I found a major communication problem with public perception of Lemmy. they seem to think a community is tied to a particular instance
I found a major communication problem with public perception of Lemmy. they seem to think a community is tied to a particular instance
This is a big problem. It creates the illusion that /c/cats on one particular instance is the real /c/cats.
This is the root of re-centralization and it must be pulled out.
I think part of the issue is that all the different Lemmy and kbin instances are trying to be Reddit themselves. By which I mean there are a bunch of instances with no focus. They're all "kitchen sink" instances, each with their own Politics, Tech, Cats, etc.
Lemmy.world, lemmy.ml, kbin.social, fedia.io. All of them are generic reddit alternatives, but the real reddit alternative is the amalgamation of subscriptions from multiple more focused instances.
Startrek.website is a great example of the opposite: it's an instance focused on one topic, where some people will want to sign up as a user and others will want to just subscribe to one of their three (!) boards from their own instance. They don't need their own Politics topic, users on the site that care about it will subscribe to a politics topic from another instance. The startrek admins and mods only have to care about their one focus.
My ideal fediverse feed would be pulling individual topics from a few dozen more focused instances instead of one generalist instance. I think that's what's going to end up happening.
I don't believe most Lemmy users will tolerate maintaining more than one account on once instance. If I can't see it from my account, then it doesn't exist. This is all starting to sound like old school phpbb forum with new paint.
You don't need more than one account. You just decide which instance you want an account on, then subscribe to all the topics you care about across multiple instances. I just think that generalist instances with thousands of local topics are unnecessary.
I like filling up my feed with some content while I figure this stuff out. It'll be easy to ditch the annoying instances once I know what I'm doin.
I like the idea of topic dedicated instances. Warframe, one of my favorite games ever, has their own instance and it's chugging along.
There are 3 instance for *.nz, lemmy.nz, no.lastname.nz and feddit.nz
@Dave@lemmy.nz and I (no.lastname.nz) have been workin together so we don't overlap with nz based communities, with Dave concentrating on general NZ communities and I'm concentrating on more environmental type communities (Wildlife/Outdoors/Trees[therapeutic use based])
We probably need more collaboration for smaller communities, but there will always be different takes on topics and moderation.
The instance I'm on is for science! mander.xyz
I am a lemmy.ml user and don't think it is being or trying to be reddit. Maybe some of the users but that isn't the instance in awhole. Your idea sounds nice until I learn I have to signup to all thesee diffrent instances, or am I missing something?
You don't have to sign up on multiple sites, you just subscribe to specific channels you care about from the site you signed up for. For instance, signing up to lemmy.ml's Politics, Lemmy.world's Tech, and fedia.io's Cats.
For instance, here's a link to !startrek@startrek.website that you can interact with and subscribe to from your Lemmy.ml account: https://lemmy.ml/c/startrek@startrek.website
You don't have to sign up to different instances. You can just join the sublemms and it will show up on your feed.
It's like having an email and signing up to different newsletters through other sites.
When using email, be aware that
george@aol.comis the real George. All other Georges on all other email servers are fake.I feel like this is how it will realistically happen though. People will flock to one instance and use that one community, otherwise it becomes too stagnated.
The best thing about federation is that if that hugely popular community's instance were to crash/go down, the community can just join another one. Sure it might take some coordination, but why not have one central place to hang out until it gets shitty?
Imagine youre at your favorite bar. They get new owners and then all their prices change. But hey guess what, you can make an exact copy of the same bar on a different instance! "Hey guys, lets all go to this new bar thats literally the same thing across the street!" and then everybody is happy.
This is really terrible news. This means Lemmy has no chance. It's just another Reddit. I hope this flaw is fixed and soon.
If the cool bar sells out and becomes a rip off. The community of that bar does up and leaves and then coherently as aunit join another bar.
What happens is, that bar community simply dies. It's members scatter. The end.
If that was like you said, Reddit community as a whole would already have left Reddit and we'd all be here.
This is a system killing bug.
Lemmy is seen as another Reddit, that's why people are coming over to use it as a potential alternative.
I'm also not convinced that the community would scatter entirely. Things might be scattering now, but this is more like the entire Earth being blown up for some space highway.
Whereas previously on Reddit, the community might splinter, with some parts going off to make their own subreddits, effectively moving to a new bar. It's happened before, with multiple subs.
/r/anime_titties was created due to issues with how /r/worldnews was moderated, /r/curatedtumblr was created due to issues with bots and inactive moderation on /r/tumblr, so on.
But moving subreddits is a far cry from moving to a whole other site, with its own communities, quirks, and issues, where they might be losing out on creature comforts, and the identity that they've built up on Reddit.
