What instances are people here using? I recently decided to give Lemmy a try. From what I had been seeing I was planning to sign up to BeeHaw, only to find that they had defederated two of the largest instances due to their lax sign-up policies. I can understand their reasoning and it looks like it was relatively well handled, but it still makes that instance impractical. I ended up going to VLemmy as it was one of the recommended ones, seems fairly general purpose and doesn't seem to have much "baggage" (political or otherwise).
They say the instance you choose doesn't matter that much, but if even large instances are going to start defederating then there is a kind of Keynesian beauty contest to choosing the right instance - you might not care what an instance looks like if you're just using it as a gateway to the fediverse, but you need to choose an instance that doesn't repulse the other instances too much.
Beehaw is a bit dramatic. I'm part of one of the most active lemmy instances, It only just brought in upstream lemmy as it forked 2 years ago when the community was created, because lemmy wasn't ready.
Beehaw has some weird ideas about harassment and hate speech. Essentially civility and concern-troll like behavior cranked up to the extreme.
The instance I'm on is a bit rowdy but has a tight culture and something like 600 average users online at once, 20kish accounts, and a very active banhammer to boot.
We take things like transphobia, homophobia, racism, etc very seriously. The mods have zero patience for wreckers and "debate me" types. As a result, we find historical figures such as John Brown very admirable and hold strong opinions on what should happen to slaveholders and their ilk. Beehaw doesn't seem to like that.
The thing to understand about this defederation drama is that the federated system don't create these stresses, they expose them in a visible manner.
Reddit has all these problems too, as well as any other big site like Facebook, etc. The solution there is a one-size-fits-all policy that generally, surprise surprise, conforms whatever the dominant culture of the company that created it is. I mean, what else would it be, right? No sarcasm. Then further modulated by the commercial interests created by the advertising-funded nature of the large-scale community. And especially because of that, the desire is typically to just shovel any conflicts under the carpet.
But these pressures are still there. They often seem to explode at some point. Reddit may or may not be seeing that now.
This is why I remain unsure and unconvinced that these one-size-fits-all communities can function as communities for the long haul. There's this intrinsic build up of stresses that will eventually overwhelm the system. Clearly they can function for a decade or two, since they have, but can they go beyond that? Yeah, in Internet time that may seem like forever, but it really isn't all that long or stable on human time scales.
You simply can not shovel the whole of humanity into one "community" and expect it to work.
>As a result, we find historical figures such as John Brown very admirable and hold strong opinions on what should happen to slaveholders and their ilk. Beehaw doesn't seem to like that.
What does this even mean in the context of a social media site?
I am also curious. The main reason I haven't even tried figuring Lemmy out is because I figured it'd be exclusively full of "free speech" people, like other Reddit alternatives.
I think there's room for both... I'm also pretty much okay with judicious use of individual block buttons, as well as add-ons that will allow shared/convention block lists. I generally lean towards a platform being open (source and speech), and letting individuals filter. Of course, that would leave opportunity for someone to create solutions. Site bans also happen to/from some systems.
I also find that many people are way too quick to label, and will find myself tending towards that as well. In practice, I try to keep a conversation open and civil so long as personal insults aren't flying. I am human, however and will also close conversations if I reach a point where I, myself, am likely to slip. I feel it's a fair approach.
I do miss when online communities were mostly local BBSes where you will meet, see and interact with locals that will have differing views from you. That doesn't mean there aren't toxic personalities, but only that a little bit of understanding can at least go a long way in terms of community and society. I feel that, in terms of politics at least, negotiation from opposing views is supposed to be part of what makes it worth. The general ill feelings towards anything that is "other" is disappointing.
With a prior warning that a lot of people aren't big fans, and the instance hasn't formally federated yet, it's hexbear.net. Far left with specific rules against sectarian infighting, wrecking, etc.
It's generally a really positive place, a lot of well read folks who can back up their views. Not pure shitposting a la genZedong.
Not a fun place to go if you want a debate off the bat.
It was originally a diaspora for /r/chapotraphouse after they were banned for "promoting violence" after basically saying "slave owners deserve to be killed", which like, yeah. It was banned at the same time as /r/the_donald which really felt like a "if we ban one extreme, gotta ban the other". If you ask me, the sins of the two weren't equal but we did a ton of brigading so we sorta deserved it anyway. Diaspora split between discord and hexbear. The latter has two daily megathreads that get more interaction than most lemmys see in a week.
It will be federating soon, lemmygrad to start with and most likely some hobby and special interest lemmys soon.
Then shouldn't people like us run our own instances, which then just act like an aggregator and wrapper around our single user account?
Or am I federating TOO MUCH in a way that's hard to explain to new people?
Because in my head... Each subreddit/community maps almost perfectly to 1 instance, and each technically savvy user also maps almost perfectly to 1 instance. That feels right to me...
> each technically savvy user also maps almost perfectly to 1 instance
Today, nothing speaks against that. But if this proliferates, I'm predicting white lists to become more common on "sensitive" instances like Beehaw.
It's just like Email today. Sure you can run your own Email server. But expect to sometimes end up in the spam folder of users with Gmail accounts. You can thank the spammers for that, and the trolls if that ever becomes common on Lemmy.
You're basically right. The devs have explicitly said that the ideal is for every user to run their own instance.that said, while it's not hard to run an instance it's well beyond the level of effort most people are ever going to spend.
>while it's not hard to run an instance it's well beyond the level of effort most people are ever going to spend.
This. And it's not just lemmy either. Mastodon, pixelfed, diaspora and other fediverse-capable platforms are a pain in the ass to set up and self host.
As a technical guy, I've set up most of these and while it's certainly possible to do, the hoi polloi don't have the knowledge/skills to do so and aren't interested in gaining such skills.
