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.
Ive signed up for multiple instances, most don’t accept new users, or wait for approval which gets denied I assume.
I have accounts on four instances that are all still open for registration. And two did have an approval required but I got it within hours.
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.
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.
well they just told 100k people what will be in their 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.
think about it relatively
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.
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
A lot of power within Lemmy.
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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.
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 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
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!
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…
Let’s be honest, this is partially on Jerboa for being the oldest and most convoluted active Lemmy app.
Here is the problem, and they already refused to fix it
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.
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
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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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.
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 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.
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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…
Is there a list somewhere
off the top of my head, there’s this
domain/instances
eg.
lemmy.today/instances
There are other better ways to browse them probably
That’s only a list of federated instances to your instance.
There’s more! It looked comprehensive to me but just because it was a massive list.
Join a local instance, and then don’t forget to donate to it
done that…
I’m doing my part!
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.
See this issue
I think I might also make a hexbear account.
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 assume op runs an instance, then?
Fortunately, they don’t need to! There are dozens of small open instances, and joining any of them helps the current centralization situation.
Can I move a community from one server to another or do I have to delete the old one and recreate it elsewhere? Because I have a community on .world and would like to move it somewhere else, probably feddit.de
