Before the Reddit exodus, I don’t remember many active servers besides Lemmy.ml and Lemmygrad (there was Lemm.ee and Lemmy.ca but they both had like 3 posts a week). Hexbear wasn’t federated, and servers were mostly being desperately spun up in anticipation for a flood of users who would crash the network.
There were about 80 before the exodus (may 2023), compared to to 40 (may 2022) and 15 (may 2021), about double the servers every year which is good considering this is “word to mouth” growth, even older data shows a clear growth trend, my guess is that i and others didn’t really see them because they are some dude community, even today i think i will have a problem listing more then 5-10 lemmy servers.
unfortunately other data is not encouraging , the number of servers is both down since the exodus and in the recent month.
this is normal. we’ll go through a lot of similar waves. people start servers, realize they’re a lot of work, and then abandon them. servers that foster a healthy community will survive. hexbear’s worst cycle involved losing the entire administrative team just weeks after a large percentage of the website left. don’t sweat the growing pains - work together to learn, grow, and change.
Oh sorry, I wasn’t clear enough. I’m taking about the posts that have an authoritarian slant to them.
“There should only be one (memes or whatever) community across the fediverse. Someone… should deal with all these copies.”
Fedi doesn’t map exactly into their single server reddit experience. They want to re-create king spaz for some reason. It was kinda gross and I felt a few randos really showed their ass.
I’ve always liked having personal chats in the servers section. The notifications were much more clear, as the chat would always pop up to the top, and navigating to them was significantly easier as every area for messaging was easily accessible through one motion.
The UI is generally better and separating personal chats isn’t a deal breaker for me, but the new app is buggy in ways that actively impede my daily use, such as search filters not working over the full server in the default search bar, and the structure for dms makes it much harder to go seemlessly between talking in a server and talking with a group of friends in a dm or sending a message to someone. Swiping out of DMs to servers has much more friction, and switching between DMs takes significantly longer and is incredibly glitchy, sometimes trapping text boxes in a different chat, opening the conversation well above where you were actually talking, and many times it simply will get trapped in one dm and I need to restart the app fully to use DMs normally again.
I generally use significantly more DMs than servers, talking with my friends in groups of 3 or individually and having one or two servers for large communities of people. As such, the significantly shittier DM experience on mobile is making me want to use discord significantly less on mobile.
Lemmy’s biggest competitor at this point isn’t reddit, it’s Discord, or rather, the monster it has become. It seems to me that instead of creating a subreddit nowadays, every project now wants to use a Discord server for everything.
The problem with that is:
Asking messages in a big, open chatroom (over, say, 20 people) gets real messy, real quickly.
Conversations on Discord are difficult to follow when multiple of them are going at once.
The conversations containing solutions to problems in chat or threads are not search indexable, which is the reason why reddit became quietly dominant in search results, it is simply the biggest centralized repository of organized English language text conversations available.
So why do people insist on using Discord servers to build their community? Simple, it’s the network effect. If somebody wants tech support, it’s way easier to click a Discord invite on an account for group chat you already have than it is to sign up for yet another forum that you only use once. But Lemmy doesn’t suffer from that problem of traditional forums because of federation.
Which brings me to my point, if Lemmy is to grow, it’s better to sell Lemmy to disgruntled Discord admins and forum owners to move their community than it is to get people to move off reddit at this point, since people who wants to leave reddit has all done so at this point.
An ejabberd instance can handle 2 million concurrent users. The free software XMPP server is used by the likes of League of Legends, Fortnite, Zoom. If it’s a good enough for them, it would easily handle your community, big or small.
I feel like Discord fills a different need than forum type systems.
The one API I have on discord, likes Discord as a place for casual chat about the system. I think the devs prefer it because it is an active place for the community; to word it better, ‘hey look at this cool thing I did’ > response within a few minutes ‘that’s cool’ heart^5 fire^3 thumbs up^7. Whereas on a forum you’d be waiting for hours, or just not have that casual of a conversation.