RPM/DEB/etc. packages with set up scripts and windows installers would make a world of difference, but instead we have 'curl <url> |bash' and docker containers.
While I'm not really too upset about the great unwashed being able to access the Fediverse (I wouldn't mind if it were mostly the technically minded, but I can just choose who to follow to get that), the current situation does little to improve the network effects of the Fediverse.
IMHO, the situation is similar to a scenario posited in another discussion[0] about devops, where developers throw their code "over the wall" to let the ops folks handle deployment/operations.
Except the "ops" folks in this case are mostly non-technical end users. With the results being pretty much what you'd might expect. And more's the pity.
I love Sandstorm.io, but each instance seems to act as an island of users / apps, by design.
...I wish it had thrived enough to have Federated Apps integrated with it intelligently.
I love how the App Store works on Sandstorm.io and in Linode (for initial set-up, anyway).
I also hope that this stuff gets integrated with something like Tailscale... So if I run an instance, I can see which individual users or apps on other instances are allowed to talk to my apps on my instance, and it's all end-to-end encrypted...
I continue to hope for the fediverse to do well!
And yes, people will subscribe to Allowlists and Denylists, and that's not great, but people are terrible...
I'd thought about running a vanity instance with me being the only user. I can then sub to who I want/where I want as long as my instance isn't blocked... though I do feel that block/clean lists should be at the individual level and not generally at the instance level and easier to share in sub-communities.
I prefer blocking at individual level(s) as well over platform blocking, even for what I see myself. YMMV though.
I think you'll end up using a lot of storage space; in my totally uninformed understanding, you would end up storing the full contents of any community/sub that you follow.
Yes but the storage used by that instance is shared among 1000 users, rather than all devoted to just one user. Theoretically there would be a fair amount of duplication and therefore less net resource use.
> They say the instance you choose doesn't matter that much
I would way that's not true.
Mostly speaking from a Mastodon perspective, but should be true for Lemmy/Kbin too. Healthy small ones with active moderation should be a good choice as they have a lesser chance of being defederated. Many smaller instances recently defederated mastodon.social because of spam. You should also choose one that doesn't defederate other instances left and right (if that's what you're not after).
Spam is one factor, but biases is another that I don't see mentioned often enough. I'm on mastodon.social, see zero spam, and reading through discussions of past bans it looks as if smaller admins banned it because of tiny vocal minorities that might as well be individually dealt with.
I also signed up to another instance (which I am not going to mention) and to hachyderm.io (which nominally caters more to techies, and where I'm essentially lurking) and the local timeline is full of self-promotion and activism. Better cat pics, but I'm struggling to find good discussions. The former instance was just full of idealistic randos chanting as Twitter went belly-up, and although it was all "positive", it was very much the Clockwork Orange kind of positive...
Regarding Lemmy, right now I'm on the fence.
The defederation of Lemmy.world means I can't follow the 3D Printing community there (as well as a couple of others catering to makers and electronics), and Mastodon integration isn't working, so I'm really tempted to just subscribe via RSS or set up a private Lemmy/Kbin instance just to follow the things I'm interested in (which seems wasteful and overly complex).
Anyway, my opinion right now is that the bubble syndrome is really strong in the Fediverse.
To me this highlights my top issue with fediverse replacements for sites like Twitter & Reddit.
I always want to be able to see everything. I do not care a single bit about the "local timeline" of my Mastodon instance (also hachyderm.io here). I have no desire to choose a Lemmy server based on its population. The thing I like most about sites like Reddit & Twitter is that they provide me with boundless one stop shopping, and I can choose to ignore things I don't want to see at any particular point of time.
I think a better model might be that there is one central raw feed, that is universal but that instances just prefilter it for you. That way you can have the raw sewage with spam, or you can view a sensitized version that filters for content, or trigger warnings, or even just users. So it's like a single DB table with many views. So EdgeLord420_69 can see and even respond to comments by PrincessSnowflake... but PrincessSnowflake won't see EdgeLord420_69 comments because PrincessSnowflake is using a view that uses a user whitelist of known safe respectful commentators.
Yeah this is a solution that would remove my own complaint as then I could choose an instance that either has no filter or is only applying something like standard spam filtering. I don't really care if other people don't have the ability to see what *I* have to say, I just want the ability to see what *they* say.
Same here. I was immediately turned off from Mastodon and even more from Lemmy by my initial interaction with them. As soon as I tried to get involved, I was required to pick from a list of instances with weird-looking descriptions and make myself a member of one of them. That's a lot more commitment than Reddit or Twitter asks me for, and it was enough to stop me from proceeding.
> reading through discussions of past bans it looks as if smaller admins banned it because of tiny vocal minorities that might as well be individually dealt with.
I’ve ceased looking at the local feed (instead of people I follow), because it always seemed to be defederation drama.
This mostly seemed to be “This other large instance has one person we don’t like and won’t impose _our_ moderation standards, so we are defederating”. Or, poor you if you wanted to follow Doctors Without Borders because a news organisation your instance doesn’t like joined it.
Running your own instance seems to be the only way to avoid this, but Mastodon doesn’t seem to be lightweight and I don’t know how sustainable it is for e.g. _everyone_ to do that.
> Running your own instance seems to be the only way to avoid this
The problem with this is that running your own instance is also seen as inherently suspicious by the same communities, see the comments about Pleroma by the admins of many medium size instances - because it's easy to set up it's often set up by people avoiding bans, but they miss that easy to set up is a factor that helps everyone.
Wasn't this the expected outcome of federated social media? More echo chambers for ideologues. It happens within Reddit too. You'd have two sub-reddits of the same kind with one having another word to differentiate it from the other. Often times, split through politics.
