The only thing I really have to add regarding “shiny new features”, is you can fire up something like VirtualBox and make “virtual” installs of other distros on your current machine.
A virtual machine or “VM” is basically running an emulated computer on your currently running computer, just like it was a program or game. But everything is self-contained in that emulated system.
So in Mint for example, you can still download other distro ISOs, get used to running the install process, trying out new things, basically just playing around and experimenting, because if you bork the whole thing it won’t affect your working “bare metal” system you’re using. You can just delete the file and start over as if it were a brand new computer! It’s strangely fun and has a lot of practical uses. (You know, like seeing what all this fuss is about with Temple OS for instance lol)
You can find a ton of interesting distros to play with on Distrowatch.com for instance, from stuff that’s meant to run on embedded devices to stuff that’s straight up memes. Lol
If you decide to actually switch your bare-metal system using the advice above, you’ll have a lot more experience then. :)
As for other distros, distro-hopping can be a lot of fun, but just remember in the end, there’s not as much difference between distros as it seems.
Mostly it’s about whether it’s rolling release or LTS, the desktop environment it starts with, and the packages / package-manager it ships with, aside from different specific customizations that team might have done.
Essentially Linux is Linux, but different distros cater to a certain kind of use case, audience, community, and so on.
The beauty and fun of Linux is choice and always having more you can learn!
Also Mint is often touted as a “beginner distro” but that doesn’t mean it can’t be a main driver for pros! There’s nothing wrong if you find you enjoy sticking with it in the long run. :)
I recommend EndeavourOS primarily because of it’s ease of use and rolling distro means you’ll have access to the latest bug fixes and patches (and a very active and supportive community), whereas it does come with the drawback of requiring to fix things every now and then if you’ve installed packages from places other than endeavour/Aur or require packages/apps that are older.
Yay (package manager) is very easy to get using as a beginner, however, if you don’t want rolling updates and just large update packages similar in scope to windows service pack updates I’d recommend popos or the sister/base os ubuntu. (fedora apparently may be good in this instance as well but I’ve very little contact with the OS and have been avoiding RHEL-related products recently because of their anti-consumer and anti-open source actions recently).
Ultimately it’s definitely recommended that you try a few distro’s to get a feel for what you like and then customize to your hearts content.
distrowatch.com if you’d like a more in depth review of various distros and what their performance bonuses or problems are.
EndeavourOS with xfce4 is very clean and quick to pick up with their little introductory/learning module that they include (once installed or on live, it will provide a popup that includes the following):
🎶To be fair🎶 .world isn’t without it’s own problems, mostly getting DDOS’d all the time, so if you’re gonna look for an instance, I’d try to pick a lesser-known one than .world or the other big ones. Probably being a hypocrite here, since mine is arguably the biggest meme community on Lemmy right now, but I think that’ll change given time.
I wouldn’t suggest using blahaj as a home instance. It’s one of the instances that pussyfoots around with defederating from hexbear, and I think it disables downvotes, which just means the content isn’t voted on democratically, which fucks up the aggregation and doesn’t give you an accurate view of Lemmy as a whole.
Cool communities there, poor admins. Stick with lemmy.world or pick a different home.
There’s like, one conservative community on one instance. And it’s like five people who get clowned on for making hilariously stupid and fallacious comments. They’re outnumbered in their own communities.
People could advertise this as feature about using lemmy, that the probalility of getting comments are pretty high. particularly on Mastodon, because it’s certainly something people are looking for, after coming from platforms like Youtube that keep hiding your posts. I think it’s mostly the ease of use with the communities. Because on Mastodon, while a instance hosted may have a dedicated topic, posts aren’t typically organized. and it’s harder to find posts that interests you if people either use different hash tags then what you search for, and the added fact that you have to constantly search, while once you join a Lemmy community you just scroll the post feed In said community.
Yet it’s normal for Mastodon users to join in on the conversation here.
Well, as neither of us are presenting or citing data on this, we can’t be sure.
Personally I care about this and keep a bit of a lookout for it and have in the past tried to advocate for and create more cross-platform talk. In my experience, and from what I’ve heard from others, the UX friction from the mastodon end makes it mostly a dead end. So while some cross talk certainly happens, I’d estimate it’s quite minor and meaningless in so far as we’re talking about it as a salient strength of ActivityPub compared to its competitor ATProto.
That’s a decision on the side of the developers, not a weakness of the ActivityPub protocol.
What this misses is whether the protocol makes it easier or harder for developers to ”decide” to allow for more inter-platform cross talk. Part of my critique was that the protocol and its general design isn’t making this easier. Kbin, for instance, doesn’t truly support microblogging. And the lemmy devs have acknowledged that allowing users to be followed like communities would be good but is just too hard right now.
The question then is whether the protocol could have made this easier for platform devs, either through its design or through providing fundamental tooling that enables developers more and removed the need for constant wheel-reinvention. From what I’ve heard from actual developers working with the protocol, they’re real technical critiques to be made around how hard it is to work with. So I believe that it isn’t helping anyone interested in making something new and interesting with it (which has yet to be done IMO, though kbin gets close ).
