I have run into too many instances of billionaire defenders on lemmy.world and kbin.social for this community NOT to exist. I get into strange arguments (where, from my perspective, I am just defending common sense or open standards) with frothing fascist, astroturfing fanbois about their chosen billionaire and I felt like I had nowhere to go, “look at this fucking corporate cuck”. ;)
In the past imgbb was used to post CSAM to some communities so some instances remove links to images hosted on it (or I guess ban the user in the instance you were on)
Edit: seems like that was lemmy.world, reach out to their community team and ask to be unbanned if you want your account unbanned, seems like they did that for someone else in the past
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.
edit: I want to post this map but its complaining that the content type isn’t html. I don’t really see the purpose of linking a webpage when linking directly to the image will allow it to properly embed? Not sure if that’s an instance limitation or a community limitation but it seems like not the right choice for meme communities
It’s an issue that could be solved within lemmy where communities with the same name should be able to merge and show each others content.
This is bad idea though, unless if it’s an optional feature that the users themselves choose to activate (e.g similar to multireddit, but you don’t have to manually curate the communities yourself). Imagine the same community from two opposing instances (e.g. blahaj and hexbear) somehow got merged by default. That would be an absolute shitshow. Also, how would moderation work? Those communities often have different moderation rule. Can mods from one community remove posts from another community with the same name? This would also be an absolute shitshow.
Seeing how some communities have bots. Who post Reddit content on to Lemmy. Also since the 0.19 update, users can block instances. So nothing will happen. If Reddit does that.
EDIT People wanted the Fediverse to get more popular. So more popular it gets, more big companies and an like will join the Fediverse. So mission accomplished, everyone. 🥳
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...
I don’t think that’d work, with Lemmy being a federated model, not a fully decentralized one.
How do you handle the actual login? Does that mean every server has access to your password hash? Or do you overhaul the account system to use something like a private and public key, with the user needing to store and transfer the private key to every device they use?
And what happens if two people register with the same username on two instances that aren’t federating? Do they somehow need to still communicate with all other instances in the network they operate in, to prevent that from happening? Because the alternative I see is the login being random in some way or tied to the instance, in which case you still lose the impression of a single service.
If I’m not mistaken, right now anybody could host a non-federating Lemmy instance, if they just wanted a small private community in this style. To my understanding, that’s the idea behind federation, and a founding concept of Lemmy - it’s not a giant service distributed across trusted servers, but a network of smaller communities that communicate with limited trust.
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?
I think you’ve correctly identified a problem, but misidentified the solution.
It’s true that there are many redundant communities of which everyone would be better served if there were an easy way to group them together. The solution, however, is not to reduce the number of instances, but rather to provide more tools for instances to group communities together. You want communities to be spread across many instances because this maximizes user control - it’s kind of the entire point? But of course, the lack of grouping makes it very difficult to try to centralize discussion, which is important for the community to grow. This service is still a work in progress, so these kinds of things - I hope - will come in time, as both the technology and culture develops.
tl;dr: centralized control bad, centralized discussion good, the current system does a bad job of reconciling these two positions
Lessons from 15 years as a stay-at-home father By Shannon Carpenter Illustration of a man holding hands with two kids to >quizzical looks from others Illustration by Pat Thomas for The Atlantic November 24, 2023
When I first became a stay-at-home dad, 15 years ago, people didn’t know how to categorize me: I was called a babysitter, “that guy at story time,” and even a woman a couple of times by shirttail relatives and friends. Their words were patronizing and unnecessarily feminizing, but they didn’t diminish my love of being a father. Over time, I raised three kids while my wife advanced in the advertising world. She negotiated contracts; I negotiated naptime. She worked hard to bring in new clients; I worked hard to raise our children. The division of labor has benefited our individual strengths: We both agree that I’m more patient while she is more business-savvy.
Yet, after all this time, many people still can’t compute that I’m my kids’ primary caregiver. Several years ago, as I was fetching my youngest child from preschool, a kid asked the teacher why my son was always picked up by his father; the teacher explained that I was a “daddy-mommy.” As I wrote this article, I learned that I’d missed the sign-up for the same child’s parent-teacher conference because I never got the email. My wife did, even though she barely interacts with the school.