The only spam I ever get on Mastodon is crypto DMs from mastodon.social; my instance hasn't defederated it (actually, I don't believe defederating .social is very common; it's too big to fail to an extent) but you can see the temptation.
What is the practical effect on the user of an instance being "defederated?"
People compare these federated social platforms to email, as there are many email providers and they can all exchange mail with each other. But there's no concept of being "defederated" in email. Or is there? I just don't understand the term.
There is, it's just not talked about much. It is incredibly hard to run your own email server today because even if you follow all of the rules the big players will often refuse to accept your emails (i.e. defederate your email server).
That’s a very persistent myth. I run my own email server and my mail gets delivered fine. There are a few things you need to do, yes, but it’s not “incredibly hard”.
It's not that doing the list of things is hard. It's that even if you do everything correctly, sometimes your mail will get dropped anyway for no explicable reason.
> What is the practical effect on the user of an instance being "defederated?"
The entire instance is sort of "shadow banned". Everyone on it can post, but no one will ever read it (except for the few dozen people on that instance). Since forums have some minimum number of users/readers that if the number falls below this people just give up and go away, it will be dead within a month.
Not only is it like being shadow-banned, but you get to be shadow-banned for what the other people on the instance are posting.
The Fediverse might be a good model for a Twitter-alike (it's debatable), but I don't think it's a good model at all for a reddit-alike.
Conversations aren't meant to always be civil. If you enforce that harshly, it turns into a place to post cat pictures.
So the likely fallout of that would seem to me be that if a "federated Reddit" ever got off the ground:
- Over time, a few instances will grow to dominate and nobody will defederate them because they are too big and you'd lose too much/make too many people mad. These will be the Gmail, iCloud, Hotmail, etc. instances.
- As they become larger, instances will be motivated to follow established politics of the big instances so they don't get cut off.
- Small instances will exist as echo chambers for certain unpopular points of view and mostly none of the big instances will federate them. Porn, Nazis, KKK, Anarchists, religious extremists, etc.
- Possible large bifurcations may develop, e.g. "Fox News/Breitbart" vs. "CNN/Huffington"; each has large followings but they would probably not federate each other.
- New users who just want a place to do normal Reddit-like stuff will be confused by all of this.
Defederation in email would be a.example putting in a block where you can't receive email from users on b.example. With email this pretty much only happens because of spamming, so it would be very surprising for, say, Hotmail to block Gmail.
What I don't get is that this seems like something you would want to do for yourself as a user, not something you'd want your instance/server admin doing due to whatever drama of the week is going on.
> What I don't get is that this seems like something you would want to do for yourself as a user
Speaking as an admin, if a server starts sending me hundreds of spams an hour, it's going to get blocked because I don't want to spend (my limited) resources on spams, much less push the handling of that down to my users.
The email equivalent of being "defederated" would be if Microsoft and Google both decided to start dropping all mail from your domain sent to any mailboxes they run.
I'm on Beehaw, and I like the way the defederation was handled. Here's the latest from them: https://beehaw.org/post/594843 You can see some positive comments from users about the change and a transparent road map for re-federating.
To put it another way, would you want to join an instance that isn't trying (or is failing to) contain harassment and other forms of bad actors? That's the challenge the de-fed is addressing: https://beehaw.org/post/567170
Seems like beehaw is a very pro-censorship platform, and everything that social media should not be, so it will be a hard pass for me. Social media is a big enough echo chamber
Edit:
Now having read their "What is Beehaw" Post [1], I can clearly see I was correct and would NEVER want to be a part of that oppressive community, That post is fill with political ideology, plainly false statements, and mental contractions... wow. just wow
Yeah, I saw that and don’t mind them defederating. I don’t want to interact with those people…
But I’m really glad it exists. I’m glad they have a space for themselves. Glad I can (hopefully) find a space for myself, and that we are no forced into co-existing. I might even recommend Beehaw to some extended acquaintances… but it’s fairly anti-me.
Anyone recommend something like Something Awful from it’s glory days? I don’t mind trolls and saltiness and edginess, just don’t want spam.
> Yeah, I saw that and don’t mind them defederating. I don’t want to interact with those people…
But what a complete farce this whole fediverse is. Any instance with any traction is going to attract people that you, I, or even the majority are not going to wish to interact with. Hell there's plenty on this site. And beehaw sounds like a community I have no interest in associating with.
> and that we are no forced into co-existing.
Not sure how simply federating servers forces coexistence.
Defederating is such a ludicrously blunt and ultimately ineffective moderation tool.
It isn't trying to be a platform, its trying to be a community in the same sense that a church or a softball league is a community. That takes handling things differently and they can afford doing that because its a federated network where someone who doesn't want to be OPPRESSED can just go to a different instance.
> Our goal is to create a platform in which nice people will want to stick around so that the experience is less toxic than other websites and because of such it needs to resemble an offline community - the rules must be more open to interpretation and the way the rules are interpreted needs to be a community effort.
> We want this to be a community - this means that discussions about behavior should organically arise. When someone violates a rule they aren’t banned immediately, but rather reminded that they need to behave appropriately. In the offline world, this might resemble a friend asking you about how you treated their friend, a pastor pulling you aside and talking to you about how you’ve seemed on edge lately, or security asking you not to vape inside their establishment.
Fair, I shouldn't have hinged on my comment on that as I read some amount of ideological neutrality into the word "platform" that they apparently don't.
I don’t think they are calling “rationalism” itself bad, but there is a fairly large contingent of people who call themselves “rationalists” who don’t show the slightest hint of self introspection or rational thought. They see everyone else as driven by sloppy or emotional thinking and completely miss that their own arguments and reasoning are sloppy or emotion driven.