You seem to use the word censor a lot. For someone who who clearly has no idea what freedom of speech means.
Let me give you a clue. Your freedom of speech in no way forces others to provide you with a platform. Just governments not to silence you. Private citizens running web sites are not governments. So have no obligation to support your ideals.
When private community moderators do not want to deal with the opinions you push. They are not removing anything from you. You are failing to sell your ideals in a way that appeals to the people you are trying to force your ideas upon.
If you want to communicate with no limits. Host your own community on your own instance. And hope you do not piss off enough people to be de federated.
These are supposed to generate an instance agnostic link regardless of who clicks it. That means they’ll go to their instance’s version of your page, which means they can subscribe or whatever with their logged in account. Rather than going to an entirely different instance, then having to manually search for it in their own instance. However, the caveat is that not all apps have adopted these links - they work on the website, but not all of them work in Jerboa, for example.
There’s also @user@instance, this doesn’t automatically make a link but if you start typing it (on the website) then you’ll get a popup window with usernames. When you select this you’ll generate the code @user@their_instance. This links to the user’s instance, not the viewer’s instance, but it also sends a mention to the user. So if you reply to another user and mention them, they’ll get a notification. I think you can also fiddle with the link text with like [link text](https://their_instance/u/user) and it should still send a mention, but haven’t tested it.
Since the URL is pretty vital for federation (users from federated instances would follow for example !main@pigedove-lemmy-clone-u9568.vm.elestio.app in order to join a community), it's probably worth getting the domain up and running before you start federating anyway. Even though it's a frustrating wait for sure!
I think there's potential for a bird instance - I've heard rumours the birdwatching community is pretty active over at Mastodon.
Sorry that I don't have an answer to your direct question, but
It doesn't necessarily need to be at a large scale, because of federation. The technical knowledge needed to admin an instance is a barrier to entry now, but probably can be improved. We could eventually see an ecosystem where your WoW guild (or your college buds, or your found family, or your fantasy football league, or equivalent smaller community) hosts an instance for its members. You can still participate in federated discussions, and the subscriptions of the instance could stay comparatively filtered to what's most important to the users of the instance.
You'll always have bigger generalist instances, but the flexibility you can have with really small and topical ones shouldn't be forgotten about imo, especially as the platforms/technologies mature.
My instance of ~300 users (and uh, far less active ones) is costing me $223/year
I’ve had users donate about $25 so ~10% community funded and 90% admin funded.
That’s fine by me at the current cost. Though if we somehow got a bunch of new users I’d have to cut off signups at some point unless more donations rolled in. I could probably handle a sizeable increase in users first though.
If they all hang out on communities on the server (more or less), no problemo at all.
But if they all roam around and sign up on thousands of active communities on other servers, my server will be under water.
I love thinking about stuff like this (P=NP, complexity, etc) and I do not see very much about that concerning the lemmyverse which is IMO a shame.
I’m planning setting up a Lemmy build so I can tinker around with it, but you know, time and stuff. I also spent a lot of time just setting up the docker version so maybe it’s quite the job :-)
That’s a very interesting question and I’m not sure of the answer.
Obviously on some level, the cost of the infrastructure scales with the number of people using it. But so does the ability to crowdfund, if there are 100x more instances then theoretically there would be 100x more potential donors to meet the cost.
One clear way to influence the scaling in our favor would be to utilize instances with clear themes and purposes. If everybody on a particular instance is interested in the same content, that reduces the wasted computational resources compared to an instance where all of the users are interested in different topics, and thus subscribed to a much wider variety of communities.
My intuition is that as long as the platform only hosts text and images, the costs should be manageable, especially with inevitable improvements to computational efficiency that are likely to come as Lemmy matures. For instance, I believe there is some kind of patch that reduces storage utilization that should be shipping with the next version (0.19).
I actually hope that some dev work goes into providing "premium features" for paying subscribers. Things like profile cosmetics, awards, "superlikes", gif embeds, maybe sub only communities/threads. I view all of these as perfectly acceptable premium features that folks pay for on platforms like Discord that don't deter free users. If it helps make instances sustainable and keeps high quality admin & moderation in place, I would argue it would be a big community benefit.
Another possibility is instance - as - affiliate where the admin sets up affiliate accounts with services like VPN, Amazon, a web host, etc. To enable users to buy things they would already and give a kickback to the instance.
It expects the communities to be on the post instance or your instance (lemmy.world) if not specified. The community should always be referred to as !Kurzgesagt, which automatically works as a link.
Non-profit social media isn't exactly healthy either.
I know beehaw is a relative safe haven, but venture to other instances in the fediverse and you'll find cesspits of toxicity that are as bad as it gets.
And given what my experiences with toxic positivity, cancelling and culture wars in minority run communities which should know better, I doubt beehaw doesn't have its fair share of toxicity too. Even if you manage to keep out the worst bigots, people who have been hurt or bullied, quite often end up hurting or bullying others.
