OpenStars @ OpenStars @discuss.online

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spujb@lemmy.cafe somewhat beat you to it:-)

Agreed.

I made such a post, but ironically federation issues prevented the vast majority of people from seeing it (except those I sent explicit links to as part of other ongoing conversations) until several days later, at which point it got buried in the past posts and wouldn't have shown up even in New.

And that experience convinced me that essentially this is Lemmy. The apps are not always such, and PieFed and Mbin are like the apps: they work to communicate with "Lemmy". Content is hosted at places like !tenforward@lemmy.world, which is "Lemmy", even if you access it from Mbin.

It will not always be this way, especially if Lemmy.World switches to Sublinks (or PieFed?), but it is now. I still would like to use a more inclusive term, but I am not sure what it should be.

I never saw an announcement to that effect, though I don't have an account on sh.itjust.works. Elsewhere in that thread other admins voiced strong support for Lemmy.ml so there may be quite strong push-back to such, even being easily reversible, even for strictly new accounts, even though it makes the issue opt-in rather than currently where the have to expend ENORMOUS efforts to opt-out. Also iirc the issue of site content warnings came up and took focus in the conversation to see how that might play out in the then-future.

People have been asking for such tools for 2 years now - here's a post from ml itself asking for finer-grained controls. And another that said not yet, but given all the things they listed seems like it would say the opposite today (e.g. suppression of anti-ccp views appearing on ml, which I suspect was happening even back then too).

Despite that, no major instance has wanted to separate itself from ml. This is their software, apparently it's their network too. We don't even have a name for the part of the Fediverse that isn't either Lemmy or the Threadiverse that would by definition include Meta's Threads (Mbin and PieFed are too small, and Sublinks non-existent yet). And a Google search of the word Lemmy pulls up ml as the first instance hit.

Ofc if we're changing that now, then I think that's awesome.

The top reasons people avoid coming here iirc seemed like (a) "tankies", (b) lack of niche content (Reddit legit has more...), and iirc c) toxic interactions (which, really, I personally think Reddit is far worse in this regard? probably the lowest end is the same across both Lemmy and Reddit, but the niche subs there are more chill, mostly, compared to like r/all; also if a right-wing person were to come here and act like a Redditor, then yeah they legit may feel unwelcomed!:-P).

Defederating with the big 3 would mostly take care of the first issue (though there's always more e.g. whenever a new person downvotes anything from the admin of Midwest.social and gets banned as a result they'll have to discover that whole thing on their own; there's only so much that can be done to create a walled garden effect). There's little that can be done about the second issue - although bringing people in is likely to help with that longer-term. And blocking the political communities including memes masquerading as such is likely to help with the toxicity effect, ofc there's always going to be people that refuse to control themselves and need to be blocked.

I agree, this looks interesting. It would require some effort. 💪

Yes, but your message here is far too kind. Maybe throw in a KYS or best of all "well ackshually"... 🥴

Sorry, I must be too tired and focused on the "caveat" rather than the fact that we are in agreement on everything, so ofc in true Reddit style I had to write it as it I disagreed, I suppose? 🤡

In reading through all of these comments, I hate to keep saying it, in case it comes across like I'm harping on the point or some such, but genuinely PieFed already does most of it.

Want politics? Click Topics->News and Politics. Don't want news or politics? Click one other ones: Arts & Craft, Technology, Science, Gaming, Health, Hobbies, Music, etc.

Okay so memes is problematic yeah, but you can also unsubscribe from communities too, as well as block any instance of your choice without requiring admin support to do so. Then reverse your decision at any time, then re-do it again later, back and forth as you choose (unlike defederation where you would miss all messages delivered during the period of defederation). Though most are not nearly so bad, like Arts & Crafts.

You can also subscribe individually to something like !upliftingnews@lemmy.world and have it show up in your Subscribed feed. I barely used the Subscribed feed in Lemmy as it didn't seem to offer much in comparison to either All or visiting specific communities that I wanted to go to, like !fedimemes@feddit.uk that regardless of how well it competes with the more popular meme communities, I still enjoy more. But on PieFed I use the Subscribed feed all the time, it works for me better there. Also I have notifications sent to me for the smaller communities that nonetheless have the primary content that I want like !tenforward@lemmy.world or !starwarsmemes@lemmy.world, though we saw earlier how Favorites or customized Categories will likely be coming in 2025 and that will be an even better way.

Right now some of the foundational aspects of PieFed suck, especially searching for content. Then again, Reddit's search sucks even harder so... how much will that matter to people? Tbf, Lemmy's search feature is nice, and I saw somewhere a plan to allow searching strictly for post titles rather than keywords in them - that effort is appreciated!