What does scatter really mean in the threadiverse? You and me sit in different bars, and can communicate and see the same communities, so it doesn't really matter if we are "scattered" or all on the same instance, since we still see and can communicate on the same places.
While true, people seem to pretty immediately get it once it's clear where to see the source instance. If they care, they're usually surprised, and then the reason magazines on different instances are different makes sense.
I'm not sure what there is to do about it, the impression that there is one magazine is a relic of centralization, all there is to do is explain that it is not the case when people are inevitably confused. I hate simplifying it to "bob@microsoft.com and bob@apple.com are different people" because I know it feels more complicated than that but it seems like it doesn't take that long to click honestly.
Best I figure is to have welcoming communities that don't turn into asshats if someone is confused or asks questions. This doesn't seem like something you can force people to understand before they run into a problem and try to figure out what's going on. Eventually there will be an AI bot that answers questions I'm sure...!
It is very obvious what is to be done to honour federation. When you go to lemmy.example.com/c/cats, you get every /c/cats from every instance.
Then your client applies to personal filter list to hide what you don't want to see. And then it applies the filters of the moderators you are subscribed to.
What you're describing sounds like topics or tags, which have been requested a couple of times to both Lemmy's devs and KBin's devs, and both have just about said if they do something like that it would be as a feature release after they hit
1.0.0types of stability. The idea would be that you could post to a community on a server with some sort of tag or flag or something that another community or person might be interested in. I like to think of the Fediverse being a country, platforms as being metropolises, and servers as being the cities, suburbs, boroughs, and towns that make up that metropolis. So, what I'm using as a metaphor in this case is that !comics@lemmy.ml, !comics@kbin.social, and !Comics@chirp.social are all different comic book stores. You go, and you hang out at the comic book store that feels most comfortable to you, and that's your community. You all share comics there, but you don't hear about the comic book discussions happening in one of the other comic book stores unless you choose to go there (and you totally can!). The idea of topics or flags would act like a comic book convention. A lot more people will be there to discuss comics, though you won't know as many of the people there as you did at your home comic book store. The conversations will be busier, have more eyes on them, and won't be as intimate, but it will still be a valuable experience for many people. In fact. Both will be valuable experiences.The Fediverse is designed less around durability of data, and more around curation of interaction. On Reddit, this was done by splintering communities in some really weird ways. For example, there was r/knives and r/knife_club. It wasn't immediately obvious which one was which and how they differentiated themselves. But they definitively had a different moderation style and character. You just had to invest yourself in finding out the history of both to figure out which you wanted to subscribe to. On the threadiverse, we can expect these moderation styles to express more on the server level than on the community level. For example, !politics@beehaw.org, !politics@lemmy.ml, !politics@kbin.social, and !politics@lemmy.nz all have RADICALLY different moderation styles and scopes. They're all about politics, but what you can expect from them is more communicated to you by the server they're in. The Beehaw one is going to have more discussion around how politics impact women, people of color, and the LGBTQ+ community based on that the server is explicitly set up to be a safe space for those groups. The Lemmy.ml one will have a more pro-authoritarian communism feel to it because that's what the moderators over there are all about. The kbin.social one will probably be the one that acts and behaves the most like r/politics worked, since that instance is seen as a general purpose instance good for most people, with a moderation style that fits the traditional mold of online forums. Finally, and this one's my favorite because it's communicated to you directly in the URL, the lemmy.nz one will be about New Zealand politics.
Whether all that about the servers being different is good or not is up to you to figure out for myself. Me, I like it because community moderation is critical to community curation, and the Fediverse gives you infinitely more flexibility at the administrator level to find what works for you than a centralized corporation ever could. At Reddit, the admins were the admins, and there was nothing you could do if they refused to step in to stop a Subreddit from breaking Reddit's site wide rules about gaming r/all to get more eyes on propaganda, and nothing you could do either if they banned a community that you felt was really valuable. Here, if you don't like how Beehaw is administered, don't join Beehaw.
With all of this said, reading through your comments, it sounds like you don't like that core concept and would prefer something like Nostr where anyone can post anything and anyone can see it and there's no moderation whatsoever. Unfortunately, there is not at present any kind of link aggregation or community curation aspect built on the Nostr protocol, and I'd have some serious concerns about how you would do that from a technical level. If you're dealing with an infinitely diverse network topology of peer to peer hosting, how are you going to define what the community is even about? If I create t/pocket_dumps, how do I ensure it stays on the topic of pulling everything out of your pocket and putting it on the table, instead of say, people pooping in pockets. Ultimately, if we leave it up to the user to define for themselves what a community should be or shouldn't be, they're going to spend all their time on the network playing a game of Whac-A-Mole blocking users who post material they don't want to see, trying to filter uncurated communities, and also dealing with the problem Nostr and SSB both have where it's REALLY hard to sign up.
