I’m fairly new to the Fediverse, and I’d like to share my onboarding experience. Personally, I appreciate the concept of decentralization and the community-driven aspect of Fediverse. I’ve used Mastodon and Lemmy, based on ActivityPub, for a while:...
I find it difficult to get all the updates I need on a particular instance, and except for a few very large instances, most others appear quite quiet and like the Internet ten years ago.
About this particular problem, I see no reason to not join the largest instance in any case. Sheer discoverability of content is massively improved from sitting in the biggest pool, as I still have to subscribe to the communities I want to see.
Fediverse isn’t truly decentralized; instances operate under the will of server owners, who can ban and remove content as they please.
I would like that. I liked the internet ten years ago. I think today it’s filled with yet more noise and lots of low-effort posts. But I don’t know where Lemmy is headed. In August/September I was pretty active here and had lots of nice conversations and in the last few weeks I struggled a bit getting meaningful discussions going. And there seem to be a lot of posts where OP doesn’t engage and just dumps a question. And people only reply to comments in order to point out mistakes.
I don’t know your exactly problem. Maybe you’re using Lemmy/Mastodon wrong?! If you mean there’s not enough activity in niche interest communities, I agree…
each instance tend to be quite diverse. To find someone to follow, I must switch between different instances
I really like diversity, that’s great. But why do you have to switch instances? The fediverse is supposed to be a connected network of instances. You should be able to do everything from everywhere, subscribe across instances and not needing to switch.
Fediverse isn’t truly decentralized; instances operate under the will of server owners
I think you confuse decentralized with anonymous / free speech / unmoderated platforms. Federated means it consists of several independent servers that get interconnected. Each server has it’s own autonomy, rules and people who make decisions. (Distributed is yet another term for something slightly different.) If you mean something where nothing gets moderated and no-one banned, I suppose there are platforms like it. But I haven’t yet seen an unmoderated place I like. They are fun for trolls and shitposters for like 3 days, then they become a place for hate and scams, ads and crypto schemes. Mostly posted by bots. And everyone normal will leave the platform so it’s just toxic people mixed with lots of bots. You can post something but the only thing you get as a response is someone writing 25-times the n-word and some crypto-scam bots posting unrelated ads. So here, the will of server owners and moderators is what keeps this place running. Of course they don’t always do the right thing. But still, we need them unless you have something different in mind. Maybe a better way to distribute power?
I think there’s an issue with coupling on the fediverse. For instance, if I run a community, but I’m not happy with the current instance policies, I can’t easily move it to a new insurance (while keeping the memberships). It’s also tricky to migrate my account - and it will lose me posting and vote history, edit/delete rights, etc. Finally, if I want to participate in two servers that have defederated each other, I have to maintain two accounts, which is a terrible user experience.
I’m noticing an influx of Reddit users today, maybe revolving around their weird bug they had today. I know this question pops up semi regularly, but for those just getting their foot in the door maybe we can help show them what else is out here on the Fediverse to help them get started....
I want to suggest !main , or !chatter (general topic discussion that’s been kind of inactive), !general, and other just general chat communities across servers that aren’t memes and shitposts, just to give people a low bar of entry to talk about how they feel, what’s going on in their lives (to the extent they wish to share).
Someone looking for general advice, share something cool that isn’t yet part of any community (but it could help start one), ask a question that they feel isn’t a good fit for asklemmy, newbs and forum veterans can talk about their experiences. I think it can foster contributions from power-posters, occasional posters, commentors and lurkers alike and grow the Lemmyverse organically.
I don’t see why not - there are loads of other sites, let’s say DDL (roms etc) and various self-hosted blogs that chug along for years at the expense to the owner.
With Lemmy, the main concern would be growing storage, but that’s mostly solved by using something like B2 or Wasabi to store images, instead of the local server. B2 also recently changed their plans to make it free to download to a certain extent (prior to this, you had to pay for downloads) which makes this route even more viable.
I’m aware of lemmyworld and dbzer0 being very public about their donations, and lemmyml has been run by the devs years before we migrated. Lemmee’s admin is extremely active in the fediverse so that’s likely to stay too. We’ve only migrated from reddit in the past few months, so i’d say a lot of lessons have been learned in that time, as well as the viability/sustainability of running reasonably big instances.
