I do still see value in a general landing page for new lemmy users, but this whole thing has really shown me that it should not be anything like this. .ml and .world have done a lot of work becoming the “big” instances and now they have a taste for censorship (and have most the users) I doubt it will get better.
I don’t know how federation works in detail, but I really hope it’s like torrenting where peers introduce each other. That way if one person decides to defederate with an instance it’s a decision that only applies to him. If anybody else is federated then the connection information is available to all. i.e. the network heals around damage.
I have no problem with someone constructing a bubble for themselves, but they don’t get to say what’s in my bubble.
well they just told 100k people what will be in their bubble…
Lemmy world has like 3500 active users a day. That’s not large. That’s going to be the base for a small decent instance in a year.
If everyone was spread out onto different instances
Each instance with an owner/operator making rules… that the average social media user walks in, orders a drink, and starts smoking without any concern that neither one may be allowed. People can be loyal to their media outlets even when it is beyond obvious they are bad. People raised on storybooks that endorse bad behaviors and values, HDTV networks, and social media too. Audience desire to “react comment” to images and not actually read what others have commented - nor learn about the venue operators and reasons for rules is pretty much the baseline experience in 2023.
I am new here and I don’t even know what an instance is, how to find one for me or why you are mentioning HGTV.
think of it as subreddit, and within the subreddit you have other sub-subreddits.
An Instance is just another word for ‘server’ in lemmy terminology. HDTV is a classic form of media that doesn’t involve TCP/IP to watch films and other video content.
Every country should have their own instance and people should sign up to the server that’s closest to them or that best fits their privacy concerns.
I would love to see more federated social media servers in Switzerland for example.
The government of the Netherlands has their own Mastodon server since they left Xitter.
government are shit then they would really liked to control it
Depends if the government is shit. Most in the developed world aren’t.
They don’t really have any more power than any other instance. Users can simply join another instance ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
If they choose not to federate with anybody, that community is basically dead.
Oh, I wasn’t aware that they had defederated from everybody.
Also, doesn’t affect me, right? Even if I had a lemmy.world account, it wouldn’t affect me because I could simply create an account on another instance, or create my own instance.
Come to think of it, even if they defederate from everybody (as if that’s possible), they could still communicate with each other. I’m on several forums that are not part of the fediverse, and they’re not dead, so…
I started on one of the smaller instances, and guess what? They didn’t make it. I spent about two days setting up my account searching for all the communities I wanted, and had a great feed. Then about a week later, they were gone. I can’t fault the admin- they were doing a lot of work and running up a server bill largely for gratis, but I lost all that setup time. So when I had to start a new account I chose to go to one of the moderately large instances because I didn’t want it to go poof overnight again.
What I’m saying is there is safety in the medium to large instances.
That said, I do have some problems with some of the largest instances throwing their weight around in performing global bans on users from other instances whose world views differ from theirs.
I’m beginning to see that in order for lemmy to be truly federated, users must also become federated
User data needs to be exportable and importable somewhere else.
If anything, I would say user data should be a lot more perishable than it is. Original content, answers to questions that don’t need to be answered again with a good search system, those are nice to preserve, but every word from every conversation ever?
I was meaning things like subscriptions and preferences. Not posts and votes.
Sure, like a config file to export and import.
This loosing my first account sucked
I don’t think the point of the post was to say everybody huddle into 10-user instances. The problem currently is there are maybe 5 or so large instances roughly within the same amount of users, then lemmy.world has 10x the amount of the next largest. I’d like to see communities get more spread out into things like startrek.website but there isn’t really a way to do that for the more general communities like Technology, Gaming, etc. because any instance could really have those.
Wouldn’t be much of a problem if you could export account to a file
Mastodon allows you to transfer accounts between instances and IIRC there a feature in the Lemmy roadmap that will allow you to do the same for accounts and communities. Can’t happen soon enough.
Judging from this issue
https://github.com/mastodon/mastodon/issues/12423
It is not fixed. I think you lose your history and relationships in the current barebone migration functionality.
If this were fixed, the sign up process could be streamlined and users could be stuffed in any random open instance without fear they’ll be caught there and lose their identity when the instance owner turns out to be a dick
Can you get the file into another server ?
Yes
That only exports settings and subscriptions, I think what they’re talking about is a solution that allows you to migrate everything including your ownership of the posts and comments that you made.
