Rule 196 is what I’m assuming you’re talking about. It was a subreddit that gained popularity due to only having one rule, which is to post before leaving. The sub started after it’s predecessor, r/195, was shut down by the moderators
Reusing a comment i made a few days ago, "It's based off r/195, which was a sub where the main rule was that you had to make 1 post before leaving, that sub closed down a few years ago, then r/196 was made to replace it. IIRC r/195 was originally for some peoples apartment, with the name just being their apartment number. Eventually other people joined in because of the rule and it snowballed from there."
To add onto that, r/195 shut down because the mods didn't feel like running it anymore as it became to much to handle.
I saw someone else respond to this on an earlier thread that it was the dorm room number of the person who created it. The sub closed down and someone created a new one as 196. The rule has always been the same.
And worth pointing out that Lemmy has a c/195 and a c/196.
I blocked both of them because I just don't want to see that many memes and /new was full of posts in those two communities. But clearly a lot of people are enjoying those.
since it’s all federated it’s most likely donations and out of pocket. the real risk here is that as communities become more and more centralized, the cost to operate increases significantly (the lemmy.world guy had to upgrade servers at least twice during the boom). there’s a chance that these instances won’t stay around long term, i’m not sure how the lemmy code base deals with instances dropping off. does everyone lose access to all of those servers? since your account is associated with that instance do you not also lose your account and posts?
the lemmy.world guy had to upgrade servers at least twice during the boom
It’s their fault, though. You could either throw money at it to gain more and more power over users, or you embrace the federation and disable new registration at a certain amount of users.
Sorry if I get a bit technical but I'll try to explain my understanding.
Lemmy.nz has it's own communities. When someone subscribes to a community on another instance (say, !asklemmy) , the posts and community details are copied to a local version on the server. When someone from Lemmy.nz posts to the community, it goes into our local version. The server then behind the scenes is trying to keep our version in sync with the "real" one on lemmy.ml. Lemmy.ml is sending new posts and comments to lemmy.nz, and lemmy.nz is sending posts made by lemmy.nz members back to lemmy.ml, who then send them out to other servers.
If lemmy.ml suddenly disappeared, we would continue to be able to post to the community, add comments, etc, but sending those posts to other servers wouldn't work. lemmy.ml is responsible for sending the posts to your server at lemmy.world, and so you would not see the posts made by lemmy.nz users that are no longer able to federate - however, you could still read the community as it was at the time federation stopped and with the addition of anything anyone on your own instance has added.
One exception is media. Lemmy currently does not federate media, so if someone posts a picture to a community on lemmy.ml (where the picture is uploaded to lemmy.ml), then lemmy.ml goes offline, no one will be able to see the picture (but they will still see the post).
In terms of accounts, you will lose your account. However, accounts are also federated as remote users, so when a lemmy.world user like yourself posts to lemmy.nz, your account is also copied here. Lemmy.nz users can view the account, see that you made the comment, etc. However, you cannot log in to your account and make new posts from a different server - it's a sort of ghost account.
So long story short, you lose access to your account and any images but the posts and comments are accessible from other servers so long as they were federated with your instance prior to it shutting down. If a new instance comes online, it will not be able to get posts from a community on an instance that is no longer online.
I understand that you can create your same username on another server. Is there a way to have that account scrape whatever data you want to back up, saved posts etc from your 'ghost account' or your original account on the other server?
Servers are independent. You can only create the same username if it's not already taken. dave@gmail.com and dave@hotmail.com are the same username but different servers. You don't get dave@gmail.com reserved just because you have dave@hotmail.com, but if it's available you can register both.
Is there a way to have that account scrape whatever data you want to back up, saved posts etc from your ‘ghost account’ or your original account on the other server?
Lemmy is pretty young and there aren't a lot of tools. Most likely in future there will be an ability to transfer you account to another server, notifying other instances of the change. But this would require the home server to be available for approving the transfer otherwise you would have people stealing other people's accounts.
Mastodon (a twitter-like federated site) has an option to migrate an account, but as I understand it, that's more about moving your followers to your new account. I don't think the posts move. This page claims there it's a technical reason so perhaps we wouldn't have that on Lemmy either - but Mastodon does re-direct accounts, so perhaps on Lemmy in the future your posts might still point to the old user but if someone clicks on it then it will take them to your new account.
None of this is sorted yet so ideas will probably change over time.
Hey mate. The way you explain things is very clear and especially helpful if like me you’re missing the broader strokes context of a lot of Lemmy based discussion. It’s very off topic, but I wonder if you could explain to me the drama around meta wading in to the fediverse space and also specifically people getting angry about secret meetings and NDAs? I got wind of this on posts on my local instance but they’re all discussing the issue assuming an audience that’s already ten steps deep and understands the technical basis behind everything so I was pretty lost.
Specifically, people were afraid what Meta’s entry in to this space could mean for privacy in the fediverse but I don’t really understand why it would make a difference unless you basically joined whatever this new thing Meta has brewing is. If they enter this space, do they somehow pose a privacy threat to users of instances that federate with them? I worry about that because as far as I know you can’t personally as a user defederate, as in block anything from a particular instance, you just have to hope your specific local instance does that.
