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 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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
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