I think you perfectly got it right. Everything that you wrote includes exactly the same questions and conclusions I've come to.
"It seems like it’s trying to be a link aggregator and a microblogging software"
I think too this is its purpose; To to be a link and content aggregator plus a microblogging platform. Therefore it confusingly has both Reddit-like and Mastodon-like behavior.
It's almost there. If it automatically aggregated magazines and communities into one place on a server as well, I think it would achieve its purpose as an aggregator. For now, there could be a dozen magazines and communities with the same subject that aren't connected because instances have no automated view of what is on other instances and so redundant magazines get created.
Whether we need what it's trying to be, I don't know. For me, I use Mastodon and so I haven't used anything on KBIN except the magazines, at least, so far, in my one week of experience.
@HomerAtTheBat search for the community in the Magazines area of kbin and it will return you results from kbin and other instances (lemmy.world, sh.itjust.works, etc.) magazines is what kbin calls communities.
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.
Instances aren't really blocking others, they're defederating. That means not communicating with certain url's. That's something you can accomplish on a system level, even if the "feature" isn't in the application you are running. (lemmy/kbin)
The devs didn't "give" this ability to instance admins, it was always there.
As for users being able to block instances, I agree. It should be a feature. For now, you can still get there the long way round, by blocking every community on a given instance.
But the vitriol in your wording is entirely unwarranted.
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......
You're also forgetting that with a centralized platform everyone is stuck under the same roof. If we do reach that level of saturation then the communities can always splinter into a different instance or group of federated instances.
The problem with reddit was once we reached the point of everyone being there and the overall quality lowering, there was no refuge for the more engaged users to congregate and reform the communities that focus on quality over quantity. You could try and flee to more niche subreddits but it's really not the same, as demonstrated by OP making this post.
And then as you pointed out, the financial incentives are very different here, which will change how users engage with the platform and how the platform evolves as a result. Centralized platforms do everything to drive engagement to increase ad impressions and potential value to ad distributors. We have an opportunity to build communities with entirely different business models where growth is not an imperative.
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
If the adoption rate continues and quality of life improvements such as efficient mobile apps keep getting made, I think it's inevitable. But I also think it can be a good thing, especially if the distributed instance culture with semi-independent communities persist. If the culture shifts so much to instances just being nodes into the larger "verse" so to speak, the general experience could shift a lot with it.
In any case, with all the different user experiences available already with Mastodon, kbin, lemmy, Calckey, Pixelfed and Peertube offering vastly different experiences into the same ecosystem, it'll be a lot more diverse I believe as everyone will find their own comfort zone.
It's likely all this will change as the user base grows. However there are some distinct advantages.
Having instances focused purely on certain topics or ethics makes it so you can join the communities that align with your ideas. while all these communities federate having a home base that aligns with your ethics is important. Also if any particular instance becomes overly trollish there is the option that your instance can defederate from them. While this is not ideal having smaller instances with a more homogeneous community means that it will be easier to lobby for things like that than a monolithic service.
people at the moment are focused on building something that is community oriented and that people will want to use. Right now we have mods, power users, tech enthusiasts, and community leaders mostly. We don't have a ton of trolls yet. This will change but I think we can adapt to it.
There is a sense of comradery. People are dusting themselves off after the collapse of a former community of bolstering each other. This will wear off. however hopefully by then the service is robust enough that people will have found their new communities and groups that they jive with.
There aren't any bots here promoting a narrative, or auto-downvoting people. From around 2015 until its final days, Reddit was manipulated by business and political entities to steer groupthink. Turning off reddit unplugs you from the Matrix, so to speak.
On Lemmy specifically: its a higher barrier to entry, there's less karma chasing here. Especially if you aren't on one of the larger Lemmy instances. It feels like a community and not like karma-whoring. In my preferences, I turned off viewing the number of votes a comment has, which is nice.
Maybe to a lesser extent, since not every instance federates everything. If clusters start to form, you'd expect some in-jokes to be limited to certain communities / instances.
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.
Not just the architecture, but also the possible logistics of such an event. Who'd contact John Oliver's PR team, for example. What about the scheduling? Also, while I think people here are good-natured enough that it might not be necessary, who'd be making sure that the thread responses (the questions) don't violate any community and instance rules?
I may be overthinking it, but such a huge event would involve a lot of coordination from many different people.
Other thought: I think in recent years, AMAs have been trending towards decentralization towards the individual subreddit level anyways, because neat people want to interact with groups that would be interested in what they are saying, otherwise they are going to get drowned out by the noise in something big like r/iama.
Which means that the only people who are going to do an AMA on a big, general subreddits are mostly people who have a lot of money and influence to sell things to the biggest audience, like to promote a major blockbuster, for example.
So, if we have a big Last Week Tonight fan community on Lemmy, yeah, let's welcome John Oliver there, but he's not going to come to help ex-redditors spite promote Lemmy, what's in it for him?
Since decentralization is the way forward for the Fediverse, AMAs should be decentralized toward the community level anyways, and maybe with a dedicated community to aggregate them across the Fediverse, having a centralized instance solely for AMAs is what led reddit down its current path.
I plan on making two videos, one where I explain how Lemmy works and then how to post in a community. I'm going to do my own research but is there any points you want to give to a new user?
