This is a chance for any users, admins, or developers to ask anything they’d like to myself, @nutomic , SleeplessOne , or @phiresky about Lemmy, its future, and wider issues about the social media landscape today....
Can you add one to your list? Linking posts across instances? Like you can do !community@instance and the community will open viewed through your instance. But for linking posts there is no such equivalent. Like if I make an HTTP link it will be through my instance or possibly the one the community is hosted on which would be annoying for users of other instances.
Also, linking communities across instances is possible already, but you can leave it up since it’s confusing. I still see a lot of folks try to do the reddit approach if c/community
The big instances are bad enough but big communities are absolute killer of decentralisation
When you go to /c/books on your server, you don’t see an agglomeration of all /c/books on all servers of the fediverse. You only see that server’s /c/books, if it even has one.
This is a fatal flaw of lemmy which concentrates power enormously into the hands of the owners.
The default view should be all /c/books on all federated servers, with an easy way to filter only local posts.
Lemmy will turn into reddit if this is not quickly rectified.
I have seen this first hand. I think when someone hits report it needs to go to the moderator of the community. From there the mod should be able to forward it to where it needs to go.
Instance admins should be able to intersect this process.
I’ll say this is really clunky to do and often means being redirected to that instances site where you are no longer logged in. Mobile apps mostly solve this themselves, but its sometimes a pain on desktop. I’d like the ability to somehow group similar communities, but I’m fine if its like Multireddits or playlists on the user end.
If it is not the default and automatic, then lemmy is a pointless reddit clone.
You have to filter out what you don’t want because it is not possible to undelete what has already been deleted.
Users will just circulate ready made blacklists of spammer and thoughtcriminal communities to automatically remove them all from their feed.
The alternative is that only the biggest instance and the biggest community will matter and writing everywhere else is just a exercise in pointlessness
I think one thing you’re missing here is that under such a system the defaults would likely become your locally hosted /c/books rather than the largest one. Even still you’d probably see posts from the largest books communities because /c/books@your_instance follows multiple /c/books@big_instance. Community blocking would likely still work as it currently does so any books communities that you were not fond of could still be blocked.
There is still the issue of where do you post and I think the answer looks something like:
Post in /c/books@your_instance if you want to talk to your neighbors
Post in /c/books@big_instances if you want to talk to everybody
Which is more or less how most people would decide where to post book stuff anyway.
The Lemmy devs operate lemmy.ml, but it’s far from being the most active one (it’s currently the 5th): lemmyverse.net/?order=active_day
Large instances admins? The most active communities are spread across dbzer0, lemmy.world, programming.dev, lemm.ee, feddit.de, etc.: lemmyverse.net/communities?order=active
The main difference of Lemmy compared to Reddit is the ability that communities have to walk away, as I explained in another comment: discuss.online/comment/5393546
I think the instance admins should handle that. Lemmy itself should be a open and agnostic platform. Admins should use defederation and block specific communities.
(My oppinion, I’m not associated with Lemmy development.)
For migration we recently added a feature to export your user data. But “real” migrating accounts is something I put on our “todo” list, though it probably also first needs a proposal to define how it should work exactly (should it still work when the original instance is down?) As soon as we start giving users more control over their private key issues start appearing like not having any infrastructure for key rotation / revocation. Without that it will only work when the original instance still exists.
I’m not sure if by tagging users you mean linking / mentioning them? Or adding tags to them like you can tag posts / users on other platform. For tagging in general there’s a pending proposal github.com/LemmyNet/rfcs/pull/4 . So far it focuses on post tagging though to reduce the scope. I think the goal is going to be to start with one kind of tagging and add more kinds of tagging later.
For improving cross-instance linking (both communities, posts, and users) we also have a open milestone. There’s a few spitballing issues about it, but no real concrete proposal on how to build it yet.
Its definitely a concern. IMO the lemmyverse is far too centralized at the moment. The big questions are:
Is there a trend toward centralization, or away from it?
How are people being introduced / onboarded onto lemmy?
What can we do to combat centralization?
(1) I’m honestly unsure, and I’d def appreciate if anyone has done a study of it. We’ve seen a big growth in single person / smaller topic-focused instances, which is a great thing, but if their communities aren’t growing, we need to figure out how to reverse that trend. I’d have no problem with the current large instances, including this one, as long as the long-term-trend is away from them.
(2) Is mostly word-of-mouth, join-lemmy.org, and apps / web-ui’s which show an instance by default.
