So relatable lol. I feel like an expert but I have only been using it for a few weeks
I’m so high I thought the top pic was of the Jonas Brothers 😭
I think that this also helps one figure out Lemmy.
I used reddit for like, a few days. Dunno how this place is confusing, maybe adaptation pains?
Fucking five, I miss him.
What an incredible actor he is. Everyone on the show is great, but he is really, really good.
I’ve literally had a conversation like
“the fediverse is too complex”
“It’s actually pretty simple when you get the hang of it, it took me like 5 minutes to understand it”
“That’s 5 minutes too much, everything is simple once you get the hang of it, actually simple things are intuitive from the start”
As if when you’re born you already have the knowledge required to browse Facebook in your brain. You have to “get the hang” of everything you use, there’s just more complex and less complex stuff (and 5 minutes is very much on the lower end).
I think people get some degree of choice paralysis as well. It’s hard to pick which instance to join, and I worried about what I might miss out on. I ended up making accounts on a few and messed around until I settled on Lemmy.world. I could see this being a barrier for entry and forcing some people to just stick with the easy road, Plebbit.
If I can figure this out to promote “Barbie”, then they can too!
It’s a Stockholm syndrome kind of thing. They’ve been under the control of social media companies so long they’ve gotten to like it. It’s scary to leave that control.
I have choices? No, that doesn’t make any sense!
Wth is federation?
Disclaimer: see the bottom of the post for any corrections.
Imagine two spheres: me and you. Now, say we can talk between each other by uploading and downloading data back and forth with each other, like what you see when you check your internet speed on Speednet. I say “hello” in a text chat, and you say “hey” back. We can both see these messages. This is mutual federation: you and I both agree to communicate with each other.
Now imagine you defederate from me. I can no longer download data from you, data either in the form of comments, posts, etc., nor can I upload my responses to those comments, posts, etc. I’m blind to you, and you’re blind to me. This is 2-body defederation.
Now imagine a third sphere: some stranger that creates a post. Say I comment on the stranger’s post, and you respond to my comment. If we’re all federated, we’re all downloading and uploading each other’s data, meaning everyone can see every interaction: 3-body federation.
Let’s say now that I defederate from you. I can’t see your activity and you can’t see mine. I can comment on the stranger’s post, as can you. We may be the only commenters on the stranger’s post. The stranger can see that 2 other Lemmy users interacted with their post, but on our side it looks like only one comment was made by you or me. This is an example of 3-body “relative” federation (quotes are mine).
Now let’s imagine that I know that the stranger hasn’t defederated from you, and that bothers me. Maybe I don’t appreciate your data and don’t want to associate myself with you or any other actors that tolerate you. I may want to close myself off and save my effort for other Lemmy users. In this situation, it would make sense for me to defederate from both you and our mutual stranger. After defederation, I’ve completely cut myself off from your network. I can’t see your guy’s interactions, and you can’t see mine. This is a case of 3-body “absolute” or “total” defederation.
Of course you can extend this idea to a server/instance/community that has thousands of users. Within an instance you can create little blobs of users that can and can’t communicate with each other. This activity happens at the user level as users choose who to block or defederate from.
The next step would be extending this idea to multiple instances that each have thousands of any number of users. The communications between entire instances on Lemmy are dictated at an admin level, but the capabilities are essentially the same as those at a user level. Admins can defederate from other instances relatively, or even absolutely.
When relative instance defederation happens, the entire user base of the subject instance can’t communicate with the entire user base of the admin’s instance. Notice that here we may have a third sphere in the form of a stranger instance that both communities can interact with. The admin’s instance can’t see the defederated instance, but the stranger instance can see both.
Lastly, if we take this system to its final conclusion, then admin’s can absolutely instance defederate from other instances that they deem counterproductive, a threat, or for any other reason. The admin’s instance is blind to both your instance, and the other instances that federate with you.
You can imagine that doing this can greatly fracture the global user base of the fediverse. However, Lemmy users are free to make accounts on any instance, and in doing so can bypass the decisions of admins of other instances to absolutely defederate.