It replaces the old usage of IRC servers.
The help channel is highly responsive, and great for things you want a quick chat about, need a response now, or if you get help now great, but if not, you’ll figure it out on your own before you would ever get help on a forum, so it’s not worth posting to a forum.
Threads really do help organize when a discussion is going to be large, and discord is very much searchable, just not from your browser search engine.
For changes to the API, ideas, issues, or bugs, they direct you to github “Discussions” or “Issues”. They do have an idea discord channel, but it’s a more casual thing, or far out there discussions.
Discord does get a lot of hate for it’s searchability, which is valid, but I don’t have a problem with it as long as places like Stack Overflow (or what replaces it) are still around.
It’s easier to imagine the end of the world than the end of capitalism. Nowhere is this more visible than on the shelves of game shops, where our choices for the future are dystopia, apocalypse, and space. Fully Automated is an open source tabletop RPG project developing a free game meant to provide for solarpunk what Dungeons...
We want to inspire you to shop local this holiday season! Use our gift guide full of creative Canadian-owned small businesses for all your online holiday shopping....
This post was reported, and often I will leave up a post once I’ve read through the report and decided that it should stay up. In this case, since I’m the one that posted it, it doesn’t feel right resolve the reports without a comment.
I left up the post because I think the reporter misunderstood what this was, which is my fault because I didn’t take the time to explain when posting. If people still think it’s inappropriate, I’ll remove it and not post these in the future.
The Canadian Internet Registration Authority is the not-for-profit org that manages the .ca TLD. They have grants for infrastructure and community projects, and they’re involved in the Fediverse through their partnership with the mstdn.ca Mastodon server.
Going off of their history and past work, I felt that the guide was in good faith and that it would be good to highlight some Canadian creators instead of large corporations. I don’t think they’re sneakily making money by highlighting these businesses, and so I left up the post.
So yeah, I want to discuss or point out why I think Valve needs to fix Anti-Cheat issues. They have VAC but apparently its doing jackshit, be it Counter Strike 2 (any previous iterations) or something like Hunt: Showdown the prevalence of cheating players is non deniable. For me personally it has come to a point that I am not...
Cheats will only grow more advanced, at some point you’ll be able to train an AI to play exactly like a human, but while performing perfectly far more reliably than a human.
The line between what skill looks like versus cheating will only get blurrier.
The real long term solution is to enable the vetting of players (not by the game company or god forbid the government, looking at you china), by returning to community based servers/private matches. And to have reports dealt with faster and by people who care about the game personally.
As a member of the Northstar community, cheating is basically a solved problem for us atm.
There is no anti-cheat, instead a global ban tracking system was put in place and server admins are now able to share the identities of players who have been caught cheating, banning them on every server, regardless of who is running them, by the hosts simply opting into the global ban system.
People used to form “gaming-clans” in order to find people to play games with to begin with, and that structure for a community around a game is likely to become relevant again simply to be able to fill matches with people who you can be sure are honest players.
People used to form “gaming-clans” in order to find people to play games with to begin with, and that structure for a community around a game is likely to become relevant again simply to be able to fill matches with people who you can be sure are honest players.
Unlikely imo, because modern game devs have been killing the viability of that for years. User-hosted servers are gone, crossplay is reliant on SBMM to be realistically possible, and private matches often block players from receiving XP and rewards because they’re worried about FOMO and people getting too much fun without spending enough. Even CSGO got an update in the months leading up to CS2 where they removed the ability to earn drops on community servers, driving another nail into the coffin as one of the last kinds of these games that still retain the mere ability to run servers of our own.
While that’s all true, the day you can just fire up an undetectable AI to play for you, and all the matchmaking queues are flooded with people doing the same… Players are going to beg for the ability to not just team up with people they know, but play against people they know.
Maybe that wont be privately hosted servers, or even fully custom matches, but when cheaters become indistinguishable from the highly skilled, forming even the most basic community bonds in order to find people to play with will be preferable to matching with randos.
