Not cheating at all! It should be happening more IMO!
First, there’s a lot of parallel chatter and interests kept separate because people are on different platforms.
Second, bringing down the boundaries between instances and platforms (so that don’t all have to use screenshots all the time) is what the fediverse is about)
Third, using existing communities and platforms to activate new communities and platforms is supposed to a super power of the fediverse, as it makes it easier and easier to kickstart new things as the fediverse grows
Fourth, and getting back to the second above, the fediverse’s “killer app”, IMO, is the eventual creation of a diversity of communities and platforms that interoperate in a useful, flexible and engaging way for the user.
At the moment, I’m actually frustrated at the lack of cross platform engagement between lemmy/kbin and mastodon. A big part of it, IMO, is the simplicity of mastodon’s UI and how integrating with any other platform with a more sophisticated UI becomes difficult. Right now, for instance, mastodon has no nice way to deal with a community/magazine or a post with multiple threads of comments beneath it, as all mastodon does is see everything as a flattened stream of posts in reverse chronological order.
Right now, posting from mastodon to a community is the only way to bring these worlds together that works for users of both platforms, except for the user making the post, which is a problem.
Ah … right … yea I’ve seen that happen occasionally … I had actually presumed that something had been changed with that post, perhaps by an admin or something cleaning stuff up, and that triggered a new timestamp for the post.
Maybe still a bug. I’ll keep track now of when it happens as it might help sort it out.
But still, that’s rarely the case for me. Just went down a fair way in my feed now and there wasn’t a single occurrence of it. Could it be particular communities causing it, maybe from instances on older software?
Otherwise though, Hot seems to do what I’d want. Combine with a bit of New or Top for an appropriate time window and I’m all good.
For comments, Hot/New/Top all do what I’d want too.
This is a big one. There were some contributions from either instances or bots on my feed I didn’t like that I just blocked, and my feed is fine now. No need to ask for defederation of the whole community when you can do it yourself.
most people i know use google by searching whatever question they have and including the word “reddit” at the end to find reddit threads since it currently has the most useful information....
Maybe I’m misinterpreting what you’re saying, but lemmy.one has basically no content on it other than the 8 communities that @jonah has created or allowed there. The whole point of that server is to allow people to simply login and then participate in other instances from there.
That is all to say, lemmy.one would be one of the “smaller” instances from a standpoint of content to be indexed by Google.
MapReduce is term pertaining to a software data retrieval architecture/process (also known as divide-and-conquer). The simple version is that instead of asking one super big database that knows “everything” you ask multiple smaller databases the same question i.e. “what all posts do you have from bob@domain.com?” (this is “mapping” a query to mutliple sources) and each database returns 0 or more results, then the query interface joins the results together (“reduce”) to a single response. This is common in “big data” because you can more efficiently optimize the query by parallelizing it across many machines/workers/nodes. There are additional optimizations that can be implemented such as caching common queries or data-sharding (items a-f on node 1, items g - k on node 2…).
I don’t think Nostr protocol is immune to the development of big centralized popular instances. Especially if something like Threads integrates and becomes the “default” client with millions of users over night. Users, in general, will always gravitate towards content and community. But, I think Nostr has a slight edge over ActivityPub in handling that problem by the user having no direct dependence on any one particular host.
I’ll have to read more into the Nostr protocol specifically as it pertains to privacy, tracking and content injection (ads).
I’m by no means an authority on ActivityPub nor Nostr, I apologize if that may have been surmised. I too am just chatting.
So, as any self-respecting datahoarder and selfhoster, I have my server rack populated with a few machines, churning along as they tend to my hobby-related projects. Now that I’ve started using Lemmy I’m toying with the idea of selfhosting an instance, as I have both the hardware, bandwidth, and skillset for it....
This isn’t a terrible idea, but it’s also important to understand single-user and tiny invite-only instances as analogous to “leechers” in the torrenting world. The federation load that an instance instance imposed on other instances depends much more on the number of communities it subscribes to than the number of active users. If a user stops using Lemmy but leaves their instance up, it’s generating federation load for no reason.
Tiny instances are inefficient, and while it is desirable for the network to be able to scale to the point where it can reasonably support lots of them anyway, right now federation queues are backed up and messages are frequently getting dropped. Encouraging lots MORE tiny instances is probably not the efficient thing right this second. Rather, we’d want more users joining mid-sized instances that are not overloaded locally and that are making efficient use of the federation load they generate by using it to serve 100-1000 users rather than 1 or 2.
