Boy I was wrong about the Fediverse
1mon 9d ago by lemmy.world/u/ekZepp in fediverse from matduggan.com
It became the only reliable source of information I had. People posted links with a minimal amount of commentary, picking and choosing the best content from other social media networks. They’re not doing it to “build a brand” because that’s not a thing in the Fediverse. It’s too disjointed to be a place to build a newsletter subscription base.
People complain about Lemmy having limited content and engagement. Not in this article so much. I’m sure there were fewer posts in the past too. But what I found is that there are real people on here and you don’t have to wade through bots and shills which makes this community feel much more whole to me.
While that's true, I don't believe it to be a fundamental property of the medium or federation in general. I think what we are experiencing is the result of lack of mainstream attention and traffic.
The people here are much less demographically diverse than the public at large, and have intentionally sought out this space and others like it, so they have more of a sense of ownership and community about it. The more attention it gets, the more the demographics will change to reflect the broader public, and the more it will become like a public space, complete with all the ills that come with that, like advertisers vying for attention, shills posing as enthusiasts, and influencers saying what will get them the most followers, rather than what they think.
I believe it would take extensive moderation and amazing tools to keep places like this the same as they gain users. I haven't ever seen a community survive that kind of growth and retain its original spirit, but I also haven't seen one with no profit motive. If we can get the moderation tools where they need to be, there could be hope!
True, Lemmy feels this way almost exclusively because it's small and hasn't been noticed by mainstream media enough. The second that changes this place will become what reddit was pre-ipo.
My hope is that it will always be a little too disjointed to hold that kind of attention for long.
We take it for granted that as the fediverse grows in numbers and nodes that it will continue to stay mostly contiguous.
While Lemmy lacks those, PieFed already has both advanced automated mod tools plus other features that dramatically increases the democratization of moderation itself.
e.g. if someone wants to see less Trump and Musk content, keyword filters allow someone to personally set that up, without having to rely upon a moderator to make that decision for the entire community.
Another example along those lines is the automated collapsing or even hiding of content that falls below a certain score threshold - personally I have that turned off, but if someone wants that then again, they don't have to rely solely upon the efforts of a moderation team, and can rely instead upon the community engagement. Again: if they want.
Still another example is showing icons next to usernames - e.g. one shows new users that are <2 weeks old, another shows someone who receives ~10x more downvotes than upvotes, and so on. These are not "filters", just helpful indicators so that you know more about someone's reputation prior to responding. Most conservatives for example have warning labels next to their usernames, in these more leftist spaces.
Also - and I cannot emphasize enough how crucial this is - PieFed moderator reports actually federate. This has been a source of huge pain in Lemmy, and tbf I think a future Lemmy release is planned that will do that... but meanwhile as with so exceedingly very many other features, PieFed has had them for months.
PieFed thereby helps avoid some of the major issues that cause community fragmentation. Which ironically PieFed also helps solves that issue too, by collapsing comments (old example of this phenomena), and with the Categories of Communities suite of features, including the user-customizeable and shareable Feeds.
Also PieFed is easier to install, requires less maintenance, uses fewer resources (even sending 25-fold less data to end-users), and so on. So yeah, I don't think Lemmy is capable of scaling up, despite its reliance upon its sourcecode being in the hyper stable Rust programming language, because of all the other issues with it (database issues requiring constant restarts, and especially lack of moderation capabilities), so I am putting all of my hopes into PieFed. Sorry if this reads like an advertisement - I feel like PieFed is to Lemmy what Lemmy is to Reddit, except that analogy does not begin to come close since PieFed has added features that even Reddit never bothered to, plus some others that it continually tried to take away from people by not retaining it in new-reddit despite how it was present in old.
This is the sort of advertisement we actually want
Also PieFed is easier to install, requires less maintenance, uses fewer resources (even sending 25-fold less data to end-users), and so on. So yeah, I don’t think Lemmy is capable of scaling up, despite its reliance upon its sourcecode being in the hyper stable Rust programming language, because of all the other issues with it (database issues requiring constant restarts, and especially lack of moderation capabilities), so I am putting all of my hopes into PieFed.
This is the first time I'm hearing most of this, except the part about Piefed having more moderation tools. Do you have any links to additional information?
Absolutely! Start here: https://join.piefed.social/features/.
The linked blog is also really interesting to me, e.g. this post: https://join.piefed.social/2024/02/09/comparing-network-utilization-of-lemmy-kbin-and-piefed/,which shows how 5x less data is sent for 5x more posts e.g. 25x greater data efficiency between server instance and client.
