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....
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.
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.
I understand your sentiment, threads on generative AI get me all worked up as well. I couldn’t resist jumping into the fray and I did have the distinct impression that most users supporting OpenAI’s stance were originating from other Lemmy instances and that many Beehaw based users were against it. My humble opinion is that this specific thread is more representative of the Fediverse’s vibe than of Beehaw’s.
I very much doubt you’ll get snark for your comment. That’s just not what Beehaw stands for. If you decide to hang in there some more, I suggest you pay attention to the commenters’ Lemmy instance. Beehaw embodies the hope for a caring web community, but the rest of the Fediverse doesn’t necessarily share the same ideals.
The not saying why they were banned is what inspired my question.
I was afraid those people would just come here, but the moderation based on instance and community seems to be working so far. I’m curious how’s that’s going to scale.
I moved from Lemmy.ml because I liked the name of Lemmy.world and it ran a newer Lemmy version which meant I could make communities. I moved from Lemmy.world because they defederated from piracy communities they didn’t even host (but for some reason still kept the small piracy community they DID host) From thelemmy.club...
There are no instances anymore with this system, it’s the data hosting that’s decentralized, the front-end looks like a centralized website so you would go to Lemmy.com instead of whatever instance you signed up on.
Imagine Reddit but there’s no central authority and instead of using a service like AWS it’s just people providing storage space and bandwidth and they can decide not to host content from certain communities on their server, but from the user’s point of view they wouldn’t know where they’re pulling the data from.
So no, you couldn’t have two users with the same username. The user database could easily be shared by all storage providers or the database could be randomly split and you would have to mention what part of the database your info is stored on when logging in. When creating your account (where it checks for doubles on the whole username list hosted on all servers) you’re given a random third credential that you need to mention when logging in so the service knows which servers host that part of the user database (all info including the database would have triple redundancy).
Right now a website’s data might not be stored on a single server so that’s already how things work, the difference is that all the different servers are owned by the same company (like Amazon or Google). In the backend the servers communicate together to provide the data to the users so it feels like everything is hosted in the same place.
TL;DR: The best way to fix things is to make it work like it does for any other websites but to only decentralize the hosting instead of also decentralizing the communities.
lemmynsfw has implemented (or intends to) an interesting compromise, in that you can only downvote posts on that instance’s communities that you’re already subscribed to. Ideally, this means that downvotes are for the quality of the individual post, rather than as a reaction to the type of content.
I think it’s due to lemmy.world defederating from some of the louder instances that I’ve seen way less content of that nature. Not 0 of it, but at least it’s not shouting over the top of every single post I see while browsing the All Communities list.
i was legitimately confused why i was getting zero replies in very active threads. and yes this is just a whine post about how horribly opaque fediverse moderation is these days...
I’m kinda not surprised the FOSS community would end up on a communist instance, I’m actually considering just blocking the entire .ML instance at this point.
I’m so sick of seeing them having a tantrum every time YouTube tries to make them either pay for the service, or watch ads.
Consider your specific audience you are reaching out to.
Honestly the biggest barrier for entry into the Lemmy content isn’t choosing an instance. You can easily tell someone to sign up for Lemmy.world or kbin.social without going into detail about what that means.
The issue is that most social media users don’t want to spend an hour or two searching for communities and blocking bots. They want a feed that is appealing at first, that they can tweak incrementally as they get more familiar with the service and its content.
With that in mind, what people want is to know what makes the experience helpful to them right now. I think that boils down to two primary concepts: Draw people in to specific communities that are more accessible than their Reddit counterparts, or convince them why Reddit is not a good experience for them
The latter is a tough sell to someone who already is happy with the Reddit experience. And the trouble with the former is there’s currently not a great deal of communities that are clearly better than on Reddit. The few that I would say count are fairly niche interests.
I think the Lemmy and kbin software needs a set of default subscriptions for guests and new users. Something curated by instance admins to provide the best new user experience, while still allowing them to customize it from there.
For what it’s worth, I would expect most social media users not to care about any of the decentralization aspects. Putting too much focus on the “it’s like email” thing is likely to fall on deaf ears at first.
I don’t necessarily see fracturing as a bad thing. I don’t know about you, but I didn’t find the askreddit discussions with 10,000+ replies to be particularly high quality. At least, no higher than what were found in much smaller threads. Fracturing can help make threads less overwhelmingly large. In addition to the other reasons why the redundancy can be a positive.
I understand why seeing ten different versions of ctechnology would get old, but that’s only when scrolling by ‘all’. Scrolling by either local or subscriptions will for the most part fix that. A downside is if you are subscribed to multiple ctechnology communities, in which case having a “multireddit” style feed would be nice. I think the Voyager app may offer that, I actually haven’t tried it out.
But when it comes to browsing ‘all’, seeing duplicates from different instances is a far sight better than having a centralized site where ‘all’ is dominated by low effort rage/horny/stupid bait.
You’ve been following this person for months while they talk about their gender
No. I haven’t. They were banned from this community 3 months ago and I forgot they exist until they commented above. I would like examples of me “following this person”. I am also not a moderator nor an admin. I had no hand in their banning.
However the blatant double account here is pretty intense. You created your account 42 minutes ago just to make this comment? Sure.