The first step to being a true rationalist is to realize you’re as vulnerable to cognitive biases and emotion driven thinking as everyone else, and focus on your own thought processes first and foremost.
Being a rationalist isn’t about lording over other people, it’s about trying to make your own thought as clear and rational as possible, and that requires challenging your own deeply held beliefs and opinions constantly.
Most people I see who call themselves rationalists aren’t that.
The term "rationalism" is defined earlier in the linked comment. I don't believe it's being used with the typical definition. This quote needs context.
Every instance is filled with "political ideology". Its just that the instances you prefer do not specify it as explicitely. But saying ''we dont censor hate speech'' is just as much politics as ''we censor hate speech''.
I didn't find the original post so bad... it surely sounds like someone a bit unstable, guilty of their own existence... but not bad, specially when you start reading comments and learn that some people are so supportive of the idea of "being nice" that they suggest the author should fork Lemmy and move Beehaw to their own platform because the Lemmy creators have different ideology than themselves :D omg, talk about being intolerant.
Agreed. This is a strength of federation. Pick an instance that defines the term the same way you do. Communities with strong usage guidelines, like HN, can feel very safe to use.
HN does not ask the user to dance to be let in. Rules and guidelines are stated, users are freely let in, then moderation is reactionary rather than proactive. Beehaw takes the worst parts of mob mentality and label it as a positive thing. I'm sure it's a cozy club, but they will not be learning anything they aren't already wholly convinced of.
> Pick an instance that defines the term the same way you do.
And this is why the idea of the fediverse (outside of a content blind common carrier type scenario) is DOA. Once you get outside spam and widely illegal shit, defining the "terms the same way you do" has nearly as many possibilities as users, and the overlap of that Venn diagram does not exist - so the natural evolution is just a bunch of tiny instances none of which want to federate with another.
The only purpose these new fediverse systems seem to have is for disjoint communities to increase availability - in one of the clumsiest ways possible and at the wrong level of abstraction.
I actually dislike the moderation here, in some instances it is extremely biased. I can remember an example of a post and discussion around tech, feminism, and how much of society has looped around to benefit women, and any comment that wasn’t overly positive on feminism immediately got detached from the post for “being inciting”.
After requested clarification, it was explained that this was done because it is a contentious topic that has high likelihood of getting heated, but moderation was completely blind to how allowing only one visible perspective on an issue completely distorts how a community’s stance at large on that issue is perceived.
HN is more of a case of “least worst” rather than “best”, for me.
To me this is a weakness; it requires me to read between the lines of a whole horde of different instances' statements of principles and try to make an informed decision based on that. Many people don't have that kind of time/interest/inclination, they just want to be able to read some discussions.
I’m one of many to run my own instance, letting me be in control of who I federate with (though there’s of course the risk of being defederated myself). It’s not for the faint-hearted, but doable, and doesn’t require much in the way of hardware (for me, a Raspberry Pi CM4 with 8GB of memory).
I’d be willing to answer any questions people here might have.
I am also interested in self hosting my own lemmy instance just for myself and my close friends. Can you share the details of your setup? Do you host your RasPi at home?
> risk of being defederated
I was not aware of this risk. How does this defederation work?
I’m running OpenBSD 7.3 and manually compiled Lemmy 0.17.4 from git (I plan to eventually submit it as a port). I’m running lemmy-server and lemmy-ui behind relayd to ensure both are accessible (this is a bit finicky, refer to the nginx config in the official Docker container to see how everything needs to be forwarded to make federation work). Lemmy-server (the backend) is a single Rust binary and lemmy-ui (the frontend) is a single-page web application whose server side runs under NodeJS. The PostgreSQL instance that holds the data runs on the same Pi. I’ve not yet installed pict-rs (which is what Lemmy uses to host images).
Rust, PostgreSQL and NodeJS are all from OpenBSD’s ports.
I admit that this isn’t for everybody, so most will want to run the official Docker container.
> Do you host your RasPi at home?
Yeah, it’s in a closet at home. With Lemmy running it’s still perfectly usable for the kind of hobbyist development I otherwise use it for (I may eventually want to switch to a dedicated server).
> How does this defederation work?
Any one instance is totally free to block anyone else. Plus I’m guessing that eventually, as the Fediverse grows, smaller nodes are going to be blocked entirely to keep spam under control.
An instance can block another instance from federating with it. So if I'm on instance "b" and it defederates instance "a", I can no longer see any of instance "a"'s communities or comments.
I'm on Feddit UK (https://feddit.uk/) as I realised that my primary use of Reddit was for the UK-based communities (DIY UK, UKPersonalFinance, Ask UK, UK Politics, Casual UK etc.)
It feels a bit sparse at the moment, but I'm hoping it grows steadily and not too much! :)
I think the easiest way to deal with that is to register a new handle directly through the instance hosting the community you want to participate into. I think participating in the community beats federation and having one handle for every instance. I don't think users care about federation.
You will not be let into Beehaw with this attitude, an attitude of "I'm a normal person with no specific intentions", or with any stated intention other than what is prescribed.
They defederated mastodon.art(?) recently and then te-enabled it, and the drama of (thousands?) of broken follows is still playing out on my timeline. I have no way to ascertain who is “right”, but am worried about guardrails and processes to prevent single individuals from doing (or triggering) the same…
As a Fediverse user, I don't even care about these instances. What I am looking for is the communities to join, some handle to follow, but those are harder to find ;( I won't switch to Lemmy as a long time Friendica user, that kinda breaks the point of Fediverse
Needing to think about instances and having to create legends of features they support already dooms widespread adoption, but I suppose this can be fine. Small communities and spaces can be a benefit, though they'll be heavily filter-bubbled towards the tech/nerd crowd.