A fair few have folded in that time too, some just disappearing out of the blue (vlemmy, lemmyuk, lemmyfilm) and others not able to manage the moderation as well as abusive users. I don’t think any have folded from it being too expensive to run - but I could of course be wrong there.
Personally, my blog site costs about $200/yr to run out of pocket, and is quite manageable at around $16/mo - comparable to a multiple-screen HD netflix subscription maybe. For a moderately used lemmy instance maybe you’d be paying $600/yr - about $50/mo which is still reasonably manageable. If just two users donated $50, your out-of-pocket costs drop to around $40. If all your users donated $2, assuming 100 users, your out of pocket drops to around $34.
The last time I checked, the largest instance Lemmyworld costs over $1k/mo to run (this also includes sister site mastodonworld, which is on separate infra but managed by the same core admin team IIRC). As of today there is a 4 month donation buffer, but looking at the graph on OpenCollective at least it looks like the admin team may need to cover a few hundred $ out of pocket if the buffer runs out, as monthly recurring donations is lower than the infra expenses. There are occasionally some very generous donors so I think it’s financially sustainable for the time being.
Overall I don’t think there’s anything to be worried about, this is the fediverse so you’re free to have an identity on any instance and still interact with the various communities. It’s not like Digg or Myspace where “when it’s gone, it’s gone”.
If they all hang out on communities on the server (more or less), no problemo at all.
But if they all roam around and sign up on thousands of active communities on other servers, my server will be under water.
I love thinking about stuff like this (P=NP, complexity, etc) and I do not see very much about that concerning the lemmyverse which is IMO a shame.
I’m planning setting up a Lemmy build so I can tinker around with it, but you know, time and stuff. I also spent a lot of time just setting up the docker version so maybe it’s quite the job :-)
So I’ve been hearing the buzz about Linux and gaming and how it’s finally fixed everything and is a perfect replacement for windows. My windows install has definitely accumulated some bloat, so blasting it and trying some Linux for a bit sounds like a solid plan....
Couple of things that might have tampered your experience:
Nvidia. This should come to no one as a surprise, but unfortunately the experience still leaves a lot to desire. Unfortunately, even changing to Nobara didn’t help you out there. If you’re still dead set on Fedora, I would recommend the Nvidia Images of uBlue which are also mentioned in the Troubleshooting part of Fedora’s documentation.
Using Fedora as a new user. Before people start shitting on me, I’m a proud Fedora user and it has been my daily driver ever since the day I’ve switched to Linux. But -like Debian- Fedora’s strict stance on FOSS requires one to take additional steps during initial setup/configuration after installation. The aforementioned images from uBlue (once again) help to solve that.
I assume you just did the thing on Windows and straight up downloaded VLC off the internet and thought it would work out like that. I wonder if you do the same on your Android/iOS/macOS device. If I’m mistaken, then please feel free to skip the rest of this paragraph. If not, then please consider to read on. So, while it is possible to download software directly off the internet through your browser, this is in 99% of the cases simply inferior to grabbing your software the intended way; through the installed package manager(s). On Fedora, that would have been dnf and/or flatpak. As VLC isn’t even found in Fedora’s repos (though it is found in RPM Fusion’s repos), your best bet would have been installing it as a flatpak. Which in this case, could have been through the built-in ‘storefront’ with a GUI (it’s called Software on GNOME) or through the terminal with the flatpak install org.videolan.VLC -y command.
Regarding Media Server, I simply have no experience setting that up. Therefore I hope that others could chime in to offer their support.
but y’all are dirty liars. Linux is still bullshit and has been since I first installed it over 20 years ago. What the hell has the community even accomplished if it still sucks this much dick to use?
This doesn’t help your cause. Please refrain from saying such things in the future.
Edit: I just noticed this thread. It might simply be the case that Fedora 39 isn’t playing nice (yet). Consider installing Fedora 38 for the time being instead.
Depends on what you’re using it for. Fedora’s release ver upgrades are fairly seamless. Just a big dnf update really.
Meanwhile I have a bunch of servers stuck on CentOS 7 that are going to need to be completely rebuilt by next summer. I’m also limited by them because the pdf generator I use requires a version of libpango that was released in 2019 and EL7 is stuck on the 2018 version.
I switched from Rocky to Fedora Server because I was sick of running into compatibility issues with dependencies that exist in the Fedora repo and not EL.
