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Thoughts on Lemmy/Yiffit? (yiffit.net)

submitted 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

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We've been here a few months now, how is everybody feeling about it?

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[–] [email protected] 9 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Overall I have good feelings about it. It didn't grow as much as I thought it would, and I'm very disappointed in the furry community for staying on reddit, but we're past the hard part of momentum and I expect consistent growth from now on. I find it very odd that the furry community didn't transition to Lemmy, since they're everywhere on Mastodon and furries are always there first for the new/techy/left-leaning things. Whenever reddit does the next user-hostile thing we'll be more prepared.

Lemmy itself is very slick, and I really like how fast navigation is. Video support could be better in the web UI, and multi-communities would be great, but otherwise I can't think of many things that I really need. The comment sorting is especially great, where old comments trend to the bottom even if they're heavily-upvoted. That means that specific comments don't dominate discussion forever, and it keeps a variety of topics active under a post. On reddit you'd almost always see a single comment (probably a stupid pun or something) with 90k upvotes and 700 replies underneath, and nothing else in the thread would get any attention.

Moderation/defederation needs the most work. The big instances have defederated from each other, and Yiffit got defederated from lemmy.ml which is really brutal since there's a lot of big communities there. We need more fine-grained defederation procedures, like defederating from specific communities so that users don't get swept up in the mix. Communities also need to spread out onto more servers - Lemmy.world is making some questionable decisions (new TOS, admin abuse, blocking archive.org links) and there's no power to stop them since they own a good chunk of the Lemmyverse. Thankfully Pawb.social hasn't been targeted by anyone yet, and Pawb/Yiffit aren't defederating from any big servers themselves which stops half the problem.

We also need more posts/topics, and I'm not very good at this part. I don't know where to find OC/new content to x-post to Lemmy, so I only find external content if a friend sends it to me. We have many people with a lot of knowledge ready to comment on posts, but the double-edged sword is that everyone already knows everything and no one needs any help. A big part of reddit's strength was the archive of questions and answers by real humans - we could use more casual/novice users to balance this out.

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

I find it very odd that the furry community didn’t transition to Lemmy, since they’re everywhere on Mastodon and furries are always there first for the new/techy/left-leaning things. Whenever reddit does the next user-hostile thing we’ll be more prepared.

Lemmy, especially lemmy.world was very rough the first few weeks. Constant downtime and stale posts. There are still a lot of stale posts. as for Mastodon, I actually think I see more talk about bluesky these days than Mastodon. That's a different can of worms. Federated sites are both a blessing and a Curse. With reddit, there is one site and you get everything and one experience. The fediverse can be quite confusing. Your "all" is different for each instance. If your on Yiffit, you can't brows local on pawb. If you don't have an account on pawb, but have one on yiffit, its hard to find all the content as not all communities are listed. So before you can even interact you need to know that you have to join an instance, and you have to decide which one to join. And even then, you might have multiple accounts across instances just to see everything.

On reddit you’d almost always see a single comment (probably a stupid pun or something) with 90k upvotes and 700 replies underneath, and nothing else in the thread would get any attention.

On the other side, sometimes that top comment is top for a reason. Although nothing here is big enough to cause good info to drop off... yet.

Yiffit got defederated from lemmy.ml which is really brutal since there’s a lot of big communities there.

We need more fine-grained defederation procedures, like defederating from specific communities so that users don’t get swept up in the mix.

I don't know much about AP, but yea, the ability to chose to defederate from communities, instances, or their users, or any combination thereof, would probably be a net positive change. Although it was my original understanding that defederation was a one way thing, yiffit would still get data, just couldn't send. I guess that's not how it actually works.

Communities also need to spread out onto more servers

I've generally noticed the same thing, the network effect and fediverse confusion is quite a strong force.

We also need more posts/topics, and I’m not very good at this part.

I'm doing what I can. A few things combined to make me decide to start participating. I have been doing 2 posts a week and commenting when something comes to mind.