I wish I could be surprised that this kind of confusion hasn’t gone away. I live just outside Kansas City, Missouri, in a rather progressive part of the Midwest where people tend to accept those who buck traditionally gendered roles. In 2021, the proportion of American fathers who were stay-at-home parents was 7 percent, up from 5 percent in 2020; dads account for 18 percent of all stay-at-home parents. Still, I’ve come to believe that a gradual increase in the number of stay-at-home dads alone won’t alter people’s perceptions. Two problems also need solving: policies that discourage men from being involved parents, and a cultural misunderstanding about men doing care work.
Let’s start with paternity leave. Denmark offers a year of paid leave that is split between a child’s parents. Swedish parents get 480 days of paid leave between them. These systems come with their own complications. But the American counterpart is paltry: The Family and Medical Leave Act provides only 12 weeks of unpaid time off, for mothers or fathers—and applies only to certain employees at certain companies. When new mothers aren’t even guaranteed paid time off from work after birth, it’s hard to imagine fathers taking time too—in some cases, they might need to provide the family’s only income while a mother recuperates and cares for a newborn. The result is that fathers, from the very start of a child’s life, tend to be seen as the secondary parent. This too often sends the message to new dads—and to other men—that child-rearing is not the father’s main job.
For a rich country like the U.S., these parental-leave policies are a travesty. However, paid time off at a child’s birth is the bare minimum required for fathers to be active in their kids’ lives. We also need to address society’s perception of what kind of labor can lead to a fulfilling life for men.
A vehicle for this could be some of the many caregiving fields that have a labor shortage. Richard Reeves, a nonresident senior fellow at the Brookings Institution, the author of Of Boys and Men, and the president of the American Institute for Boys and Men, has advocated for a “massive national effort to get men to move into jobs in the growing fields of health, education, administration, and literacy.” He argues that having more men in occupations like therapy, nursing, and teaching would not just fill jobs but provide a broader social good, by modeling that men can be caregivers. Reeves points out that federal funding has increased the number of women in STEM professions by providing grants, scholarships, and direct aid to women. The same funding could be provided to place men in fields such as nursing and teaching. The number of male nurses has increased by 59 percent over the past decade. But currently, only 12 percent of nurses are men, and 11 percent of elementary-school teachers are men.
To Reeves, there are real benefits to men when they are cared for or taught by other men. They may be more receptive to a male therapist, and thus more likely to get help, for instance. But doing care work rewards the giver, not just the receiver. Studies show that people who actively choose to provide care may experience a decrease in stress and a greater sense of social connectedness. Dads experience caregiving benefits in specific ways: One study found that when a group of fathers cradled their premature newborns against their bare chests for the first time, they experienced a decrease in both blood pressure and the stress hormone cortisol. In general, when men become fathers, their testosterone tends to decrease, a change that increases empathy while lessening aggression, writes Linda Nielsen, the author of Myths and Lies About Dads: How They Hurt Us All and a professor of adolescent and educational psychology at Wake Forest University. In short, it can be both psychologically and physiologically healthy for men to care for others.
My hope is that policy and societal changes will benefit all fathers in the long run, no matter the particular caregiving structure in their family. But for stay-at-home dads who might feel marooned or misunderstood in their experience now, the best recommendation I can offer is joining a dads’ group. These are locally organized small associations of fathers—and not just at-home ones—who might meet regularly for playdates with kids or hangouts without them. The groups are an ideal way for men to bond over their parenting experiences and mentor one another: My group and I discuss everything from automobile engines to potty training. I have been a member for my entire time as a father; the community has both cared for me and taught me how to care for others. When I was in the hospital with my wife for the birth of my youngest son, one of the fathers in my group took care of my older kids, while other dads brought food over for the next month. Just recently, we discussed strategies for teaching my 16-year-old son to drive, ahead of his upcoming test.