Shame we don't live in a world where Reddit somehow turned into non-profit for the common good like Wikipedia before it monopolized forum culture and now wants to squeeze users for profit.
Yeah having to worry about instances is already a fail. You should be able to search and join a "community" and the instance shouldn't even matter for the end-user. If the community / topic / "subreddit" you want to join does not exist, then you can spin up your own instance to host it, but until then instances should not even be a concern.
Exactly, each instance should have been separate communities tied via a “front page” that can also be self-hosted, using RSS to aggregate from each instanced community. Not multiple instances each with multiple similar communities that only serves to fracture an already minority of users.
Yes a non-profit reddit would have been great, but not sure it would have made it this far. And probably couldn't have gone that route after it was acquired early on by Conde Nast in 2006.
Small email providers are doomed, though. If they don't have an address from their ISP, just about everybody just gets a GMail account, or ProtonMail if they're more privacy focused.
I'd like to host my own mail but it's not worth it anymore thanks to spammers.
Are they? I'm seeing self-hosted Postfix as the most common mail server in scans. For free, personal email hosting I agree but that's just a fraction of the market.
For very general reasons small things outnumber big things. In the case of services this tends to mean that most users are using one of a very small set of providers despite the many smaller providers outnumbering the few big ones.
To your point: this conversation has pretty much convinced me to stop trying to figure Lemmy out and just hope Tildes pans out. I wanted to be a Lemmy adopter, but from an inability to sign-in and a complete disinterest in figuring out who is defederating from who (and why and what that means for me as a user) is giving me an allergic reaction to using it myself.
Yup I agree, plus right now it seems to be people that love internet drama.Drama of defederating and federating. I think to some people it's like a highschool clique that they get to run and it's just so hard to give a fuck about
Is anyone able to sign up on any Lemmy instance. If I try to sign up, the sign up button just turns into a spinning wheel which keeps spinning for ever. It does not seem to be load issue. When I click sign up, the browser does not seem to send any request to the server either except for a request to "symbols.svg". Is the sign up button even working?
It's probably a problem with your auto generated password.
Passwords can't be longer than 20char. It's a bug. Also don't enter an email when trying to join initially, if you can. The UI waits for the email to send before returning. Another known bug.
Self plug: come join on https://reddthat.com. We currently don't have email requirements, or any "forms" to fill out before you join.
There are plenty of rough edges, that the community is finding.
> Sorry, this is supposed to be a viable alternative to Reddit?
It is an alternative that removes a problem that Reddit users were facing. Lack of Control. It gives control back to the users. I wouldn't say it's perfect but if a person doesn't want a company being completely in control of everything relating to that platform. The fediverse is that solution
The vast majority of casual users don't care. They want something that works and doesn't get in their way with weird bullshit. If you want lemmy to be something other than a self-filtered community of misfits and outcasts, you need to make it convenient and easy to use/grok for casual users.
Based on your reply, it's clear that lemmy will never be anything other than an afterthought.
> Based on your reply, it's clear that lemmy will never be anything other than an afterthought.
What is your personal gripe against Lemmy? Lemmy is a FOSS project developed by volunteers. The instances are run by volunteers for fun. It may become something or may not become anything. But the people developing and maintaining Lemmy will have fun regardless, I'm sure.
And all that hard work and fun is offered as a gift to you and me if we want to join one of their instances. You and I don't have to. But that option is there as a gift. Why are you so angry with this gift? If you don't like it, don't use it!
I don't think anyone else cares about what you care about either. Get over yourself! People develop projects. They have fun. Users find the tools that work for them. Nobody really appointed you as the person to worry about what options users have. Users are doing fine looking for options that work for them. They will try out Lemmy. Lemmy may improve or it might not and users may find something else. That's the way the FOSS world works.
Like I am not going to join Lemmy because I don't like the UI/UX issues of Lemmy and I also don't like how communities are dependent on specific instances. If the instance goes down or rogue, the community is affected. But that doesn't mean I am going to disparage their efforts which they are putting in to serve their own needs. If I was so motivated to improve the condition of their UI/UX, I will send pull requests, not talk about it. Talk is cheap!
This is a volunteer-driven FOSS project for christ's sake! Nobody is pretending anything about that!
Lemmy is what it is. Why is it on Lemmy to be what millions of Redditors want as an alternate to Reddit? Your reply seems so hostile when all Lemmy did is exist.
This isn't a VC startup. This isn't even funded i believe. Why the hostility?
> When our open source grant from NLNet runs out at the end of this year, we will have to switch to full community funding, probably via yearly funding drives. Currently we only have two full-time devs, @nutomic@lemmy.ml and I, but could potentially add more to our little worker coop as we grow.
> For the past three years dessalines and I have been funded to work on Lemmy full-time by generous support from the NLnet foundation. These donations are paid out when we implement certain new features. But now we are busy answering questions, reviewing pull requests and urgentlyfixing problems. That means we are unable to work on the milestones agreed with NLnet, and won’t receive payments from them. We are increasingly reliant on user donations to pay our bills. These donations currently add up to 1500 Euros per month, which is not even enough to pay minimum wage for the two of us. Hopefully more users can consider donating, so that we can put our full attention to making Lemmy better for everyone, and possibly add more developers to our worker co-op in the future.
1) People have been gathering around the idea of moving to lemmy (see the Star Trek subreddit for example), resulting in a number of posts over the past week here about it
2) My general frustration with FOSS projects having zero interest in good UX/UI design, resulting in a lack of prioritization for basic stuff like this
Like, if Lemmy has no interest in being a viable option to most people, then fine. People just need to stop pretending that it is.
> Like, if Lemmy has no interest in being a viable option to most people, then fine. People just need to stop pretending that it is.
