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....
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:
With almost 40k subscribers on Reddit, r/ScamNumbers is one of the most useful online databases for tracking down scam phone numbers. Some use the information for awareness, while others take advantage by prank calling scammers to waste their time....
It’s for the best anyway. It’s better for the health of the fediverse when communities are spread out across a wide array of instances. The consolidation of communities on lemmy.world is not ideal. Good luck with the community!
/r/snackexchange/ - I made it a protest subreddit by embracing Spez’s call for user democracy. Every day every single thing about the subreddit would be reset and users would have to vote for every aspect. The only rules were that you couldn’t abolish democracy and you couldn’t abolish me as the caretaker. /u/Icxcnika was a weird little goober who took it seriously instead of seeing it as a protest meant to derail the subreddit. He voted to make himself mod for a day and then the admins did a mod coup to make him the head, even over the other two mods that had been there for a decade and built all of the third-party tools we relied on to make the subreddit work. He had only posted once, some 8 or 9 years before, and had never moderated. The users and other mods fucking hated him and activity in the subreddit fell off. Now he no longer posts, one of the other mods no longer posts, and the last remaining one is apparently now a bot that sells funko pops.
/r/fifthworldproblems/ - The other mods and I were all on board with the protest. They forced us back open so we refused to do anything. Now it’s restricted and the only link posted since the protest was a Lemmy instance that I didn’t have anything to do with.
/r/modernart - I started rebuilding this one after it was overtaken by spam from people who don’t know what “modern art” actually means. I want to keep the subreddit because there’s good radicalisation potential with it in the right hands, but I stopped posting and only remove the most obnoxious spam days after it’s reported to tank the quality of the subreddit. I’ll be replacing everything with a Lemmy instance link at some point but was always holding out for Hexbear to open up community creation.
I had a few others that I just left or let the admin bot take over.
I mean, even a lot of the bigger lemmy instances are of mixed thought on whether to federate with “piracy” instances (I want to say lemmy.world federated and defederated a couple times?).
Reddit Corporate is trying to go public. The piracy subs were going to be purged sooner than later and The Exodus was an opportunity to move the community en masse.
Hi everyone. I have found many ghost comments in posts. Like one of the posts has 300+ upvotes and 28 comments but when I opened it, there were no comments. I tried different Lemmy apps and it’s the same in all of them. Which leads me to believe that it has something to do with defederation done by Lemmy.ml. Which instance has...
Keep in mind, defederation is bidirectional. You can end up on an instance that doesn’t defederate anybody but is being defederated by some major instances and end up worse off. Also, communities are bound to an instance so even if your instance doesn’t defederate with another, the instance that hosts the community might, which also doesn’t solve anything.
Also lemmy.ml had to restore from backup monday because postgres shat itself, so if the post is from monday or around, it’s possible it was simply lost due to the technical problems.
There’s also some federation problems with 0.19.0 and 0.19.1, so it’s possible it’s been attempted to be delivered to lemmy.ml but failed due to load or whatever.
You didn’t give any details or examples so we can only speculate. We troubleshoot federation by establishing patterns, like from what instance are the missing comments from, what instance hosts the community.
Addendum: I’ve also been experiencing occasional ghost posts, and I’m on my own instance, so there might be some stuff going on that’s unrelated, because I sure didn’t do anything. If they were deleted or retracted I would see them because I’m admin, I see everything.
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?
1: Even big instances start out small.
2: Also having other instances besides the big ones helps prevent a monopoly over the fediverse.
3: Bigger isn't always better. Nothing wrong with a small Cozy community.
If someone is feeling sad about the normalization of ChatGPT posts, it’s understandable that they might be expressing concern or disappointment about a change they perceive in the nature of discussions or interactions involving ChatGPT. Here are a few things you might say:
Acknowledge Their Feelings: Start by acknowledging their feelings. You might say, “I understand that you’re feeling sad about the normalization of ChatGPT posts. It’s okay to feel that way, and I’m here to listen.”
