Day 2 here, and I can see the growth already. Personally I really like the notion of how its gonna shape up in the future but at the same time I really feel for the average user as of now its too complex to understand the working and how the cross servers thing is working. I mean yes still early days, UI will improve further leading to a better UX but the core mechanism yet is little tough to get along. For instance, still unclear if I made the right choice by signing up on lemmydotworld why not lemmydotml , beehaw etc.... and where does this stop? like in the coming times i it would be like a thousands of servers lemmy.this lemmy.that lemmy.etc or anything.anything. That's soo confusing for someone who just wanna join a server. Would be interesting to see how "signup anywhere, its the same thing" evolves.
I moved from aussie.zone to lemmy.world already to get around federation issues.
Now beehaw.org has stopped federating with lemmy.world 🤷‍♂️
I don't want to have half a dozen accounts so that I can access all the niches of this system, and yet it's beggining to look like the dream of federation is stillborn.
Yea. I feel like Beehaw cutting a lot of the larger general communities out from two of the biggest instances is highlighting early a major hurdle that’s gonna make the whole fediverse thing difficult to get a lot of people on board with. I don’t want to have to keep making new accounts to access stuff, but like… half of the communities I had subscribed to are just gone now because the admins over there decided they don’t want to play with anyone else, I guess.
To be fair, that's how things used to be on the internet. You'd sign up for various forums or message boards with different accounts. Then it all became consolidated under one roof, and message boards started dying. What's happening with reddit now shows the danger of that.
Beehaw has a code of conduct that everyone can read.
They already said that it is hard to effectively mod because the tooling isn't there yet.
I really wish people would hamper their expectations a bit. With more people coming, there will be more people willing to contribute for tooling etc. These projects are in it's infancy so growing pains will happen.
Facebook for example pays around 500mil per year for moderating and Reddit has free labor for it. But even then, Reddit is dependent on 3rd party tooling for their moderators to effectively moderate. That is a company that exists for 18 years or so?
At one point I expect there to be tooling available to make it easier to target ban people from an specific instance or even defederate specific accounts from an instance.
But if you are a mod team of 4 people without effective tooling then I hope that people understand the predicament they are in and also support the server in their efforts and try to understand their reasoning.
At least you don't have to switch to another platform, you can just make an account on the instance and participate.
I have been toggling between instances and accounts per instance for a good week already and I encounter zero problems with it.
If you just make an account and "activate" the keep yourself logged in checkmark than you can easily switch between instances.
In this stage we are self governing to an extent. The behaviour of people can affect a full instance so everyone has the obligation to think before they post.
Just don't be a dick/troll/spammer/bigot is more then enough to keep federating for your instance enabled.
you kinda have to pick your poison. some groups will naturally segregate themselves, while others will try to remain open for everything. you have to find an instance that matches the way you engage with stuff. Or you can use multiple instances if need be.
I'm pretty happy here on kbin.social and I doubt I'd leave if some other instance ends up blocking us.
Hopefully large instances keep federating with the small, self-hosted ones. I’m not sure how to check but I think really small instances still have the most reach.
I self hosted precisely so I can federate with who I want to. It's nice to be able to see posts from multiple instances of (for example) self-hosted on different servers within my own instance, and comment on them directly within my own instance.
The only issues I've had is the comments can take a bit to federate across, but that's to be expected.
It goes both ways though, if beehaw isolates itself enough the rest of the fediverse will make its own communities that effectively replace the ones we lost from them defederating.
As of now they're blocking 387 communities according to this
As of now they’re blocking 387 communities according to this
To be fair a huge part of those 387 seem to be (mostly rightfully) commonly blocked non-Lemmy ActivityPub instances (so, Masto and Pleroma and shit like that). I very much doubt there are 387 Lemmy instances remarkable enough to get blocked by anyone.
"I think it's easy to take this personally but I think it's more about the moderation tools in Lemmy not being adequate at the moment so this is the best bandaid solution for now. We need to quickly put effort into developing better moderation tools like limiting other servers without fully defederating, limiting specific communities, forcing nsfw on communities/instances, proxying reports to origin servers so admins have better feedback on their instance user's bad behavior, and many other things if we want to prevent defederating like this from being the only option.
I think infighting about this decision and differing moderation styles instead of focusing together on moderation challenges and tooling deficiencies risks tearing the community / federation apart and is counterproductive to the goal of being better than reddit."