I guess a final case with absolute defederation would be to do a global instance defederation where one instance’s admin cuts off all communication with all other instances and fully insulates their community. They can do this, but it might not be sustainable depending on the size of the cut-off community and whether that user base can tolerate the amount of traffic hitting their news feeds given the population size (Facebook and Twitter might be examples of this - since they aren’t part of the fediverse, they’re technically globally defederated). A user can do something similar on their level by defederating from all other users on the fediverse, but that would be very impractical. Ideally, though, you would want every instance to federate with all other instances. In reality, there are islands and continents of social networks all throughout the fediverse.
If this doesn’t explain it, there are lots of YouTube vids out there on this concept. I’d watch the ones that explain the recent Beehaw defederation as well as the one case that happened in like 2019 with Gab.
Good luck! Stay Fediversal yo 😎🤙
Edit: After writing this, I think I misunderstood defederation. I believe in relative defederation, either at the user or admin level, you can still see the other user’s/instance’s activity, but you can’t engage with that activity. You’re like a ghost that can see other people around you, but you can’t interact with them. Absolute and global defederation I think still makes sense.
Also, I didn’t mention the idea of parent users/instances, but someone else might have explained it already for you. Basically parent = stranger in my examples above, but that the way information moves is different than what I imply.
Cheers
Instances are a bit like usenet servers. Simple. 😉
Now you just need to remember usenet or know it still exists.
Never even heard of it.
Imagine if [Thing™] was like email, that’s federation. Different servers with their own rules that all connect with each other to provide the same service
You’re on lemmy.ca, I’m not, but I can still see and reply to your comment
To add to that we’re commenting on a post from a third instance neither one of us are registered at.
Welcome, eh?
Honestly. I was setup and subscribed to some initial communities within 2 hours of RIF going down. Literally my only complaint at this point is the relative lack of content.
Same. Choose an instance, sign up. You don’t really need to understand the federation stuff (although it helps understand the quirks).
I can see how having communities with the same name across different servers can be confusing for some people though.
One reason this happens if you made your account on a small instance is that your instance just isn’t federating with very many communities. If you’re the first from your instance to subscribe to a community, try this: Use an explorer like lemmyverse.net to find new communities, copy the url into your home instance’s search field, and it should appear in the results after a few seconds or a refresh. Click the search result and subscribe from there. From then on, that instance will populate everyone’s ‘All’ tab on your home instance with posts from that community, and ‘Subscribed’ if you remain subscribed
I’ve been using sub.rehab to find communities.
Could you explain this a bit more or link to some info? Im new here too, I thought the whole point was that different instances communicated which communities where hosted through them so It wouldn’t matter what instance you have your account with and you will be able to see the different communities from different instances. And to get some jargon right, that intercommunication between instances is the fediverse.
It does matter where your account is because instances will not federate communities until someone from that instance subscribes to that community, and then it only pulls 20 posts and no comments. It will then start pulling everything new thats being posted/commented on that community, but anything before that is basically gone. This means that if you join a new/low userbase instance you will be missing a lot of stuff that was posted, while the larger instances will have way more people subscribed to communities before you even joined therefore having a larger content pool
This is the current and unfortunate situation. I dearly hope that this will change soon, leveling the playing field for young instances, and improving discoverability.
I know you can “boost” on kbin which will refederate it out. I think? Does lemmy have something similar?
What if you link me a post from before my instance federated with the community?
Im not sure what kbins boost does or if theyre even the same as lemmy regarding this problem.
You could forcefully pull posts and comments into your instance by copying their original link and pasting it into your instances search, it will then federate to your instance after a few seconds but doing that for every post and comment would be stupid unless the admins cam somehow automate it
You got it right, sometimes there’s even communities with the same name on different instances.
The point is your instance doesn’t automatically pull every community in existence, it pulls from communities someone on your instance has already ubscribed to. So yes, you can subscribe to any community*, but you may need to be the first to actually find said community and subscribe no one else has.
When I browse my all feed I see posts from every community that anyone has ever subscribed to on my instance. But if I find one I like elsewhere I can be the first to manually connect (copy paste link) then more people can discover it since I basically added it to their “all” feed too.
Less confusing than I made it sound, and as the user base grows most of the big interesting communities will have been found and federated on instances with decent userbases.
Be part of the solution, make it 😉.
One of us. One of us.
Time to post some cat pictures!
Id like a filter for top of all time, but that’s honestly my only “complaint” im shocked at how developed this is, and the web app wefwef is a little too good lol
There is a “Top - All Time” filter at least on the web. Works well for local, not sure about off local though. Mobile apps might not have all the filters though.
