If everyone was spread out onto different instances, and communities were based all over the fediverse, the decisions of one instance would be less impactful.
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
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.
Urgh, yeah.
I use the 'official' Jerboa app and the web interface and duuude is it a Hassle to add a sole unknown community!
I'm doing them all for what I know ; pasting different link types into jerboa search, pasting the instance, !first, /c/ ... Going to web UI, doing the same, doing the lemmy.mysite.com/c/other@thatinstance.com or what the correct thing is (I have it somewhere) and obviously it still doesn't work.
For like 30 minutes.
Then it "just works" 😅
It would be great if admins at least (I can see the possible abuse if anyone can force-feed communities to the instance, but well they can today so.. ) can add communities to their instances by some "add-list" the server grabs quickly (I know we can by subbing to them but see above, it sure is not easy). Could be cool to be able to grab a bunch of fun communities, or art communities, or sport communities or whatever someone shares, and just force feed them to your instance.
I thought whitelisting was something along those lines, I sure was surprised 🙂.
Great job though Lemmy Developers, I'm quite sure Lemmy will roam the internet for ever!
It would be great if admins at least (I can see the possible abuse if anyone can force-feed communities to the instance, but well they can today so..) can add communities to their instances (I know we can, by subbing to them but see above, it sure is not easy).
Isn't that how Lemmy's all feed works? If someone else subscribes to an outside community it shows up under everyone's all tab?
Let's be honest, this is partially on Jerboa for being the oldest and most convoluted active Lemmy app.
You might want to ask your instance admin to run this tool to help you: https://github.com/Fmstrat/lcs
Here is the problem, and they already refused to fix it
On the other hand, the way we socialise with strangers inherently benefits from centralisation. There's a good reason everyone will intuitively go to the largest instance: it's where everyone else is.
To alleviate that, you'd need to blur the lines enough for it to no longer be visible even. All communities behave as if they're local and so on.
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.
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.
I don't think the point of the post was to say everybody huddle into 10-user instances. The problem currently is there are maybe 5 or so large instances roughly within the same amount of users, then lemmy.world has 10x the amount of the next largest. I'd like to see communities get more spread out into things like startrek.website but there isn't really a way to do that for the more general communities like Technology, Gaming, etc. because any instance could really have those.
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
Wouldn't be much of a problem if you could export account to a file
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.
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.
think about it relatively
A lot of power within Lemmy.
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.
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.
It's obvious that like mastodon when twitter imploded, not 1% of 1% of 1% of fleeing users actually made it past the registration screen. Maybe Lemmy will get another chance , in 5/10 years
A platform switch takes time, and normally it's a particular community that takes hold. Right now, on Lemmy, it seems to be mostly memes and shit posting that's on the front page. Getting more interesting conversations visible to new users will make the biggest difference.
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.
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.
Hail fellow lemm.ee er!
We really are the best.
It's funny how I made a few Alts just in case. Two of my four accounts are now unusable :')
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.
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.
Couple tools in case anyone is interested:
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.
That's as easy as moving any Reddit community to Lemmy. In other words, basically impossible.
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.
That would be nice. As a regular user, when lemmy.world does something you dislike, like block piracy communities or something, you can simply create a new account and, until something official exists, use LASIM to migrate stuff over. I didn't think about communities though, if you run the biggest community for some topic what do you do. Create another one, link to it from the first one and hope for the best?
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
Would be great if you could set other instances to have a copy of your profile in case your main one disappears.
Lemmy really kicked off when you see the drama you had on Reddit here but with instances.
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.
DISPERSE
SCATTER!
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.
User accounts being key-based/portable is one of the strengths of the nostr protocol and Bluesky/AT Protocol.
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.
Lemmy is built upon the ActivityPub Protocol which has the flaws mentioned above Bluesky is built upon the AtProtocol which to me also looks kinda great https://yewtu.be/watch?v=wJBCpzM1VfM ;- Video that explains the difference (i just watched it minutes ago) https://atproto.com/docs ;-Docs for learning how it works
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
I've got similar ideas, but not entirely the same.
