This article kinda makes me hope for reddit to survive. I want all the toxic, angry assholes to stay there, not desperately flee to the fediverse in search of their fix.
Kind of happened in r/apple you used to get the occasional good discussion in the comments until the last few weeks of 3rd party apps then it was an absolute cesspool of hate and trolls as people seemed to leave for other sites
No, defederation isn't shadowed. If an instance defederates from you, you stop receiving content from them, and it's pretty obvious to anyone paying attention that you've been defederated.
Plus, on Lemmy at least, block lists are publicly viewable.
That's not how I understood defederation. If an instance defederates from you, that instance stops seeing stuff from your instance. But not necessarily the other way around, as defederation is a one-way action.
So if the Cow instance defederates from the Poopie instance, people from the Poopie instance can still see content and comments from Cow users. But Cow users cannot see content or comments from Poopie users. For the scenario you're describing to take place, the Poopie instance would also need to defederate from the Cow instance.
That said, it's still not quite shadowbanning. The admins of the defederated Poopie instance would be aware that Cows were not seeing their content. It would depend on the admins to inform the Poopie users that they've been defederated. If the users were not aware of the defederation, then it'd effectively be a shadowban.
If an instance defederates from you, that instance stops seeing stuff from your instance. But not necessarily the other way around, as defederation is a one-way action.
I invite you to check out, say, technology@beehive.org from lemmy.world, and from beehaw.org directly. You'll notice that .world isn't receiving updates from beehaw. A couple of posts seem to have filtered through somehow, but there are almost no posts or comments coming from beehaw.
The group is completely out of sync with its origin. And it's not because .world has blocked beehaw. Beehaw very much still appears under .world's list of linked websites.
Blocked instances are blocked, and when you block communication between sites, that's usually a two-way street.
Edit: Hi Lemmy users! You can't see the screenshots I've attached to this comment. I've just learned this thanks to @B1naryShad0w. If you'd like to see my comments with the screenshots, please view this comment thread via kbin by clicking this link.
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I've looked at a few examples, and I'm just super confused now. I've also tried searching for a simple explanation of what exactly defederation does, and I keep seeing conflicting descriptions.
Let's look at two examples (please bear with me as I only know how to attach one image to one comment at a time.) On this comment let's look at AskLemmy, a lemmy.world community, from Beehaw:
Notice that all threads (with one exception) were posted almost a month ago when defederation happened. That one exception was a Beehaw user who posted to AskLemmy 5 days ago. So we can see that BeeHaw, having defederated from lemmy.world, is blocking 100% of new content from this lemmy.world community, except for that one thread published by a Beehaw user who seems to be out of the loop 5 days ago.
Mostly makes sense to me so far. Beehaw defedearted from lemmy.world, so Beehaw can't see new stuff from this lemmy.world community. A little weird that there was a new post by a Beehaw user, but that still makes some sense with my previous understanding of how defederation worked, since I think(?) defederation is one-way. After all, if defederation was two-way, then how did a Beehaw user make a thread on lemmy.world?
Now lets look at Beehaw's technology community from lemmy.world:
On the one hand, this is not blocking 100% of the content from this community, which seems consistent with what I originally thought. Lemmy.world is not defederated with beehaw, so lemmy.world can see new content from Beehaw's communities.
But on the other hand, there is a ton of content missing. And it's not just federated content taking awhile to move from instance to instance, as I'm seeing posts from the last 24 hrs from Kbin that are not showing up on lemmy.world. So it appears that there is content that's being blocked from getting to lemmy.world. But it's not 100% of the content that's being blocked?
To make matters more confusing, I can see content published by Beehaw users on a Beehaw community from lemmy.world. Wtf is going on.
I appreciate the effort and have also verified your analysis myself to be true. However, and I don’t know if it’s just me, but I don’t see any images attached to your comments.
Thanks for calling that out. It looks like attaching images directly to a comment only works for kbin instances. This is what it looks like from kbin.social. I just tried viewing this thread from lemmy.world and the images were not showing up.
To be honest, I don't want to go through the effort of editing my comments to correct it right now. But in the future I'll go back to hosting images and linking them in my comments, so anyone from any instance can see them. That's a shame, because attaching images to comments in Kbin is super convenient. Oh well! Thanks again for letting me know.
Hrm it seems defederation needs some work put into it. If an instance defederates from another, there should be no way to see each other, one way or another.