It’s definitely better than nothing but it’s probably not what they are looking for, hopefully we’ll get a true account migration system soon.
(if) till such feature comes, you can always link to your old account from the bio. Can’t think of any other solutions.
https://github.com/maltfield/awesome-lemmy-instances from this i used monyet.cc since they didn’t need email discuss.online is good as well
DISPERSE
SCATTER!
Think we need universal/transferrable accounts to make this happen. People, myself included will be concerned that if they sign up to a tiny instance someone’s hosting on a raspberry pi or something that it’ll just disappear without a trace one day and their account along with it
If accounts were made portable I think a lot more people would disperse
Would be great if you could set other instances to have a copy of your profile in case your main one disappears.
I think once adding communities from outside your instance becomes a little easier we’ll see that. A lot of newcomers had some trouble figuring out how federation works and went where a lot of the activity was
On the other hand, the way we socialise with strangers inherently benefits from centralisation. There’s a good reason everyone will intuitively go to the largest instance: it’s where everyone else is.
To alleviate that, you’d need to blur the lines enough for it to no longer be visible even. All communities behave as if they’re local and so on.
Urgh, yeah.
I use the ‘official’ Jerboa app and the web interface and duuude is it a Hassle to add a sole unknown community!
I’m doing them all for what I know ; pasting different link types into jerboa search, pasting the instance, !first, /c/ … Going to web UI, doing the same, doing the lemmy.mysite.com/c/[email protected] or what the correct thing is (I have it somewhere) and obviously it still doesn’t work.
For like 30 minutes.
Then it “just works” 😅
It would be great if admins at least (I can see the possible abuse if anyone can force-feed communities to the instance, but well they can today so… ) can add communities to their instances by some “add-list” the server grabs quickly (I know we can by subbing to them but see above, it sure is not easy). Could be cool to be able to grab a bunch of fun communities, or art communities, or sport communities or whatever someone shares, and just force feed them to your instance.
I thought whitelisting was something along those lines, I sure was surprised 🙂.
Great job though Lemmy Developers, I’m quite sure Lemmy will roam the internet for ever!
You might want to ask your instance admin to run this tool to help you: https://github.com/Fmstrat/lcs
It “just” grabs all communities with >50 user’s & upvotes and subs you to them?
Kind of brutal lol, but maybe it can be reworked to accept specific communities…
Here is the problem, and they already refused to fix it
Let’s be honest, this is partially on Jerboa for being the oldest and most convoluted active Lemmy app.
It would be great if admins at least (I can see the possible abuse if anyone can force-feed communities to the instance, but well they can today so…) can add communities to their instances (I know we can, by subbing to them but see above, it sure is not easy).
Isn’t that how Lemmy’s all feed works? If someone else subscribes to an outside community it shows up under everyone’s all tab?
Yep, but it’s a big hassle to actually sub to a community not yet known to your instance. That’s like the problem.
There’s also the fact that a bunch of instances immediately closed registration as soon as the Reddit refugees started arriving. They couldn’t handle the sudden extra load, so they all closed their registrations. Which is their right as owners, but it also meant that virtually all the new users were funneled to the instances that were willing to expand, with Lemmy.World being one of the only ones.
Hell, I still haven’t received registration emails for most of the “we’re filtering our registrations. Click the link in your email to verify you aren’t a bot” instances I tried to register with.
Gmail address?
Nope, self-hosted. So I know it didn’t get bounced off of a spam filter, because I control the spam filters.
maybe your email host is filtered as spam from their side
I assume op runs an instance, then?
Fortunately, they don’t need to! There are dozens of small open instances, and joining any of them helps the current centralization situation.
It kinda makes me wish that instances were forced to be single-topic, or even single-community, and that authentication was key-based so that you didn’t need to “make” an account on a single instance.
I think instead instances should have every community. There isn’t one /c/books, every server has a /c/books. Your feed pages just pulls from the entire fediverse. No concept of “creating” /c/books, it just is.
Likewise, there isn’t “a” moderator. Every user is a moderator. Whether you vote, or delete the post out ban the user (from your view), your moderation opinions are published publicly. Your local feed algorithm sees everyone’s “moderation opinions”, if the consensus of the community is delete, then it just doesn’t show up in your thread
For each “moderation opinions” by a user, your client investigates their historical record to address credibility and likelyness of being a bot, a user’s history is his credibility
Usenet news - 2020s edition
I wish
I’ve got similar ideas, but not entirely the same.
