'm probably going to abandon this soon unless I can find some kind of curated community list to subscribe to or something.

[–] [email protected] 48 points 11 months ago* (last edited 11 months ago) (12 children)

I don't really get all the "'all' is bad" discussion. Isn't that what the "subscribed" feed is for? Just sub to the communities that interest you and browse from there. Just like it was back on Reddit.

[–] [email protected] 20 points 11 months ago* (last edited 11 months ago) (3 children)

The big difference is 1. Finding communities is not easy. Can you name every one of your interests off the top of your head? 2. Just punching in communities from reddit 1 for 1 doesn't work. 3. Content and user base. There are no discussions for my favorite podcasts here and if there are where do I find them.

It took me a decade to build out a decent sub list on Reddit and I still stumble upon new interests now and again. I don't know how to "stumble upon" decent communities on Lemmy and I'm sick of wading through cartoon horse cocks.

[–] [email protected] 21 points 11 months ago (3 children)

If you have a decent list from Reddit you can use https://sub.rehab to map Reddit to Lemmy / Kbin

If you just want to look for communities you can use https://browse.feddit.de

Takes some time to get everything set up but I honestly prefer having only stuff that interests me in my feed + no porn randomly popping up

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[–] [email protected] 9 points 11 months ago

Yeah I think that respondent is being defensive and really doesn't get the point.

Discovery sucks. Its really bad and its hurting the ability of lemmy to be a viable alternative.

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[–] [email protected] 12 points 11 months ago (4 children)

One thing I don't like about the approach of blocking things is that the frontpage of reddit still allowed some level of discovery. If something in a niche community got hot enough it would break into my feed even though I didn't subscribe to that community. It was a cool way to expand my content on an occasional basis.

If I'm going to only view my subscribed list on lemmy then I have to also manually go out and intentionally discover new communities. That's hard, because some of my favorite small reddit communities were ones I never would have thought to search for.

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[–] [email protected] 21 points 11 months ago

I browse all and block communties I have no interest in.

Bye bye Star Trek memes and may the force live long and prosper.

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[–] [email protected] 37 points 11 months ago (22 children)

That seems to be the growing consensus on some of the biggest instances. Hopefully they start prioritizing that, or some other nice dev who knows Rust will. Maybe I need to start brushing up on it lol.

[–] [email protected] 19 points 11 months ago (1 children)
[–] [email protected] 8 points 11 months ago (1 children)

I didn't see really any questions relating to mod tools or moderation outside of the one that was talking about the join-lemmy lists. Is that what you are referring to or do you mean the lack of mod tool discussion on that AMA?

[–] [email protected] 13 points 11 months ago (4 children)

A couple of beehaw admin had questions about the status of moderation tooling and the Lemmy Devs were like "not an emphasis"

[–] [email protected] 12 points 11 months ago

I kind of feel like that may be a major strategic mistake.

It won't be long before any given instance is overrun with alt right or other disruptive sorts if there aren't good tools to help moderators/admins.

One of beehaw's admins' feature requests is for more granular instance controls such as blocking (defederating) at the community level.

[–] [email protected] 8 points 11 months ago

To be fair, I think at the time, Lemmy had major performance issues. I can see how sorting that out is a big priority as well.

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[–] [email protected] 32 points 11 months ago (6 children)

????

Why do people not seem to know that the subscribed feed exists?

[–] [email protected] 15 points 11 months ago* (last edited 11 months ago) (2 children)

They do.

But, if they used subscribed, they wouldn't be able to fuss about all of the stuff they don't want to see.

Instead, they just want to look at everything. and then block instances (not communities) showing things they don't want to see.

[–] [email protected] 10 points 11 months ago (6 children)

I just wish I could block porn instances. I like porn as much as the next guy, but I don't want it offered to me every time I browse Lemmy.

[–] [email protected] 8 points 11 months ago

There is a current PR, which I think has been merged. That being said, next release will likely contain that functionality.

[–] [email protected] 8 points 11 months ago (2 children)

I keep hearing this complaint. At the same time I have literally never seen porn in my Lemmy feed. This is absolutely mysterious to me.

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[–] [email protected] 11 points 11 months ago

Because they want to find new stuff maybe?

