I see some Linux but I’m subscribed to a lot of techy communities. Self host, programming etc. So it’s kinda normal.
Could be the default view on each instance… On my first account I subbed to a lot of different communities on different instances so I saw all the crap. Eventually due to all the politics bullshit I just migrated to my current instance which has hexbear and lemmygrad blocked so it’s been a lot better.
But even so, I always see a bunch of politics crap on the memes community.
Totally depends on the instance. There are definitely furry communities here in Lemmy and they definitely feel lonely. But I have heard of some furry mastodon instances that actually are lively and active. No idea if they actually are since I don’t have a clue why I can’t access my mastodon account, let alone what instance I signed up on.
But active non-Linux, non-Star Trek meme groups definitely are a thing, despite how small they are.
Hopefully all the different clients will soon support good blocking. With connect for android I can block instances and keywords, but I most just continually block on a community basis what I don’t want to see from All. I’m sure there are hundreds in there. This keeps it quite relevant for me but I’m still in the flow of seeing new subs. I do subscribe to all the ones I really like.
So it’s a curation process, but a more active one vs trying to hunt subs down like I used to do with Reddit.
I haven’t tried to get community tech support on Lemmy, so I wouldn’t know what it’s like firsthand. If people are really that difficult, sure, that sucks. But it sounds like the person asking needs to work on more fundamental linux skills than something specific to running a Lemmy instance, and the internet is full of information about that.
I don’t know how I forgot about the sorting options, that stills limits me to the communities that have been connected to my instance right? I saw somewhere that each instance only syncs the communities the users from that instance have followed or something of the style
Yup exactly I agree with this. I think people are entitled to an opinion and that includes tankies. But the way alot of “lemmings” go about discussing there views and opinions is worse than reddit in my opinion for an instance there’s alot of folk assholes in my opinion raiding Christian communities downvoiting them and commenting on them I’m not Christian myself but I personally see this as despicable behavior. Especially considering there people consider themselves to be the “tolerant” one’s
Well, for what it’s worth, we’re happy you’re here, not just as the topic of discourse, but as a contributing member too. I just hope we can hold onto the sense of community that gets lost in the wash when a user base hits that certain threshold. The last few months I spent on Reddit were kind of awful, even before the blackout, to the point that I started physically feeling way better after I nuked my old account.
Honestly I’m kind of hoping the ability to disassociate from instances is the secret sauce. I feel like the Beehaw admins have been doing a good job decoupling from federations that get a bit too ick - I certainly see way less negativity here than there.
plus it’s federated, not just a single site. The cost for hosting services are divided by instance so say one instance goes down, that doesn’t kill the entire program, although it would erase a portion of communities from Lemmy history in such a situation. Also it would be cheaper to host a Lemmy instance as the prices of hosting the instances that build up Lemmy are divided.
I don’t see why not - there are loads of other sites, let’s say DDL (roms etc) and various self-hosted blogs that chug along for years at the expense to the owner.
With Lemmy, the main concern would be growing storage, but that’s mostly solved by using something like B2 or Wasabi to store images, instead of the local server. B2 also recently changed their plans to make it free to download to a certain extent (prior to this, you had to pay for downloads) which makes this route even more viable.
I’m aware of lemmyworld and dbzer0 being very public about their donations, and lemmyml has been run by the devs years before we migrated. Lemmee’s admin is extremely active in the fediverse so that’s likely to stay too. We’ve only migrated from reddit in the past few months, so i’d say a lot of lessons have been learned in that time, as well as the viability/sustainability of running reasonably big instances.
A fair few have folded in that time too, some just disappearing out of the blue (vlemmy, lemmyuk, lemmyfilm) and others not able to manage the moderation as well as abusive users. I don’t think any have folded from it being too expensive to run - but I could of course be wrong there.
Personally, my blog site costs about $200/yr to run out of pocket, and is quite manageable at around $16/mo - comparable to a multiple-screen HD netflix subscription maybe. For a moderately used lemmy instance maybe you’d be paying $600/yr - about $50/mo which is still reasonably manageable. If just two users donated $50, your out-of-pocket costs drop to around $40. If all your users donated $2, assuming 100 users, your out of pocket drops to around $34.