Liability is not binary. There is a qualitative change in risk as you transition from “I subscribed to 100 actively moderated communities that I read and am familiar with” toward “I subscribed to everything there is including the worst of the worst and I didn’t realize I was doing so and don’t look at the results”.
Also, moderation activities federate. So even if a rogue poster does “contaminate” the actively moderated communities on a well-admin’ed instance… when those mods and admins delete the offending material they’ll automatically cleanup your instance as well. As a result, it’s the creepy crawly communities that don’t clean up or don’t want to clean up that generate the lion’s share of risk.
Is it 100% safe to sub to well-moderated communities, no. You have to know your local laws and protect yourself. Do you do yourself favors by running lemmony? Also no. These two statements can be simultaneously true.
Folks should not use lemmony to bootstrap their subscription count. It’s not that hard to hit lemmyverse.net and just manually sub a bunch of stuff you’re actually interested in, or to visit a big instance and browse their all feed unauthenticated.
But if you really want to automate community bootstrapping, lemmony is the worst of the scripts that doit because it defaults to subscribing to EVERYTHING, including all the porn, piracy, and hate communities on the most absent-admin’ed under-modded instances in the lemmyverse. Then your instance will mirror all those questionably legal communities and re-serve them to the public unauthenticated internet, creating hosting liability for you. Not to mention being a bad fediverse citizen and creating massive amounts of federation load on the instances forwarding you posts and comments from 20k communities that you don’t read.
These two subscription bootstrapping scripts limit you to top subs by default… So you’re more likely to be in well-modded territory and just the number of subs is smaller you you can review them and back out of anything sketchy. Subscriber-bot’s docs do a good job of explaining the risks and problems of mass-subscription so you know what you’re getting into.
Then your instance will mirror all those questionably legal communities and re-serve them to the public unauthenticated internet, creating hosting liability for you.
To be frank, this liability risk exists even in well-moderated communities as it only takes one rogue poster/commenter to “contaminate” your own instance…
Bugs and performance issues are their focus for now. Lemmy was tiny until recently, that means a lot of features weren’t needed, and a lot of issues never arose.
Now it’s big, and we want multi communities, flairs, and many other things, but for now the focus is on not having federation from lemmy.world take 2 hours, and for custom emojis not being able to take over instances and stuff ;)
You don’t have to make a ton of accounts. An account on one instance can subscribe to and participate in communities on any other instances (provided it hasn’t been defederated by the instance admin).
Another feature I’d like to see is instance admins proposing multi-communities, as in: multi-communities which pop up in the search results and allow you to subscribe to all the the communities grouped together with one click/touch. This way the problem of community fragmentation across multiple instances (e.g. multiple instances having a a “memes” community) would be solved (or mitigated at least).
I don’t think it should be done by a specific name, it should be user defined, I should be able to add the communities together which I deem that they do belong together for some reason.
This.
People are used to a single handle mapping to a single community, and I get that they want that to still be true, but it isn't here. It just isn't. Having a communities auto-group in any way is asking for a bad time for all involved.
First of all, people generally are not considering the contexts that those communities are situated in. My go-to example here is politics communities. r/politics is, very frustratingly, about American politics, but that isn't going to be universally true here for communities named politics. You should not assume that an Australian based server, a Canadian based server, a UK based server, an Indian based, etc. will reserve that name to deal with, well, foreign politics. And having them automatically lumped together will functionally destroy the communities on instances focused on smaller countries.
In top of that, it's wide open door for troll instances.
If people want lists of communities, that's fine. That's great even. I'd love to lump together some sports communities so that when I'm in the mood for that, I can find them all in one place. It'd be cool to be able to have them optionally not show up in Subscribed, too. But auto-grouping is one of those features that is actively bad for smaller communities, and which people really only think they want. It's more of a sign that people aren't opening their mind to this new space and paradigm they find themselves in than an actually useful feature.
I have only ever needed this feature with NSFW content. In Lemmy I have easily and better way resolved it by having another account with nsfw instance. This creates even better outcome than the multi community feature. All clients easily support two accounts, and you can switch between them in few presses.
If the instance I started my community on shuts down, then the whole community is gone. Is there anything I can do as a mod to prepare for this so I can transfer everything onto a new instance? Or is everything lost if my instance shuts down?