For similar reasons people already prefer to team up with someone they know, as opposed to a stranger they might have to carry. People will want to be able to pick who they go up against, as well.
Once the cheaters win, (and they will) the first game to figure out a system to let players do this, WILL be a better experience than current matchmaking algos.
Edit: An example of a game that kinda already does this is Elite: Dangerous. There are two main modes, open and solo, in open you can run into all other players also playing in open, that means you might have to defend yourself against other players.
But, if you want to avoid PvP, but still want to run into other players, you’re in luck! Because there is a third option, private groups. When in a private group, the game works as if you’re in open, but you can only see other players who are in the same group. Meaning other players who also do not want to engage in PvP.
Mobius is likely the largest such group, essential it’s a giant clan of non-PvPers who play the game together. Something similar could absolutely be done for other games, where smaller communities can then vet their members and get rid of players who break the rules.
I’m not denying any part of what you’re saying, I’m saying that this specific case is currently working fine, and that it is merely an example of the kinds of solutions I want to see enabled.
Obviously the bigger the community, the more complex the solution needs to be, and the more bases have to be covered. You’re nitpicking a specific example I gave (and doing so from a position of ignorance concerning northstar and its community), rather than my ideological thesis. Which is that communities should be empowered with social structure so that cheaters can be properly ostracized. Spyglass is just one way for a community to implement that.
Northstar isn’t big enough to even begin to compare with discord or minecraft. The concurrent playercount on all servers put together seldom matches ONE big minecraft server.
If the factors you bring up become a concern, I’m ready to pick up the tools to deal with it myself, as I’ve already done before. But so far, there has been no need.
Lemmy does not use the entire screen width. The way it has been embedded in the page means that image takes up only 850 pixels of horizontal space so it could be 5x smaller and no one would be able to see the difference.
Lemmy really should be automatically resizing the images (on the server) when they are uploaded, not every single time the community is viewed (in the browser).
Pubnixes. Or more specifically the tildeverse. I thought these things were long gone but no, there is still a community of passionate computer nerds sharing common servers and colloborating in the community.
It’s a fantastic message app and no amount of posts like this will change that fact. I get that it’s proprietary and therefore evil and all that, but literally nothing else compares. It’s so feature-rich and provides powerful features for server admins, and has a great ecosystem of bots and communities.
Matrix isn’t anywhere near as good and Revolt, let’s be real, is only good because it is UNAPOLOGETICALLY a 1:1 Discord clone. Even the settings menu is exactly the same. It’s also lacking a bunch of features.
Beeper can be self-hosted if you have a Mac, so you don’t have to trust their servers
Sunbird’s app (Nothing Chat) was riddled with its own security vulnerabilities that allowed users to read other users messages, which were all stored as unencrypted plaintext, all discovered by the community within 24 hours of launch
Beeper is actually open about how their technology works and what it’s limitations are, while Sunbird/Nothing basically lied about their product and never provided any meaningful documentation
As I understand it, fediverse has a lot of syncing overhead (it takes a lot of bandwidth and processing to share content between all the servers). The more servers there are, the more overhead is used for syncing.
While lots of servers is good for resilience, and diversification of communities, going to the extent of every individual hosting a server seems like an overburdensome extreme.
BlueSkys official #ATProtocol account just highlighted a community developer project to bridge it with #ActivityPub
#BlueSky early on decided not to go with the open #W3C standard in favor of implementating features like account migration. Planning to start federating next year, they've made some decisions I'm skeptical about.
Sandstorm launched in a rough state but some mods made it interesting.
Yeah, they were pushing for a wider public with things like cosmetics that would be more in place in Rainbow Six Siege than a grittier tactical shooter (it did not go well with the community). I’ve mostly fallen off this game after having played some form of it since the Half-Life mod days. I’ve only played one game a couple of weeks ago because a friend had his heavily modded server back up like the good old times but I’ve barely played it at all this year.