Sure, but i think viable is in the eye of the beholder. In this case it's bleeding edge software not even 1.0 yet, with a massive influx of sudden, demanding users, and no dedicated employees or income (i think). I'd counter that people need to set their expectations accordingly.
For those people unable to deal with reality on this subject Reddit still exists. Stay on it if you want VC polish and the funding that requires. No one is out here making purposefully bad software.
Your frustrations seem better spent on individuals arguing everyone move to Lemmy than it is Lemmy (devs) directly. Stay on Reddit, it sounds like you prefer the VC experience. There's nothing wrong with that.
The FOSS devs are just doing the best they can with the time and resources they have.
I noticed there's a web socket connection and when you submit the info goes there (not a separate request). Then the client gets something about a captcha and the spinner spins forever.
I think if all images were hosted not on my infra it would be fine. I am not aware of any laws that forbid sharing information about weed.
But it would need to be heavily moderated. There are already some "trees" communities. Subscribing to them from our instance I wouldn't have a problem with
Edit: position: no, unless we get other moderators and admins we can trust. Currently it's just 2 people doing admin n moderation. Having a community like that may be a lot more involved that I would want to be.
Sure, but why would the code ever do anything that could result in failures of longer passwords? I'm struggling to think of a mechanism that could do that inadvertently. You almost have to do .length don't you?
Try signing up on kbin.social. It's not Lemmy but an entirely different piece of software, but fully interoperable with Lemmy thanks to ActivityPub. So you can view and interact with Kbin posts from Lemmy and the other way around.
I couldn't sign up or even find the sign up button for any of the recommended instances or through the android app. I eventually found a sign up option by navigating to a post and trying to leave a comment which prompted me to sign up. I filled in the requested info and the sign up button didn't do anything or show an error.
I tried again using view desktop site (on Firefox Android) and then it worked but still anything but a smooth intuitive process for now it seems.
As far as I understand, this is related to a very inefficient implementation with Web Sockets (probably why you don't see an additional request). They're trying to get rid of that as soon as possible is my understanding, so things should get better.
What helped in my case: Picking another username. It's possible that somehow it handles existing username errors weirdly which leads to the infinite spinner.
All three cause "spinning forever" problem without any notification what the problem actually was.
Yeah, not the best sign up experience, I'll tell you that much. Apparently other people around here have noticed other ways for the signup process to fail.
Would be quite useful to add the focus of each instance (e.g. tecnhology, music, art, etc). Reddit migrants to lemmy would probably want to join specialized instances that resemble the subs they frequented.
p.s. checking out beehaw I realise that lemmy can be run either as a reddit alternative (with lots of subreddits communities on different topics) or as a discourse type forum (with categories). thats good flexibility to have, but for easy discovery it needs to be managed somehow
Any instance can connect to any other instance by design. That includes any of the communities (sub Reddits). Any community is available from any instance.
So if you join a general instance (like reddthat.com #selfplug) you can search in the communities and find any other community and subscribe to it.
browse.feddit.de is the current place that searches every fediverse instance, and indexes all the communities. So your can find any community, even if the instance has not federated yet
> Any instance can connect to any other instance by design. That includes any of the communities (sub Reddits). Any community is available from any instance.
Which is both good and bad. Good because federation of course. But it also ends up fracturing the community. Say all the r/python people decide to move out from Reddit to Lemmy. They are probably going to go to different Lemmy instances each with their own c/python community. Yes you can follow any c/python from any instance but let's be honest, how many such c/python communities are you going to follow?
How do we explain what instance to join for people if they followed technology, music, and art? I have tried explaining this to friends, and there's new and unique vocabulary. I end up having to explain a bunch of other stuff too and their eyes glaze over. Is there an ELI5 or guided setup for people who don't want to deep dive into federation but want to talk about art, music, and tech (and memes)?
Ideally they would join any instance and follow the topics they're interested like they would subscribing to a subreddit, and the fact that content is spread out over several instances isn't something users need to worry about.
The reality is that discovery is terrible right now and you can't browse a feed of all Tech/Music/Art threads from all federated instances. Hopefully this is being worked on.
It's not that difficult. Lemmy is like email. You need an instance to host your account like gmail, outlook or gmx, but you can still send/receive emails with everybody else.
I appreciate the reply, but I think that's a bit oversimplified. Gmail, outlook, etc. doesn't have "topics" and the instance you join does matter to some degree, which is not the case for email.
* Cryptocurrencies who's sole reason to exist is to justify its own existence. "We need token X to perform operation Y. Operation Y is important to facilitate the trade of token X". Seriously, how many tokens exist for the only purpose of being "gas" for its own network?
* Social networks that only discuss itself and its own existence.
* Programming languages where the largest project written in that language is its own compiler.
Solutions in search of a problem, is what they are.
I'd argue that social networks are a little bit different because discussing is what they do. Reddit is obsessed with itself, when I'd say most of the wide world doesn't care about the API or 3rd party app business (though they eventually may if moderation gets bad). Even 15 years ago a good amount of posting on reddit was about itself: secret Santas, seeing reddit bumper stickers, self referential memes, killing digg, how it was going mainstream, etc. It's a pretty natural progression of any project. That isn't to say federation will be successful, just that its self obsession is pretty normal.
Federation is already successful, since email is federated (you can register on gmail.com and send an email to an account at yahoo.com, or even run your own email server, although the ecosystem has evolved/commercialized to make that more difficult than it strictly has to be).
But Lemmy, we'll see. Maybe a better-written competitor emerges, or maybe they get their act together, or maybe the world doesn't want a federated Reddit clone (although my personal bet is that it does and subreddits are sort of the centralized prototype of that). But there's no question that federation itself is useful in certain applications.