Do federated instances keep everything forever from communities someone is subscribed to? Or do they just keep a temporary cache that they can drop after no one has accessed it in a while?
Can’t answer it but isn’t the whole thing backed up (synced) to other instances? If I’m browsing lemmy.world community on my lemm.ee account, I’m actually only fetching data from lemm.ee. Only downside is that if there is an instance started after the community got lost, it will not have that community synced.
The best you could do is try to archive the updates on an instance you control, but that is going to require you running an instance, writing custom code, and possibly breaking any GDPR protections you might have by not cross-honoring deletions.
There is a reason why a lot of Reddit subs who want to make their own Lemmy community create their own instances.
Setup your own instance (don't even need to allow other members), create the community there. Then just create some alt accounts on other instances that you think would be interested in your community. Subscribe to your community from those instances to at least get your stuff to appear. Than hope for the best.
Hi, My normal account was recently banned from c/memes and possibly all of lemmy.ml, but I wasn’t sure why. I was wondering if there was a mod I could ask, so I could learn from my mistake, mea culpa, and possibly beg for forgiveness.
Thank you so much. l’m glad to know that I probably wasn’t booted from the entire instance. And while ignorance of community rules isn’t an excuse, I hope they see I was posting in good faith.
How can I access Kbin communities(magazines) and posts from Lemmy? Do I need a separate Kbin account to post in Kbin or can I post in Kbin by using my Lemmy account?
You should be able to search them in the same format as you'd search for federated Lemmy communities. For instance, !askkbin@kbin.social should let you access Kbin's version of this community (assuming I know how to format the text correctly).
From there, you can subscribe to it from within your instance on lemmy.ml, and it'll show up in your feed as the rest of your content.
Hey people! I have just started using Lemmy and have have got a basic feel for how it works ok. The one thing that confuses me is the navigation using the exclamation mark, like ‘!linux’...
the ! addressing allows you to post a link that anybody can click to get their instance’s version of the community link. So for example, !linux posted anywhere on lemmy becomes a link to lemmy.fmhy.ml/c/linux@lemmy.ml for me, but the exact same link is a link to aussie.zone/c/linux@lemmy.ml for you
Hi all, I’m pretty new to the fediverse and have tried learning about the way it works. I have tried finding some information in vain, so I have ended up mostly reasoning about it by drawing parallels with other non federated systems but I feel it’s not accurate....
What's the benefit of using Kbin over Lemmy?
I see a very small minority of people using Kbin, but I don’t understand why....
How can we improve Lemmy’s SEO so we can google “(question) lemmy” instead of relying on “(question) reddit”
most people i know use google by searching whatever question they have and including the word “reddit” at the end to find reddit threads since it currently has the most useful information....
Any Nostr ppl here?
Been hearing a little about Nostr. Apparently it’s a protocol?...
Advantages to selfhosting a Lemmy instance?
So, as any self-respecting datahoarder and selfhoster, I have my server rack populated with a few machines, churning along as they tend to my hobby-related projects. Now that I’ve started using Lemmy I’m toying with the idea of selfhosting an instance, as I have both the hardware, bandwidth, and skillset for it....
deleted_by_moderator
How can I back up a community I mod?
If the instance I started my community on shuts down, then the whole community is gone. Is there anything I can do as a mod to prepare for this so I can transfer everything onto a new instance? Or is everything lost if my instance shuts down?
banned from c/memes
Hi, My normal account was recently banned from c/memes and possibly all of lemmy.ml, but I wasn’t sure why. I was wondering if there was a mod I could ask, so I could learn from my mistake, mea culpa, and possibly beg for forgiveness.
Accessing Kbin from Lemmy
How can I access Kbin communities(magazines) and posts from Lemmy? Do I need a separate Kbin account to post in Kbin or can I post in Kbin by using my Lemmy account?
Navigation Question
Hey people! I have just started using Lemmy and have have got a basic feel for how it works ok. The one thing that confuses me is the navigation using the exclamation mark, like ‘!linux’...
how to find communties on lemmy?
how do you find more communities on different lemmy instances? are there any lists for migrating from reddit?
Fediverse privacy
Hi all, I’m pretty new to the fediverse and have tried learning about the way it works. I have tried finding some information in vain, so I have ended up mostly reasoning about it by drawing parallels with other non federated systems but I feel it’s not accurate....