For what it’s worth, there is a big problem with Lemmy.world federation. Lots and lots of posts to/from LW and other fully-federated instances take days to show, if at all.
I suspect it’s something to do with their size, but I base that on absolutely nothing.
I read a post by the Beehaw admins a couple weeks ago saying they were talking to the lemmy.world admin about resolving the issues that caused them to defederate, so it’s possible that they were no longer defederated when the post you found was made. My understanding is that automatic updates only happen when users on one instance are subscribed to the community on the other instance, so refederation might not be obvious. I expect they would have cut the cord again over yesterday’s security breach, though.
That’s pure speculation on my part, though, and quite possibly it was some kind of bug. But I am not particularly tech-savvy, so I tend to wonder about non-technical causes.
There is. Lemmy.ml is currently shadowbanning kbin for unknown reasons.
Lemmy.ml is blocking the bots kbin uses for federation. The devs have ignored anyone asking why. It's been weeks and only applies to Lemmy.ml, so it appears to be intentional. They're running slightly different code on their flagship site than what all the other instances use (which makes me wonder what else Lemmy.ml has changed compared to what's publicly available).
OLD angry assholes who don’t know how to navigate social media. They need Facebook because it’s easy and you can comfortably be a racist, homophobic, entitled prick and you’ll find a big audience that will stroke your ego.
Reddit is a bunch of people asking each other to rate them now, including their clothes and wedding dresses. I don't understand the appeal of any of those subs, especially when we already know some of them were specifically created by 4chan to try to get people to kill themselves 😬
Haha I visited with being logged in and it was true what you said. So many rate me sub content. Someone disagreed saying it is your algorithm. I wanted to sign in and comment to say no go log out and see what reddit shows by default when you browse all, but resisted.
I still have a few communities that have yet to migrate, so I hate browse them. But sometimes it recommends these rating subs, and morbid curiosity takes over. I swear, the vitriol that is emitted from some of these people... It's just depressing to see people treated that way
I used to subject myself to those rating subs on 4chan for some dumbass reason when I was younger, do not recommend. Sucks to see people fall into the same cycle.
I suspect what the article is describing is actually happening, but I’m curious how the writer a couple of quotes deep goes about identifying “emotionally sticky nodes”. They are using verbiage that makes it sound like they are describing something objective, but I have my doubts.
Not really. There is some discussion of "emotionally sticky nodes", but they aren't really defined, just described. Which is fine, and it's actually an interesting article, but when you start throwing around terms like "nodes" it makes it sound like you want your readers to think you're talking about something that is empirically valid, not just giving your opinion.
The article does kind of define it, but does a poor job.
An emotionally sticky node is a user who makes other users stay on the site. Examples of this for Reddit would be accounts like poem_for_your_sprog, ShittyWatercolor, Shittymorph, or wil.
There are others, of course, that you may not be able to name - /r/California was mostly kept alive by /u/BlankVerse, who posted 85% of all the articles to that subreddit. You'd never notice unless you paid attention to usernames. Similarly, a small percentage of people made a large percentage of Reddit's OC. Typically you couldn't name them, either, but you'd know if they weren't there because they gave Reddit a soul.
Reddit started off as a bunch of bots reposting links they found, without even a comment section. Eventually real people came and started posting nerd stuff (like programming articles) alongside the bots. Enough of a critical mass was created that a comment section was added, making old Reddit look like what HackerNews or Tildes look like today. The programming and porn were sent to different subsections of the site for the people who don't want to see such things (these became the first subreddits). The default subreddits were slowly created, then anyone could make their own subreddits for their own topics.
Still, it was largely posts to things found elsewhere. People went to Reddit as part of their trip through several other websites. They'd usually gather what they found during that trip and repost it to Reddit. OC wasn't expected; reposts were encouraged. By the early 2010s, a lot of the pictures on Reddit were mainly 4chan reposts. People who had a lot of stuff saved from other sites were the "emotionally sticky nodes" and people would come to Reddit to see stuff that was explicitly gathered from everywhere else - hence why Reddit was the "frontpage of the internet", an aggregate of what people had found elsewhere.
Eventually we started to see OC for the first time. Advice Animals sprung from 4chan memes and really started to go viral across Reddit. Reddit users started making their own native advice animal formats and now Reddit was no longer just "things from elsewhere on the internet" but new content you couldn't see elsewhere. Soon these people making OC became the "emotionally sticky nodes", keeping users on the site.
