I love how that puts the power in the hands of the user where it belongs
letstry
joined 2 years ago
So as an individual user, with V0.17 it looks like I can choose which communities and users I personally want to block. Is that correct?
Quick question.
Can you nest communities? e.g. Could you have a group call "Crypto Currencies" and nest communities for the different currencies under it? Or could you have a group called Europe and nest the different countries underneath it?
I put together this list of the top 10 Lemmy instances by page views - mainly to see what I could learn to improve what we are doing and be more successful.
I noticed a few things I found curious, so I thought I might raise them here and see if you had any suggestions/explanations.
I used a tool called SiteShow to gather the info that has a bunch of different data points. (BTW I have no idea how accuate this tool is - if you have a better suggestion for me to use in the future, please let me know).
So here are some of the things I noticed:
None of the Top 10 had a Page Rank from Google or Quantcast. Is there something we can change to get a ranking - which I believe helps improve our directory and search engine rankings? I double checked with another site for a page rank and it found all the instances were ranked (Google PageRank) between 2 out of 10 and 3 out of 10 except Lemmy.ml which was ranked 4 out of 10. Still seems very low - wondering what we can do to improve this?
About half the top 10 instances were indexed with Google, Bing, & Yahoo
But the other half were not.
This surprised me because I thought once a search engine found one of our instances, it would have spidered its way through the rest of the instances. I would have thought being indexed by all the major search engines would be important to bring more traffic and users to our Lemmy communities.
Lastly for the instances that were indexed by the major search engines, as a general rule, they had a lot fewer pages indexed then I would have expected based on the number of posts listed in these instances SideBars. I wonder what we could do to get these search engines to index more of our pages.
What about at the bottom of each post after the comments we lists 3 other "You might also be interested in" links to posts. Say 2 randomly selected from the same community and a third randomly selected from another community? Maybe a 4th randomly selected from a different instance?
Any thoughts/suggestions?
@nutomic is certainly a good ambassador for Lemmy. That sort of informative welcome would make most new instances feel more committed to joining the Lemmy bandwagon.
Did you know wolfballs and lemmy.ml federated for a long time?
Do we know why they stopped federating? It might be a useful exercise to find out why and how Lemmy can be improved to allow them to federate again. Especially as you said they are both active in the software development - it seems to be the perfect opportunity to workout how to remove a roadblock to Lemmy's growth.
It also demonstrates another shortfall is this entire instance blocking system. If Lemmy.ml has blocked wolfballs, then the owner of the wolfballs instance cannot even participate in this discussion to help work out a better way forward.
Out of interest, do you know who blocked who first? Was it a tit for tat response? You blocked me, so I am blocking you?
instances are usually blocked to stop their users coming over and posting unwanted things
It is easy enough to block individual users if they are misbehaving on your instance rather then blocking an entire instance. I think it does the potential of Lemmy a disservice to cast it in terms of one tribe versus another tribe. Don't fall for the old "divide and conquer" trick.
leading many apolitical instances to not follow it
There is a difference between a user choosing not to follow a community (which is the default for all Lemmy users - you need to make a conscious decision to follow/join a community) and an instance deciding to block another instance - in which case they are making a decision for all their users. They are taking the decision to follow or not follow out of their users hands.
Seems to me if you want to maximize the growth of Lemmy, you really want to give the freedom to users to choose. But at the same time, the instance owner needs the right to stop material that is clearly inappropriate polluting their instance. That is why I think blocking at a community level would be a good middle ground. It would give users more freedom, help non-political instances gain critical mass, while allowing instance owners to nurture their instance.
Hope that make sense.
Wow, you have made the upgrade process so smooth, so easy.
Thank you.
This is a great post - very thoughtful. I had not seen those growth state from Fediverse Observer - very impressive.
I just wanted to add a few thoughts into the mix:
Helping Non-Political communities grow critical mass There are lots of communities that have nothing to do with politics, that struggle to gain critical mass. That problem is magnified because entire instances are being blocked based on politics. I think it would help if the blocking mechanism was more granular so instances could block the specific communities they found objectionable rather then the entire instance. That would allow non-political communities (e.g. Coffee, Fitness and Health, Saunas, etc to spread across more instances and make it easier to gain critical mass. As they gain critical mass they would help attract new users to the Lemmy Network
Silos and Echo Chambers We hear a lot of discussion in the media today about people being locked in their Silos and Echo Chambers - only associating with those they agree with. I think by making the blocking mechanism more granular so specific communities were blocked rather then entire instances, we might help our users avoid that trap. For instance, we may not agree on politics, but we both may enjoy a vegan diet and enjoy sharing/discussing vegan recipes.
Do not let politics divide and conquer us I guess I am saying - as well as the Lemmy Network is already doing - I think politics is holding us back from even more success.
Cross posted from Exploding Heads
I like how the slur filter is described here:
"Note that it doesn’t include any simple swear words, but only slurs which are used to insult and attack other people."
but I guess the devil is in the details. Where do I see the actual words that are being blocked? When I clicked on the link I just saw a page of code which I cannot understand.
Lemmy is a fabulous creation - keep up the good work. I am excited to see what the future holds for Lemmy.
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You guys are awesome