this post was submitted on 15 Aug 2023
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[–] drzow@sh.itjust.works 30 points 1 year ago (4 children)

I started on one of the smaller instances, and guess what? They didn’t make it. I spent about two days setting up my account searching for all the communities I wanted, and had a great feed. Then about a week later, they were gone. I can’t fault the admin- they were doing a lot of work and running up a server bill largely for gratis, but I lost all that setup time. So when I had to start a new account I chose to go to one of the moderately large instances because I didn’t want it to go poof overnight again.

What I’m saying is there is safety in the medium to large instances.

That said, I do have some problems with some of the largest instances throwing their weight around in performing global bans on users from other instances whose world views differ from theirs.

[–] treefingers@lemmy.world 6 points 1 year ago (2 children)

I’m beginning to see that in order for lemmy to be truly federated, users must also become federated

[–] wewbull@feddit.uk 5 points 1 year ago (3 children)

User data needs to be exportable and importable somewhere else.

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[–] interdimensionalmeme@lemmy.ml 2 points 1 year ago (6 children)

Wouldn't be much of a problem if you could export account to a file

[–] rmuk@feddit.uk 3 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Mastodon allows you to transfer accounts between instances and IIRC there a feature in the Lemmy roadmap that will allow you to do the same for accounts and communities. Can't happen soon enough.

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[–] CorrodedCranium@leminal.space 27 points 1 year ago (3 children)

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

[–] Mic_Check_One_Two@reddthat.com 30 points 1 year ago (3 children)

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.

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[–] Loulou@lemmy.mindoki.com 2 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (4 children)

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!

[–] CorrodedCranium@leminal.space 2 points 1 year ago

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?

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[–] seedoubleyou@lemmy.seedoubleyou.me 27 points 1 year ago (10 children)

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.

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[–] jkozaka@lemm.ee 18 points 1 year ago (3 children)

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.

[–] SchizoDenji@lemm.ee 6 points 1 year ago

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.

[–] Waluigi@feddit.de 3 points 1 year ago

It's funny how I made a few Alts just in case. Two of my four accounts are now unusable :')

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[–] flashgnash@lemm.ee 17 points 1 year ago

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

[–] regalia@literature.cafe 14 points 1 year ago (1 children)
[–] CaptKoala@lemmy.ml 7 points 1 year ago
[–] tinho@lemmy.world 14 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Lemmy really kicked off when you see the drama you had on Reddit here but with instances.

[–] regalia@literature.cafe 5 points 1 year ago

It's pretty entertaining tbh. It really makes you more tight knit with your community too. It's something I never really considered with federations, you're like joining a team.

[–] interdimensionalmeme@lemmy.ml 12 points 1 year ago (2 children)

3 words SINGLE USER INSTANCES

[–] xavier666@lemm.ee 13 points 1 year ago (2 children)

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.

[–] interdimensionalmeme@lemmy.ml 3 points 1 year ago

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.

[–] jcg@halubilo.social 3 points 1 year ago

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.

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[–] anolemmi@lemmi.social 11 points 1 year ago (3 children)

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.

[–] M0oP0o@mander.xyz 8 points 1 year ago (1 children)

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.

[–] Blaze@sh.itjust.works 2 points 1 year ago (1 children)

However I understand that building up to that is damn near impossible with the current infrastructure.

Lemmy is still in its infancy. Any community wanting to move somewhere (like lemdro.id did) can still do it as long as they clearly indicate the new home.

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[–] PeriodicallyPedantic@lemmy.ca 11 points 1 year ago (4 children)

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.

[–] interdimensionalmeme@lemmy.ml 3 points 1 year ago (3 children)

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

[–] natanael@lemmy.ml 2 points 1 year ago (2 children)

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).

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[–] vacuumflower@lemmy.sdf.org 10 points 1 year ago (3 children)

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.

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[–] wheeldawg@sh.itjust.works 8 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (2 children)

If people would share the idea of the fediverse instead of saying "yeah reddit suck, go to this website instead", this would put a dent in it.

But since the concept is so alien and hard to describe, people find it easier to just share the site, and since that game keeps being recommended, and since even if they know about multiple sites working together, even those people are going to go to one that has a friendly name, so this is what happens.

I'm only not on it because I like picking less popular things in general, so I actively avoided picking what seemed to be the default at the time.

Also I believe it would help if the sites/instances had a way of distinguishing themselves more and communicating their differences. Even most of the instances' intro or about pages are mostly saying something like "hey I'm a general use instance, with mostly this language, pick me!"

Which in and of itself is fine, but it seems most of them are general use, so people have no basis for picking one. They may figure out different reasons to like one or the other along the way, but once they pick one initially, I don't think most people make another account.

I haven't done much of that either, except for making one my dedicated NSFW account and this one, but I plan on making at least one or two more just in case of downtime, or even to separate genres of content.

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[–] cyborganism@lemmy.ca 8 points 1 year ago (2 children)

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.

[–] Honytawk@lemmy.zip 4 points 1 year ago

The government of the Netherlands has their own Mastodon server since they left Xitter.

[–] the_lone_wolf@lemmy.ml 3 points 1 year ago (1 children)

government are shit then they would really liked to control it

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[–] MonsieurHedge@kbin.social 6 points 1 year ago (1 children)

This has its negatives. If someone makes twenty-seven different hate speech communities spread out over twenty-seven instances, it becomes harder to exterminate them like the vermin they are. If they all congregate on one overly-permissive instance, you can defederate them and call it a day. Much easier.

[–] RoundSparrow@lemmy.ml 5 points 1 year ago (3 children)

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.

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[–] Waluigi@feddit.de 5 points 1 year ago

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

[–] Sigmatank@midwest.social 3 points 1 year ago (2 children)

Join a local instance, and then don't forget to donate to it

[–] Misconduct@startrek.website 4 points 1 year ago

I'm doing my part!

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[–] cokane_88@lemmy.world 3 points 1 year ago

Ive signed up for multiple instances, most don't accept new users, or wait for approval which gets denied I assume.

[–] conorab@lemmy.conorab.com 3 points 1 year ago (3 children)

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.
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[–] Swim@lemmy.ca 3 points 1 year ago

Their recent actions have convinced me to move to another instance

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