And, of course, there are other things who were "emotionally sticky" without necessarily posting memes. Reddit became a great place to aggregate news at-a-glance. This is because of the moderation of the news and politics subreddits, ensuring that things posted to their subs were actual articles, post names were real headlines (no editorializing!), and the page wasn't littered with random YouTube videos or self-posts or images or whatever. Good moderation meant that you could go to /r/news or /r/worldnews and trust that you were getting the same effect as looking at the headlines of a newspaper. Similarly, the 2012 election had /r/politics become a great source of information and discussion about the US Presidental Race. These sorts of things made Reddit a useful site and kept people coming back.
Even now, Reddit still has "emotionally sticky" places. They could be individual users like the ones I mentioned above, or they could be entire subreddits that aren't quite captured here on Lemmy/Kbin yet. Neither Lemmy nor Kbin have great mod tools, and a lot of mod teams here are inexperienced and not as aggressive as Reddit mod teams are. You can argue this is a good thing, but aggressive moderation really matters for places like the news communities where legitimacy comes from users avoiding editorializing. This means that these places aren't a good replacement for Reddit (yet) - subreddits where moderation is important are still "emotionally sticky" because nothing can compete with them. (This is why it's important that Lemmy develop good mod teams and good mod tools!)
There are oodles of niche communities that you've never heard of that haven't come over, either - for example, !modeltrains (@modeltrains) and https://lemmy.world/c/nscalemodeltrains are niche communities on Reddit, but neither of their fediverse counterparts have much activity (other than me). People on Reddit thus don't want to leave their niche community because it doesn't have any activity over here, and because there's no activity over here, nobody wants to come over here to start activity - meaning there's no activity over here. That's why it's important to make sure you contribute often to niche communities you care about, even if your content isn't "good" - there needs to be something to lure emotionally sticky nodes here and get people to jump over.
That said, some places absolutely have made the jump successfully (https://lemmy.blahaj.zone/c/196). But for most places there's a while to go before Reddit gets to the point where it can't maintain itself as a site.
Yeah, what was unthinkable a few months ago is now an ever growing reality.
If ever reddit had a crisis management division, the people there didn’t understand what reddit really was.
Even spez forgot what made reddit special. Or a very big possibility is he never knew it from the beginning at all. It can be argued that reddit was the vision of aaron.
My theory is a bit more of an Illuminati conspiracy. I really don’t care what people think of my thoughts or of me.
I think the powers that be want anything like Reddit to either die or degenerate. They (as in our wealthy owners) don’t want a happy healthy stable platform of free thinking, free talking individuals sharing ideas and openly and freely discussing the world’s problems so easily.
They want Reddit to die or at least degrade.
They’ll put up with the fediverse for the time being because it isn’t that big … but once it hits critical mass, there will be a slow corporate takeover and eventually another slow death and the process will repeat itself
Yep, I can confirm, I visit it about once a day, the content is… boring, to say the least. IDK, it feels like it lost it’s soul. I still need it, cuz of Void, but other than that… no. I’d drop it completely if it wasn’t for the Void sub.
r/voidlinux. Someone already started one (says unofficial, since the one on reddit is official, run by the Void maintainers), but there are very few posts there. Not enough content to actually get engaged. Plus, the maintainers were the ones that always gave the best advice over at r/voidlinux and they’re not here with no plans to move whatsoever (there was a post on r/voidlinux about what the Void community is going to do in the blackout, it got deleted). They see the subreddit as a means to an end (they just don’t wanna hassle with maintaining a forum, so they use reddit).
I’m thinking of starting my own community here analogous to a subreddit that has not migrated. Do you have any tips or advice for someone starting out? My biggest fear and the only thing holding me back is nobody showing up :(
edit: I think it’s important to mention I don’t have moderation experience, but there’s a first for everybody and I’m willing to commit the time and effort to maintain a community.
double edit: looks like I confused your OP tag for a mod tag. In either case, I am open for anyone that might have any type of advice.
It’s really fine if nobody shows up. If anything, you could always just post or cross post something every once in a while to help the community pick up steam. What you should be concerned about is too many people showing up. The reddit admins (as well as certain sections of redditors, it seems) have forgotten that moderating is pretty tedious and not everyone has the time or energy to spend on moderating. If I were you, make your moderating policy clear from the start and stick to it as objectively as possible. When changes to that policy has to be made, clearly communicate to your community what changes are made and why. Some changes will not be accepted by the community, and you should do your best to remind yourself that it’s not a personal attack on your values if they disagree.
