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....
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
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 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.)
The package manager is usually tied to the distro, but the point above is to let the package manager inform your distro choice.
You’ll notice a running theme in my lecture here is “choice.” You can switch Desktop Environment and other stuff on just about any distro and make it feel like yours. Switching package managers isn’t recommended though! 😅
So for instance, Arch (btw lol), or Manjaro, or Endeavour use Pacman.
I’ve switched to Endeavour recently which is essentially “User-friendly Arch-based” with an installer and stuff, and it’s absolutely lovely for games. My old 960M laptop runs plenty of stuff great. :D
On my main rig I’ve used OpenSUSE Tumbleweed for years, which is also a rolling release (constantly updated) distro that technically uses RPMs, but uses its own package manager called Zypper, which I find mostly user friendly. Packages are also a bit more thoroughly tested.
Both use KDE Plasma desktop environment and it’s gorgeous.
Alternatively, especially for laptops with hybrid Nvidia graphics, POP!_OS is alright if you’re okay with GNOME desktop environment. (You can always change, but it’s geared toward GNOME). It used Aptitude, and the updates trail behind a bit, but generally that’s supposed to make a more stable system.
(Note that when I say “lags behind”, latest security fixes tend to be backported, but you won’t see fancy new shiny features as fast.)
For gaming specifically though:
Win10 is gonna be my last Windows. 11 is invasive and opinionated, and 12 is gonna have a forced Ai fetish. Gross.
Good news: Steam games work wonderfully. Thanks to advances with Proton and all their support for the SteamDeck (which runs Linux btw!)
For other platforms, look into Heroic Launcher, which takes a lot of the headache out of managing stuff like GOG games. :)
With rolling releases you usually want to update cautiously and check news updates and stuff, because newer versions aren’t as thoroughly tested and some stuff might break…but you get new features faster so that’s fun.
That being said: If you’re willing to learn a little as you go, OpenSUSE Tumbleweed is a big win in my book for getting the latest fun stuff while still being stable! It’s also thoroughly security-minded.
And by default, it includes “Snapper” set up for you, so you can just roll the system back to a working version in the rare case something goes wrong. You can install snapper on any distro, but it comes pre-configured and ready to go, as long as you use the default “BTRFS” file system.
I won’t get into filesystems because hoo boi…but TL;DR: BTRFS allows “snapshots” and rollbacks that don’t require literally doubling your disk space for rolling back, so it’s a great safety net.
That being said: ALWAYS have more than one backup, in multiple locations, of anything you find important!
Good luck and have fun. I will say, Endeavour, OpenSUSE, and Pop_OS all have great communities that are eager to help if you’re eager to learn! :)
I’m not sure that this is how it works in practice, but ideally: Unless you are registered in their stance / are browsing directly in their website, your client shouldn’t be making any direct requisitions to their instance, so there is nothing they can infer your IP from. (Everything you interact with is comes directly your instance - the only thing that interacts with other instances is the server) That said, it’s possible for some links to direct to the original stance, in which case your client will have to make requests directly to the original instance hosting the content… looking around in this page a bit, it looks like the Community images (banner, icon etc.) are linking directly to the original instance, so I guess that’s a little bit of a problem - but just that shouldn’t be enough information for them to connect the dots between the IP address fetching the image and the account you’re using to browse
I like it to keep track of communities that don’t have enough members here to be very active. I don’t participate in the discussions, but it’s good in case some news come out that I would miss otherwise.
Lemmit.online is also good, because it actually lets you know that it’s mirroring reddit. There was another instance that was mirroring reddit including comments, without any indication. I started “participating” in the discussions until I caught on to the fact that I wasn’t getting any answers or up- or downvotes because it was just full of bots. It soon landed on my blacklist.
If you’re replying to a community on your home server, all actions should be similar levels of responsiveness, I think replying to another servers community may involve “some” active communication with the instance? Simple way to test this, if you are replying a lot on to another servers community, since you are browsing anyway, would be to just open the server/community directly and click around, if it’s feels a bit slow, then that server is overloaded by a bit and that’s probably the source of your issue. Otherwise we need someone with deeper knowledge in this thread.
At first probably just the nsfw instances since I’m not here for porn and foreign language instances since I can’t really interact with them anyway. That alone should help clean up my feed a lot. After that no idea, I’m normally fine just blocking individual communities but if I see an instance where I’m seemingly blocking all their communities, I’ll just block the instance.
Yeah. It’s been discussed a fair bit. There are/were a few different projects doing this, with the intent of “jumpstarting” or “kickstarting” communities on Lemmy. Some of the larger instances defederated from them. I don’t feel like it’s a solid theory either.
So, I’ve seen this question quite a bit within the fediverse. By the looks of it, there isn’t really a good answer as to how it should work. Although, there is this GitHub issue on the topic of multi-instance communities, that will hopefully lead to some implementation soon.