If this is how Lemmy is ran then I will need to find another community
Lemmy is not ran in any particular way.
That’s one community one one instance. On most instances, anyone can create a community and become the god of what is allowed there. That doesn’t mean it’s representative of the rest of that instance. But even if it is, you can post to other communities on other instances.
There is one mod on one community doing something dodgy (or just got a report about it being antisemitic and assumed they were right - after all, there’s no training course for being a lemmy mod). This is certainly not the way “lemmy is ran” and thinking lemmy is run in any particular way is missing the core aspect of what lemmy is.
Based on the original post of this thread, this comment, the modlog, and an “innocent until proved guilty” approach, I have no reason to distrust the OP.
As such, what I’m going to say might be wrong, and I’m ready to apologise if it is; but I do not think that it is wrong.
What the fuck, !worldnews mod team? If OP is being accurate, at least one of you is bloody irrational, to the point that the mod is unable to understand the difference between “here’s why this discourse is bad” and support to said bad discourse.
I get that it’s hard to recruit new mods in Lemmy, but remember - a bad mod is worse than no mod. In other words, IMO you guys should seriously consider to review each others’ mod actions and perhaps expurging a mod or two.
OP: your mileage will vary when it comes to Lemmy moderation. Some communities are moderated by sensible people; some, well… you know. Sadly there’s not much that you can do against this, except perhaps avoiding those comms. (inb4 Reddit is not an option in this regard; here, shitty mods are like stepping on shit, but there it’s like drowning in it.)
I also think that mod actions need more transparency. I’m thankful to the developers for the modlog, but I do not think that it is enough. IMO the content being removed should be still visible, when not illegal, with a big (USER WAS BANNED FOR THIS POST/COMMENT) in it.
Also, the current modlog should at least clarify which team was responsible for a mod action - the comm mods, the comm’s instance admins, or the user’s instance admins. And there should be a way for mods to report users upstream to the instance’s admins.
There are lots of weird kbin/lemmy interaction quirks. For the community linking, you need to include the instance as well. So if you wanted to link the community this post is in (using lemmy syntax) it would be written as !animemes@ani.social (note that you don’t need to include linking markdown, it will automatically be parsed as a link) even if you are on ani.social.
As for bot accounts not federating, that is especially frustrating for the !episode_discussion community since it means that kbin users just see a vast desert of a community that contains zero posts.
That's exactly how I wrote the community links in my original post on kbin though. i.e. the literal text I posted for the first sentence is: I was introduced to the boykisser/girlkisser meme over in !196@lemmy.blahaj.zone recently, and today the power of memes compelled me to make this. I think something is not getting translated correctly when sending the message from kbin to lemmy. Maybe kbin is converting it to a link first and then sending that to lemmy instead of the literal text of my comment?
Related to linking, is there a syntax for instance-relative post linking? (Or even just a good recommendation for how to link threads without driving people insane?)
This seems like a weirdly unnecessary way to not quite manage to duplicate what lemmy has been designed to do.
How do I make it just work with just my original account?
You go to the community list for your instance and do a search on the URL of the community you’re interested in. Then (assuming that your instance is federated with the other one) your instance will create its own mirror of the community, and you’re done.
That might be kind of difficult because each post is going to be different depending on instance, so there won’t be one universal link to it. What I would do is post a link to the community like this “/c/CommunityName@instance.tld”
An unbiased comparison of linux distributions' setup (sh.itjust.works)
If linux distributions were tools. (sh.itjust.works)
It's not fair (startrek.website)
(sorry if anyone got this post twice. I posted while Lemmy.World was down for maintenance, and it was acting weird, so I deleted and reposted)
Gitlab now requires phone number/credit card verification (lemmy.world)
Looks like gitlab now requires account verification for new accounts in addition to email. Either phone number or credit card....
something to look forward to? (lemmy.world)
Why does lemmy seem better for engagement and conversation then (I meant than) Mastodon
On average if I make a post on Mastodon whether I get a comment, and a continued conversation is either hit or miss....
Why Bluesky over sth like Activitypub? (slrpnk.net)
Is it really decentralized and private?
wayland, not even once (gist.github.com)
As of now I have approximately 1 user. (lemmy.world)
Is Lemmy as a platform sustainable?
I’m wondering how are all those different Lemmy instances financed? I know some rely on donations, but is that all and is that sustainable?
Can anyone else see this post?
infosec.pub/post/5039488
Kurzgesagt — An unofficial community for discussing Kurzgesagt's videos on space, biology, philosophy, etc. (kbin.social)
An unofficial community for discussing anything and everything related to Kurzgesagt – In a Nutshell....
Nepal bans TikTok and says it disrupts social harmony (apnews.com)
Being banned with no accountability
I took a 2 month ban from worldnews@lemmy.ml...
mememaker (media.kbin.social)
Best way to bookmark lemmy communities in a web browser (lemmy.world)
If you’re like me, you would join one Lemmy instance, and then join a community by one of the following ways,...
How do I link directly to a post inside a Lemmy instance?
Hoping to spread the joy to people who haven’t learned…