Specifically postgres. One of the projects requires postgis and gdal, which are in the Fedora community repo, but I have to use the official postgres repo on Rocky and the people that maintain those repos are literally incompetent. They have an automated script that generates all of the packages and they can’t even be bothered to double check that the packages are built against the correct version of postgres, so your install will fail because a PG14 package is looking for a dependency that only exists in the PG11, PG12, and PG15 repo.
Magic the Gathering: Arena grabbed my attention again after our friend group picked up the cards again. When I dont play modern stuff I’ll boot up my PS2 and play Monster Hunter 2 (DOS) online. Some smart folks brought back a private server for the old PS2 era games. Great Community (MHOLDSCHOOL Discord, also hosts of the Server) and a change of pace.
I just received my invite code today and took a quick look around the app. Like Mastodon I do not prefer microblogging platforms. And that’s all I know about Bluesky....
So the storage layer is “neutral”, accounts are “portable”. That to me means that node operators will have no agency in the system. Discoverability/search/recommendations are done in a separate layer, and the way the system seems to be designed (nodes have no say, they just provide the data) effectively places all the power with these “reach” algorithms.
3rd party feeds and recommendations and discovery already exists. They are also not dependent on the continued existence or openness of the bluesky servers. You can control your own experience and it’s easy to find and switch between feeds. Having more subscribers to your feed doesn’t make you more powerful in the context of network effects. If people stop looking your feed they’ll dump it.
Also, node operators have full control of what they forward to clients. They can absolutely apply moderation filters, and this is one of the expected means for such nodes to market themselves to their communities - “we have default feeds and moderation which suits your community”.
So it’s a winner-takes-all system that strongly avantages whoever starts building their dataset early and can throw as much money at it as possible.
Nonsense, the network uses relay servers which acts as open CDN servers and the firehose feed is open AND 3rd party hosted feed builders already exists (and they’re open source so you can copy them), you don’t need to waste duplicate work on building datasets. This network is cooperative. It has absolutely no winner-takes-all effects, it explicitly encourages division of labor and mix-and-matching multiple 3rd party services.
Another pretty good sign that BS’s decentralization is actually b.s. is the fact that the Decentralized Identifiers (DIDs) used by BlueSky are currently “temporarily” not actually decentralized. The protocol uses something imaginatively called “DID Placeholder”. If I were a betting man I would bet that in five years it will keep on using the centralized DID Placeholder, and that that will be a root cause of a lot of shenanigans.
Then use web-DID which already is fully decentralized
Jack is not involved with bluesky anymore, he’s in nostr land now. He doesn’t have majority on the board and isn’t influencing development.
There is no way to opt-out from “reach” algorithms indexing one’s posts, as far as I can see in the ATproto and BS documentation. So fash/harassers would be able to choose an algorithm that basically recommends targets to them.
Moderation tools like this is in the works, it’s not complete yet. Mute/block filters already exists, and label services for moderation are being worked on
A whole lot of directly false nonsense and irrelevant arguments and ignorance of what the devs are working on
Microsoft is singing the praises of the new Outlook and wants to persuade users to switch. But beware: if you try out the new Outlook, you risk transferring your IMAP and SMTP credentials of mail accounts and all your emails to Microsoft servers. Although Microsoft explains that it is possible to switch back to the previous apps...
We call them “toe-dippers” - people who turn up with no desire to actually get involved with the community and just post random memes with no relation to the topic of the server
A personal instance generally doesn’t have a big reach, unless people actively follow the person who’s posting the doxxing information.* The fediverse may not be a good way to spread personal information of others, throwing up an instance like that is not much different than throwing up a website or forum.
There’s two things I can think of you can do: Contact the company that hosts the website to take it down – I’m unsure about how you go about this, but I’m sure you can find out more about that. And to report the instance to other instance admins to get it blacklisted, perhaps get it on a block list, limiting its reach and thus effectiveness. Get in contact with big instance admins, they likely have chatrooms you could join, and they might be able to help with the other step as well.
*edit: In the case of Lemmy, I suppose it would be people following a community, rather than a user directly. If moderators or admins act on the posted informated and delete it, the deletion will federate as well and any legitimate instance will automatically delete the content on their servers as well. This would also be true for Mastodon and such. If not, the above applies.