Thanks, that was interesting about the network utilization. For a while now I've been trying to evaluate the resource efficiency of Lemmy vs. PieFed for my own curiosity. Rust has been shown to be much more resource efficient on the server, using a lot less RAM and CPU from what I recall reading in the past, but I hadn't thought about the differences in network utilization that could counteract that efficiency, and I was also not aware that Lemmy was so reliant on Javascript. Javascript is still supposed to be quite more resource efficient than Python, but much less so than Rust since it's still an interpreted language (an extremely optimized one, but still has inherent limits compared to compiled languages). I would still like to know about PieFed requiring less maintenance and the Lemmy database issues requiring constant restarts, if you have any links to information about that. Thanks.
One very popular account that you probably have already heard is here: https://jeena.net/lemmy-switch-to-piefed.
Another informative discussion relates to the upcoming (in 2026) switch of slrpnk.net from Lemmy to PieFed, see e.g. https://slrpnk.net/comment/18799445.Some highlighted nuggets from that:
the main bottleneck on performance is the database itself, and at that point the language the frontend is written in doesn’t seem to make much of a practical difference
the core issue with Lemmy is really that it is very annoying to run and maintain, has huge memory issues (ironically given that it is written in Rust) that the devs ignore since years, and the image integration is a stuff of nightmares. In addition, the upstream devs are often actively hostile to sensible suggestions how to improve things and the proposed solutions by them often make things actively worse (latest case in point: the next version will hardcode lemmy.ml as a source to pre-fetch popular communities). After nearly 5 years of running Lemmy, I am ready to cut my losses and rather give Piefed a try, and so far the devs and community around it has been very welcoming and actually have lots of sensible ideas.
(Note that the proposed hard-coding issue has been somewhat walked back, as in it will still be hardcoded to some instance but it only remains lemmy.ml by default yet can be changed. Using a single instance as the ultimate source of truth though, it will still be subject to issues of defederation.)
The Lemmy backend causes the Postgres database to use more and more RAM, to the point that it crashes with out of memory issues randomly and causes other processes to go down with it. I have reported the issue multiple times and I am not the only one with the problem since many years,
There are also some further links there to older discussions and additional blog posts, such as https://join.piefed.social/2024/02/13/technical-performance-of-each-fediverse-platform/.
See also notes for developers at https://join.piefed.social/docs/developers/,e.g. it mentions PieFed relying upon the Flask framework, and the code repository at https://codeberg.org/rimu/pyfedi,which reportedly the Docker containerization makes it fairly straightforward to install? (I have no personal experience with that though, or Docker containers at all myself.)
In my mind, PieFed is running circles around Lemmy and has been for like a year now. Nobody knows how scalable any of these approaches would be to handle like a million of people, but on the other hand the entire Threadiverse has only ~35k active users currently (last I checked) and that is already down from our peak at 55k just after the Rexodus. i.e., scalability is the least of our concerns right now, and can be postponed for another day, in lieu of aspects such as features proferred to users and ease of use to instance admins.
Then again, FOSS is FOSS, so I wish both Lemmy and PieFed (and Mbin, nodeBB, etc.) the absolute best of success - when one is improved, we all benefit due to the federated nature of content shared via ActivityPub Protocol. I just think that Lemmy has little hope for the future, while PieFed continually impresses me. Nothing is perfect, but on the whole I hear the best things about it, and I have little doubt you'll enjoy having delved deeper into learning about it, based on so many stories shared in e.g. piefed_meta@piefed.social that have said exactly that.
Great, thank you. I was not familiar with any of those links discussing these issues. I will read them to get more details. Thanks again.
It is good to always remain curious 🤔🤓🧠
I think even if shills, bots and influencers gain traction in the fediverse, it's still better than reddit or Instagram because of federation. There won't be one corporation algorithmically feeding you ads. You can curate your experience more than you can on another platform.
I think the community is a good size right now. Popular enough that we guarantee getting any content of relevance I care about, but not popular enough to have all the problems you mentioned. I hope the community stays this size and off the radar indefinitely.
Also, there is no central power that has to make the line go up. I remember reddit like before 2014 and that was much like here in many ways (in an older kind of way, more racism and smut), but they just had to shoehorn in moar users more and more and more, and forbid any troublesome subs (while leaving other troublesome ones ofc.).
So IMO there is a real difference, we cannot grow too big or we'd just split off into new entities.
This is how I see it. If fedi proper becomes mainstream then us old heads will just recreate the old fedi and guard who we federate with very closely.
Most people aren't here for commerce, so I think it makes sense to keep some areas aggressively social only.
Malls versus parks or libraries kind of thing.
There is no effective way to ban a person. As long as that remains true, moderation tools don't really matter.
Israel alone is putting $760 million into propaganda. Lemmy may not be big, but it's worth 0.2% of that budget.
And that's just Israel.
I think that's trying to solve the wrong problem.
