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.
Gmail address?
Nope, self-hosted. So I know it didn’t get bounced off of a spam filter, because I control the spam filters.
maybe your email host is filtered as spam from their side
Urgh, yeah.
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/other@thatinstance.com 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?
Yep, but it’s a big hassle to actually sub to a community not yet known to your instance. That’s like the problem.
Let’s be honest, this is partially on Jerboa for being the oldest and most convoluted active Lemmy app.
You might want to ask your instance admin to run this tool to help you: https://github.com/Fmstrat/lcs
It “just” grabs all communities with >50 user’s & upvotes and subs you to them?
Kind of brutal lol, but maybe it can be reworked to accept specific communities…
Here is the problem, and they already refused to fix it
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.
The Fediverse requires federated thinking as well as federated technology. Critical thinking can be hard when its been so easy to just consume what you’ve been fed without question since you were born.
Lemmy is not meaningfully federated You can’t click /c/book and see the fediverse whole discussion space about books. It is a UI problem, Lemmy simply is not a federated application, it only has federation tacked on.
Is this a problem? I like that there’s not just one c/book. I like that any instance that wants to can create a book community, and interested people can subscribe to any or all of them, if they so choose.
I also see it as a good thing, why? Because you have instance moderators, and community moderators. If we join all communities together like that, were going to be essentially forcing these disparate community moderators to work together. This will never work, as people have different ideas of what should and shouldn’t be allowed, and how to handle different issues (or even wether something is an issue in the first place)
Also there’s the idea that if you don’t like one community in one instance, you can move or create one in another instance, and everyone is happy - you could say that in this case redundancy is good, in case one falls into shit.
Thank you for understanding me! I feel like everyone is caught up in the idea that One Forum to Rule them All is a net positive, but my experience has been quite contrary. I think it’s especially apparent to people who fall somewhere outside the norm. There were “official” communities on reddit based on interests of mine that I wouldn’t join simply because they were fairly unwelcoming to me as a gay man. (r/residentevil is the first that comes to mind due to its moderation style, but there were others.) I really love the idea that there’s really no such thing here. Sure, there are some that are significantly larger than others, but often I find myself gravitating to the smaller ones simply because it’s a more relaxed, cozy experience for me. (memes@sopuli.xyz vs. memes@lemmy.ml, just for example.) But other times, I like the larger, busier discussion.
I honestly hope the fediverse helps us put away the notion of centralizing everything. Sure, there are certain communities where people like lead devs of a piece of software or guide are actually present, but even these would do well to have alternatives that are more community driven.
I see it as part of creating a more open, equitable space online where, as you said, everyone is happy.
I think so, especially as users can’t have multiple subscription lists. The post sorting algorithms use activity as a key metric, so lots of fragmented communities will get buried under posts from (for example) memes@lemmysworld.
I guess you and I must interact with the fediverse in completely different ways. I tend to sort by all > new when I just want to browse random content (and I’m ok with that being meme-heavy).
When I want to communicate with a specific community, I will visit the individual community itself. For instance (ha!), I like that there’s a Firefox@lemmy.ml and a Firefox@fedia.io that have different users and different content.
I also feel like it’s time to abandon the idea of one centralized “official” community for things. That has never ended well.
That’s why I don’t understand things like the former r/gamingcirclejerk mod being upset that someone created a gamingcirclejerk@lemmy.world. Like just – create your own?
I don’t use All. It’s completely devoid of interesting things for me. I tend to use Top Day Subscribed so I’m looking for stories that have some traction and a conversation going on. Doing that with a large number of subscriptions means the most popular topics overwhelm the less popular topics. All I’ll see is Memes, but never my sub about scuba diving. If the scuba diving community is split across 7 channels, but memes is just one big channel, that just gets worse.
I was a big user of multireddits. That allowed me to group subs together for more niche topics, and see what was top in that area. I think Lemmy isn’t going to cultivate smaller channels without having a way to get them appear regularly to users.
I browse by all frequently, and I don’t have this problem. I also check in on smaller instances, as one does.
Skill issue.
Is it a problem that people with a common interest, cannot find common ground ? Yes, it is a fatal flaw for a social network.
Sure, and client viewer can activate a “local posts only”. It’s easy to exclude everything else.
But you can’t undelete what never existed. If there is no common space there is no community.
The best compromise Lemmy has is “the one big community” that drowns out everything and sucks the air out.
It doesn’t mean not finding a common ground, though. If anything, it’s healthy to have smaller, more fragmented groups. Otherwise, you end up with a reddit or 4chan situation, and that only benefits those who fit the status quo.
What you call a weakness is the thing I like best about the fediverse. There are no “official” or centralized forums, nor should there be.
Care to explain why you think it’s bad?
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.
I’m beginning to see that in order for lemmy to be truly federated, users must also become federated
User data needs to be exportable and importable somewhere else.
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?
I was meaning things like subscriptions and preferences. Not posts and votes.
Sure, like a config file to export and import.