True, though I'd say that email is a cautionary tale due to how centralized it's gotten. I guess I was referring to "second wave" federation, for lack of a better term. Federated replacements for social networks: Mastodon, Lemmy, Friendica, etc. I can't say if those will be as successful as email, just that an obsession with itself is a pretty normal part of the growth process. Part of what made reddit successful, especially early on, was people identifying themselves as reddit users.
> Running your own instance seems to be the only way to avoid this
Apart from languages which never bother self hosting, this seems backwards. It could be considered a sign of failure of a language if it never attracts projects beyond its own compiler, but it isn't true that a project which has its own compiler as the largest project is doomed to failure. For example, this was once true of Rust and Go but no longer is.
As far as I've noticed those politics discussions boil down to different degrees of reverence for Deng Xiaoping, and if one is slightly to the right of Bernie Sanders you get banned.
It seems to be a Taiwanese server. With the tankie userbase on Lemmygrad, I'm not surprised someone's private server might get banned.
I can't read Chinese so I don't know what this person is saying online, but whether they're pro or anti China, getting blocked shouldn't be that hard with some of the userbase.
Federation is never going to work with normal users and this thread alone proves why. The top comments are bickering about defederation and fragmentation.
Normal people don't care, this is all too complex and the community politics are mind numbing. It's no wonder centralized systems continue to win. I'm a technical person and I don't even want to bother with this kind of stuff.
There's no fundamental problem with federation. The UX can be made good enough for the average user.
The problem here is the developers. Federation developers don't seem to be interested in UX. They aren't focusing on adding the polish and ease-of-use users expect out of a social media platform.
90% of the issues with Lemmy isn't because of federation. It's because of basic UX:
- Error messages silently discarded everywhere. Stuff "loads forever" when in reality some error has happened and the operation has already failed.
- Links to other instances are not handled properly (WTF? Links to other instances are a huge part of federation, how could you not handle this properly?)
- To follow a community in another instance, you have to search the community? TWICE! (The first search loads the community asynchronously in the background). WTF?
- They decided to rewrite the entire UI using websockets causing bugs everywhere? WTF? Over-engineering at its finest. At least they are trying to undo the rewrite currently...
- Searching for communities should search through all communities that the instance is federated with. It should feel like there's only one instance. Right now search shows only cached communities. WTF? Are we expecting users to understand caches?
I'm hoping that the influx of new developers (who are more UX focused) is enough to polish the platform for end-user use by June 30th. It's going to be difficult, but it's possible.
10 years ago, I’d be all over this. Nowadays, I have so many other more important things that I have no interest in the mental load that comes with Lemmy.
Lemmy’s type of social media is mindless, timing filling. Having to figure out the nuance of federation defeats the entire point.
Further, the primary reason for federation seems to be anti-censorship. While there are absolutely cases where censorship is applied to destroy/control, most of the topics I engage in on social media have little to no censorship. It seems like the only people that care about “avoiding a central authority” are those looking to stir hate and trouble on social media.
> Further, the primary reason for federation seems to be anti-censorship. While there are absolutely cases where censorship is applied to destroy/control, most of the topics I engage in on social media have little to no censorship. It seems like the only people that care about “avoiding a central authority” are those looking to stir hate and trouble on social media.
There's plenty of censorship on many large Reddit subs already. Just look at the difference between r/worldnews and r/anime_titties (which is also world news, name is misleading).
I mean, my local town's sub, ostensibly a very general-purpose place to ask and answer questions, share news and event info, in practice is quite left-leaning (college town) and heavy handed with permanent bans. Trump or even anything nominally Republican is right out, which is fine in that they are off-topic in a locally-focused sub, but you can praise Biden and Democrats all day. Even trying to have a very civil debate on local political and business topics is like walking on eggshells if you aren't supporting the popular point of view, but everything up to outright slander is tolerated in the other direction.
>There's plenty of censorship on many large Reddit subs already. Just look at the difference between r/worldnews and r/anime_titties (which is also world news, name is misleading).
No, see, since it hasn't effected them (yet?)there is no good faith reason to be against censorship. The only ones effected by it or worried by it are the wrongthinkers and bad people and who cares about them?
Apologies. Your impression of the argument was so spot on that I couldn't actually read the sarcasm in it :P
Just to be clear, I think there are bad forms of censorship. My point is simply my use of social media tends to not overlap with the places where those bad forms of censorship occur.
It'd be impossible to prove, but the types of topics I utilize social media for simply don't tend to correlate with highly-controlled/highly-censored topics. Generally, highly-censored topics result in alternative communities in grey areas of the web. I just don't see those types of communities popping up for wood working, programming, or the sports that I enjoy.
This list is about as interesting as a list of all phpBB/vBulletin communities: there's almost nothing actionable about scrolling it beyond clicking at random.
Might as well just google "best internet forums" and do the same.
One problem that I experienced is that, after all this talk of "federation" and a "fediverse" with all Lemmy instances and all other ActivityPub apps...
every Lemmy instance has a /c/technology, a /c/anime, a /c/funny, and a /c/linux, and all those community are entirely distinct.
Yeah, but like you can subscribe to all those communities, you don't have to just pick one, they'll all show up in your feed. Ans eventually some will die off and others will become dominant. That's the circle of life for a Lemmy community.
Sure, subscribe to all of them, see the same stories multiple times, with the comments spread out over separate thread. Post your story manually into each separate community.
That's no federation, that's the definition of silos. That's my experience using HN and Reddit today, or Facebook and Twitter.
Calling an instance without users "awesome" is stretching it. Unfortunately, less than 10 users makes up a large majority, and those have very, very small communities.
Lemmy is federated. You can interact with other instances by design. Being on a small instance may even be better as it's less likely to be overloaded, which is a current issue with the largest instances. Running an instance of your own, for just yourself is a primary way to use federated services.