“Lemmy gives their developer update on the work they have been doing in the last 2 weeks. Lemmy is preparing for their new release, v0.19, and the lemmy.ml server is already running the update. One of the changes is a new sorting algorithm, scaled sorting, that gives more visibility to smaller communities on Lemmy.”
How do I make friends as an adult? I'm new to my area and don't have any local friends or community. Have been struggling with loneliness a lot lately.
@magicalgrrrl@actuallyautistic What has somewhat worked for me is: Hanging about in Twitch channels and their discords. And also, lots of instagram accounts, that eventually point you in the right direction, ie. communities. And those communities (including discord servers) then lead you to find friends, eventually.
Note: It doesnt have to be Twitch or Insta, it could be also any other bigger streaming platform and site about images.
World was already the biggest by far when I first started lurking back in July, and it’s just getting more dominant. Before, there was quite some diversity in the distribution of generic communities, but nowadays the vast majority of posts that reach the top are from over there....
This is really what’s is beginning to bother me. I came from Reddit with the fuck-spez-wave searching for an alternative, and Lemmy somehow sounded interesting and a new way of doing things.
I can live with the lag of content, that will come, but more and more it looks like every server is their own little community with whatever weirdnesses they have, and each one has a bunch of moderators, most good, some bad, but all doing what they think is best.
When you’re just a mainstream user looking for content and debate, and take no interest in server drama, defederations and whatever, it’s all just unwanted noise and irritating.
Free google play credit, I usually get an email every year for it
But I do pay for Plex, despite Jellyfin being a thing. If I like something and it’s worth it to me personally, why not 🤷♂️… but you will never find me defending their kinda crappy decisions like the new Discover feature, removal of “All Songs” from the plex apps in favor of moving people to Plexamp, removing the Gallery sync a few years ago etc.
Some people want their software to be 100% FOSS all-eyes-on-the-codebase, others just do a balancing act based on their personal values.
I value my software to be “transparent enough” in how it operates, “just work”, and hackable to some extent - if I really wanted to I can swap out the ffmpeg binary that Plex uses for transcoding to something else (doesn’t remove the Plex Pass limitation for those curious), I can hook into the server API to change ambient lighting colour based on the cover/background of whatever media is playing, I can create speakers running a Linux board to cast Plex media to, etc. But once that hackable ship sails, then I will look to FOSS alternatives.
For Niagara, everything “just worked”. No noticeable bugs, fast search, consistent feel and design, useful contextual info (e.g. next calendar event shows under the clock), and gestures that made sense for its overall UX. Using it felt less like you were using a “launcher”. The yearly sub was cheap enough that I wouldn’t mind covering for it if I didn’t get credits, and having a single person working on software usually comes with a high level of attention to detail (particularly in performance and UX) but it does have the downside that the experience may be more opinionated and closed compared to if it was a community-driven FOSS project instead IMO.
Alas, google didn’t send credits this year, Niagara made less sense for value/worth-it compared to Kvaesitso, so I abandoned it.
For me, Kvaesitso does everything in a slightly different, much more customizable way, and being FOSS was one of the things that made it particularly attractive as a replacement
I’m sorry to say this but, your way of picking software is wrong. You should always look for the open source software first, then use proprietary software.
I agree here, this is what I generally do nowadays. The exception for me is only software that I’ve been using for years, such as Plex and Niagara - finding an open source alternative for a proprietary solution is the easy part, the hard part is actually making it fit into your workflow.
This is why I’ve settled on just jumping ship to an open source option when the existing proprietary option is no longer fit for purpose (hackable, “transparent” etc) because of the time sink.
Niagara to Kvaesitso was really easy though, thanks to that developer and contributors absolutely knocking it out the park with the amazing search and UX.
But using Plex when Jellyfin exists is just wrong. I personally have a jellyfin instance, and there’s nothing jellyfin can’t do when compared to Plex.
