This is an opportunity for any users, server admins, or interested third parties to ask anything they’d like to @[email protected] and I about Lemmy. This includes its development and future, as well as wider issues relevant to the social media landscape today.
Note: This will be the thread tmrw, so you can use this thread to ask and vote on questions beforehand.
So, is the official term for AMAs on Lemmy “Ask Us Anything” (AUA)? Or shall we call it “Lemmy Ask U”?
For me the whole point of fediverse is not depending on a single party for your socials/subs. But the current climate in each instance forces users to have accounts in multiple instances.
As a Lemmy user I believe account migration should be a default Lemmy feature which enables true federation for end users. Any plans for this feature in the near future?
Something that trips me up a bit about federation and instances is the overlap of identical communities from different instances.
So for example, I’m an atheist, but it’s be years since that was a part of my identity that moved me to care about atheist memes or patting myself on the back for not being religious, which (sorry guys), is what I feel like happens in those communities. So I get them out of my feed by blocking them the way I block plenty of other communities I’m not interested in. In Apollo I was spoiled by the ‘hide subreddit’ feature that I don’t believe existed in Reddit itself, but which was crucial to my enjoyment of that particular app. But since there are multiple instances hosting a version of any given community, I must’ve blocked at least three ‘atheist’ and two or three ‘atheistmemes’ communities, which look the same to me, but are hosted on different instances.
Is my All feed destined to continue having different instance versions of all the topics I don’t want to see, no matter how many times I block them, as long as there are more and more instances hosting those communities? I don’t want to sound unimpressed by this new technology or ungrateful for the amazing service you all are building, but this feels like either a pretty big flaw in the federated user experience or a pretty big gap in my knowledge of how to work the platform. I’m entirely receptive to the idea I may just be doing something wrong.
Just curious. Thank you for everything you do.
Thanks!
As for fragmentation, see here.
Subscribe to more communities and only look at all when your Subscribed moves too slowly.
No thats just how it is, and I dont think there is a general solution. Maybe sharing blocklists with other users, but that might create even worse problems. Hopefully the users of such similar communities will over time move to the largest one so its all in one place.
will uploading audio files become a thing? as a musician i need it
deleted by creator
When the possibility to block instances will be implemented?
FYI: I use this usercript to block whole instances: https://greasyfork.org/en/scripts/469297-block-lemmy-instances
You need to edit line 17Here adapted to work also with MLMYM (https://old.lemmy.world): https://pastebin.com/z0mShfDP
I will probably work on it soon. Can make any promises though as there are always lots of PRs to review and other things to do which prevent me from coding.
Thanks a lot for your work.
What do you mean? Being on instance X federated with Y would you like to have the possibility to not see content posted by people from Y? Does the content include comments? (Imagine weird blank spots in the middle of conversation and people replying to non-existing for you message). Would you like to also not see Y in search results?
I mean blocking all communities from an instance by a user. Currently, it’s implemented on a client level in a few clients, but it obviously doesn’t work for the web UI. Blocking all users from a certain instance is not that useful, I guess.
I suspect they mean blocking instances at the user level - Mastodon allows this.
Is there a use case for a user creating their own Lenny instance for their own use?
Will an AMA comment sort type be added? Would be convenient to scroll by new replies from OP so we can easily keep up with AMAs
How come I can natively log into my Lemmy apps on iPhone / iOS, but with every single Mastodon app, it opens a Safari window to try log in?
(Reason: I blocked the browser, and just want to use the apps I specifically chose as daily drivers, still testing out Lemmy + Mastodon apps.)
How do you see Lemmy working with duplicate communities on different instances? For example if Lemmy.World and Lemmy.ml have a PersonalFinance community, are people expected to cross-post? Or have you conceived of a system to allow people to find the right community efficiently?
I’d imagine it would be the same way it worked on Reddit when there were multiple communities with identical topics/similar names:
One gets a bit larger, therefore shows up in feeds more, appears higher in search results, etc.
Unless the other community has some kind of differentiation, it will wither and die.
And everything will be fine.
I keep seeing people being this up as if it’s some huge problem. There’s tons of /c/memes out there, but [email protected] is clearly the place to go. It’s not confusing, IMO.
For me it’s a problem for the exact reason you think it’s fine: I don’t want centralization. If I did, I’d go to reddit. I do want each topic of discussion to be spread out amongst different instances and communities. But for that to be viable, you need a way to get all the content as easily as if it was all in one place.
Aside from any impracticality that could arise in implementation, I like the idea of federated communities between servers. I mean why not extend the possibilities of federation even further? Community mods or users could de/federate from communities on other servers with the same names or core themes should they so choose. In consideration of difficulties with moderating spam and other materials from other communities generated with the same name, I think it makes sense for that kind of community federation to be opt-in rather than opt-out.
If it goes the Reddit route, one of those communities will definitely border on dead and the risk for moderators/servers having too much power/influence within the larger communities continues.
Its a problem, and at the same time a feature. For example, you can have two communities named
!news, that pertain to completely different topics based on their instance:This also isn’t unique to lemmy, since reddit too had tons of duplicate communities for the same topics.
Just like on reddit, the network effect will run its course here: unavoidably there will be a lot of cross-posting on duplicated communities, until people center around their favorites, based on quality of content.
There are a few tools out there too, like https://lemmyverse.net/communities , that can help people find communities to subscribe to.
Overall tho, I’m against the concept of “combining / merging communities” that are run on different sites by different people. These should be curated and controlled by the people who created them.
I agree that community structure should not change to handle duplicates. If anything, having a feature similar to hashtags or topics that can aggregate a stream of posts from multiple communities would be nice.
What do you mean by combining in this context? If they mutually agree to combine because they have aligned interests I don’t see anything wrong with that. An external entity combining them I agree would lead to a bunch of problems.
Are there any plans for a “multi-community” (pka multi-reddit) to allow users to combine multiple communities into one? This could give users a neat way to browse/participate in similar communities across instances without having to navigate to each one manually.
Hi there! Looks like you linked to a Lemmy community using a URL instead of its name, which doesn’t work well for people on different instances. Try fixing it like this: [email protected]
Is this link supposed to work?
No, it’s a fictional instance used to make a point.
I appreciate both the information and your username 🐦⬛
Classic bot. Don’t you know who you are talking to!
Thanks for the software!What is your and others Devs opinion on the pre-emptive de-federation of 20k hexbear users by 120k user instance lemmy.world?
Would you think Ranked Choice voting for admins i.e. with the Schulze method - which Debian
uses - integrated into the sites would mean that better community supported decisions can be made for both moderation as well as in comments/communities about stuff?Also: is there a remind me in 2 month of this post option?
I have heard some respectable communities, namely r/AskHistorians, express hesitance at coming to Lemmy in part over fears of appearing biased due to the overt political stance of Lemmy’s creators. In other words, it’s hard to be a neutral body in affiliation with anything that has an overt political stance.
I wonder what the devs of Lemmy think of this hesitance. Is it unreasonable and itself biased? Or do you see any potential for finding a way to facilitate a platform that would allow for a more neutral space?
Which instant messenger do you use and recommend the most for general use? I read Dessalines essay about why Signal is bad, from these options SimpleX looks best to me. Thoughts?
Thanks for creating Lemmy! I like it a lot :) Do you have any ideas/plans on a privacy and user focused algorithmic view? If Lemmy wants to be big, I think we need something like this.
No, I dont even know what you mean by that.
I think he means another sorting option for posts, using an algorithm to tailor their order for the user
Urgh, algorithms.
Is there a reason we don’t have users ability to block entire instances, or is it difficult to code? (I don’t mean to sound ungrateful)