Encourage Communication: Encourage them to share more about why they feel this way. Open-ended questions like “Can you tell me more about what’s bothering you?” can invite them to express their thoughts.
Offer Understanding: Let them know that it’s normal for people to have different perspectives on changes, and it’s okay to express their opinions. You might say, “It’s completely okay to have mixed feelings about changes, especially when it comes to how ChatGPT is used.”
Express Empathy: Show empathy by expressing that you understand their concerns. For example, “I can see why the normalization of ChatGPT posts might be disheartening for you. Changes can be challenging, especially when they affect something we care about.”
Highlight Positives: If there are positive aspects or potential benefits of ChatGPT posts, you can share those as well. For instance, “While the normalization of ChatGPT posts might bring changes, it’s also an opportunity for diverse discussions and perspectives to emerge.”
Suggest Alternatives: If applicable, suggest alternative platforms or communities where they might find the type of content or discussions they prefer.
Encourage Adaptation: Remind them that change is a constant part of life, and adapting to new circumstances can lead to new and positive experiences.
Remember to approach the conversation with empathy and an open mind, allowing the person to express their feelings and thoughts freely.
Good thing I checked, I was going to just insult you.
Like Reddit, KBin and Lemmy are 'link aggregators’
This means, in subject driven Communities (sub-reddits), people post links or images or their thoughts and others comment on them
Reddit is software that’s installed in one central location (server). This means it is owned and controlled by one single commercial entity.
Kbin and Lemmy are both software that are installed in multiple locations (servers), owned and controlled by multiple people and can be installed by anyone. This means no one can ever own or control the entirety of Lemmy.
Reddit, KBin and Lemmy can be accessed by users via websites or apps.
Reddit is centralised. If it disappeared tomorrow, it would be completely gone.
KBin and Lemmy are federated. If one instance (server) disappeared tomorrow, all the others would be unaffected and carry on as normal.
All instances of KBin and Lemmy can talk to all other instances of KBin and Lemmy, as long as they are federated.
Rule breaking and/or toxic instances/servers can be defederated by other servers/instances.
Reddit, KBin and Lemmy are all free to use. However, with Reddit you must contend with invasive privacy and advertising. The way to support KBin and Lemmy is to donate to the development team and the server/instance your account is on.
yeah, idk, we’ve built up an actual community here over the last few years and all these redditors have come over, made reddit 2 but worse on their instances, got bored and then left
No it got popular because Reddit pissed a lot of people off temporarily. The only thing segregated instances does is confuse and upset the average person. Hell I host like 10 different alternative open source front ends for various websites and I fucking hate Lemmy instances. It makes Discovery new content unbelievably tedious.
What if I just want to browse communities? I can only do that on a per instant spaces, I have to go to that instance go to its communities tabs to browse and then if I find something I want I have to take its address and then go back to my own instance so I can subscribe to it with my account. That pisses me off and makes me not want to bother with it let alone the average user.
The sad state of reality is that centralized systems will always eventually get turned into corporate greed money machines but decentralized instances are by their very nature just shit and hard to work with and no one wants to put up with them.
Since the URL is pretty vital for federation (users from federated instances would follow for example !main@pigedove-lemmy-clone-u9568.vm.elestio.app in order to join a community), it's probably worth getting the domain up and running before you start federating anyway. Even though it's a frustrating wait for sure!
I think there's potential for a bird instance - I've heard rumours the birdwatching community is pretty active over at Mastodon.
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?
That’s because, currently, the community stats that you see in the sidebar are only from your instance – community stats are currently not federated. Afaik, federated community stats are going to be implemented in 0.19.
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?...
Your instance connects directly to other instances. All of the lemmy instances doing that with each other is the lemmy network.
Each instance can connect with any other instance unless blocked, but will not do so until someone on your instance follows a community on the remote instance.