We’ve made the sort for the join-lemmy.org instances page be by random active users, and tried to emphasize on that page that it doesn’t matter which instance you join, since most federate, and can subscribe / connect to any community. I hope that helps, and we need to replicate that wherever we can.
Apps and webUI’s mostly just show lemmy.world rn, where they should show random instances. I’m guilty of this in Jerboa as well (showing lemmy.ml by default), and I’ve just opened up an issue that it should be showing a random server for anonymous users.
But I think we need to do more, and I’d def appreciate yours and anyone else’s ideas on how we can combat centralization. We need to get ahead of this problem before it gets worse.
But I think we need to do more, and I’d def appreciate yours and anyone else’s ideas on how we can combat centralization.
I am admin of the biggest Brazilian instance, but I am welcoming more local instances and talking to the admins we should spread the load. But what I notice is the users are concerned they will miss out if they are not in an instance that already have everything.
Could we have an easier way to auto-federate every new communities from a given instance? Even an “auto-federate everything possible” option. as @nutomic said lemmy DB isn’t too big, most instance owners could have it on their servers. And making it opt-in won’t hurt the small instances.
If you’ve been following our code commits / PRs, we’ve been adding a lot of mod tools improvements not just lately, but over lemmy’s entire life. I would even go so far as to say we have the strongest mod tools of any project in the fediverse, all the more necessary for us because of the community-focus.
Instance owners currently gets notified when someone has reported a user for spamming or trolling, but frequently it’s a user that is not on his instance, so he can’t do anything about it. Wouldn’t it be better if instance owners got notified only when they can take actual action (like the user being registered on their instance)?
Instance admins are responsible for what content their users see, so if a troll is visible to their users and ruining their day, then it should be taken care of everywhere necessary.
As @phiresky mentioned we have improvements coming down the pipe for linking content across instances.
Community linking and user linking do work currently (for example I just linked phiresky above), and a community example would be !risa , but we could improve this by extending it to posts and comments, as well as creating a url link standard that would work across apps.
It would be relatively easy to write a script/bot which fetches the list of communities from a given instance, and then subscribes to all of them from another instance. In fact I heard something like this already exists, but dont know the name.
When do we get advanced moderation features? And for example the ability to block all users from a single instance to prevent for example brigading? I mean for the user, so we don’t have to rely on defederation so much.
This could be added to the existing instance block feature, but so far no one has even bothered to open an issue I think.
Are you planning to revamp defederation? I mean it’s rather complicated the way it works and the triangle that is the user’s instance, the other user’s instance and the instance the community is located.
Its very simple and effective in that in prevents all network connections to the blocked instance. So I dont think it makes sense to change that, but other tools can be added on top for more fine-grained restrictions (eg user-level instance blocks in 0.19).
I think short event or campaign with push for donations with a pop up that you actually can dismiss. An ad like banner. The biggest problem would be community organization as Lemmy isn’t only decentralized horizontally but also vertically. Different front ends, different apps different instances. Most of them wouldn’t want to implement an ad that wouldn’t benefit them directly. They also have costs with running their piece of lemmy. So some cut for them should be included.
I think a dedicated trustworthy person should be responsible for organizing this campaign as developer time is best spent elsewhere.
For example, I used to follow a lot of subreddits for individual YouTube content creators, however, Lemmy doesn’t really have the size or culture to support this currently.
I’m pretty sure the hololive community is active here.
It’s also a pretty self fulfilling prophecy but I get what you’re saying. Hopefully the new scaling sort gets more popular as instances upgrade to 0.19. I’ve seen so many more smaller communities since I’ve started browsing by that.
Even league of legends, a huge game worldwide, barely has a community here.
When doing a search for community names, it would be cool to also see the instance name a community is located on. (The user count of the community is still useful.)...
Lemmy Developer AMA and Dev Update, 2024-01-26, 1500 CEDT
This is a chance for any users, admins, or developers to ask anything they’d like to myself, @nutomic , SleeplessOne , or @phiresky about Lemmy, its future, and wider issues about the social media landscape today....
Netflix enshittification will continue until morale improves (lemmy.dbzer0.com)
What is a niche interest or hobby you'd personally like to see represented more on Lemmy
For example, I used to follow a lot of subreddits for individual YouTube content creators, however, Lemmy doesn’t really have the size or culture to support this currently.
Brave to end 'Strict' fingerprinting protection as it breaks websites (www.bleepingcomputer.com)
[Feature Request] Additional search information.
When doing a search for community names, it would be cool to also see the instance name a community is located on. (The user count of the community is still useful.)...