If everyone was spread out onto different instances, and communities were based all over the fediverse, the decisions of one instance would be less impactful.
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
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.
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!
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?
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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
Let’s put things in perspective. Lemmy.world currently has a “whopping” 127k users. That’s fewer users than the moderately successful niche subreddit I created on Reddit has, which is just one of several thousand subreddits over 127k in size. Not to mention the tens of thousands of Instagram, youtube, facebook, tiktok, etc., pages with more than 127k subscribers. Saying lemmy.world has “a lot of power” at this point seems like a real stretch to me.
It’s obvious that like mastodon when twitter imploded, not 1% of 1% of 1% of fleeing users actually made it past the registration screen. Maybe Lemmy will get another chance , in 5/10 years
A platform switch takes time, and normally it’s a particular community that takes hold. Right now, on Lemmy, it seems to be mostly memes and shit posting that’s on the front page. Getting more interesting conversations visible to new users will make the biggest difference.
Their “power” would be relative to other lemmy instances, not absolute.
The comparison to reddit isn’t really fair, as by the time they were getting thousands of subs with more than 127k subscribers, they had been bought by Conde Nast, and were also making money through ads.
These servers don’t just magically run for free, someone is paying for it. And I don’t know about you, but I don’t want lemmy to change in order to appear more appealing to advertisers.
If people would share the idea of the fediverse instead of saying “yeah reddit suck, go to this website instead”, this would put a dent in it.
But since the concept is so alien and hard to describe, people find it easier to just share the site, and since that game keeps being recommended, and since even if they know about multiple sites working together, even those people are going to go to one that has a friendly name, so this is what happens.
I’m only not on it because I like picking less popular things in general, so I actively avoided picking what seemed to be the default at the time.
Also I believe it would help if the sites/instances had a way of distinguishing themselves more and communicating their differences. Even most of the instances’ intro or about pages are mostly saying something like “hey I’m a general use instance, with mostly this language, pick me!”
Which in and of itself is fine, but it seems most of them are general use, so people have no basis for picking one. They may figure out different reasons to like one or the other along the way, but once they pick one initially, I don’t think most people make another account.
I haven’t done much of that either, except for making one my dedicated NSFW account and this one, but I plan on making at least one or two more just in case of downtime, or even to separate genres of content.
The problem is that Lemmy is not federated. You can’t click this link /c/books and get the whole fediverse book community. Federation dies right there.
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.
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.
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.
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
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?
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
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.
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 yewtu.be/watch?v=wJBCpzM1VfM ;- Video that explains the difference (i just watched it minutes ago) atproto.com/docs ;-Docs for learning how it works
Correct me if this is already a thing, but it would be nice if you could post to multiple communities at once and have users see comments across all communities and instances. So a user posts “A” on instances X, Y and Z all under communities run on those instances at the same time. When making the post, you select ehich communities the post goes to instead of just one. Users on instances X, Y and Z see it as a single post it appears in all of the communities the user specifies. A limit might be useful here to prevent trial spam. A user commenting on the post in instance X will be seen on the other instances and communities where that post was made.That way, you could remove the centralisation on instances and communities (one community or instance might remove the thread, but everybody else still sees it and each others comments in the remaining communities/instances.) This has a few advantages:
People are incentivised to post to smaller communities knowing that larger ones will also get the same post and everybody can see each others comments.
If a moderator of a community removes the post, it still disappears in their community, but not the whole instance. If the thread still exists in other communities in the same instance, users of that instance can still participate in the post on those communities.
If the post is banned instance-wide, it is banned across all communities in the instance at once. This could include non-local communities.
Users in other instances will still be able to see the post and continue contributing to it. You can only remove the post from your own instance.
One issue that came to mind when I tried to re-write this comment to post it on lemmy_support: a post can be made to communities with completely different rules resulting in commenters following the rules of the community they are in, but not the other community the post was sent to. This seems like a pretty big issue for moderation.
That is why defederation and blocking communities happen! If both communities are on far extreme side of the scale then there’s no good ground to be made for interaction.
Only idea I had in mind would be to have the post go to a “home” community and all other communities pull the comments from that one and submit their own comments to that one. If the “home” community has rules that the others roughly follow that might help filter the extreme ends out so you don’t just get constant de-federation.
Content allowed on instances:
Instance 1: Content A, B
Instance 2: Content B only
Instance 3: Content B, C
By making instance 2 the home for the post, which by it’s own rules only allows content that both instance 1 and 3 allow themselves, you filter out the content which 1 and 3 would hate. Of course, this puts the moderation burden on instance 2. You could still allow instances 1 and 3 to have their own comments which instance 2 doesn’t allow, but only they will see those comments.
IDK, I feel I’m starting to see why Lemmy works the way it does. I’ll post in !lemmy_support if I get a better idea. :)
While this is true, the fact that communities tend to all group together when one gets big enough on an instance means that the same centralized control of power problems happen.
For example one of the Android communities I was subbed to on here closed down because they all moved to one on a different instance that was started by the reddit android mods…so now those same power hungry reddit mods are the mods of the go-to lemmy android community. It’s all centralized there. Are there other android communities on lemmy? Sure, but they’re tiny and unused because no one wants 10 tiny communities, they want 1 big one.
The amount of data that needs to be exchanged because of this approach is not scalable. Assume that there are 3 instances with 100 users each. Even if lots of users upvote/post/comment, the traffic is exchanged only between 3 servers. But if there are 300 single user instances, the amount of traffic/storage will be duplicated which can cause a huge load for everyone which might not be viable in the long run, for both the sender and receiver. PS: I am assuming that the instances periodically update content by fetching the deltas.
Just go to your average big popular subreddit, check out all the text of all posts and comments they week. That’s still a minuscule amount of data. A few megabytes when uncompressed.
And Lemmy won’t get to that point of popularity and traffic for a very long time.
And even then, it’s an easy problem to solve. Each instance creates a chunk of a day’s data, sign it and share it on a bittorrent like protocol. Even nntp massively archaic infrastructure can manage this, it is a piece of cake for Lemmy to do.
🤔 We need an ActivityPub app that is basically just a user account holder that is tied to their IP or MAC address so individuals can carry the same info throughout the fediverse, block instances they personally don’t like, and so bans from instances are actually permanent and enforceable.
IPs change constantly, MAC is per network device (a laptop with Wi-Fi and wired has two different MACs), so you would need to be able to have a list of MACs and MACs can be easily spoofed so thats a whole other set of issues.
Another interesting thought about MACs and any other chip-based IDs that get floated in the future. Spoofing aside, while MACs are supposed to be unique, there are a lot of dodgy mfgs that just burn the same MAC or set of MACs into entire batches of chips at a time. If a new standard was announced, it would be interesting to see the results of orgs trying to take advantage of the ID while shady mfgs continue to not give a flip.
🤔 In principle, you could just order a chip from a manufacturer with a specific ID tag so you could mimic someone you hated, or steal their shit, or otherwise fuck up their lives under such a system.
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