In short, there is no way to see everything, and there is no one true view
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?
Are you thinking about a community? Because instance doesn’t really need posts, it can be purely a user instance with no communities. If you mean a community, then yeah, it happens for various reasons:
people think they can attract people to it, turns out they can’t
people sit on good community names to be part of the mod team in case someone wants to pick it up
personal problems causing people to have less time to moderate
I have most of the Fediverse-based account and seem to have just gravitated towards Lemmy over Kbin as found it very confusing, What makes you prefer Kbin over Lemmy or any other Fediverse instances?
Extra features like (apologies for the run-on sentence) being able to see upvotes and downvotes on threads and comments like lemmy admins can, better integration with mastodon, every community has both a 'reddit-like' section like Lemmy/Reddit, and a 'twitter-like' section which as I mentioned integrates with mastodon via hashtags, we can block users, communities, domains and (soon) instances, we have a wide variety of user-style scripts via Tampermonkey to customize the UI (the base UI is also, subjectively, better).
Given its all federated, you also don't lose anything by using kbin since you have access to lemmy too. Plus the dev is just the nicest, hard working son of a bitch lol.
Only drawback is we dont have an API yet, so for mobile you're stuck with the mobile site, but the mobile site is also really good so eh. Once the API is up tho there's a few apps which have already said they'll support kbin as well, so that's a matter of time.
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 was recently talking to some friends about Lemmy and the whole Fediverse idea, as it seemed like a really cool part of the Internet. As I was talking about it, though, I realized how unusually friendly this whole place is, and I joked that I “surprisingly haven’t found any bigotry.”...
Do you think lemmy/kbin’s relatively poor and insufficient moderation tooling is partly to blame for what you’re seeing?
Not as such. The moderation tools lead to redundant handling, and make it easy to miss reports you shouldn’t miss, and force you to leave reports open so that others don’t miss them, but the actual number of reports is more of a cultural thing than anything else.
Do you think that the communities based structure make this sort of thing more likely to be bad or problematic?
So, the microblogging fediverse (which I’ll call microfedi) existed for years before twitter crapped the bed. It housed queer folk who had left main stream social media, and those queer folk set the culture and ran the instances. So when twitter happened, even though the culture changed, there was a sufficient mass of existing instances to ensure that bigots remained unwelcome in the mainstream fediverse.
However, when reddit crapped the bed, by comparison, the threadiverse basically didn’t have an established culture. There was a handful of lemmy instances (we were one of them), but the only one of notable size was lemmy.ml. kbin didn’t even exist in any meaningful way until a couple of months before reddit died.
So, when reddit died, there was no established culture. Instead, people brought reddit culture with them, and reddit culture, because of lax admins, was much more tolerant of hate speech than microfedi. And so, people who are “reddit people” more than “fediverse people” set up lemmy and kbin instances, and brought those reddit norms with them.
So then, you get instances like blahaj and beehaw that are threadiverse instances, but have the “old school” microfedi approach to bigotry. We smash it down hard at the first hint of seeing it, but most of the instances we federate with don’t attack it so aggressively.
And thus, on microfedi, much of the work is done by remote admins before I ever see it, but on the threadiverse, it’s often just not done by remote admins (unless it’s aggressively hateful), and that means I end up seeing a lot of shit, and blocking a lot of users that wouldn’t have had a chance to get established in the microfedi universe
I tried searching a Titanic sub on my UK instance, and it didn’t show up. But it was deffo still there on my L.W search? What?
Ah, I learned that there’s a trick to this specific situation. If a community hasn’t been subscribed to by anyone on your instance yet, it will not show up in results when you first search for it (search by URL or !link by the way). However, wait a few seconds and hit search again - the community will now show up and you can subscribe to it! What apparently happens is that your server is not yet aware of that community, but once you search for it with a URL or !link, your server will immediately search it out and become aware of it. This is why it’s usually better to search for communities on one of the big Fediverse directory sites, especially if you’re on an instance with fewer people in it. My favorite site for this at the moment is lemmyverse.net/communities - it will show both the URL and !link right there and allow you to easily copy it to search on your instance.