For all the chaos it created, the pandemic gave many fathers more unexpected family time, even if they weren’t full-time caregivers like me. It opened many fathers’ eyes to a new approach to parenting. But too many people still see men caring for others—be they one’s own kids or a wider community—as an implausible vocation. I’d like friends, extended family, and our kids’ teachers to recognize how fulfilling being a stay-at-home dad can be. And I’d like fathers to see that caregiving can be a joy for them, too.
If this is how Lemmy is ran then I will need to find another community
Lemmy is not ran in any particular way.
That’s one community one one instance. On most instances, anyone can create a community and become the god of what is allowed there. That doesn’t mean it’s representative of the rest of that instance. But even if it is, you can post to other communities on other instances.
There is one mod on one community doing something dodgy (or just got a report about it being antisemitic and assumed they were right - after all, there’s no training course for being a lemmy mod). This is certainly not the way “lemmy is ran” and thinking lemmy is run in any particular way is missing the core aspect of what lemmy is.
Donations or grants would probably be best. I’m sure there are community grants available for doing public good.
I’ve also seen some open source things sell merch, where you buy a hat or something with a particular logo. It’s still donating with extra steps, but it’s a little different
Our instance admin broke it down recently, and it’s actually not too expensive to run. Without wasting money on engagement, growth, data collection, marketing, etc, it’s not actually that expensive to run social media platforms I guess
I am an anarchist, so the idea of the community doing all the work, creating content, and then mods basically ruling over them as a reward, just doesn’t sit right with me....
Yes it does and it always has. There has always been social group control in the public square
I also see no reason why there couldn’t be a way for the community itself to deal with disruptive actors through some mechanism that does not put any sole individual in power.
Cool. then create you own lemmy instance and run it the way you want.
Good luck.
one question, if the majority of the accounts on your instance vote to allow CSAM, what will you do?
While you may be an anarchist, someone (you, as the one running the instance) will be legally responsible.
There are potentially 3 different groups of people that may ban you for a comment. If you break a community rule, a moderator may ban you as you would expect from reddit. However, since reports also notify the admins of the community instance and the admins of the instance of the reporter, you may end up banned by an admin if they believe you are breaking an instance rule.
The modlog is great for transparency, but lemmy should also make it clear what group has banned you and why. I haven’t been banned before so I’m not sure what that process looks like currently though.
It can happen in any lemmy.world community, even if you did absolutely nothing wrong and you wont be told anything, not even that you have been banned or why. You just suddenly can not log in any more and when the ban is over you might even find that all content you ever posted has been deleted and can not be brought back. Lemmy.world admin team urgently needs to improve their banning practice and they should really consider to start answering emails. On the other hand, did I already tell you what a great instance lemm.ee is? They also have a very nice admin team over there …
Right now I have SEVEN lemmy apps on my home screen as I figure out which I like best. So far I keep going back to Sync the most.
Boost’s animations suck. It takes too long to show the post list after swiping away an image and the whole screen goes black, it’s a bit jarring.
Liftoff works well but it’s ugly.
Jerboa isn’t very customizable and the post list doesn’t feel dense enough.
Voyager literally does not tell you what instance the community you’re viewing is on.
I haven’t touched Thunder in a while but I see they’ve updated quite a bit with a lot more customization. I remember older versions being nice, so I’ll give it a try again.
Connect is about the same as Liftoff, works well but kinda ugly. Admittedly not as ugly though.
How can I access Kbin communities(magazines) and posts from Lemmy? Do I need a separate Kbin account to post in Kbin or can I post in Kbin by using my Lemmy account?
You should be able to search them in the same format as you'd search for federated Lemmy communities. For instance, !askkbin@kbin.social should let you access Kbin's version of this community (assuming I know how to format the text correctly).
From there, you can subscribe to it from within your instance on lemmy.ml, and it'll show up in your feed as the rest of your content.