What you call communities would be closer to what I would call content sources / repositories (host servers) plus topic tags. Then instead of consensus (because that's too hard to automate with decent quality results) you'd have communities formed by subscribing to "curation feeds" which pull submissions and comment from all over the network in a similar style.
This would let you easily crosspost and comment to multiple related communities in a network, as well as to yeet bad mods/curators without losing any content or splitting the community (just create a new curation feed and get people to switch). You could similarly choose to have your client mix comment from multiple curation feeds (similar to "multireddits" on reddit).
3 words SINGLE USER INSTANCES
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.
Just go to your average big popular subreddit, check out all the text of all posts and comments they week. That's still a minuscule amount of data. A few megabytes when uncompressed.
And Lemmy won't get to that point of popularity and traffic for a very long time.
And even then, it's an easy problem to solve. Each instance creates a chunk of a day's data, sign it and share it on a bittorrent like protocol. Even nntp massively archaic infrastructure can manage this, it is a piece of cake for Lemmy to do.
🤔 We need an ActivityPub app that is basically just a user account holder that is tied to their IP or MAC address so individuals can carry the same info throughout the fediverse, block instances they personally don't like, and so bans from instances are actually permanent and enforceable.
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.
In principal yes, but requiring people to handle private keys would be a nightmare! Imo what we can and should do is support for transferring accounts between instances, including posts and comments.
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.
The government of the Netherlands has their own Mastodon server since they left Xitter.
government are shit then they would really liked to control it
Depends if the government is shit. Most in the developed world aren't.
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.
I think I might also make a hexbear account.
The problem is that Lemmy is not federated. You can't click this link /c/books and get the whole fediverse book community. Federation dies right there.
See this issue
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.
There's also partial defederation. lemmy.world has just blocked piracy communities while still federated with the rest of the instance, while that decision might not be liked by pirates, we now know this option exists therefore it's also possible to block hate communities without blocking the entire instance.
Has to be done manually, though. Better tools will make this a more appealing option in the future, but for now I unironically think more centralization is the better option just to make the moderation job a little easier. Lord knows it's difficult enough.
If they choose not to federate with anybody, that community is basically dead.
Their recent actions have convinced me to move to another instance
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
Ive signed up for multiple instances, most don't accept new users, or wait for approval which gets denied I assume.
I have accounts on four instances that are all still open for registration. And two did have an approval required but I got it within hours.
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.
I am new here and I don’t even know what an instance is, how to find one for me or why you are mentioning HGTV.
An Instance is just another word for 'server' in lemmy terminology. HDTV is a classic form of media that doesn't involve TCP/IP to watch films and other video content.
think of it as subreddit, and within the subreddit you have other sub-subreddits.
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:
Share this thought here !lemmy_support@lemmy.ml
One issue that came to mind when I tried to re-write this comment to post it on lemmy_support: a post can be made to communities with completely different rules resulting in commenters following the rules of the community they are in, but not the other community the post was sent to. This seems like a pretty big issue for moderation.
I do still see value in a general landing page for new lemmy users, but this whole thing has really shown me that it should not be anything like this. .ml and .world have done a lot of work becoming the "big" instances and now they have a taste for censorship (and have most the users) I doubt it will get better.
I don't know how federation works in detail, but I really hope it's like torrenting where peers introduce each other. That way if one person decides to defederate with an instance it's a decision that only applies to him. If anybody else is federated then the connection information is available to all. i.e. the network heals around damage.
I have no problem with someone constructing a bubble for themselves, but they don't get to say what's in my bubble.
well they just told 100k people what will be in their bubble....
Join a local instance, and then don't forget to donate to it
I'm doing my part!
done that...
Lemmy world has like 3500 active users a day. That’s not large. That’s going to be the base for a small decent instance in a year.
Is there a list somewhere
I assume op runs an instance, then?
Fortunately, they don't need to! There are dozens of small open instances, and joining any of them helps the current centralization situation.