It seems to show the posts with the most updoots. Curiously the first page of Top - All Time are all from the last few weeks. Goes to show the explosive influx of Reddit Refugees into the Fediverse.
Connect for Lemmy has a setting where it will hide posts the user has voted on. I believe the website has this as well. Works great for keeping content fresh rather than seeing the same posts about the Reddit migration.
Why do so many of you like this feature? Do you just never go back to the same thread more than once?
It’s steadily getting better. Try looking at All instead of Local or Subscribed to see more
Also use Top day or Top X hours instead of Hot.
Note that “all” is all communities someone on your instance has already subscribed too. Still check lemmyverse.net and others to find more.
I don’t mean to sound like I’m super smart or anything but I didn’t have any issue figuring out mastodon or lemmy.
I’m having issue figuring out how it works interacting from one side to other. I know lemmy.world can interact with mastodon instance via whatever activity pubsub thing they have, but for instance, can I log into the mastodon app with my lemmyworld account? I know I can post there somehow, but all the web mentions of it are like, pasting the url links in proper order like I’m in the pre-dial-up age or something.
A much more cohesive unification is needed.
I think the larger issue is people won’t take three minutes to read some basic instructions and background. They want to be spoon feed info and told what buttons to click.
Hey @smokeydonuts I like your name ;)
That’s true and it’s growing fast enough that it doesn’t need any help in that department, but increasing ease of use and lowering the barrier to entry are major factors in software design. Hopefully, the 3rd party app devs that no longer have Reddit apps to maintain make the switch easier in the future.
Is there a good guide that summarizes everything? The docs make sense to me, but I also understand the technical parts of Lemmy too (I’m a backend dev). I think something that introduced Lemmy (and the Fediverse in general) that had visualizations.and everything would go a long way for some people. Maybe a short video or something too.
To be fair, if it were spoon fed to people, it would be more popular. The best thing for federation is if it were much easier to get into for the average person.
Agreed but it needs to catch up to the current influx before we make it any easier :P
True, and I spent almost a month holding the spoon, but now with Sync dead I’m hoping the rest can feed themselves.
Federation made no sense to me either, but everyone just said to make an account somewhere and start using it. That’s what I did and, while I don’t pretend to understand the back end, the stuff I’m using makes perfect sense to me.
99% of us don’t give a shit about federation. Just give me the memes!
That’s what I keep saying. Stop trying to explain it. Just have them sign up and start consuming content. They’ll get the basics by osmosis eventually
But then we end up with everyone on lemmy.world and kbin.social
Does that really matter, provided the servers don’t melt?
Kind of, I know the lemmy.world guy was already well known to those into fedi, and Earnest has been very transparent with everything, but just in principle I’m a little cautious just because part of the advantage here is no central control.
Even if it never becomes about money, say someone gets hit by a bus, and whoever gains control either doesn’t understand or can’t cope with it and passes it on to someone else, or maybe even just shuts the whole thing down. I’m sure there are checks being put in place but I’d still hate to see some freak tragedy or something take out a good portion of the users and communities here. Even if the content would have still already federated out.
Yeah, lemmy.world got so popular for a reason and I trust Ruud. I see where you’re coming from and don’t disagree but you can’t get too paranoid either, shit can always happen. I hope account migration (and maybe even mirroring/linking across instances) gets implemented eventually because that would really make the system bulletproof.
After a few days you won’t even remember that there are different servers. It will feel like one.
That’s the cool big idea in my eyes.
Like, you see a different thing after the @, but it’s all in one place so it doesn’t reeeeally matter.
What is this from?
Umbrella Academy
Great show.
I could never get past those rubber gorilla arms on season one. I know I’m probably missing out… lol.
The guy lived on the moon for a bit so… bound to be a little off. The whole show is a little helter skelter but I think that’s what makes it so great. Creative and unexpected with pinch of time travel, yum.
After a while, Five fully became whatever his old age is in the story. I stopped seeing a sixteen year old pretty quickly and that’s what pulled me in.
It’s a gonzo superhero show on Netflix. It’s weirdo fun based on a very, very silly comic book. I enjoy it, but if you don’t you’ll know pretty quickly. Check it out.