Yeah, my first account on Lemmy was actually on Beehive, but I was confused by their sign up process (there wasn’t a page update telling me I had to verify my email, it just happened in the background and didn’t appear to do anything when I clicked sign up). I sorted it out when I checked my email an hour later, but that killed the vibe for me. So then I made this account, but jerboa didn’t support Aussie zone at the time so I made a shitjustworks account and used that for a while until I started becoming more active in the Aussie zone communities and tried to jump ship just for the ease
But yeah, I saw quite a few people who were very confused about the whole instances thing and a few others that have jumped ship a few times because of it. And as I mainly browse local top day, then all top day once that runs out of content, and my instance federates with all the instances I want to interact with, I don’t see a reason to use either of those other accounts I created
That’s a very interesting question and I’m not sure of the answer.
Obviously on some level, the cost of the infrastructure scales with the number of people using it. But so does the ability to crowdfund, if there are 100x more instances then theoretically there would be 100x more potential donors to meet the cost.
One clear way to influence the scaling in our favor would be to utilize instances with clear themes and purposes. If everybody on a particular instance is interested in the same content, that reduces the wasted computational resources compared to an instance where all of the users are interested in different topics, and thus subscribed to a much wider variety of communities.
My intuition is that as long as the platform only hosts text and images, the costs should be manageable, especially with inevitable improvements to computational efficiency that are likely to come as Lemmy matures. For instance, I believe there is some kind of patch that reduces storage utilization that should be shipping with the next version (0.19).
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”.
Non-profit social media isn't exactly healthy either.
I know beehaw is a relative safe haven, but venture to other instances in the fediverse and you'll find cesspits of toxicity that are as bad as it gets.
And given what my experiences with toxic positivity, cancelling and culture wars in minority run communities which should know better, I doubt beehaw doesn't have its fair share of toxicity too. Even if you manage to keep out the worst bigots, people who have been hurt or bullied, quite often end up hurting or bullying others.
We very often see the same username created across many instances
Guilty as charged. I’ll say though, there are several legitimate reasons why one might want to do this. I personally use it as a substitute for Reddit’s multireddit feature, by grouping community subscriptions across different instances by theme. As long as users use the same username across instances I don’t think this practice should be automatically regarded as an attempt to sockpuppet. It that was the goal, the accounts would definitely not be using the same username across all the instances.
When a lemmy instance federates, does it connect to one big lemmy network, or can there be multiple disconnected, yet locally federated instances? What I’d like to know is, can I simply join any Lemmy server and choose “All” to view everything Lemmy has to offer, or is there still hidden content?...
The way I think it works is that your local instance hosts its own communities, and then it will reach out to other instances to grab content from every external community that at least one local user has subscribed to. “All” mode is limited to that set of content.
So I think the only way to see the entire set of all content on lemmy would be to meticulously subscribe to every single community on every single instance.
And someone can correct me if I’m wrong, but I think you can still subscribe to subs on defederated instances, it’s just the interactions that don’t get passed back and forth.
You could crawl the Fediverse looking for instances and communities of the sort that your instance understands, but new servers and communities can show up whenever, so you'd have to keep looking continuously. Stuff also gets interesting because different servers have different views of content.
I've seen posts from users on two different servers talking in a thread on a 3rd server asking other users to help proxy messages manually between them because one of the servers was defederated from another and the messages were only going one way between the two users... I'm not sure in that case what the communication pattern was between the three servers (never mind me on kbin.social -- which isn't a Lemmy server at all -- also able to see the conversation), but it seemed like a big headache.
I've manually gone to different instances to make sure my posts show up when I make them; kbin is often pretty bad at getting new photo threads to federate out and sometimes needs a bit of coaxing... Looking at my profile on those instances though shows wildly different thread and comment counts sometimes. As of the time of writing this (before posting this comment) I have 30 threads and 85 comments listed in my profile on kbin.social. lemmy.world shows me as having 30 "posts" (threads) and 78 comments. lemmy.mindoki.com (your instance) shows 0 posts and just 10 comments!
There's also users on Mastodon and Misskey which show up for me as part of the regular experience of using kbin but which are a bit more awkward to interact with from Lemmy, I think? If I manually put in a mastodon.social user's account into lemmy.world's user lookup, for example, I can see some of their posts, but I'm not sure if they would ever actually show up anywhere on Lemmy without manually looking for a user?
Nevermind the other parts of the Fediverse like Peertube and AP-enabled Wordpress blogs and whatever else is out there... You can probably get a decent view of most of the Lemmy/kbin-like communities if you have a good list of servers to scrape community lists from and subscribe to everything you find regularly, but I think you'll still have some problems in practice.
and then it will reach out to other instances to grab content from every external community that at least one local user has subscribed to
It’s the other way around. The local user subscribes to the community on the remote instance, which causes the remote instance to then push you every action that occurs on that community as it happens. The pull method is only used once and doesn’t bring in comments, it’s meant as a preview for when a remote community is used for the first time.
