Interest is waning because there is no work being done on federation. Federation is the defining feature of this project, and no tangible progress has been made.
There was massive interest in the project when it first picked up some steam and for a while after. I think that most people are viewing it as a dead project. There are multiple FOSS link aggregator servers out there, and while Lemmy is i believe technically superior to them all, the interest is in federation, not another alternative link aggregator. I personally think that all feature requests need to be put on the backburner until there is at least minimal federated functionality. Of course I am not the maintainer or project manager so that is not up to me, it is just my opinion.
Also bear in mind, this instance is not for production, it is for testing. So that will play a role in people being skittish of signing up here.
Someone mentioned it on Reddit and on Riot -I don’t remember in what subreddit or room- while talking about federated alternatives to Reddit. Came here, saw the Github, lurked a bit. Looks an interesting project and I can’t wait for federation to come!
Strong moderation abilities, and instance admins like ourselves who actually ban white supremacist communities and not sit on their hands about hosting the largest one on the internet, for years.
edit: like just today, we had a few TERF communities try to set up here. It took us less than a day to ban them. Its not difficult.
That’s good to hear, I’ve got very little idea of how the fediverse works nor how moderation works on these types of sites so thanks for clarifying. I had a look to see if c/the_donald existed and although it seems to, I could see the following:
Make America Great Again removed by mod
No Posts.
Does that mean the community has been removed by a mod then or something else?
Shitjustworks just voted to delist exploding heads from their instance. Beehaw is not federated with two of the largest (lemmy.world and sh.itjust.works) because they are worried about bots.
I’m genuinely curious, looking to move from Reddit due to heavy-handed mod abuse and the extreme leftist bias of virtually all the big subreddits. Is Lemmy going to be a place where free speech is honored, or will conservatives always get the boot like on Reddit? I’m not talking about hate speech or calls for violence, I’m just as against that as the next person. But I’d like to know I’m not going to get banned because my opinion differed from that of a mod.
You don’t understand Lemmy. Feel free to host your own instance with your conservatives views. It will likely get defederated by other instances, but nobody’s stopping you.
People who complain about “censorship” and “authoritarianism” while espouting the benefits of “freedom of speech” are exactly the type of people you don’t want around.
If there’s been discussion on lemmy.ml about this topic, I haven’t gotten around to seeing it. But from what I’ve noticed from witnessing this type of discussion all over the web is that these calls always come from either the most reactionary users or enablers i.e. those that would rather sit on the sidelines and either let it happen or put up a weak front because they have a right to “free speech.”
Unfortunately, this libertation-esque ethos runs deep in so many online spaces, where they’d rather have vague notions of freedom that obviously benefit them at the expense of others. Spaces like lemmy are not for them, and while there’s nothing lemmy can do about it, going against the grain and purging that type of vitriol is the best way to keep it from turning into the shitholes ranging from Reddit’s “enlightened centrism” to outright fascist spaces like *chans or gab.
Just a crazy idea, but why not make lemmy invite-only like lobsters so if someone repeatedly does harm we can disable invitations for the inviter? Everyone on lemmy would be able to invite after one month (or so) if you have at least X karma.
I’m in the US so Reuters, NPR, AP. But there are so many “news” websites around anymore I usually take everything I read with a dose of skepticism and I look at Snopes and MediaBiasFactCheck often.
I agree that maybe there’s something that could be done.
Fact checking is tricky
As to fact-checking, I’m not really sure what to do. On one hand I worry the ‘reputation’ system would be too restrictive. On the other hand, in general (by which I mean that I haven’t seen this crop up in Lemmy but I wouldn’t like to see) I’d hate to see anti-vax, flat-earth, or otherwise blatant fake science showing up.
Nudging cognition and affect is as well, but seems more viable
But there is something that could be done regarding the way in which the Lemmy interface nudges our thoughts and feelings. The paradigmatic example in the Fediverse is Eunomia. I wonder (and don’t doubt we could find) literature on these nudges to improve interactions.