Treat it like a personal blog maybe? Like Tumblr or a journal. Might help get over the mental hurdle of people not being present, and viewing it like your own private web page just for you. Posts also help it show up in all so eventually someone will see it.
The only tip is, be an active poster. If you start a community, you have to be the one regularly posting content until you get above like 1000 subs and others start posting consistently. If you can’t dedicate yourself to that, it won’t go anywhere
I mostly stuck to a small circle of communities on Reddit, and while the quality of content has stayed about the same, the frequency of posts has dropped notably in most of them.
The one exception is /r/iiiiiiitttttttttttt/, which is supposed to be for IT memes and funny interactions with users. Since the blackout started, that sub has gradually devolved into reposts of years old memes (not even IT specific memes, just anything tech related) and text posts asking random computer questions, which was previously banned.
Very well put. The shutdown of Apollo was enough to make me want to ditch Reddit but the very noticeable drop in quality in both posts and comments since at least the blackout was the final nail in the coffin. Glad to see that it’s not just me. Luckily Lemmy has quickly filled the void for me and I’ve been very surprised with how much it’s been growing lately.
They have too many users to die any noticeable death.
Their bot defense left. Tons of communities affecting millions of subscribers have changed to adopt rules to make their platform borderline unusable (/videos only allows text posts describing videos).
Without defense against bots, the place will become a “dead” website in that the majority of the content will be bots posting for bots, and a handful of addicted dipshit interacting with them.
Much like Facebook, their soup du jour will be anger. Posts will seek to dri e engagement from what few users remain, and the main method they will achieve this through will be so ially and/or politically divisive topics.
Let it rot from the inside out. Let it be the new Facebook.
I think it is a big mistake to underestimate the effect of having reached the critical mass of users. It will not die easily (spez is working hard to achieve this), much less quickly.
MySpace and digg still exist as well. Social media sites don’t die in the typical sense of the word, but they “die” nonetheless. More like abandoned malls than 6 feet under
Yeah it’s changed focus a few times. They focused on music for a while, then pivoted to entertainment news. Surprisingly they still have around 100 employees.
Some years ago they “lost” a lot of data during a data center migration. MySpace was the go-to place for small indie bands in the mid to late 2000s, so a lot of music that was only available on MySpace is totally lost now. People didn’t get a chance to archive it, since MySpace didn’t announce it beforehand.
I say “lost” because my opinion is that it was expensive for them to keep storing all that data and so they just deleted it all and made up an excuse.
I visit out of habit. There's nothing interesting being posted. bots are posting super old reposts, and spam is being posted and the mods aren't removing them, and i'm not going to report them. I'm in a weird state where there's not a great content aggregator anywhere right now, so its giving me an opportunity to waste my time on other things instead.
Anecdote incoming: i had coincidentally put myself on hiatus from news/Reddit before the whole 3rd party app drama started the Exodus, and didn’t have a clue what was going on until about a week ago.
I think it’s a perfect time to say goodbye forever. I miss a couple smaller communities to the point i want to remember them for what they were. I don’t want to see them die firsthand.
I’ve been shitposting 12 years. Its bittersweet, I’ll truly miss it, like an old friend. i’m ripping the band-aid off.
Active uniques were high, the amount of time people spent on the site was continuing to grow, and new accounts were being created at a rate faster than accounts were being closed. I shook my head; I didn’t think that was enough. A few months later, the site started to unravel.
Sounds a lot like the way ecosystems collapse. At first nothing seems amiss, maybe a slow decline, but hardly worrying. Time passes, and you start to think nothing bad will happen after all. Then an inflection point is reached, and catastrophic failure ensues in an extremely short time. And there's no going back after that.
Or your vehicle has a few tiny rust spots on the inside behind the exterior paint … you can’t see the rust but its affecting the metal and growing in size every day. You won’t notice for months or even years but eventually, paint will start to bubble up and you’ll ignore that too hoping that it won’t get any bigger. Then a large flake of paint will fall off and reveal a big patch of rust eating away at your car and you’ll realize it’s days are numbered. You keep driving but its only a matter of time before a critical part will break down from rust and either slow you down or stop your vehicle from moving.
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