Jellyfin is great, particularly for us and tech enthusiasts. For non-techies though, the first hurdle of different clients for mobile/desktop/insert-platform-here is a very tough sell (each with a slightly different UX, rearranged settings etc) and is even trickier when there are no apps available for games consoles and some smart TVs. I share my Plex server with my partner and parents, so moving to something else seems like more trouble than its worth at the moment.
Regardless I do have my eye on Jellyfin (and particularly the music apps like Finamp, since that is my personal primary use case for Plex) - for TV libraries and Movies the gap is closing fast, I believe the only major thing that is missing is the “Skip intro/outro” on some of the clients, but for music sadly the gap is only widening. It’s very much a watch-this-space type thing though as the community catches up, but I feel the sonic analysis in Plexamp and the many features built on top of that are going to take a lot of volunteer time to replicate
Encouraging proprietary software makes them stronger and erodes our rights. Like using chrome instead of Firefox is voting for a future where remote device attestation and forced DRM is a normal thing. Do you want the corps to eradicate your free will?
I agree.
With remote attestation sadly we are already there on Android: most apps require GMS even when they don’t need it, and some paranoid non-banking apps unnecessarily call Google’s attestation API, and subsequently block some actions if your device doesn’t pass.
I personally run a rooted device for full control over app backups, my device’s BMS, and various other stuff - where possible I pretty much use open source& source-available apps, as well as browser shortcuts and PWAs, where I have the freedom to perform any desired action without being restricted by any attestation. My partner has a very keen interest in the freedom offered and is actually very annoyed at the state of things on modern Android - but sadly the attestation issues and Samsung Knox in particular are big showstoppers (I use an FP3, so no “security void” hardware fuses here)
Lemmy's active users are up again for the first time since the exodus (lemmy.ml)
from lemmy.fediverse.observer/stats
venture capitalism goes brrr (feddit.de)
Do you want to go on adventures in a Solarpunk world?? Do you want to write your own story?
It’s easier to imagine the end of the world than the end of capitalism. Nowhere is this more visible than on the shelves of game shops, where our choices for the future are dystopia, apocalypse, and space. Fully Automated is an open source tabletop RPG project developing a free game meant to provide for solarpunk what Dungeons...
.CA Small Business Gift Guide – CIRA (www.cira.ca)
We want to inspire you to shop local this holiday season! Use our gift guide full of creative Canadian-owned small businesses for all your online holiday shopping....
Valve needs to step up on Anti-Cheat
So yeah, I want to discuss or point out why I think Valve needs to fix Anti-Cheat issues. They have VAC but apparently its doing jackshit, be it Counter Strike 2 (any previous iterations) or something like Hunt: Showdown the prevalence of cheating players is non deniable. For me personally it has come to a point that I am not...
why does the poster image of c/linux have 3.8mb? (programming.dev)
This is the link to the image. It has 3.8mb. In my opinion that is way too much.
What's something that has fascinated you recently?
Discord: Improving Our Mobile Experience (discord.com)
There’s a new iMessage for Android app — and it actually works (www.theverge.com)
My fediverse use - I'm hosting everything myself - PeerTube, Mastodon and Lemmy (tube.jeena.net)
To really own your content, I think you need to host it yourself. The fediverse makes it possible.
Insurgency Developer New World Interactive Shut Down (insider-gaming.com)
Last Week in the Fediverse: Episode 46 (wedistribute.org)
“Lemmy gives their developer update on the work they have been doing in the last 2 weeks. Lemmy is preparing for their new release, v0.19, and the lemmy.ml server is already running the update. One of the changes is a new sorting algorithm, scaled sorting, that gives more visibility to smaller communities on Lemmy.”
How did Lemmy World become the default instance?
World was already the biggest by far when I first started lurking back in July, and it’s just getting more dominant. Before, there was quite some diversity in the distribution of generic communities, but nowadays the vast majority of posts that reach the top are from over there....
My Niagara Launcher subscription ended today... enter Kvaesitso
I woke up this morning to an awful looking homescreen on my Android - turns out my Niagara Launcher subscription had lapsed!...