Right now there are people who sign up with an instance like lemmy.world, who then create loads of communities, because they don’t fully understand the nature of things and can’t quite believe that the URLs for lots of different IPs are available. For Reddit, if you snagged the likes of r/starwars early on, that gave you some power. For Lemmy, it’s meaningless: if you just want to moderate 100 communities, and not spend time actually building a Community up, then you’ll just be overtaken by the Community at one of the many other instances.
You might as well block the entire lemmit.online instance since that is the main perpetrator of these cross posts.
I just checked - it has nearly 170,000 posts and only 3 users. At some point one has to question whether these posts are even wanted by the general community or if it has just become spam.
There is no to little engagement on these posts so they don’t bring anything new to discussion. And if the purpose is to enable users to view reddit content without actually going to reddit, there are sites which already exist for that purpose, e.g. libreddit.kavin.rocks.
I personally dislike when their posts flood my feed so I have blocked everything.
Look at posts and comments from the instance admin. Does this person seem to know anything about running a server or managing software? Do you like the admin’s tone and attitude? Does it seem like the instance will be around for the long-term, or is it someone’s hobby that they may abandon on a whim?
Look at the instance’s ban list. Do you agree with the choices? Maybe you want your All feed to include exploding-heads and lemmygrad, or maybe you don’t.
Does the instance seem to have a community theme that you want to be associated with? Some emphasize LGBTQ+ communities, or NSFW content, or particular political views.
Content quality and the rate of submission has clearly plummeted. /r/all has become stagnant, and completely filled with memes and shitposts. Comment quality has amazingly gotten even worse (4chan level in a lot of cases), and there are definitely less participants on threads.
In comparison, I've found commentary in the fediverse to be more active, engaged, and positive than Reddit has ever been - and I was there since before Digg. My kbin feed, with a bit of tweaking and expansion out to other instances, is more useful by far than Reddit ever was, and it's activity level is beginning to match what used to be common on Reddit.
I think that Reddit was banking on not having a competing centralized corporate entity to absorb their users, and that it would prevent a Digg style exodus from their site. And to some extent, they were right - users, primarily readers still came back to reddit and have continued to do so because it's still the easiest place to find content on the internet. But, as you can see from the slow heat death of /r/all - that's changing.
What Spez didn't count on was that their moderators and content creators - the real engine behind Reddit - would leave. He assumed the thrill of having a large audience would be enough of a carrot to keep them participating while he made the site more difficult to use. This was a significant miscalculation, as anyone who's ever run a forum knows. Only about 2% of your users on a site will post, which means that if you alienate that 2% by any significant amount, you'll see a following degradation of non-participating readers as the content dries up.
Huffman should have realized this, as in Reddit's early days, he and the other admins on the site would regularly post with sockpuppet accounts to keep the content flowing enough to maintain readership. This mess is clearly of his own making, and one that he personally should have anticipated given what he and the other admins had to do to build the community in the first place.
But what's more interesting to me is what this (and the Twitter debacle) has done to illustrate the flaws of relying on centralized media. It's created a discussion about the wider internet and an interest in expanding it that hasn't been really talked about since the last decade. There was no reason to expand out from the centralized services as long as they were working well, fairly, and with an eye towards fostering their communities. It's when they moved into looking at their users as profit centers, and their moderation of content as a means of social control that it became clear that this contract of social responsibility had been broken.
And when that contract was broken, it broke the soul of Reddit's community. Nobody wants to contribute to Reddit, because Reddit isn't about creating a good space for the internet community to grow anymore. It's about how much money it can make Spez, and most of us really don't feel like working for him for free.
I just find ActivityPub kind of confusing. It works for Mastodon because that's user-centric, and most people only have an account on one site. But the same communities can exist on multiple sites, and it's confusing to navigate all of that.
This sounds like someone who hasn't even tried. These instances aren't difficult to navigate, they're just setup a little differently. It's like refusing to go to another country because they use metric instead of imperial (or vice versa).
He would be the perfect person to AMA as he’s already associated with Reddit revolts, and it would result in tremendous media coverage and mark fediverse as a viable alternative to Reddit. What do you think?