The problem with the fediverse in that regard is that it’s basically multicasted. On one hand that’s a negative for the reasons you’ve said, but on the other hand it means you can easily dig up information that moderators and admins acting in bad faith can hide and then claim whatever bullshit they want.
Ultimately, you really shouldn’t be seeking privacy in lemmy and should try to refrain from using information that can personally identify you if you are really afraid or really incapable of having a public presence. If someone tries to dox you, they could dox you from any website. If they do, the way to proceed with that is usually filling out a police complaint form and/or any other specialized agency in your country block that can deal with it, or if you have the money, to get in contact with a lawyer which usually makes it about who has the biggest bank.
However, we also have to understand what is being called doxing. In your case, I understand its someone pointing out an alt that had apparently posted content word for word. Doxing generally involves things like the SWAT showing up and assaulting your home or people messing up your personal life by making personal data public for misuse. I’m not sure how noting similarities to try to imply that you should also be banned applies here.
And trust me, I’m in a very similar situation, except it involves an admin committing libel just because I complained about them where people who complain about them also have, ergo I must be whatever the worst shit that he can throw at me and get to stick is, which apparently has been that I’m an alt of an account who is a pedophile on another server. Not only that, they didn’t even mind including and leaving several links to an external server spread out through several comments that they claim hosts the pedophilia with the implication that people go there and check it out for themselves to confirm an association to the person they were accusing. Implied because, well, they are just leaving the link there without any real explanation, which might mean a user on a “No porn” instance could also randomly click on it if they are careless.
Going after libel is pretty shit, you can’t really do anything about it, but I have reported the links to what is by their own words pedophilia to the appropriate organizations because that’s far more serious and I’m sure not going to sort through that shit. But would I call it doxing? Well, besides the fact that the claim is false, no, sometimes libel is just libel, and sometimes linking to CSAM for any reason is still linking to CSAM. Looking at this, some lawyers do claim it is when it is tracking multiple usernames, although I imagine it might involve associating accounts with personal identifying information.
Doing it isn’t necessarily wrong but should be limited to gathering information to report to law enforcement agencies to help with their investigations, if it’s something more than casual speculation. In communities where the community itself can be considered an extension of the authority, the issue limited to it, where transparency is valued, and where the information itself isn’t really that personally identifying, well, the circumstances seem different. Frankly, I think an abuse of authority is worse than doxing in such an environment, specially in a social network where you control the flow of communication. If that’s your case, you should probably be calling that out instead.
Yeah I expect given how long ago IRC’s heydey was, we’re talking about quite a different demographic. Everyone I know who used it was on the nerdy side (this includes me, it’s not an insult!), whereas things like Discord with their modern interfaces make things easy enough that for example I run a crafting community on there full of old ladies sharing their cross stitch.
Anything that attracts huge numbers of regular folks like that is gonna be a target for trolls and spammers and suchlike, so without good moderation a public server can spiral down quite fast in my experience. Add to all this the ever-increasing hostility and us-vs-them of people on the internet in general, and ugh.
I’m sure there are plenty of lovely spaces out there too ofc, it’s just finding them that’s the trick :)
I personally think the best way to use discord is to create a server and invite people to it as you meet them online. For me, it’s gaming that connects me with people. My wife and I meet people that we like and want to play with more, and so we invite them. This usually results in getting invited to other small community servers.
Alright, I’ve just looked up both code repositories. You’re right, the first tagged version of snapd was committed one month before the first tagged version of Flatpak.
Snap is quite a bit older than that; its original codebase was released as “click”, which was part of the Ubuntu Touch project; it’s a project with a fairly long history.
Flatpak’s roots come from OSTree, which has its own depth of history, but the idea to use that to create a containerised packaging format came after clicks and Appimages (and their forerunners) were already on the scene.
Again, not a criticism of flatpaks. On the contrary, it shows that being the latecomer doesn’t mean you can’t be the winner.
Unity was neither revolutionary (looked the same as Gnome), nor usable (it was slow af).
Ubuntu had their own motivation for Unity, which was their at the time focus on full device convergence. That is, a single DE on PCs, smartphones, smart TVs and kiosks. It was something which wasn’t on the cards for GNOME and which was made clear was not going to be a design focus, and there really wasn’t (and still isn’t) any other DE that was built with that focus in mind.