The goal could be to avoid finger-pointing as well as aggression, and to incentivize thought/understanding, kindness, and, in general, positive emotions so that we’re able to be both flexible and critical. Note that the positive emotions part is not me being hippy-dippy; by now it’s well established that positive emotions enhance .
It would be great if we can find a way of changing interfaces in such a way as to nudge us towards positive emotions and critical thinking.
But until the heavy lifting for that is done (something that, once I feel comfortable with my CS training, I could attempt), I wonder if the minimal Democratic manifesto could be done with tricky situations like these in mind. In other words, make an explicit, clear, and widespread expectation that we’re here to share, understand critically, and interact kindly.
On the other hand, in general (by which I mean that I haven’t seen this crop up in Lemmy but I wouldn’t like to see) I’d hate to see anti-vax, flat-earth, or otherwise blatant fake science showing up.
You should bet on that happening. I created /c/conspiracy because Reddit’s /r/conspiracy is effectively /r/The_Donald. These people do not care about your facts, at all whatsoever. If anything they’ll want their “facts” to be the only facts you ever encounter. Go there (/r/conspiracy) and look around if you do not believe me. A different approach needs to be taken. I was there when Voat was first created, before it turned to shit. Something creative needs to happen here, or IMO this place will turn to shit too.
RUSSIAN ACTIVE MEASURES CAMPAIGNS AND INTERFERENCE IN THE 2016 U.S. ELECTION
VOLUME 2: RUSSIA’S USE OF SOCIAL MEDIA:
Analysis of the behavior of the IRA-associated social media accounts makes dear that while the Russian information warfare campaign exploited the context of the election and election-related issues in 2016, the preponderance of the operational focus, as reflected repeatedly in content, account names, and audiences targeted, was on sociapy divisive issues-such as race, immigration, and Second Amendment rights-in an attempt to pit Americans against one another and against their government. The Committee found that IRA influence operatives consistently used hot-button, societal divisions in the United States as fodder for the content they published through social media in order to stoke anger, provoke outrage and protest, push Americans further away from one another, and foment distrust in government institutions. The divisive 2016 U.S. presidential election was just an additional feature of a much more expansive, target-rich landscape of potential ideological and societal sensitivities.
A much easier approch would be to let downvotes and upvotes decide the fate of each post.
That’s one of the worst ideas I can think of right now. If anything upvotes/downvotes should be disabled for a temporarily amount of time.
Go there (/r/conspiracy) and look around if you do not believe me. A different approach needs to be taken. I was there when Voat was first created, before it turned to shit. Something creative needs to happen here, or IMO this place will turn to shit too.
I was not at Voat or Raddle or Saidit or other reddit clones for this reason. I picked Lemmy due to multiple reasons, and one of them largely was that QAnon followers could simply not flock here and spew all kinds of nonsense. I am trying to look around ways to help encounter this, because for now only vigilance of user base seems the correct answer.
I was on Voat when it was a pleasant community like Lemmy, and I tried to nudge for civility as over time every post became hateful and angry. I would still browse Voat occasionally until it shut down because I value diversity of thought, and I was curious to encounter rhetoric which contradicted my own beliefs.
Lemmy is not so different, however, instead of having a far-right bias Lemmy has a far-left bias. For now there are no far-right Lemmy instances to balance far-left instances like Lemmygrad.ml. This creates an atmosphere where right-leaning, and centrist users might take one look around and feel unwelcome.
I think it is important that left-leaning, centrist, and right-leaning users feel welcome while leaving bigotry at the door. We need for someone who is bigoted to feel welcome here by all of their other traits, and to erode their bigoted beliefs over time because bigotry is not tolerated. I think Lemmy and the Fediverse have real potential to foster a space where diverse users can share stories and form communities with users who hold very different beliefs.
Voat showed it is not enough to create an open platform with unmoderated free speech, the platform itself must have structures in place to promote civility, and the users of the platform must work hard to maintain a culture of civility. The fact that QAnon believers are not welcome here means that Lemmy has already siloed itself, and I believe that the current policy of non-federation with disagreeable instances is too strict to be a long-term viable solution.