Edit: Out of curiosity I asked an admin from another instance to check if they were the same person. According to that magic 8-ball, “all signs point to yes.” What a huuuuuuge surprise. Oh noooooo.
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?
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.
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.
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?
I see a lot of posts lately, mainly in ‘world news’ communities, that when I investigate their source, I cannot come to any other conclostion that purposefully spreading of fake news and propaganda on lemmy....
Honestly, I think the only true antidote to this sort of thing is to foster spaces in which people of vastly different opinions and positions can come together and communicate in a civil and genuine fashion. Pushing back on biases and presumptions through antagonistic or challenging conversations seems the only tried and true method we have for getting to the “truth” (or, more realistically, how little we know of or can grasp the actual truth whatever it may be).
It’s hard, especially online and many just don’t have the behavioural and cognitive muscles for it at all and very few in the world are actually strong at it.
Moreover, the moderation task would be monumental, which is why I’d think there’d have to be community buy-in from users/members and a grass roots enforcement of the ideals of the space as well as probably a good amount of gate-keeping unfortunately.
Additionally, I suspect that the technology of the platform actually has a role to play in fostering such a space. The technology is never a complete solution, but I think in such heated environments what’s missing from real life are contextual and gestural cues and meta data that we can all use to moderate how reception and reaction to any statement. Social media basically allows for none of that. But there’s no reason that we can’t try to represent a post/comment/statement in some way that tries to capture the sentimental and gestural context it is being made from. I think this is an example of modern technology actually losing sight of the mission of humanising technology.
EDIT: It would be an interesting idea for a lemmy instance, to try to foster such a space. Maybe it has no users of its own, just communities? When it comes to gate keeping, it’d be cool of lemmy allowed invite only community subscriptions or something similar.
I wonder if the abandonment occurred around the time that image uploads were disabled, old images wiped and instance was often down. That’s about the time I realized it was basically impossible to moderate and contribute to a community I created on the instance. I now handle mod duties from another instance, one that is usually accessible and allows image uploads.
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).
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....
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…
My biggest gripe is that the all feed is not actually the all feed from across the fediverse, but a feed from all instances your instance is federated with.
It's even worse than that. It's all communities that users on your instance have subscribed with. If someone creates a new community on another instance, you won't see it on yours until you or someone else discovers and subscribes to it.
How annoying. I thought the point of being federated was that i had 1 account for everywhere. Now the douchebag running my instance is going to ban certain communities (defederate) on my behalf? The fuck. Do i need an account on every server if i want to see everything? It’s removed. Give me a ban button and open everything up.
/all isn’t really all the fediverse though, it’s “all” from communities at least one user on your home instance has subscribed to.
If no one ever subbed or browsed there from your instance, it won’t show in /all.
It’s plausible some instances have different amounts of porn in their /all feed.
On Lemmy, if nobody is subscribed to a community on your instance, it doesn't appear in that view.
In order for it to appear, someone with an account has to go to the search bar at the top right of the page and type in the URL to the community manually. Then it'll appear after an initial search.
On large instances like Lemmy.world, you can almost guarantee someone has already done this for most popular communities - but newer/smaller communities may not appear because nobody on your instance has searched for them yet.
For smaller instances, there are likely multiple communities missing and you'd have no idea until you went to look for them.
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....
how's your week going, Beehaw
it’s week 2 of 2024 and Holy Fuck Is It Windy Out There right now, oh god
deleted_by_author
Corporate Censorship Bring You Here?
Pure curiosity:...
I might move again. (Or not) (lemy.lol)
I moved from Lemmy.ml because I liked the name of Lemmy.world and it ran a newer Lemmy version which meant I could make communities. I moved from Lemmy.world because they defederated from piracy communities they didn’t even host (but for some reason still kept the small piracy community they DID host) From thelemmy.club...
Imagine only being allowed to upvote something? (sh.itjust.works)
This post was made by Fediverse gang.
Weapons of Gas Production (lemmy.today)
it's a puzzling one i'll tell you hwat (lemmy.one)
i was legitimately confused why i was getting zero replies in very active threads. and yes this is just a whine post about how horribly opaque fediverse moderation is these days...
How would you explain Lemmy/Kbin to a Reddit person or to a social media person?
Trying to "recruit" more folks in Kbin but I think I lack enough information to describe Kbin effectively....
Forgive me, but… (lemmy.ml)
It’s my hope to see unity and cohesion is the Lemmy-verse. Looks like asklemmy@lemmy.ml has over 39k subscribers....
deleted_by_author
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)
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....
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?
What can we do, as lemmy users, to fight fake news being pushed in the platform?
I see a lot of posts lately, mainly in ‘world news’ communities, that when I investigate their source, I cannot come to any other conclostion that purposefully spreading of fake news and propaganda on lemmy....
LOOKING FOR NEW MODERATORS
Hi!...
deleted_by_moderator
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....
What's your filter settings on Lemmy? I feel like I miss the big posts and such.
Been loving the fed, but the past few days i’m wondering if my setup is wrong on this site?...
What should I look for when I’m choosing an instance?
I have accounts on three instances but I’m unsure which one should be my main account.
18+ Can we talk about porn on Lemmy?
Mostly as in…where is it?...
I don’t understand people who say they can’t figure out Lemmy or KBin
Does federation have a bit of a learning curve? No doubt....