And this is why their content won’t make it to your instance: it expects the other instance to send it to you, but they’re refusing to. Similarly, they won’t accept content from your instance, even though it’s trying to.
Local and remote communities are pretty similar internally, federation happens as a separate process in a queue system.
This leads to this:
you can still subscribe to subs on defederated instances, it’s just the interactions that don’t get passed back and forth.
When you post something, the post is on lemmy.world.
For example, this is your post lemmy.world/post/7469149 . If you would post to another community, it would still be lemmy.world/post/xxx even if the community isn’t on lemmy.world. But the post is attached to that community.
All is all the post from all the communities the accounts in your instance are subscribed to.
It is difficult for me to ascertain when the person I am communicating is using a logical fallacy to trick me into believing him or doubting my judgement, even when I realise it hours after the argument....
I HAVE seen people turn around discussions when they have evidence of being more in the know than the established flow of Karma. Hell, I’ve seen it happen with people who only managed to produce complex evidence hours in and that I myself had commented in disbelief they could be right.
But it’s a rare occurrence even among discussions that do have a person who’s such. Often, post scores pre-dispose the new people coming in into choosing who to agree and disagree on, and even the actual expert who objectively “wins the fight” will continue to get downvotes just because the other downvotes were there. This often leads to the whole “Highschool America is asleep, it’s okay to post X” mentality you’d see in some communities.
Personally, I think that scoring systems have a useful place. Even downvotes. Sorting things is useful. But I see no reason to actually show the numbers. If scores were hidden, we’d have no more and no less benefits. But that stuff is instance-admin policy and I don’t really feel like fighting for it. Right now, Lemmy isn’t having enough issues like that that I’m bothered, and I don’t know if it’ll ever grow to the point it will.
This question may be moot but it’s something I’ve been thinking about. I’ve only recently jumped into this brave new world so you’ll have to forgive my ignorance....
There’s a lot of factors to consider, enough factors that there’s no consensus on how you make this choice and at the end of the day you have to pick one and run with it.
A random list of some factors you could potentially consider before yolo’ing:
Is the admin team good? Are they power-tripping jerks? Are they ideologues who are likely to defederate the world for no sensible reason? Do they have a good head for policy? There’s no easy way to evaluate this, you have to look at the sidebar to see who the admins are, stalk their posts a bit, read the modlog for banned users (but he aware that moderation decisions are federated and anonymous so it can be hard to tell what mod did what), and you yourself have to be good enough at these things to recognize quality (or at least alignment with your own values).
Is the instance well-funded and is the admin team prepared to deal with the serious stuff like child-porn reports and subpoenas? Again, this is hard to check for. Basically, if an instance has been pretty big for years (there are only like 2 or 3 Lemmy instances like this and they’re all overloaded) or has the admin team run some other big service before?
Are the instance rules compatible with your topic? Don’t run a porn sub in an instance that bans porn. There are vibe concerns as well, like an edgelord meme community is not going to do well on a hyper-moderated safe-space-oriented instance.
Is the community topic geographically based? You might want to pick an instance homed in that geography. This can be eval’ed by using ip-lookup tools of the instance doesn’t advertise its geography.
Is the instance homed in a jurisdiction that has favorable laws for your topic? It’s better to host a community for sex-work or bourbon on an instance in a jurisdiction where those things are legal, rather than in the UAE.
Is there a topic instance that specializes in your topic? There’s a pathfinder TTRPG instance and a star trek instance, is there one for your topic? Note that topic-based instances can fail some other and more important criteria like being an experienced admin team. It’s possible that a topic instance is NOT the right choice, but it’s worth considering.
Is the server overloaded already? Mebbe pick a different one.
Is there already a well run community on another instance? Help that one grow, don’t splinter the community further.
There are many more factors to consider, and no one considers them all. Eventually you have to pick an instance that’s “good enough” and run with it. But those are some of the major factors one could consider if you’re willing to put in the non-trivial amount of effort required to evaluate them.
I don’t think that really justifies a lot of the comments I’m seeing in Reddit alternatives threads that it’s hard to figure out.
Haven't been back there and didn't read the comments...
But I think I can understand to a degree:
Too many choices: Picking an instance can be confusing for folks that are used to only having to remember 1 name. I personally think this is a bit like people trying Linux for the first time and getting confused by all the choices available. Basically, it's what some people call "analysis paralysis" but add to that the fact that you'll get 12 different recommendations from every 10 people you all (e.g. there's no clear consensus on the "best" one bc "best" means something different to each person). I think one list I saw on GitHub literally had over 200 instances... For non-techies, I could see that being a bit confusing
UI differences: some things like making a post on kbin are a bit different (IMO not bad but still different enough that I could see some folks getting confused). Doing searches on lemmy for specific topics (not finding communities but searching for something in a community) is done from a different area on lemmy than on Reddit and IMO is kind of a pain in the ass currently. And on kbin, frankly, I'm not even sure we have that feature at all.