Okay, this brings up a question that's been in the back of my mind. I'm all in on federated communities, but I'm wondering how that architecture supports a massive event. Are there any instances that could support a giant number of concurrent users constantly refreshing a page? How much of the server burden is on the insurance hosting the community, and how much is on the instance that a visiting user is logged into? I'm not sure how it works.
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......
As much as I’d love to think otherwise, i think a significant amount of the good feeling and comradery that we’re seeing now is due to us being in a bit of a honeymoon phase. You saw the same thing on Mastadon after the Twitter migration, everyone was singing kumbaya and holding hands, but overtime it started to regress a bit (though not nearly as much) towards a more “twitter” feel.
I’m sure over time it’ll stop being quite so feel-good and happy, but the fact that it’s community run and less centralized will help a lot in the long run i think. A lot of the friction and tension on Reddit was due in one way or another to it’s centralization - if you had a popular subreddit that was run by shitty mods, there wasn’t much you could do about it. here, you can just create a new version of the same sub on a different instance, and it’s a lot easier for people to “move” over to the new one.
I think the lower population helps a lot as well, right now the majority of the people on Lemmy are good faith users who care about the platform and want it to succeed. When you have 100’s of millions of users like Reddit does, you’re going to get a lot more bad faith users and people who just want generic content to scroll on
I noticed two things, along with all the good answers in this thread:
There is no such thing as Karma, and I hope it will never be implemented into the fediverse. The reason is that on Reddit Karma was handled like a currency, an in order to obtain Karma, the general quality of the content declined, as a result of Karma-farming. Also it was used as a threshold for posting comments in certain communities. Imagine you could join an instance only when you have a certain ammount of a Karma equivalent. That is something I don't want to see.
At this moment there are mostly tech savvy users (former heavy Reddit users) here, who are interested in creating content and participation. Also these folks are helping each other. It feels like a little community. I think, the threshold to join the fediverse is still too high for the average mainstream user. Maybe it will be easier to get started when there are mobile apps.
HailCorporate: Call Out Corporate Astroturfing on Lemmy (infosec.pub)
https://infosec.pub/pictrs/image/81e899ff-f02b-4fb4-abed-67e9763ab05f.jpeg...
What's the deal with posting images from imgbb?
Got my account banned because I posted a photo that I uploaded to imgbb.com with the reason being “blacklisted URL”.
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....
Feeling the lack of moderation now Reddit? (lemm.ee)
Shocked Pikachu face meme.
I just realized /c/piracy is the most subscribed community in the lemmyverse! (lemmy.dbzer0.com)
lemmyverse.net/communities?order=subscribers
What if reddit joins race of services joing fediverse?
Title + Have you ever thought of it?
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.
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?
Lessons from 15 years as a stay-at-home father (www.theatlantic.com)
Being banned with no accountability
I took a 2 month ban from worldnews@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?
Fellow Lemmings, how to create Social Media that does not have mods? (lemmy.world)
I am an anarchist, so the idea of the community doing all the work, creating content, and then mods basically ruling over them as a reward, just doesn’t sit right with me....
rules for thee, but not for me (lemmy.ca)
To be clear, not talking about this community, obviously 😛....
Favorite Lemmy Client
What is your favorite client for Lemmy?
Accessing Kbin from Lemmy
How can I access Kbin communities(magazines) and posts from Lemmy? Do I need a separate Kbin account to post in Kbin or can I post in Kbin by using my Lemmy account?
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....
deleted_by_moderator
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.
Reddit braces for life after API changes (techcrunch.com)
Reddit and its communities are preparing for a life after the platform's API changes forced popular third-party apps to shut down.
People in /r/redditalternatives are talking about a "Reddit 2.0" What website would fill that role? (kbin.social)
On Reddit at reddit.com/r/redditalternatives, people are talking about a "Reddit 2.0." What do you suggest?
Whaf do you think of hosting an AMA with John Oliver to make Lemmy/kbin officially a viable Reddit replacement?
He would be the perfect person to AMA as he’s already associated with Reddit revolts, and it would result in tremendous media coverage and mark fediverse as a viable alternative to Reddit. What do you think?
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......