What you call communities would be closer to what I would call content sources / repositories (host servers) plus topic tags. Then instead of consensus (because that’s too hard to automate with decent quality results) you’d have communities formed by subscribing to “curation feeds” which pull submissions and comment from all over the network in a similar style.
This would let you easily crosspost and comment to multiple related communities in a network, as well as to yeet bad mods/curators without losing any content or splitting the community (just create a new curation feed and get people to switch). You could similarly choose to have your client mix comment from multiple curation feeds (similar to “multireddits” on reddit).
Whatever the solution, it needs to create communal view of content or else users will not have a communal experience of which is the basis for a community. This is why multireddit remained a niche feature incapable of overcoming zealous moderation and censorship.
As a midpoint there’s things you can do like “2/3 consensus of X, Y and Z’s submission selections on topics ABC”, then defining that as it’s own feed people can subscribe to.
But it gets complicated to mix and match when different subcommunities have very different local cultures.
User accounts being key-based/portable is one of the strengths of the nostr protocol and Bluesky/AT Protocol.
The key based (and content addressing based) thing is what bluesky is building. They’re starting of with Twitterish microblogging, but there’s people building forums on top the protocol too. Federated, of course.
Lemmy is built upon the ActivityPub Protocol which has the flaws mentioned above Bluesky is built upon the AtProtocol which to me also looks kinda great https://yewtu.be/watch?v=wJBCpzM1VfM ;- Video that explains the difference (i just watched it minutes ago) https://atproto.com/docs ;-Docs for learning how it works
This has its negatives. If someone makes twenty-seven different hate speech communities spread out over twenty-seven instances, it becomes harder to exterminate them like the vermin they are. If they all congregate on one overly-permissive instance, you can defederate them and call it a day. Much easier.
There’s also partial defederation. lemmy.world has just blocked piracy communities while still federated with the rest of the instance, while that decision might not be liked by pirates, we now know this option exists therefore it’s also possible to block hate communities without blocking the entire instance.
Has to be done manually, though. Better tools will make this a more appealing option in the future, but for now I unironically think more centralization is the better option just to make the moderation job a little easier. Lord knows it’s difficult enough.
Yes please! Lemmy.world and lemmy.ml shouldn’t make up the majority of my feed.
I think best case scenario, you have themed instances based around art, tech, politics, news, gaming, food, etc, and the largest communities are hosted there. Then you have “catch all” instances like lemm.ee which federate with everything, there can be as many of these instances as needed as the user base grows. These types of instances should be where the bulk of the new user accounts go, assuming just an average user looking for a /all replacement. Curated instances like beehaw allow for a more fine-tuned experience, but should still function basically as a catch all and not as “hosting the content” instance.
However I understand that building up to that is damn near impossible with the current infrastructure. We would basically need a means to migrate an entire community to a new instance, while simultaneously updating everybody’s subscriptions to reflect the new home of the community.
We would basically need a means to migrate an entire community to a new instance, while simultaneously updating everybody’s subscriptions to reflect the new home of the community.
That would be nice. As a regular user, when lemmy.world does something you dislike, like block piracy communities or something, you can simply create a new account and, until something official exists, use LASIM to migrate stuff over. I didn’t think about communities though, if you run the biggest community for some topic what do you do. Create another one, link to it from the first one and hope for the best?
I thought lemmy.world was a “catch all” and it was, for a bit. We really do need better migration tools, then you could just leave any fools.
Couple tools in case anyone is interested:
User or community move?
Oh just community. User would be ideal, I hope that is widely advertised when it’s available
However I understand that building up to that is damn near impossible with the current infrastructure.
Lemmy is still in its infancy. Any community wanting to move somewhere (like lemdro.id did) can still do it as long as they clearly indicate the new home.
That’s as easy as moving any Reddit community to Lemmy. In other words, basically impossible.
Is there a list somewhere
off the top of my head, there’s this
domain/instances
eg.
lemmy.today/instances
There are other better ways to browse them probably
That’s only a list of federated instances to your instance.
There’s more! It looked comprehensive to me but just because it was a massive list.