I agree that while Lemmy looks like a far-left space, you have to consider why people that escaped Reddit and r/worldnews style of Hegelian vacuums came here. Reddit provides a neoliberal space, Raddle/Gab/chans (4chan et al) provide a far right safe space, and Lemmy provides a safe space as well.
People over there mass brigade and spout racist shit and do not rely on facts to prop up their agendas. None of this happens on Lemmy, because far left is one domain that largely does not consist of uneducated hypocrites, reactionaries, warmongerers or racists and believes in critical thinking just like some of the conservatives do.
The problem is, you will not see corrupt liberals or neocons leaving their bigotry or agendas at the door for a discussion, and will use every opportunity to leverage their agendas. This is what creates such massive friction. That does not mean to say far left people are some hermits, but I have seen more humanity, collective good and peace advocacy in this political space than anywhere else. And there is no honeymoon phase in political ideologies, so I am not dreaming either.
Instances, unless agree to rules mutually, cannot and should not federate with each other. It has massive consequences of destroying peace for the composed, silent users, and whoever wants chaos is the beneficiary party of such federations (often the far right warmongerer kind or a right libertarian or a neoliberal).
From what I saw, Voat became a far right thing, and QAnon stuff has poisoned half the American voter population. Allowing these kinds of propaganda liars, while seemingly great in utopia, is dangerous on Earth today, because we do not have a utopia. Society envisioned in a vacuum is meaningless unless you live in a vacuum.
Every “free speech” platform is simply a way for contemporary fascism to flourish, which is observed evidently again and again and again and again and again. It is why Mastodon had to ban National Socialism (Nazi) people from its main instance, which most instances do prefer.
I think the key here is reminding ourselves why we are on lemmy, as opposed to other social media sites. I’ll speak for myself, having recently discovered lemmy on reddit while looking for alternatives to that site:
Lack of corporation/state control (i.e. tencent buying a stake in reddit),
Lack of censorship (while bearing in mind that individual communities can and should retain the right to enforce rules)
Privacy (lightweight interface which doesn’t sell your data to advertisers)
A new start (ideally learning from mistakes of previous forum/social media endeauvours)
In my opinion structurally incentivising long form debate as opposed to hot takes in political/worldnews instances is one way of improving the discourse. I enjoy the r/geopolitics approach (though I am aware that many here will disagree with the political slant of that subreddit), in that submissions are heavily regulated and require an input from the OP as to why they are posting a given source.
One thing I would also say from my perspective, is that I am a novice in regards to the technical elements of lemmy as far as federalised platforms and struggle to participate in technology based privacy discussions.
Perhaps outreach from the more tech savvy elements of the lemmy community towards “tech novices” (among whom I count myself) in regards to internet privacy and the privacy benifits of lemmy and other such endeauvours would be helpful here in retaining users. It should be easy to find a simple explanation on the advantages of lemmy vis a vis other (hopefully soon to be) obsolete (heh) platforms.
Some of these points don’t directly attatch to the discussion of the OP, but I feel this thread has engendered much discussion in the wider community.
tl;dr: privacy, lack of massed external interference good, outreach to less tech savvy, but privacy interested users good, dispensing with a datascraping monetisation model very good, repeating mistakes of established platforms bad bad bad
It’s not “leftist” necessarily, but all leftists should inform themselves about the Russian Revolution IMO, which is covered by season 10 (the final and currently ongoing season) of the Revolutions|^Spotify^ podcast.
Mike Duncan isn’t explicitly leftist or anything, but he really does his homework and portrays things in a really neutral way. Whether or not you are a big stan of the USSR and what came after, the Russian Revolution was the most successful attempt at overthrowing capitalism (to an extent), and any future movement should learn from and analyze all aspects of what happened in those years.
Citations Needed|^Spotify^ is my other favorite with their in-depth media criticism (if you like Chomsky’s stuff, you’ll probably like what they have to say).
Seriously tho I like the idea that its advice-focused. My only preference is that ppl ask lemmy support-type questions in other places like !lemmy_support.
asklemmy
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