I hope that the code being written in Python will help it grow faster. You might ask Rimu about some of these ideas mentioned here like a Trusted and Hesitated set of instances, if showing the former and by default at least blocking the latter for new people or those without accounts would help allow a better glimpse into the Threadiverse (minus Threads).

Otherwise, if Admiral Patrick is willing to add this capability to Tesseract, then any instance willing to run that could gain that feature, though at the enormous cost that someone using an app would not be able to take advantage, I think? Btw did you see this post discussing adding Tesseract to sh.itjust.works?

The OP idea sounds really cool too, except it would require someone to do it, and also I thought there were some major administrative issues with defederating from lemmy.ml, particularly in relation to communities. But if jgrim and m_f are on board with that... then that sounds wonderful?

I do wonder how widespread the desire for it would be though. You and I might enjoy that, but how many others, really? Probably more than a few, but less than a lot? 😁

"Please introduce me to Marxism (and Marxist Lemmy)", but get this, from this URL: https://startrek.website/post/18021528.

That's the thing about how "federation" works -> it's their content, but unless a place is specifically added to a defederation list by name, it's also our content as well - in this case, Star.Trek.Website's content.

Here's another interesting proof of concept: the farewell message from a server that died 10 months ago, but their message is preserved on the internet forever for others to read, if you know how and where to look (this particular one took more than a little bit of digging to find).

You don't use All, but especially if you did just prior to an election - of pretty much any Western nation I would guess - oh the things that you would see....... yes, even from the Star Trek instance (Garak voice: especially from the Star Trek instance?:-P)

Not necessarily. Here is a discussion with a mod of sh.itjust.works who provided an alternate idea:

something like autoblocking the instance on user creation… which might make more sense than outright defederation. A bot could probably be made to do that and send them a DM with instructions on how to change it off they so wish.

Edit: it still would not block actual users from those instances though - only defederation, PieFed, or the Sync or Connect Lemmy apps can do that.

Some interesting facts:

• the release date of 0.19.3 was 2024-01-24
• also one year ago, when Lemmy.World defederated from Lemmygrad.ml, they said "Due to the severity of the posts and comments, we are not waiting for the next Lemmy update that will allow users to block instances."
• two years ago this post also mentions "Unlike Mastodon, Lemmy does not provide a feature for individual users to block an instance (yet). This creates a dilemma where we must either defederate [or]..."

Fast-forward to today, and Lemmy still does not offer the ability to block users from an instance. Or for reports to federate to moderators on remote instances. The pace of development is quite slow, and shows little signs of speeding up. Furthermore, why would those same admins of lemmy.ml be in favor of sharing the same power that they wield on that instance with everyone using this software?

Rust is not a language conducive to making many changes to the codebase. I predict that one year from now there will be little change in the Lemmy software, with people still begging for features that they hoped for two years ago already. To be clear it's not the fault of the developers, but of people having too high expectations and hopes.

So yeah, the OP idea is a good one, but I'll cover that separately and here just wanted to say that the slow pace of new features is by design of the language used, and people must simply get used to that.

Except instance blocklists don't really work much, and are too controversial, and some kind of community sourced user blocklist also is far too controversial. Libs blocking tankies, tankies blocking neolibs, so many in the middle blocking neither, or perhaps both I dunno:-P.

Omg I can just hear that!

Let's see if this can play (nope, I am not smart enough to do that, but here's the link anyway):

sound

You are a treasure to have on the Fediverse, we are fortunate to have you helping so much:-).

Can this really represent Lemmy though, unless you are banned for having offered it? 🫠

How about: "comment removed - has far too many pixels"? 🤡

Fwiw https://lemmy.world/modlog/2 says "reason: Apparent commercial spam", but pruwyben's answer is much better:-)

Well it is one of the top 10 instances, and defederated from almost no other instances, so it definitely is rather well-known:-).

True true. I think Lemmy.ml tends to be more insular than most instances though? e.g. the default sort is Local rather than All. Like basically for people who already had most of their Fediverse needs met, there was less need to join communities across the wider range?

Fwiw both PieFed and the Tesseract front-end for Lemmy have YouTube embedding. And probably some apps too but I don't know which ones. This is the real dream: you don't even leave the post to watch it, if you want, and the preview pic is just already right there.

YT does not (currently) show ads for those. Also you can switch between videos more readily, if you don't really care about what you are watching and just want to be "entertained" (like a toddler) for 1-3 minutes.

And from YT's standpoint, it boosts their traffic stats, while sucking in the Gen-Z watchers, who until it becomes enshittified can make great use of it.