Does the reddit style format inherently make for a toxic environment? Or is it a culture of toxicity from the influx of reditors? For lack of a beter example, on stackoverflow, when someone down votes you, it comes with a comment saying how to improve. On mastodon, people can’t downvote you. These platforms are a joy to use,...
I believe there are a few Lemmy instances that don’t have downvotes enabled. (Beehaw might be one of them, but don’t quote me on that.) If downvotes are a stress point for you, you could try joining one of those instances.
I personally find both upvotes and downvotes to be useful as a way for me to quickly see the community’s reaction to a piece of content. If I’m scrolling through my feed and see a post with many downvotes and few upvotes, for example, I know that post is unlikely to interest me and will move on. Conversely, a highly upvoted post or one with a mix of both upvotes and downvotes is more likely to have a good conversation in the comments in my experience.
If I make a post that receives a large number of downvotes - or if most of my posts tend to be downvoted - that’s a signal to me that I’m either not communicating my message well (confusing, passive aggressive, etc.) or that my message itself may not be welcome (hate speech, misinformation, etc.). In either case, I use that as a mental trigger for me to reflect on my posts rather than a reason to become unhappy with the community/platform as a whole.
Lemmy itself is an open source software. It's developed by a community, and was originally created by two developers. It does not make money, except from things like donations or patreon.
Lemmy instances are run by different members of the community. Various folks have answered ways that instances could make money but may not make money in any ways.
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....
Scam Numbers - Reddit's (and possibly the internet's) largest scam number depository, now on Lemmy! (lemmy.zip)
With almost 40k subscribers on Reddit, r/ScamNumbers is one of the most useful online databases for tracking down scam phone numbers. Some use the information for awareness, while others take advantage by prank calling scammers to waste their time....
Feeling the lack of moderation now Reddit? (lemm.ee)
Shocked Pikachu face meme.
Lemmy instance which has not defederated with any other instance.
Hi everyone. I have found many ghost comments in posts. Like one of the posts has 300+ upvotes and 28 comments but when I opened it, there were no comments. I tried different Lemmy apps and it’s the same in all of them. Which leads me to believe that it has something to do with defederation done by Lemmy.ml. Which instance has...
Lies (lemmy.zip)
How to datahoard Lemmy
Sorry for not doing much research beforehand and asking a newbee question. I am looking for some entrypoint info to the question:...
deleted_by_author
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?
Is there a Lemmy stats site?
Is there a Lemmy stats site?...
Finally, someone who understands me. (lemmy.world)
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....
Update the links in the Megathread? (i.imgur.com)
Those are still pointing to reddit. spits
Why? Are we not doing enough? (file.coffee)
by fedidb.org
As of now I have approximately 1 user. (lemmy.world)
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?
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?...
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?
So why do you perfer Kbin over Lemmy?
I have most of the Fediverse-based account and seem to have just gravitated towards Lemmy over Kbin as found it very confusing, What makes you prefer Kbin over Lemmy or any other Fediverse instances?
deleted_by_moderator
Have you had any bad experiences with people on Lemmy?
I was recently talking to some friends about Lemmy and the whole Fediverse idea, as it seemed like a really cool part of the Internet. As I was talking about it, though, I realized how unusually friendly this whole place is, and I joked that I “surprisingly haven’t found any bigotry.”...
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?...
Does the reddit style format breed toxicity?
Does the reddit style format inherently make for a toxic environment? Or is it a culture of toxicity from the influx of reditors? For lack of a beter example, on stackoverflow, when someone down votes you, it comes with a comment saying how to improve. On mastodon, people can’t downvote you. These platforms are a joy to use,...
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?