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....
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.
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.
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.)
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 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.
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
First, I want to say thank you for the incredible job you already have done in this area. However, do you have any thoughts on further improving some fundamental Lemmy UX painpoints? Examples such as:
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.
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.
What about features like automatically kicking of moderators / revoking their ownership. In the early days of the Reddit exodus, some people reserved lots of communities just so they’d be the owner of the community, but they don’t do anything with it. I think admins mostly already dealt with that. But there are ideas floating around to migitate for things like that and other common annoyances. I think good moderation is key (and the tools that go with that and the whole architecture of the platform should favor a good atmosphere.)
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’m not sure if this will entirely make sense, but do you believe there could be some kind of feature to authenticate with a specific instance, but make your ‘home’ instance another?
In other words, to create your account on lemmy.ml, but visit lemmy.world and be signed into your account, effectively changing what your home page and ‘local’ looks like without needing to subscribe to all communities on another instance if you’re interested in having them curate your feed? Piped has something like this, where you auth with one server, but proxy video through another.
The reason I ask is that this helps to get around tricky defederation situations and can improve privacy. Perhaps I want to auth from a server I trust more with my data, but I want to make .world or .ml my home page because they have more content that is relevant to me and that helps me discover it. Or I want to auth from lemmy.ml so I have access to instances that were defederated from .world, meaning I can still use them as my ‘home page’ without needing to actually make an account there.
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.
Oh ok awesome! We do have an art community too. Also we have a peertube instance you can use to upload your creations, if they are videos. You’ll see the information about it pinned on our page.
We are hilariouschaos.com
Let me know any questions if you have them. We’re excited to have you !
Stupid mods, well one of them, refuse to even look at a dictionary definition of the word troglodyte and prefers to stick to the idiotic method of using Wikipedia as an encyclopedia. End result is that I was banned for calling living humans troglodytes even though there are communities in Tunesia and China (and I supplied links,...
Yet insisting I am calling them a prehistoric cave dweller and subhuman when I am providing proof otherwise is exactly what they criticize Trump and his cohorts of doing. That’s the kind of juvenile bs that goes on in high school, on Facebook, and in Elon Musk;s house.
BTW, I wasn’t banned from the instance, I was banned from the community.
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....
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)
deleted_by_moderator
politics@reddit,world - i mean lemmy.world
Stupid mods, well one of them, refuse to even look at a dictionary definition of the word troglodyte and prefers to stick to the idiotic method of using Wikipedia as an encyclopedia. End result is that I was banned for calling living humans troglodytes even though there are communities in Tunesia and China (and I supplied links,...