I don’t know where to find OC/new content to x-post to Lemmy

The gallary sites, twitter are a good place. If your talking about more general, there are some interesting mailing lists, hackernews, blogs. If you find it interesting, someone else will too.

We have many people with a lot of knowledge ready to comment on posts, but the double-edged sword is that everyone already knows everything and no one needs any help.

I think the bigger issues are that its just harder to find the niche and ask communities [email protected]. Also some of them just went to matrix. You still have to deal with the network effect of reddit, and a lot of those communities are still active there.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 1 year ago

re Fediverse

Fediverse is a little confusing but not unnecessarily so. It's a one-time hurdle that is the same for every Fediverse site, and if decentralized is the future I don't think it's unreasonable to have this small learning curve in exchange for all the benefits. As for Lemmy specifically, we'll likely need improvements to how instance community discovery works. For whatever reason, NSFW communities stream across "All" but they're hidden when you try to look at an instance's communities directly. This inconsistency should be resolved, and ideally NSFW instances would just show up on the communities page by default instead of whatever Puritan slant they're trying to do now. Lemmy.ml (owned by developers of Lemmy itself) defederated Yiffit solely because there are NSFW communities here - the horror!

sometimes that top comment is top for a reason

This is a good point. We may need to tweak on this to find a good balance, or at least have good UX for switching between top/active comments frequently

Although it was my original understanding that defederation was a one way thing, yiffit would still get data, just couldn’t send. I guess that’s not how it actually works.

TMK it's both ways, and from looking at Yiffit's feed directly I don't see any lemmy.ml anymore. If a defederated server could send data they would be empowered to harass your users. If a defederated server could receive data they could stalk your users (and it would be confusing when your users try to reply but it doesn't go anywhere). I guess that's why it's bi-directional.

I think the bigger issues are that its just harder to find the niche and ask communities

Community discovery does need a push, especially when you're on a smaller server since you don't even see communities that people on your server have not subscribed to. If not many people are on your server, the odds that any of them are going out of their way to find new communities to bring back to your server is very low.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (1 children)

I'm pretty much always a lurker (or at least I was on reddit). For some unknown reason it takes me considerable effort to write a message. I'll probably continue being a lurker on lemmy as well. On the Lemmy.ml defederation issue, guess maybe I should move to pawb.social if it doesn't have any defederation against it from other popular instances? (and it can still see nsfw communities here on yiffit?). Idk if this is how it's supposed to work with lemmy? (federation is what makes lemmy "good" in terms of content flowing & amassing popularity (instead of just an instance gaining popularity), so defederation == doom?). I thought defederation was a very serious thing that would require more than just one or two bad apples? I cant imagine it being an issue with NSFW? (that stuff is like, handled separately right? there's a system in place? eg you don't see any communities that are marked NSFW if you're on a SFW instance?. I'm imagining defederation as more of a tool against "mass harassment" or a group of people that have very divergent morals / behaviour / ideas from others, forming their own instance together) I know next to nothing about this event beyond what i've read in this chat though. As a dumb user I just feel FOMO if there's good content out there I'm missing out on 🤔.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 1 year ago

I've posted more in the last 3 months here, than in 8 years on reddit. I'm really trying to be more active. The more you post the easier it gets. For me, its less scary posting on a small instance.

lemmy.ml is the instance run by the developers of lemmy. They have very strong feelings about certain things and one is a distaste for NSFW. You'll notice that other than lemmynsfw, you have to log in to see NSFW. lemmy.ml doesn't allow NSFW. Them and lemmy.world have some pretty big de-federation lists. The idea behind federation is to have lots of small sites each with their own communities and the sites themselves can talk to each other. People can decide what instance they like most and join there, or join a personal instance. That has issues with discovery though.

The admin(s) of an instance have complete control over de federation. If @[email protected] wanted to, he could decide to de-federate from everyone, I trust he won't ever do that.

If you have lots of small instances, the threat of de-federation is much less than if you only have a few large instances.

If you have FOMO, there is nothing that stops you from creating accounts on other instances. You can see some other discussion about federation issues at https://yiffit.net/post/3321843