Sure! I will try to keep it simple and not too long so I'll cover some of the main stuff without too much detail.
Open: the Fediverse is open, it's software is open source (the code is available for anyone to copy and improve on, or contribute changes back to the main software code), and any Meta platform will be proprietary (closed source). We don't know what the code is behind Facebook and they don't want us to know. The openness of the Fediverse is probably the core reason people are angry about NDAs and such.
Privacy: there are certainly privacy issues, but as an individual user this should be pretty much a non-issue if you don't follow any Meta communities and don't use a Meta account. Remember that for almost all Fediverse platforms, posts are public anyway.
Embrace, Extend, Extinguish: this phrase was coined during an anti-trust case with Microsoft in the 90s, there's a wikipedia page about it. The important bit is this:
The strategy's three phases are:
Embrace: Development of software substantially compatible with a competing product, or implementing a public standard.
Extend: Addition and promotion of features not supported by the competing product or part of the standard, creating interoperability problems for customers who try to use the "simple" standard.
Extinguish: When extensions become a de facto standard because of their dominant market share, they marginalize competitors that do not or cannot support the new extensions.
In our context, Meta is working on step 1, developing a platform compatible with the fediverse. People worry that steps 2 and 3 will come next, basically killing the Fediverse.
Shit thats scary! Is there any way the Fediverse can collaborate to stop their takeover?
Because it definitely sounds like that’s their intent. There’s no benefit to Facebook embracing an ad-free, trackerless standard unless it’s taking over.
Is there any way the Fediverse can collaborate to stop their takeover?
There is a movement to get Fediverse instances to agree to block Meta. I guess if everyone did this, the Fediverse would continue on and Meta would probably be fine building their own platform.
But Meta has something the rest of the Fediverse doesn't have: money. They can simply pay some carefully chosen instances to Fedirate with them (which might be what the secret conversations are about).
There will also likely be a bit of a fight between instances that do or don't Federate with Meta, some thinking it's good because of the new userbase and some thinking it's bad because of the Embrace, Extend, Extinguish thing. That alone will probably cause damage as well, possibly splitting the already small userbase into two factions.
Meta is making a twitter/mastodon-like site, so Lemmy might get to have a wait and see approach, but if Meta start changing (Extending) the ActivityPub protocol then the dozens of different platforms on the Fediverse will all have to decide whether to change too or no longer be able to Federate with anyone who does change.
One of the benefits of Facebook Federating with Mastodon is the users. Building a new platform is hard but if on day 1 you can already follow millions of others then this helps. But after a month thay probably won't be very important, so it will be interesting to see what they do next.
You're forgetting the most important rule of the internet, enacted in 2020 and largely unspoken, but widely followed:
No controversial thought. Everything must abide by the hivemind. Sure, the hivemind might extol the virtues of free thought and expression, but actions speak louder than words.
Thanks to the massive worldwide propaganda campaign of 2020, very few corners of the internet are safe from virtue-signaling, wannabe-woke control freaks who can't stand the thought of others disagreeing with their force-fed worldviews, because they mistakenly believe that such ideas are "dangerous." 🙄
Yes, I know, opposing viewpoints are something small little minds like your own can't possibly tolerate. Now run back to your safe space where everyone agrees with you and gives you constant validation!
Sure is looking that way already. I had such high hopes for Lemmy being a more open community....but that's already quickly turning out to not be the case.
A mix of donations for the larger instances, and some self-hosting for smaller instances. E.g., lemmy.world has a couple of links for Donations in the sidebar. Kbin got some seed money from NLnet.
The whole thing is federated, so this costs are distributed, and I'd imagine largely pro bono.
I think lemmy.ml was getting money from NLnet by completing Milestones, but now that they’re scrambling to handle bugs and doing Q&A constantly I think they’re losing out on that funding. At least that’s what Dessalines reported, I believe
My worst experience came just before the API disaster started. Someone posted on the ELI5 subreddit asking what autistic people experience when they are nonverbal. Now, I'm autistic and, while I'm verbal most of the time, I do have moments where I can't speak even though I want to. Typically in moments of high emotion or stress. (It feels like the words are in my brain, but the highway to my mouth has a twenty car pileup blocking all traffic.)
My comment was upvoted many times and many people replied positively to my comment. Then, suddenly, my comment was deleted. The mod said that because this was my personal experience, it was too subjective. Meaning, only an "objective" experience from someone who wasn't autistic would be allowed.
Needless to say, I was upset and needed to vent. I vented in the Autism subreddit about the situation and got people replying in support of me. Now, I did make a mistake where people started asking to see my original comment and I posted a screenshot. That was on me - especially because I forgot to blank out the original poster's name. (In my defense, I had nothing against the OP or their question so nothing lept to mind saying "better blank that out.")