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[–] [email protected] 22 points 11 months ago (1 children)
[–] [email protected] 9 points 11 months ago (3 children)

Me too but we are also on lemmy.world which is well moderated (and I think also has the resources to do so)

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[–] [email protected] 21 points 11 months ago (3 children)

Can't argue with that, hopefully they improve before the biggest instances decide to partly close on themselves

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[–] [email protected] 21 points 11 months ago (7 children)

The biggest thing killing Lemmy for me is needing a seperate account on every single instance if I want to participate in anything on an instance.

I thought this wasn't how it was supposed to work.

I saw this post on another instance and tried to reply this exact message but got an error saying I couldn't.

Using Liftoff if it matters.

[–] [email protected] 13 points 11 months ago

That's odd, you shouldn't need another account. I've even made posts from this account to another instance

[–] [email protected] 8 points 11 months ago

You definitely don't need accounts for every instances (as long as you're not defederated). That sounds like an app bug or something.

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[–] [email protected] 16 points 11 months ago (5 children)

That's what the subscribed feed is for.

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[–] [email protected] 15 points 11 months ago (2 children)

I respectfully disagree. On our LW Android comm, the discussion quality is generally pretty good, except when a post get on the front page, then the quality just drops like a rock.

Smaller (but not too small) crowd usually lead to higher quality discussions, that's true on reddit(default subreddits are pretty much all terrible) , and that's true here as well. (the turning point for quality decline reddit is at about 20K subscribers). So, I don't think the "instance protectionism lead to lower discussion quality is true at all.)

Also, I think the mod tools here is basic but perfectly adequate. You can check our community's mod log to see how much post removal/bans we actually had to do, and it's not a lot. Also not to brag, but I think our weekly discussions are some of the best threads on Lemmy right now.

It's not hard, I just tell our comm's users that I expect them to act like adults, and most of them act like adults, and we just remove the post of the few who refuses to do so (they are like in the single digits over the last months) and our admins usually handle the trolls that requires site wide bans in literal minutes here.

I don't use bots to mod and still do not see the need for it, because it turns out that if you cultivate a good culture in your community, moderation is pretty easy. That's just my experience here though.

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[–] [email protected] 14 points 11 months ago

Yeah thats the problem - too many comments. /s

[–] ryathal 10 points 11 months ago (2 children)

Instances shouldn't be first class citizens, they should be more invisible to the users. The fediverse should be more like a cloud. Communities should be the primary focus, and only allow Instances to control how many users/communities they are the primary/secondary source for.

[–] [email protected] 31 points 11 months ago* (last edited 11 months ago) (8 children)

Disagree. Indeed, I couldn't disagree more strongly.

Instances are not just abstract server nodes in some overly wasteful recreation of some other website. This is the world wide social web as it should have been.

You may as well argue that websites should be indistinguishable from each other.

This isn't Reddit. Full stop. And it's not a drop-in Reddit replacement, either. It's not "Reddit, but different". It's a whole new paradigm in forums and content aggregation. It's very different from centralized social media, and we need to stop dancing around or trying to hide that fact.

It will never get to reach its potential if we decide it needs to be nothing more than a simulacra of what came before it.

[–] [email protected] 11 points 11 months ago

This is the world wide social web as it should have been.

This is my stance too - we took a wrong turn letting initially utopian tech companies create vast eyeball-farming dystopias when the natural progression from forums and blogs is breaking them out of their silos (not building bigger ones) and letting them talk to each other.

This isn’t Reddit. Full stop. And it’s not a drop-in Reddit replacement, either. It’s not “Reddit, but different”. It’s a whole new paradigm in forums and content aggregation. It’s very different from centralized social media, and we need to stop dancing around or trying to hide that fact.

Indeed. It's early days still and the Reddit diaspora has shaped the initial growth but, as it spreads beyond that, it will expand and mutate. Already kbin have a kind of forum/microblogging thing going and it will be interesting to see how things evolve from here. With better moderation tools, I could see people skipping setting up their own forum and blog and just spinning up an instance instead - there are too many advantages to not do it. That'll drag in a more diverse group of people with different needs and requirements that will push development in new directions. I, for one, can't wait to see where this all goes.

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[–] [email protected] 10 points 11 months ago (1 children)

How feasible would it be to have levels of federation? Make it possible for instances to partially-federate (if you're from "your-instan.ce" and its partially-federated with lemmy.world, you don't see lemmy.world stuff in your feeds, but allow browsing and interacting with "https://your-instan.ce/c/[email protected]").

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