Of course it didn’t work out. Partly because Canonical never had any success marketing Ubuntu Touch (on phones and tablets) or Ubuntu TV; partly because they were never able to get Unity to a place where it worked in that way (the never-released Unity 8, now Lomiri, was due to be the big pay off, but it was stuck in development hell). Canonical pulled the plug on it because it was haemorrhaging money on it and they desperately needed to get back in the black.
But honestly, there’s as much legitimate reason for pursuing that as there was in any of the others. COSMIC being written in Rust isn’t revolutionary; Rust is great, but it’s just a memory-safe C-family language. It’s a fine choice to write a new DE in, but the benefits are mostly on the side of the developer than the user.
Well, what I meant was Mir as a display server, but you got the point. Now they turned it into a Wayland compositor. Cool, but then why not do a favor to the open source community and contribute to wlroots instead?
Canonical’s main focus has been contributing to Mutter rather than Mir. Mir’s usecase is really more for kiosks, signage and thin client devices (where it’s the guts of Ubuntu Frame); although it’s possible to build something like that in wlroots, nobody really has yet. And in any case, I take issue with:
why not do a favor to the open source community and contribute to wlroots instead?
Mir and Ubuntu Frame are open source, and since when have we required the FOSS world to be monolithic around one solution? We have multiple DEs, multiple browsers, multiple office suites and email clients, heck whole selections of different FOSS OSs. The variety, competition, and ability to choose is kinda the whole point. If Canonical think they can do a better job with Ubuntu Frame kiosk software with Mir, they can have at it.
Best way to bookmark lemmy communities in a web browser (lemmy.world)
If you’re like me, you would join one Lemmy instance, and then join a community by one of the following ways,...
Commentor criticizes resume submission in Lemmy World's Call for a volunteer Junior Cloud Engineer position, downvoted (lemmy.ca)
This had high visibility because it was pinned to their server at time of writing. Please refrain from going to this comment just to vote brigade....
Am I the only one who can’t get used to Fediverse?
I’m fairly new to the Fediverse, and I’d like to share my onboarding experience. Personally, I appreciate the concept of decentralization and the community-driven aspect of Fediverse. I’ve used Mastodon and Lemmy, based on ActivityPub, for a while:...
What Lemmy communities would you like to share that we may not know about?
I’m noticing an influx of Reddit users today, maybe revolving around their weird bug they had today. I know this question pops up semi regularly, but for those just getting their foot in the door maybe we can help show them what else is out here on the Fediverse to help them get started....
Why does lemmy seem better for engagement and conversation then (I meant than) Mastodon
On average if I make a post on Mastodon whether I get a comment, and a continued conversation is either hit or miss....
Is Lemmy as a platform sustainable?
I’m wondering how are all those different Lemmy instances financed? I know some rely on donations, but is that all and is that sustainable?
18+ My experience with Linux Day 1
So I’ve been hearing the buzz about Linux and gaming and how it’s finally fixed everything and is a perfect replacement for windows. My windows install has definitely accumulated some bloat, so blasting it and trying some Linux for a bit sounds like a solid plan....
How is your experience with Fedora as a server?
[email protected]
Yorkshire - Feddit UK - back from deletion (feddit.uk)
!yorkshire...
Weekly “What are you playing” Thread || Week of November 12th
I definitely didn’t forget to do a new thread yesterday 👀...
Comparison between NixOS vs blendOS vs Vanilla OS: what to pick and why?
So I’ve recently taken an interest in these three distros:...
What can you tell me about Bluesky?
I just received my invite code today and took a quick look around the app. Like Mastodon I do not prefer microblogging platforms. And that’s all I know about Bluesky....
New Outlook update sends passwords and mails on private servers to MS. Ulrich Kelber, TheCommissioner for Data Protection of Germany plans to submit inquires on Tuesday (www.heise.de)
Microsoft is singing the praises of the new Outlook and wants to persuade users to switch. But beware: if you try out the new Outlook, you risk transferring your IMAP and SMTP credentials of mail accounts and all your emails to Microsoft servers. Although Microsoft explains that it is possible to switch back to the previous apps...
I'm sure your a nice guy rule (lemmy.ca)
[RFC] Add custom fields to local_site and local_user tables
Proposal...
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Where else on the web does everyone hang out?
I’m really curious where else everyone here hangs out on the internet besides Lemmy....
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