That is like saying an email provider with only 10 user accounts cannot be good. I mean there are concerns, but it's the connections that matter.
...that said I expect that the future is going to be much more based around whitelists because open federation means easy trolling/bots... but the current theory is to think of instances like email providers.
I've joined lemmy.world and there seems to be some stuff going on there, but the only programming community with any traction seems to be Beehaw's: https://lemmy.world/c/programming@beehaw.org
But that's still almost empty... I've been visiting for a week, and I think the posts I saw a week ago are still there on the first page, with just a couple new articles showing up every few days :(
I am in desperate need for something to replace reddit.com/r/programming, if anyone has a hint where people are moving, would love to hear it (at least some reddits like /r/lisp are still going - but they never had a lot of traffic in the first place - still more than Lemmy).
EDIT: looks like I am a victim of the defederation that happened... I only see comments made on my instance, lemmy.world, because Beehaw defederated lemmy.worlld... it's possible to see there's many more comments by going to lemmy.one instead.
Decentralization is already causing fragmentation and echo chambers, as everyone is learning the hard way... unfortunately.
You could have an instance that is not focused on having users, but instead just be the home of many communities of different topics and the have "awesome" moderators.
One could, but the author clearly didn't check that. The number of users seems pretty much related to the amount of activity. Not very surprising.
To verify, I've taken the top entry, lemmy.world, and looked at the 10 most recent posts, and they're within the last 10 minutes. One post per minute isn't awesome, but well. Then I took 10 of the 0 user instances, and lo and behold, one instance had one post, the rest zero. So the number of users does seem to predict activity (atm).
My impression (which may be wrong) of Lemmy is that a large number of instances are very pro-censorship and heavily left-leaning. Which of course is reflective of Reddit itself. But it doesn't exactly instill confidence in signing up for instances as a relatively conservative contributor, even while abiding by the terms of service of the instances.
Any advice for a conservative Christian trying to find a reddit alternative or Lemmy instance that also doesn't want to be moderated or banned into oblivion (or de-federated because of trolls which I do not represent)? As many conservatives know, even joining /r/conservative and not posting on reddit was enough to entirely be banned from many communities that have nothing to do with politics. Walking into another similarly prejudiced social network (but at a platform level) doesn't sound like fun to me.
1. I appreciate open and friendly discussion with people who don't think like me. The atmosphere, even of /r/conservative is very different than something like truth social. I don't want to be in an echo chamber, and the content from the echo chamber seems tailored to click-bate. i.e. "Watch X DESTROY Y with Logic", or conspiracy theories. I read a variety of news, and I don't need another source for it, but would rather watch discussion unfold about different topics by people who may have different opinions as well.
2. I use Reddit primarily for tech, gaming, programming, gamedev, and programming language related topics or other unrelated things like woodworking or bushcrafting. I like the community-based paradigm to social media for that reason, and that content is almost entirely lacking on conservative social networks.
3. I'm not really a Trump supporter. Truth social I believe is also relatively dead, but I've never joined so I can't verify that.
4. Free speech is extremely important to me. Trolling, hating,etc, should be moderated, but a dissenting opinion written respectively should not be, in my opinion. I'm not sure that Truth Social has reputation as a free speech platform. Reddit as a platform has largely been a free speech platform. Independently moderated subreddits have not. But Lemmy instances seem like they're going to take a stance against any communities or instances that don't fit the ideology.
There is value in open debate and conversation, but it does seem like Lemmy is intended to be a walled left echo chamber. I'm curious if your question is reflective of others' opinions as well, in that they'd prefer people not like them ideologically would just go to their own spaces and leave others alone
Thanks for a comprehensive reply. There might be a market niche then, but we no longer have infinite VC money to for many attempts to plug it.
I think the hardest part here is attracting the right moderators that can tread the line between keeping the conversation civil and not enforcing their opinion, which is harder by the day. Both criteria are very subjective and hard to automate.
I'm pretty much of a similar mind. I don't want to be closed off from dissenting opinion. I'm pretty free speech and although I'm not in favor of platform blocking, I'm all for personal blocking, and/or creating niche communities, maybe ones not even federated.
I think there's a lot of value in seeing differing opinions even if you don't agree with them, as long as the discussion remains civil. That goes for myself as much as anyone else, I'm human, but I'll tend to cut off once personal insults are flowing.
I got the domain jump.red a while ago, to make a more conservative/libertarian community... may throw a lemmy instance up this weekend there. Won't necessarily fit the bulk, but I think there's room. Was also thinking on putting up one on the bbs/tech related domains I have.
My plan is to just add a bunch of instances' local feeds to my rss reader and audit them occasionally to check which I like the most.
I'm thinking of joining fmhy, which isn't the most active but is clear about their federation policy and has only defederated from lemmygrad (which seems to be a major source of posts from the group you're referencing)
I think the Blocked By text is wrong. It says the same thing as the BlockIng section. I'm guessing they actually mean the reach of Lemmy users on that platform is limited.
Would it be ridiculous of me to think that some of the defederation drama on Lemmy has been crafted by Reddit in some way to discourage adoption?
I have my share of problems with Reddit, but most of the stuff I read about the big Lemmy instances make it seem like the mods of some instances are teenagers on acid. Marxism is in the history books, and "deconstructing our privilege" sounds like something their therapist told them they needed to do and they're projecting.
It all feels a bit fake.
On Reddit I always felt like the naive utopian change the world stuff was confined to a few subs.
They say the instance you choose doesn't matter that much, but if even large instances are going to start defederating then there is a kind of Keynesian beauty contest to choosing the right instance - you might not care what an instance looks like if you're just using it as a gateway to the fediverse, but you need to choose an instance that doesn't repulse the other instances too much.