If you’re ok with living in the middle of nowhere, then it’s entirely doable. Some folks just have different priorities.
For instance, here is a property in Yucca Valley, CA that has a hanger in the backyard, where you can head out right on the runway from your yard. Just under $300k. There’s an entire street of houses that are adjacent to the runway of a small municipal airstrip, I think they call them fly in/fly out communities. They’re often well off the beaten path, but you don’t have to pay for storage when you have a hanger out back.
I’m new to the fediverse and chose to join Beehaw because the community interactions feel positive like an active private forum that I’m on, but with the structural flexibility of a federated platform.
There is definitely a tone change between local communities and the outside federated feed, but I worry that secession and isolation will lead to community atrophy— it’s already a small instance and without the cross-pollination of outside users and content it may not have enough momentum to succeed
My personal experience so far is that the Lemmy community is significantly more responsive in getting rid of spam bots. I’ve definitely seen a few but they disappear in less than a day, and lately the amount of spam has been extremely minimal, almost nonexistent on my instance’s all page. Compare to Reddit, where spam bots might get banned from a few subs immediately but would often take weeks to get sitebanned, if ever.
Most serious Lemmy instances require user approval to join via the short application, which means they have no bots at all. And the big key is that lemmy admins are quite active and talk amongst themselves; if an instance with open no-approval signups gets abused by bots, other admins will talk to that instance about it, and most of the time it seems to get fixed pretty quick. And if they don’t… well, you defed them until they do. It’s pretty pog.
It’s not a specific community. I’ve been here since August and have nearly 1.5k posts across a wide variety of communities and wide variety of instances. In that time I’ve seen more and more bad faith comments from people with the SJW instance tag. It’s not universal but it is noticable. Due to my frequent posting, I also have gotten to know admins from multiple instances and all of them have expressed the same frustration. To its credit, SJW did get new admins within the past month or so that are working hard to fix shit and don’t take it lightly.
Just an example of what can happen when mods and admins let things slide for a while.
They come and go. They’re random clutter. We only need a few big instances that hosts a majority of the communities and that’s it. Why do we need so many smaller ones?
The core issue here is instances disappearing, and That goes into the discussion of the structure of the fediverse right now vs. the fediverse in the future
A dozen big instances feel better now, and I personally wouldn’t make a community on a smaller instance unless I know it is likely to stay up. If it was run by an existing organization for example.
Long term though, I trust existing organizations to set up stable instances that won’t be shut down easily. If a government, school, game company etc. makes an instance it’s not likely to go down. Having lots of instances will look more normal then.
Ultimately we don’t need to do anything differently, I recommend new people join a big instance and then make a new account once they know what instance they like.
note to everyone: please don’t downvote good faith questions
OP asked a pretty reasonable open ended question. There are other people who may be thinking the same, and reading the discussions here might change their minds. Save downvoting for rule breaking / content that’s bad for the community
I do not want to block all bots. I only want to block bots from specific instance. More specifically, the @alien.top instance is using most, if not all, bot accounts with random usernames. It uses that instance to post in communities of other instances. I thought about blocking other instances. But the main issue lies with...
I’ve wondered wtf is up with that instance. Someone floods certain communities - apple on hardware.watch for instance - with endless tech support questions, like pages and pages of them a day. Steamdeck on hardware.watch for instance has a dozen posts in the last 5 minutes, so it’s a ridiculous flood.
A few of the accounts seem more legitimate than others and actually have a history, but most just have 1 post. The questions aren’t badly written and I wonder where they come from - don’t sound like LLM, but I just don’t believe at all that 8,000 random people signed up at this Alien instance and want to ask one tech related question and then disappear. The content doesn’t seem harmful or scammy, though, they’re all things a normal person might post. Is the content copied from reddit? Is this someone’s idea of kickstarting these Lemmy communities? It’s all a bit odd.
Anyway it’s a limited number of communities these apparent bots post to, so I simply blocked those communities.