Would it be better to refer to servers as "websites"?
Users can make their own website or instance, there you can choose one to look through. It doesn’t matter where you choose to go since you can view all communities that are in the Lemmy network no matter what website they’re from.
I don’t think there is much concrete, but here are some things that it effects.
Performance. You view almost everything via your instance. So picking one running with capable hardware and ideally close to you (network wise) will give you a better experience.
Reliability. If your instance goes down you are basically offline. This can be hard to predict for the future.
Trust. Your identity is “owned” by the instance. So if they wanted they can impersonate you. This can also be very hard to gauge.
Longevity. If your instance shuts down it will be quite inconvenient and your identity will be lost, so you may want to try to predict which instances are likely to last.
Moderation. If they block too many other instances you won’t be able to see content that you want to see. If they block to little then you may be seeing content that you would rather not. Or the instance may be blocked by other instances if it becomes known for spamming.
Content is actually not really on my list since you can subscribe to any communities from any instance. It is true that the instance can provide some content discovery purpose via the local and known communities page but I would argue that separate service which track communities across all instance are better for this purpose.
I am a new user. To me it felt a bit like signing up with an ISP. There's a list you can choose from, rather than there just being a single reddit.
Once you sign up with an ISP, you can go anywhere on the Internet. Similarly, once you sign up with an instance, you can go anywhere in the fediverse.
Unlike an ISP, there are no costs or fees involved in signing up, though you are more than welcome to help fund the upkeep of an instance through donations. Unlike reddit, lemmy is not a profit-driven operation trying to serve you ads all the time.
In terms of choosing an instance, bigger is not necessarily better. Personally, I went with the medium-sized lemmy.ca as I am Canadian and it seemed to make sense, and have since learned that some of the bigger instances are struggling to keep up with surging demand as people seek alternatives to reddit.
Once you have an account, you can go into Communities, click on the All tab (which lets you see the whole fediverse), and start searching for and subscribing to whatever interests you. Communities are similar to subreddits, and there's a good chance you will even find one with the same name.
It's like reddit but the reddit part works like email. You can get emails from yahoo.com on your gmail, just like you can interact with users and communities hosted on different instances.
Mastodon is not a social network, which is where I think John and Dare start from. It’s a set of communities which may, or may not, choose to connect to each other. Those relationships are based on shared values and trust: my instance connects to yours because I trust you to moderate effectively, not allow spam, or whatever other ground rules we can agree on. Some communities choose to apply this loosely, and some more strictly (some communities, for example, won’t federate with others who don’t have the same expectations around moderation for everyone they federate with).
I would lean hard into the ux being work in progress. Also as instances / communities mature I would expect the specifics on what federation means and the technology behind it will be less relevant to the average user.
Instead of visiting the Mall of America and shopping at only what the mall will offer, using outdated infrastructure-- you can instead visit a variety of towns ("instances") which each host their own cute boutiques ("communities") specializing in a particular sort of item (whatever the topic of the community is). The instances can have their own rules that apply to its communities, but communities can also make their own rules, like a shop can. Skip the crowds and barely functional Supermall experience and find a better place to engage in discussion and get information.
Im joining in on the reddit ditching thing, and was kinda worried at first that i wouldnt be able to like use it the way i did reddit as it feels like a whole new place, but after engaging with posts and people and actually being a part of lemmy rather than being lurk mode all the time i was pleasantly surprised with how easy it...
Quite enjoyable and, since seeing the sub.rehab site someone else posted, even better. I've found quite a few subs that have made their way over to Lemmy.
My only gripe is that quite a few have made their way to lemmy.world, and it's buckling under pressure. I can't sign up on that instance, nor can I remotely sub to communities from my own instance. Once that's resolved, I think I'll definitely be happy to call Lemmy my new home.
I've fired up my own Lemmy instance, but am keeping it closed right now. It's mainly so I don't contribute to the user load on the more popular instances, but I may open it up to a circle of friends and family at some point in the future....
You can also remove specific remote communities, which bans them from your site instead of the entire remote instance. Make sure to use remove, not purge.
The community will not appear in the list nor be searchable.
Many communities come up as deleted for me when I open them, although I can access them from my local instance. All of them are in lemmy.world. Some examples would be...
What is Kbin’s identity?
I’m trying to get my head wrapped around the identity (or purpose) of Kbin....
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?
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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......
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?
How would you explain to a new user how Lemmy works?
I plan on making two videos, one where I explain how Lemmy works and then how to post in a community. I'm going to do my own research but is there any points you want to give to a new user?
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How has ur lemmy experience been so far?
Im joining in on the reddit ditching thing, and was kinda worried at first that i wouldnt be able to like use it the way i did reddit as it feels like a whole new place, but after engaging with posts and people and actually being a part of lemmy rather than being lurk mode all the time i was pleasantly surprised with how easy it...
Aside from blocking instances, what other controls do admins have to keep unwanted content off their instances?
I've fired up my own Lemmy instance, but am keeping it closed right now. It's mainly so I don't contribute to the user load on the more popular instances, but I may open it up to a circle of friends and family at some point in the future....
What's up with communities coming up as deleted on lemmy.world?
Many communities come up as deleted for me when I open them, although I can access them from my local instance. All of them are in lemmy.world. Some examples would be...