This loosing my first account sucked
https://github.com/maltfield/awesome-lemmy-instances from this i used monyet.cc since they didn’t need email discuss.online is good as well
I don’t think the point of the post was to say everybody huddle into 10-user instances. The problem currently is there are maybe 5 or so large instances roughly within the same amount of users, then lemmy.world has 10x the amount of the next largest. I’d like to see communities get more spread out into things like startrek.website but there isn’t really a way to do that for the more general communities like Technology, Gaming, etc. because any instance could really have those.
Wouldn’t be much of a problem if you could export account to a file
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.
Judging from this issue
https://github.com/mastodon/mastodon/issues/12423
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
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.
(if) till such feature comes, you can always link to your old account from the bio. Can’t think of any other solutions.
Can you get the file into another server ?
Yes
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.
The amount of power they have over the direction of Lemmy comes from the percentage of Lemmy users they have not the total user count.
think about it relatively
A lot of power within Lemmy.
fewer than a successful niche reddit
Maybe by subscriber count (the bad count, never use sub count).
Truly niche reddits have 5k readers at most. And even then, readers includes lurkers, while lemmy users ONLY includes people making comments.
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.
That’s all well and good, but a user can be subscribed to many subs
You can be on multiple instances?
It’s much more normal for a person to have many more subs attached to a single account than it is to have many accounts
E.g. you might have say 3 accounts, but one of those accounts might have 100 subs, relatively speaking the numbers aren’t comparable
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.
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I made an account on lemm.ee, thought it was a bad idea since all the communities were on .world. After this whole fiasco though, I’m happy with my decision.
Same. All I want is to not miss out on content that is concealed from me because of defederation unless it’s really harmful like gore or CP.
It’s funny how I made a few Alts just in case. Two of my four accounts are now unusable :')
Hail fellow lemm.ee er!
We really are the best.
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.
I thought lemmy.world was a “catch all” and it was, for a bit. We really do need better migration tools, then you could just leave any fools.
Couple tools in case anyone is interested:
User or community move?
Oh just community. User would be ideal, I hope that is widely advertised when it’s available
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.
That’s as easy as moving any Reddit community to Lemmy. In other words, basically impossible.
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?
Lemmy really kicked off when you see the drama you had on Reddit here but with instances.
It’s pretty entertaining tbh. It really makes you more tight knit with your community too. It’s something I never really considered with federations, you’re like joining a team.
Think we need universal/transferrable accounts to make this happen. People, myself included will be concerned that if they sign up to a tiny instance someone’s hosting on a raspberry pi or something that it’ll just disappear without a trace one day and their account along with it
If accounts were made portable I think a lot more people would disperse
Would be great if you could set other instances to have a copy of your profile in case your main one disappears.
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.
User accounts being key-based/portable is one of the strengths of the nostr protocol and Bluesky/AT Protocol.
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 https://yewtu.be/watch?v=wJBCpzM1VfM ;- Video that explains the difference (i just watched it minutes ago) https://atproto.com/docs ;-Docs for learning how it works
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
Usenet news - 2020s edition
I wish
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.
DISPERSE
SCATTER!
3 words SINGLE USER INSTANCES
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.
I am assuming that the instances periodically update content by fetching the deltas.
That’s incorrect, so far no batching is set up for sending multiple posts at once and the exchange is initiated by the sending server, not the receiving server.
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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.
Fair.
🤔 I worry what will happen once unique identifiers are integrated into chips.
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.
Hrm. 🫤 I admit that’s pretty problematic.
The vast majority of ethernet devices can be set to use any arbitrary mac address
Which is why identities and communities on Fediverse should be cryptography-based, and an “instance” should simply be a sort of a supernode, or a caching node.
In principal yes, but requiring people to handle private keys would be a nightmare! Imo what we can and should do is support for transferring accounts between instances, including posts and comments.
If the account itself is like a property/attribute of a post/comment, then I suppose it can be changed seamlessly. But i dont think it is designed to be that way.
Afaik right now you’d have to send an update for every post/comment individually, if it would even work. I think we need one simple ActivityPub message that simply means “this actor is now this other actor, and all its objects should be updated”.
The former can be the underlying level simply.
Every country should have their own instance and people should sign up to the server that’s closest to them or that best fits their privacy concerns.
I would love to see more federated social media servers in Switzerland for example.
government are shit then they would really liked to control it
Depends if the government is shit. Most in the developed world aren’t.
The government of the Netherlands has their own Mastodon server since they left Xitter.
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.
I think I might also make a hexbear account.
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.
See this issue
They don’t really have any more power than any other instance. Users can simply join another instance ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
If they choose not to federate with anybody, that community is basically dead.
Oh, I wasn’t aware that they had defederated from everybody.
Also, doesn’t affect me, right? Even if I had a lemmy.world account, it wouldn’t affect me because I could simply create an account on another instance, or create my own instance.
Come to think of it, even if they defederate from everybody (as if that’s possible), they could still communicate with each other. I’m on several forums that are not part of the fediverse, and they’re not dead, so…