Missing features: haven't tried mobile apps (which could again be another point of confusion) but for desktop at least, AFAIK we don't have anything comparable to RES yet. There's no analog to multireddits. And we don't have anything similar to reddit's Saved feature yet. All valid complaints in my opinion. And someone used to any or all of those, might spend a lot of time looking bc they just don't know if it's hidden or does not exist. So, yeah, I could see so confusion there too.
I think there are a lot of advantages they're probably missing too. I like that kbin/lemmy we can choose whatever fucking avatar we want instead of being limited to customizing our snoz or wtf Reddit calls their mascot thing. I saw one guy mentioning how there's no karma bullshit to deal with for new accounts and absolutely agree with that sentiment.
tealdeer; meh, I like the fediverse and it's not hard for me but I'm not shitting on people who don't get it. If they want help, would probably help but not going to push it on people either. It is what it is and that's good enough for me
Sorry if I get a bit technical but I'll try to explain my understanding.
Lemmy.nz has it's own communities. When someone subscribes to a community on another instance (say, !asklemmy) , the posts and community details are copied to a local version on the server. When someone from Lemmy.nz posts to the community, it goes into our local version. The server then behind the scenes is trying to keep our version in sync with the "real" one on lemmy.ml. Lemmy.ml is sending new posts and comments to lemmy.nz, and lemmy.nz is sending posts made by lemmy.nz members back to lemmy.ml, who then send them out to other servers.
If lemmy.ml suddenly disappeared, we would continue to be able to post to the community, add comments, etc, but sending those posts to other servers wouldn't work. lemmy.ml is responsible for sending the posts to your server at lemmy.world, and so you would not see the posts made by lemmy.nz users that are no longer able to federate - however, you could still read the community as it was at the time federation stopped and with the addition of anything anyone on your own instance has added.
One exception is media. Lemmy currently does not federate media, so if someone posts a picture to a community on lemmy.ml (where the picture is uploaded to lemmy.ml), then lemmy.ml goes offline, no one will be able to see the picture (but they will still see the post).
In terms of accounts, you will lose your account. However, accounts are also federated as remote users, so when a lemmy.world user like yourself posts to lemmy.nz, your account is also copied here. Lemmy.nz users can view the account, see that you made the comment, etc. However, you cannot log in to your account and make new posts from a different server - it's a sort of ghost account.
So long story short, you lose access to your account and any images but the posts and comments are accessible from other servers so long as they were federated with your instance prior to it shutting down. If a new instance comes online, it will not be able to get posts from a community on an instance that is no longer online.
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....
Hot take (lemmy.ml)
Film studios demand IP addresses of people who discussed piracy on Reddit (arstechnica.com)
Thoughts on reddit reposter bots?
I’m new to lemmy but would like your opinion about instances like lemmy.online
How does federation actually work?
…and why is it often PAINFULLY slow to acknowledge an up/down vote or to open the reply dialog?
deleted_by_author
Imagine only being allowed to upvote something? (sh.itjust.works)
This post was made by Fediverse gang.
Does anyone else resent the links to Reddit?
I keep seeing communities which seem to consist of nothing but a bot that reposts stuff from Reddit....
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....
F#€k $pez (lemmy.ml)
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?
Nepal bans TikTok and says it disrupts social harmony (apnews.com)
Linux holds more than 8% market share in India, and it's on the upward trend (sh.itjust.works)
Does federation connect to a single lemmy network, or can there be multiple?
When a lemmy instance federates, does it connect to one big lemmy network, or can there be multiple disconnected, yet locally federated instances? What I’d like to know is, can I simply join any Lemmy server and choose “All” to view everything Lemmy has to offer, or is there still hidden content?...
How do you like to sort your Lemmy feed?
Hot seems meh. I usually go for Top: Day but then I run out. Recently tried most active by comments and liked it....
If you're feeling left out it's probably because you defend billionaires who would mince you into fertilizer (lemmy.world)
How do I learn to detect logical fallacies in a conversation?
It is difficult for me to ascertain when the person I am communicating is using a logical fallacy to trick me into believing him or doubting my judgement, even when I realise it hours after the argument....
Is there 'etiquette' for choosing which instance your migrated subreddit is hosted on?
This question may be moot but it’s something I’ve been thinking about. I’ve only recently jumped into this brave new world so you’ll have to forgive my ignorance....
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....
So how does lemmy make money?
I'm not seeing any ads, and these servers certainly have a cost.... So is this place entirely donation based, or what?