The last time I checked, the largest instance Lemmyworld costs over $1k/mo to run (this also includes sister site mastodonworld, which is on separate infra but managed by the same core admin team IIRC). As of today there is a 4 month donation buffer, but looking at the graph on OpenCollective at least it looks like the admin team may need to cover a few hundred $ out of pocket if the buffer runs out, as monthly recurring donations is lower than the infra expenses. There are occasionally some very generous donors so I think it’s financially sustainable for the time being.
Overall I don’t think there’s anything to be worried about, this is the fediverse so you’re free to have an identity on any instance and still interact with the various communities. It’s not like Digg or Myspace where “when it’s gone, it’s gone”.
Besides funding you already have enough infighting, power mods, and admins shaping content according to political belief.
So tell years fun now everyone is going to defed against most instances and it’ll be even more of a pain in the ass to see content and it’s going to continue to get reposted across the instances you do interact with.
So like, lemmy will be here but it’s going to end up more like a traditional forum than interconnected communities.
Donations or grants would probably be best. I’m sure there are community grants available for doing public good.
I’ve also seen some open source things sell merch, where you buy a hat or something with a particular logo. It’s still donating with extra steps, but it’s a little different
Our instance admin broke it down recently, and it’s actually not too expensive to run. Without wasting money on engagement, growth, data collection, marketing, etc, it’s not actually that expensive to run social media platforms I guess
I think it’s more sustainable then Facebook ,Twitter and others. Why? Because it’s federated! if one instance goes bankrupt or shuts down for whatever reason it doesn’t close down the entire program. If anything, at worst a portion of Lemy communities would get erased from history. Lemmy in reality is really just an interface, with a bunch of different instances combined to provide the content. The cost is actually cheaper then other social platforms from the last 10 years+ like Facebook because in a way the cost for the “service” is divided by all the different instances hosted by volunteers,
From when I was asking about it, I think it’s only the instance admins that can see the details. It would be nice to have this information clearly outlined somewhere, so people know and aren’t surprised.
I didn’t say “defederate them”; I said that I didn’t know why other instances were defederated when that instance is worse. I intentionally didn’t say defederation is bad or good because that’s irrelevant.
Also, different people have different views on defederation and its relation to the Fediverse. In my experience, curating away from content harmful to your users is important to creating healthy communities.
I’m mostly a fan, because I don’t feel like I have to have faith.
If my instance explodes, I’ll make an account on another instance. If the Lemmy devs collectively evaporate (and neither me nor others want to pick up the slack), then I can go to Mastodon or Kbin or whatever.
Individual rogue instances can be defederated. If e.g. Reddit truely disappears over night and Lemmy were to gain mass market appeal, then I can likely find a more isolated instance with a smaller community sharing my interests.
Similarly, the high availability of source code may lead to malicious instances, actors, and/or back-end modifications that would favor specific instances resounding consequence throughout the Fediverse.
Historically availability of source code has prevented that sort of thing since forever. Plus you can’t favor a specific instance, that’s the beauty of the protocol. It’s like saying google can favourite a specific email provider, they can’t, if suddenly Gmail stops receiving or sending emails to random domains people would just switch boats because you can register on any of the other email providers that don’t do that. Gmail can collect your data and all, but all data on Lemmy is public, so there’s no need to mess with the source code to gather data.
So what are you worried about? Mods moderating content in ways you don’t like? That will happen on any platform that allows moderation, and you don’t want to use one that doesn’t (plus it has nothing to do with the open source nature of the server, and you can jump to another community with different mods). Maybe you’re worried that malicious software will run on your phone? That’s more likely to happen with a closed source software, if you’re truly paranoid about these things you would have a full open source phone with a custom OS without google components flashed into it, I can see that you’re not on that level since you still don’t understand that open source is needed for transparency. Or maybe you’re worried the server itself will host malicious content? Any server can do that, servers that host things people write will always be able to host malicious content, it’s not hard to link to an external website or provide malicious scripts or files, just don’t click on random links or download random things from strangers online and you should be mostly fine.
Similarly, the high availability of source code may lead to malicious instances, actors, and/or back-end modifications that would favor specific instances resounding consequence throughout the Fediverse.
That’s ultimately just the Internet being the Internet.
On the fediverse, any instance shouldn’t blindly trust any other instance for that exact reason. That’s part of the game. Instances share the data over ActivityPub, and it’s up to you to process and make use of that data. That includes spam filtering and whatnot. Some instances have CSAM detection for example.