If I can’t go to Risa from .world, I’ll just change instances. Risa is one of the most important communities for me. I’m a moderator on Lemmy Shitpost, which I wouldn’t be anymore, but I was made one without being asked anyway, so that’s more their concern than mine.
You said that as a lemmy.ml user in reply to a user from another instance, and I’m replying to you from yet a third. It doesn’t seem to be restricting any of us to our own instance
Is the “problem” you’re talking about that any instance may have it’s own community by the same name as another instance’s? That’s not a bug.
That lets anyone say “I don’t like that community for this thing I like, I shall set up my own on this other instance”
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.
The Fediverse can only grow, I'm glad that it mostly seems to work the only problem I have is that on smaller instances you can't see the history of non-hosted communities as well as you have to add each community to the instance what is hard to find without using certain communities or just checking another instance.
Lemmy has many nearly abandoned instances. Over the entire period of its existence - several posts. Shouldn’t the instance owner post content to attract users?
Even TV shows that have been off air for a decade often have a thriving community. Merlin, the BBC show, has several posts per day. Similarly with Smallville. Lemmy’s communities are smaller and tend to be broken up across instances.
Which part? I’m just saying their being proponents of Socialism isn’t a problem. The post is saying that’s why we defederated from them, which it isn’t. It was the way people behaved on that instance (and outside it), the way communities operated, that led to the decision.
There are a ton of reasons not to like it and they’re evident on Lemmy pretty notably, let alone other platforms. The entire idea of being able to defederate and federate at will is a big feature of these platforms but they’re also the part that people like the least. If the server you’re on defederates from another server you like, you have no choice but to start all the way from the beginning if you need to choose another instance to join. At the same time, each instance gets its own version of every single community. If you join an instance that federates with lots of other instances, you’re very likely to see the exact same posts multiple times since each community is completely unique and separate (again, a feature for some, a boon for others).
Federation is great for a few reasons and really horrible for others. It’s not the single answer that works for everyone.
There’s not much to do really. On the web, you’ll see a little pencil icon near the community name, which lets you change things (ex. Sidebar text, images, settings).
It’s up to you how you want to do things. I’d recommend adding a description to the sidebar for what you want to see in the community, and any relevant rules. People in your community will need to follow those rules, as well as the rules for the lemmy.world instance (ex. Think local laws vs. national laws), so you don’t need to cover everything.
No shame in copying rules from other places, such as the Reddit equivalent, when you’re not sure.
Day to day, you’ll see reported content in the mod page (little shield icon up top) and if you want to remove a post you need to open the comments and then find the button for it.
@xylinna I’m happy to help out while the community is cleaned up again (if you guys want more help), but I probably won’t stick around since I think Jimbabwe can handle it :)
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?
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.
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....
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.
Exactly this. On Reddit, you would end up with stuff like r/TrueStarWars and such as a result of bad mods moderating badly — but those communities would have a harder time taking off due to the name being less searchable, and individuals needing to be "in the know" about why one sub has "true" out the front.
With everyone being able to take the same community name, just across different instances, there's a potential for a better, more competitive process to take place instead. It won't be perfect — @starwars is going to be in a much more immediately advantaged position than, say, @starwars — but in theory the playing field is closer to being level.
With distributed hash tables it is manageable. You do something like “store three copies on three peers” and as long as one of them is online the post is accessible. This is actually better than the way lemmy does it now. In principle each lemmy server stores the posts from its communities, and a copy of each post from communities its users are subscribed to. But since all instances are federated so well, in practice each of the 1000 lemmy instances stores a copy of almost every post ever made. That’s like 100GB x1000. With a DHT, the amount of space used on each user’s device is on average the amount of posts one user makes x3, no more.
I've fired up my own Lemmy instance, but am keeping it closed right now. It's mainly so I don't contribute to the user load on the more popular instances, but I may open it up to a circle of friends and family at some point in the future....