Ultimately, where I land is that the threadiverse topographic landscape is intrinsically different from the Reddit one. It takes some getting used to, but I don't think you could make it more like Reddit without losing what makes the threadiverse special, or without significantly reducing the ease of adoption (which is already a common criticism anyway)
This is not a communication problem. Communities are indeed centralized and if an instance is shut down permanently or loses its data all the communities are gone. This is a big design problem of Lemmy.
Edit: it's sometimes possible to rebuild new communities on another instance and recover past messages that have been replicated on other instances (if there were full replicas) but this requires all users and moderators to agree on where to migrate and avoid splits and so on.
Not 100%-
If, I subscribe to !lemmy@lemmy.ml on my instance, it replicates a copy of everything to me.
When lemmy.ml goes down, I can indeed still see and browse the content here. I can even comment/interact with it, (and, when lemmy.ml goes up- the changes should sync back to it)
What you are describing is just a local cache of !lemmy@lemmy.ml on your instance and it works only if it has been populated before the downtime of lemmy.ml. If lemmy.ml never comes back to life nobody can post to !lemmy@lemmy.ml proper. All the communities on in would be dead.
Tell them to browse "All" and enlighten them.
OP, could you please link the archive too? The community is set up to NSFW so you can't access it without account, and let us not create accounts in that shithole again.
Here's an archive link for the full thread, as OP here is focusing on one comment.
Anyway: yes, there is a communication problem. I think that the "the whole" and the flagship instances should be called by different names; I've been using "the Lemmyverse" (subset of the Fediverse) and "lemmy.ml flagship instance" (subset of the Lemmyverse) respectively, but that is far from ideal. And what happens is that you invite people to the Lemmyverse and they end in lemmy.ml. Mastodon has a similar problem, by the way.
Specifically on r/stallmanwasright: I used to participate a fair bit in that [rather small] sub, so I'm happy to see them coming to the Lemmyverse. And I feel like it actually fits well within the flagship instance, as it's focused on FOSS enthusiasts. I hope to see u/sigbhu (the head mod there) around - I might not like his approach as moderator*, but in general he's fairly sensible as a person, and his opinions are often worth listening to.
*he tends to confuse too much his personal views with community views.
Then Lemmy is going to just beat repeat of voat. Why is /c/ federation disabled by default. It makes no sense.
You can download Reddit here. All of it, 2tb https://the-eye.eu/redarcs/
Then read it locally with libreddit
Sorry, I edited my comment in the meantime. (Fixing broken grammar, linking the archives, stuff like this.) That said:
Then Lemmy is going to just beat repeat of voat
Not really. Even in worst case scenario (everyone migrates to a single instance), lemmy.ml is considerably wider in scope and userbase than the socially rejected in Voat.
And, while I do agree with you that there is a communication problem, and that it needs to be addressed, it is far from the worst case scenario. For example I consistently see here people from beehaw, lemmy.world, fedddit.de, and other instances.
Why is /c/ federation disabled by default.
Federation happens between instances, not between communities. You can access any community from a federated instance.
If federation is disabled by default (is it?), I think that this might have to do with spam and bot prevention. I'm not sure however.
Now, off-topic:
While I get that spending time in Reddit made us people behave less like decent human beings and more like dumbarses/redditors/morons, even then I think that we should watch out to not behave as such outside Reddit. Let its stupidity culture die with it.
From your comment, three things caught my attention:
- assuming that things that you don't understand "make no sense".
- lack of insight - why are you giving views to that shithole?
- decontextualisation - ipsis ungulis "Then read it locally with libreddit", letting the reader to guess what you're referring to. (I got it, but someone else 2m later won't).
Please, don't.
That's really interesting about the archive; it's surprisingly small. They must have combined repeated comments, which means there are about a dozen in total, along with some recycled Facebook memes. Now that I think about it, 2TB might be too big! ...I'm joking ;)
Just want to note that Voat was a right-wing hellhole by this point, and the vibe here is extremely different. I'd pulled out of Voat within a week, because the writing was on the wall; big wall, big writing. I'm curious what is making you feel that the Fediverse will be like Voat, because I'm not seeing it. I'm still new here, but it was really obvious on Voat, just a week in.
Now you have me worried that Reddit, in recent years, moved my Overton Window so far right that it no longer sticks out. Oh no.
That's not how I read it. They were saying it didn't matter because of federation you can sub to any of them wherever they are.
The more cats the better.
I mean, you can't fix stupid.
This is not a case of stupidity (unwillingness to think). It's ignorance (lack of information). You can't fix stupidity but you can fix ignorance with information.