The whole thread was suddenly deleted from the Autism subreddit for "doxing." I deleted the person's username and asked for the thread to be restored. Instead, I was given a 30 day ban. Then, I quickly got notified that I was permanently banned from ELI5 for "sh*t-stirring." My goal was never "raise an army of autistic people to attack the ELI5 mods," but just "blow off steam for something I felt wasn't just."
I decided not to contest either and just stop going to either sub. In fact, I was deciding to reevaluate my Reddit use altogether. And then the API debacle started.
I can't say there was a worst interaction, but there's two candidates for best. The first is that when he was just starting out, shittywatercolour painted one of my photographs.
The second is not just a reddit thing, but about 7 years ago I wrote a tutorial for r/fanfiction on how to use calibre to save stories from various websites. It was well received at the time, but since them ive had multiple times where people said it was useful, including one a couple weeks ago on a completely different website.
So... from what I'm getting from that post... everyone likes to talk shit about reddit having a big ownership from a Chinese company that is exerting Chinese censorship on reddit... and now we're (well, I'm registered at lemmy.world, but subscribe to a lot of communities on .ml) sitting here on an alternate site that... is ALSO exerting Chinese censorship! 😂
Lemmy.world (where OP's account is) has a rule 3 stating:
No posts or comments supporting or promoting QAnon related content or similarly disproven conspiracy theories. Moderators have sole discretion to decide if a post violates this rule. Birds are real. The Earth is round. Get over it.
See https://mastodon.world/about (both world servers are maintained by the same admin team, and lemmy.world links to that page for its rules).
Fennec is even better than Firefox, it's the same source but recompiled to allow all add-ons in the main app. So basically a stable Firefox nightly, if you wish.
It's maintained by the folks behind the f-droid app store themselves, so arguably a highly trusted source.
Sync to Firefox desktop fully implemented and working.
Supposedly its got more security/privacy/anti-tracking. From what i can tell there is no major differences besides it using this configuration user.js by default
One thing that rings alarm bells for me is that they have a built-in adblocker, but you can enable Brave's ads instead and get a cryptocurrency reward. Brave takes 30% cut on the ads they show this way, so they are essentially replacing the website's monetization with their own monetization. Kind of scummy, and it being a cryptocurrency also looks grifty.
For one thing, Brave's CEO is an antivax conspiracionist. The browser itself is also not that great in the first place. Better than chrome itself, sure, but still miles behind Edge or Vivaldi (to speak only about Chromium based browsers).
Now what might really cook your noodle is the info that the developers of the Lemmy software are pro-Russian genocide deniers, and there's a growing sentiment to not support that by dropping Lemmy in favor of kbin or something else.
Just as I was starting to get the hang of this, it feels like I stepped into another wasp nest.
Ookay, then let's look at kbin, right? Well, there's literally only ONE developer and the current version still very much a (good) beta version. So, not kbin either, then?
What's left? Beehaw, who act like snowflakes and have disconnected from where growth and interesting stuff is happening?
I feel pretty lost in the sea of the fediverse right now. Go back to Reddit? Naw, not right either.
I haven't signed up for Lemmy. Between the Lemmy and Kbin I like this Kbin a heck of lot more and decided to sign up here.
I haven't abandoned Reddit and I have no plans on doing so. I'll probably be on both platforms if this one takes off or until Reddit becomes something like a Myspace. For now I'm just exploring here.
Don't really know what the "best" experience was. I can't say there was anything life changing for me. It was nice to have access to so much stuff in a very well designed app (Apollo) that let me share that content super easily with friends and family via Whatsapp or Telegram.
Worst interactions? There were many...the groupthink can be real bad. There are a lot of people who take karma very seriously. There was one sub, dedicated to a podcast, and it was clear there was a person that had six or seven alts because of the language they used and the debate style, and they would get so upset and downvote any disagreeing comment. Other subs had plenty of trolling, transphobia, shitty moderators, etc. Other subs became basically unusable because of how large they got and how many people posted "hey, look at me!" low effort content. You know, "art I did of X character" with 2,600 upvotes for what was a 10th grader type drawing done on a notebook. That kind of kills the visibility of posts with the potential for deeper or more meaningful conversation that don't get as many upvotes.
In the end I think the main issue with Reddit is that it got too big. It attracted too many people on a superficial level, too many trolls, and most subs worth visiting at this point are dedicated to niche subjects and have smallish communities.
Out of interest, since Chromium is open source, is there anything stopping Opera, Edge, Brave, etc. just mantaining support for the old manifest? Like, I'm not sure why this is such a big deal for anything other than Chrome and Chromium.
Because nearly 90% of users use Chrome or a derivative thereof. People can make a V3 version for Chrome and a V2 version for other browsers, but the APIs are nowhere near compatible, so it's a lot of extra work. If you just make a V3 version, it will work on any updated browser.
You don't have to think of the servers as different entities, all servers are Lemmy, each one slightly different sure but you can participate in every server equally so nothing changes to you
Manifest V3 will not prevent Brave from blocking ads. We built ad blocking into the browser itself so it will not be affected by Google changing its rules for extensions.
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