Every instance that’s subscribed to a user or community gets the full set of data: every vote, from every user, from every instance involved. We have the data, we can analyze it. And that’s what really matters.
It doesn’t matter if there’s rogue instances trying to manipulate votes. Everyone have the data to detect and filter out the noise. Maybe one day it’ll be like E-Mail where the majority of the traffic is spam. But just like E-Mail, we’ll make filters and make it work. If all else fails, there’s always the allowlist method: only see content from sources you trust not be spammy. You can even run AI models on it to filter the data if you want. You have the data, you can do whatever you want with it to make it useful for you.
I have faith in the protocol and its openness, not the software that runs it.
Kind of but not really? You’d have to federate out every vote individually. There’s no upvotes totals anywhere, there’s a vote table that contains who voted up/down on what, and it’s counted as needed. So if you want to send out 1000 votes, you need 1000 valid users and also send 1000 different activities to at least one instance.
You can make it display 100000 votes on your own instance if you want, but it’s not going to alter the rating on other instances because they run their own tally.
If you really want this to work long term, you need a credible looking instance with credible looking users that are ideally actually subscribed to the target community, and credible activity patterns too. Otherwise, the community can detect what you’re doing and defederate you and purge all the activities from your instance, and also revert all those votes as a side effect.
Remember, all votes are individual activities, and all votes are replicated individually to every instance. On Kbin, you can even see all the votes right from the UI, they don’t even hide it! You can count them yourself if you want. So anyone with the dataset can analyze it and sound the alarm. And each instance can potentially have its own algorithm for that, so instead of having just one target to game, like Reddit and a subreddit, you have hundreds of instances to fool. There’s so many signals I could use to fight spam: instance age, instance user growth, the frequency and timing of the votes, are the users seemingly active 24/7, what other communities those users post into, what are they voting for, do they all vote in agreement with each other, and on and on.
So, you technically can manipulate votes but it takes a lot of effort and care to make it as hard as possible to detect in practice. We play the same cat and mouse game as Reddit, but distributed and with many more eyes on it.
2 days ago (see 2) I posted something into the !programmer_humor community which got almost 1000 upvotes (see 1) while the user numbers for the last week are at 131 (see 3), this doesn’t add up. How can 131 users upvote almost 1000 times?
That’s because, currently, the community stats that you see in the sidebar are only from your instance – community stats are currently not federated. Afaik, federated community stats are going to be implemented in 0.19.
I didn’t see it, but I agree. The job of a mod is to enforce the rules of the community. Rules should be well thought out and boundaries distinct. For instance, no porn. Any rules without well defined boundaries are difficult to enforce and lead to power trips. Ideally, nebulous rules would require mod consensus, if these types of rules must exist to begin with.
Recently had some people tell me that connect isn’t collapsing cross-posts so when a post is posted to multiple communities at the same time it floods the feed...
yeah ill probably have to make an issue on all of their repositories
its pretty much only supported by the main instance web frontends (lemmy-ui and pangora-ui) (been supported on lemmy-ui since before all of the apps were made)
currently recommended in programming.dev to cross post to as many communities as you can to give content to the lower activity communities and since there tends to be a lot of overlap with topics but thats conflicting with current app behaviours
Communist Filth/Capitalist Filth (lemmy.ml)
Oh no ... (jlai.lu)
Can you describe Lemmy in one picture? (aussie.zone)
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?
If you can create a Lemmy instance and federate, you can shovel data about every vote linked to an account
I’ve created this post: sh.itjust.works/post/8898162...
lol (sh.itjust.works)
How are "We" to place trust in the fediverse?
I came here for the same reasons as most of you and chiefly among them was to escape the corporate embrace of common social media platforms....
The user numbers in Lemmy communities don't add up (jemmy.jeena.net)
2 days ago (see 2) I posted something into the !programmer_humor community which got almost 1000 upvotes (see 1) while the user numbers for the last week are at 131 (see 3), this doesn’t add up. How can 131 users upvote almost 1000 times?
NOW you can kick me (lemmy.world)
Connect does not collapse cross-posts into the same post in the post feed
Recently had some people tell me that connect isn’t collapsing cross-posts so when a post is posted to multiple communities at the same time it floods the feed...