You can also remove specific remote communities, which bans them from your site instead of the entire remote instance. Make sure to use remove, not purge.
The community will not appear in the list nor be searchable.
As a long time Reddit user, there's something about Lemmy and the fediverse that feels really refreshing and new. I think it has to do with a few things......
It's likely all this will change as the user base grows. However there are some distinct advantages.
Having instances focused purely on certain topics or ethics makes it so you can join the communities that align with your ideas. while all these communities federate having a home base that aligns with your ethics is important. Also if any particular instance becomes overly trollish there is the option that your instance can defederate from them. While this is not ideal having smaller instances with a more homogeneous community means that it will be easier to lobby for things like that than a monolithic service.
people at the moment are focused on building something that is community oriented and that people will want to use. Right now we have mods, power users, tech enthusiasts, and community leaders mostly. We don't have a ton of trolls yet. This will change but I think we can adapt to it.
There is a sense of comradery. People are dusting themselves off after the collapse of a former community of bolstering each other. This will wear off. however hopefully by then the service is robust enough that people will have found their new communities and groups that they jive with.
Instances aren't really blocking others, they're defederating. That means not communicating with certain url's. That's something you can accomplish on a system level, even if the "feature" isn't in the application you are running. (lemmy/kbin)
The devs didn't "give" this ability to instance admins, it was always there.
As for users being able to block instances, I agree. It should be a feature. For now, you can still get there the long way round, by blocking every community on a given instance.
But the vitriol in your wording is entirely unwarranted.
Strong moderation abilities, and instance admins like ourselves who actually ban white supremacist communities and not sit on their hands about hosting the largest one on the internet, for years.
edit: like just today, we had a few TERF communities try to set up here. It took us less than a day to ban them. Its not difficult.
Flight sim people are on another level (startrek.website)
Thinking about the direction of Beehaw
Over the years I’ve been trying to encapsulate, as simply as possible, what Beehaw interactions would look like ideally....
Corporate Censorship Bring You Here?
Pure curiosity:...
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What is the point of small instances?
They come and go. They’re random clutter. We only need a few big instances that hosts a majority of the communities and that’s it. Why do we need so many smaller ones?
How can I block posts from all bot accounts of specific instance? (alien.top)
I do not want to block all bots. I only want to block bots from specific instance. More specifically, the @alien.top instance is using most, if not all, bot accounts with random usernames. It uses that instance to post in communities of other instances. I thought about blocking other instances. But the main issue lies with...
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choose... (feddit.de)
Being banned with no accountability
I took a 2 month ban from worldnews@lemmy.ml...
NOW you can kick me (lemmy.world)
As it should be in the Fediverse (lemmy.world)
Why create an instance if you are not ready to post in it?
Lemmy has many nearly abandoned instances. Over the entire period of its existence - several posts. Shouldn’t the instance owner post content to attract users?
those ppl... (feddit.de)
Bye Felicia (lemmy.world)
Business is going well (sh.itjust.works)
Looking for new Moderators
This community has been abandoned by the creator. So in order to keep this community open we need new moderators....
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?
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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....
should we be worried about powers-moderators/users?
Power mods are one of the main problems with reddit. The same thing is already happening with Lemmy....
Do you think Federated networks are the future or do you think Peer to Peer networks are the future? Which do you think is better?
Alright so I’m not an expert so I might not be explaining it correctly....
Aside from blocking instances, what other controls do admins have to keep unwanted content off their instances?
I've fired up my own Lemmy instance, but am keeping it closed right now. It's mainly so I don't contribute to the user load on the more popular instances, but I may open it up to a circle of friends and family at some point in the future....
Why does Lemmy feel so fresh compared to Reddit?
As a long time Reddit user, there's something about Lemmy and the fediverse that feels really refreshing and new. I think it has to do with a few things......
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r/The_Donald has been banned on Reddit, what's to stop those users turning Lemmy into what became of Voat?
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