I somewhat went through that. Signed up on one instance cause it seemed a cool science based one to check out but then realized that if I wanted to make a community for anything else, I couldn't do it there
Ah interesting point, never thought of it but you're right, in this regard with lemmy it is kind of important where you have your account. Good point! I had the feeling that with lemmy it really doesn't matter where you have your account but this is a very valid point.
on kbin there was a long period of no federation and so I think we kinda ended up with this "kbin is kbin and then there's this other stuff" mindset. I think it helped ease a lot of us into this fediverse stuff lol. the analogy I use is email :) why pick yahoovs gmail vs protonmail? same idea.
I agree it's somewhat complex for the average user, but I 'm questioning whether they really need to understand. I subscribed to kbin, started using it like reddit. Federation is now enabled, too, but if I hadn't seen a post about it, I wouldn't even have noticed. The cool thing is you don't need to care where the content is if you don't want to, you still can enjoy the platform ang get a lot out of it.
And it's hard to know better in advance, but quite important is that you also choose your (instance) moderators — the people who decide in the end what you're allowed to see and say.
The sign up process is a bit non-standard, but I have mostly browsed via app (Mlem) and it makes the cross-community sub and commenting fairly seamless.
The instance you sign up on doesn't really matter. For technical people, the server you sign in on, can be important, but for the average user it doesn't. In fact, you could make an account on mastodon.social and comment on this very thread. That's pretty much the goal of federation.
This feels disingenous to say. Each community has its own rules and culture, which you may agree or disagree with. Beyond that, there's the matter of trust as the instance admin holds everything on their server. This isn't even getting into the whole mess of defederation. like with Beehaw, who seems intent on forming an isolative culture despite having some of the largest communities on the site.
I believe it will improve over time as the Fediverse matures and grows to handle larger loads and less techy people, but I think saying that to people will do more harm than good. A lot of the newer people have been reasonably freaking out in response to losing access to several large communities they frequented because they were told "instance doesn't matter", when quite frankly it does at the moment.
@shinnoodles@meteokr This is more or less the big point. You *cannot* sign up for an account on mastodon.social and see the post I'm making right now, but you *can* sign up for an account on whatever site you're using to view this right now and see this post.
Entirely fair, we are in the midst of significant drama between the reddit burndown, and the infancy of the lemmy platform as a whole. For someone wanting to talk to people, and get their feet wet in the fediverse, I think its reasonable to say that the server doesn't matter. Once you have used the platform, and know what you want then exploring the options is highly encouraged. The exact circumstances of server federation will absolutely change, probably a lot, in the near future.
I treat it akin to someone saying "I want to learn how to play guitar." I think reasoanble advice is get a cheap used guitar and start learning cords. Once you know if you plan on sticking with it more than a few weeks, go right ahead and start looking at better equipment. I don't think expecting someone at this stage to start taking musical theory is the best advice. Maybe that is a weak argument, but I don't think its entirely wrong.
Unless your instance blocks or is blocked by that other instance, which is exactly what beehaw did to lemmy.world and sh.ithust.works, and exactly what I saw happen a lot on Mastodon.
Ultimately, yes, the server admins have final on what content their users see. Not too different than mods within a community. A user, should they want to, can just make an account on a different server though. Should the user not agree with the content moderation of their original server, and can even migrate all their user data with them most of the time.
The server that hosts your account, and the server that hosts the content are independent. They all speak the same language and talk to each other regardless of where they are. So if the server hosting a thread is overloaded, then comments might take a bit to load, but you can still post on another thread on another server no problem. Eventually they all sync up. If that's what you mean?
If you plan on using the local or all filters the people you share a server with will determine what new communities populate there and likely have a big impact on what you'll come across
You know how discord has multiple servers?
Now imagine if those servers where actually owned by a person (self-hosted), and each server could connect with the other servers, so you can see content on whatever server you are.
Someone on my server came up with a mall analogy which I am extending upon, might be helpful:
Sites are like cities (kbin is a city, lemmy is a city, etc)
Instances are like malls (kbin.social is a mall)
Stores inside a mall are like magazines
Cities can have multiple malls, and the malls all talk to each other and give each other information about what's happening in their mall in relation to their stores, which is why we can see posts from other instances of the same site.
And what's more, malls (instances) in different cities (sites) can also talk to malls in another city and pass information about their malls to the other cities' malls. Cities talk to other cities. Translation: The sites share content with each other.
another analogy: Federation in the fediverse is like a group of islands with bridges connecting them. Each island represents a different platform, and the bridges allow people to travel and interact between the islands. Even though each island has its own unique features and rules, the bridges enable communication and sharing of ideas across the entire network of islands.
I hope this didn't further confuse you lol. my protest server has extensive explanations and one on one help with this if you'd like.