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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.
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
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
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!
Let’s be honest, this is partially on Jerboa for being the oldest and most convoluted active Lemmy app.
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.
Here is the problem, and they already refused to fix it
I made an account on lemm.ee, thought it was a bad idea since all the communities were on .world. After this whole fiasco though, I’m happy with my decision.
Same. All I want is to not miss out on content that is concealed from me because of defederation unless it’s really harmful like gore or CP.
Hail fellow lemm.ee er!
We really are the best.
It’s funny how I made a few Alts just in case. Two of my four accounts are now unusable :')
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
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.
That would be nice. As a regular user, when lemmy.world does something you dislike, like block piracy communities or something, you can simply create a new account and, until something official exists, use LASIM to migrate stuff over. I didn’t think about communities though, if you run the biggest community for some topic what do you do. Create another one, link to it from the first one and hope for the best?
DISPERSE
SCATTER!
Think we need universal/transferrable accounts to make this happen. People, myself included will be concerned that if they sign up to a tiny instance someone’s hosting on a raspberry pi or something that it’ll just disappear without a trace one day and their account along with it
If accounts were made portable I think a lot more people would disperse
Would be great if you could set other instances to have a copy of your profile in case your main one disappears.
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.
3 words SINGLE USER INSTANCES
The amount of data that needs to be exchanged because of this approach is not scalable. Assume that there are 3 instances with 100 users each. Even if lots of users upvote/post/comment, the traffic is exchanged only between 3 servers. But if there are 300 single user instances, the amount of traffic/storage will be duplicated which can cause a huge load for everyone which might not be viable in the long run, for both the sender and receiver. PS: I am assuming that the instances periodically update content by fetching the deltas.
Just go to your average big popular subreddit, check out all the text of all posts and comments they week. That’s still a minuscule amount of data. A few megabytes when uncompressed.
And Lemmy won’t get to that point of popularity and traffic for a very long time.
And even then, it’s an easy problem to solve. Each instance creates a chunk of a day’s data, sign it and share it on a bittorrent like protocol. Even nntp massively archaic infrastructure can manage this, it is a piece of cake for Lemmy to do.
I am assuming that the instances periodically update content by fetching the deltas.
That’s incorrect, so far no batching is set up for sending multiple posts at once and the exchange is initiated by the sending server, not the receiving server.
🤔 We need an ActivityPub app that is basically just a user account holder that is tied to their IP or MAC address so individuals can carry the same info throughout the fediverse, block instances they personally don’t like, and so bans from instances are actually permanent and enforceable.
It kinda makes me wish that instances were forced to be single-topic, or even single-community, and that authentication was key-based so that you didn’t need to “make” an account on a single instance.
User accounts being key-based/portable is one of the strengths of the nostr protocol and Bluesky/AT Protocol.
The key based (and content addressing based) thing is what bluesky is building. They’re starting of with Twitterish microblogging, but there’s people building forums on top the protocol too. Federated, of course.
Lemmy is built upon the ActivityPub Protocol which has the flaws mentioned above Bluesky is built upon the AtProtocol which to me also looks kinda great https://yewtu.be/watch?v=wJBCpzM1VfM ;- Video that explains the difference (i just watched it minutes ago) https://atproto.com/docs ;-Docs for learning how it works
I think instead instances should have every community. There isn’t one /c/books, every server has a /c/books. Your feed pages just pulls from the entire fediverse. No concept of “creating” /c/books, it just is.
Likewise, there isn’t “a” moderator. Every user is a moderator. Whether you vote, or delete the post out ban the user (from your view), your moderation opinions are published publicly. Your local feed algorithm sees everyone’s “moderation opinions”, if the consensus of the community is delete, then it just doesn’t show up in your thread
For each “moderation opinions” by a user, your client investigates their historical record to address credibility and likelyness of being a bot, a user’s history is his credibility
Usenet news - 2020s edition
I wish
I’ve got similar ideas, but not entirely the same.
What you call communities would be closer to what I would call content sources / repositories (host servers) plus topic tags. Then instead of consensus (because that’s too hard to automate with decent quality results) you’d have communities formed by subscribing to “curation feeds” which pull submissions and comment from all over the network in a similar style.
This would let you easily crosspost and comment to multiple related communities in a network, as well as to yeet bad mods/curators without losing any content or splitting the community (just create a new curation feed and get people to switch). You could similarly choose to have your client mix comment from multiple curation feeds (similar to “multireddits” on reddit).
Whatever the solution, it needs to create communal view of content or else users will not have a communal experience of which is the basis for a community. This is why multireddit remained a niche feature incapable of overcoming zealous moderation and censorship.
As a midpoint there’s things you can do like “2/3 consensus of X, Y and Z’s submission selections on topics ABC”, then defining that as it’s own feed people can subscribe to.
But it gets complicated to mix and match when different subcommunities have very different local cultures.
Every country should have their own instance and people should sign up to the server that’s closest to them or that best fits their privacy concerns.
I would love to see more federated social media servers in Switzerland for example.
government are shit then they would really liked to control it
Depends if the government is shit. Most in the developed world aren’t.
The government of the Netherlands has their own Mastodon server since they left Xitter.
- RoundSparrow ( @RoundSparrow@lemmy.ml ) 6•11 months ago
If everyone was spread out onto different instances
Each instance with an owner/operator making rules… that the average social media user walks in, orders a drink, and starts smoking without any concern that neither one may be allowed. People can be loyal to their media outlets even when it is beyond obvious they are bad. People raised on storybooks that endorse bad behaviors and values, HDTV networks, and social media too. Audience desire to “react comment” to images and not actually read what others have commented - nor learn about the venue operators and reasons for rules is pretty much the baseline experience in 2023.
I am new here and I don’t even know what an instance is, how to find one for me or why you are mentioning HGTV.
- RoundSparrow ( @RoundSparrow@lemmy.ml ) 4•11 months ago
An Instance is just another word for ‘server’ in lemmy terminology. HDTV is a classic form of media that doesn’t involve TCP/IP to watch films and other video content.
think of it as subreddit, and within the subreddit you have other sub-subreddits.
Their recent actions have convinced me to move to another instance
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
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…
Correct me if this is already a thing, but it would be nice if you could post to multiple communities at once and have users see comments across all communities and instances. So a user posts “A” on instances X, Y and Z all under communities run on those instances at the same time. When making the post, you select ehich communities the post goes to instead of just one. Users on instances X, Y and Z see it as a single post it appears in all of the communities the user specifies. A limit might be useful here to prevent trial spam. A user commenting on the post in instance X will be seen on the other instances and communities where that post was made.That way, you could remove the centralisation on instances and communities (one community or instance might remove the thread, but everybody else still sees it and each others comments in the remaining communities/instances.) This has a few advantages:
- People are incentivised to post to smaller communities knowing that larger ones will also get the same post and everybody can see each others comments.
- If a moderator of a community removes the post, it still disappears in their community, but not the whole instance. If the thread still exists in other communities in the same instance, users of that instance can still participate in the post on those communities.
- If the post is banned instance-wide, it is banned across all communities in the instance at once. This could include non-local communities.
- Users in other instances will still be able to see the post and continue contributing to it. You can only remove the post from your own instance.