If I had awesome moderating tools, identifying and deleting comments that violate the policy would be effortless. I would not need to ban a person, which as you aptly point out, can reappear forever. But, I can ban all of his violating comments, which are, after all, the true target and violation, not the commenter.
israel is pretty new on the scene, only after '23 they significantly increased thier propaganda funding, russia still beats them with billions per year on propaganda, of course its not limited to just social media.
unless you enter .ml environment...
Or hexbear, Lemmygrad.ml, hilariouschaos, and [edit: false stuff removed] maga.place.
Lemmy definitely has its dark corners.
lemmytoday isnt conservative, i havnt even noticed one, most of the actual conservatives have largely been defederate long time ago. also they wouldnt survive on a small platform anyways, because of how little interactions they get.
Thank you for correcting me. I edited my comment to indicate that it was maga.place.
I really do not understand all the .ml hate. If you have it so much why are you using their technology (Lemmy)? So much bullshit being reposted as fact. Basically echo chamber brigading. I left Reddit to escape this shit…
Edit: although judging by your post history you lack conviction and joke about everything, so maybe I missed the mark
Of you hate it so much, why are you using their technology?
Oh boy, this isn’t a question you want being asked of people (yourself included).
Really reeks of "if you hate capitalism why do you participate in it?"
I am ver intelligen
That’s why I’m advocating for people to switch to piefed and stop donating to the lemmy project which funds .ml.
Unfortunately the "attitude" system makes Piefed unusable.
Whats the "attitude" system?
PieFed keeps track of how many upvotes and downvotes you give, displays that on your profile and if you downvote too much it takes away your downvote button. That happened to me after a weekend of use. This is Lemmy. There's a lot here that needs downvoting.
Are you downvoting to disagree or are you downvoting because it’s not contributing to the conversation?
This question shows the inherent flaw with putting any value beyond the function of voting, which is just list ranking.
Some instances would say down voting at all is inherently flawed, and it is healthier to accomplish ranking by upvoting and moderation alone.
As soon as it becomes infeasible to read every comment, downvoting to disagree creates echo chambers and encourages groupthink.
I find the same, though I, and I hope others, use it as an "I agree/this adds to the conversation" button and downvotes exclusively as a "this doesnt add to the conversation or is misinformation" button. I also appreciate seeing the down votes rather than an aggregated score.
Here is the full explanation :)
That's exactly what they said though?
The full explanation is the same thing. Your context adds nothing.
Your current attitude is 1.0, the highest possible and your reputation is in the tens of thousands. If you ever decide to cast another downvote then it'll be accepted.
I think you’re missing this part.
Agree, this seems completely toxic and ripe for abuse.
That’s why
Which is? I’m still missing something here.
I really do not understand all the .ml hate. If you have it so much why are you using their technology (Lemmy)?
Piefed is a derivative of Lemmy. So you’re not getting away from it.
And Lemmy is a derivative of Reddit so by your logic you haven’t escaped from it.
Lemmy isn’t compatible with Reddit. Piefed is literally implementing Lemmy’s data structures to specifically be compatible with Lemmy.
So since your stated goal is counter to reality, I have to wonder what your real intent is. I only see this drama as weakening Lemmy and Piefed by extension, not strengthening anything.
piefed is not a derivative. It's not a fork. It's a completely different project, in a very different programming language even.
neither does it implement specifically lemmy's data structures. its not compatible with lemmy specifically. piefed implements activitypub, and is compatible with activitypub servers. activitypub is not lemmy.
PieFed is absolutely a "derivative" in terms of its DNA. It’s basically built as a love letter to Lemmy’s specific flavor of ActivityPub.
If you look at the raw JSON, PieFed isn’t just "using ActivityPub", it’s specifically implementing the "Lemmy-isms" that make the Threadiverse work. It uses the same Group actor logic, the same Dislike activity extensions for downvoting, and even mirrors Lemmy’s API routes so you can use apps like Jerboa.
In a way, it’s like how a 3rd-party controller is a "derivative" of a PlayStation controller. The internals are completely different, but it’s shaped exactly that way so it can plug into the same console and work perfectly. PieFed chose to speak "Lemmy-ish" instead of just "ActivityPub-ish" to ensure it wasn't an island.
I don't think this is a problem. these data structures have become semi-standard,and they are working fibe, aren't they? should they just change it for change's sake, so that all clients and servers need to implement compatibility code? the problem with lemmy developers is not these standards they have created
Right.
Any disagreement must be state sponsored shill bots.
You said it not me.
I’m just happy to not support a transphobe and a massive hypocrite build their echo chamber that censors words they consider ‘bad.’
If they spend as much time developing the software as they spend policing thought it might be worth something.
This post was removed by the moderator because it violated rule number 1 of this forum.
deleted
rule 1
From one socialist (me) to another (you, presumably), the lemmy.ml hate comes from:
- Conservatives who dislike socialism
- Liberals who dislike socialism
- Socialists who think Stalin and Mao were anti-democratic fuckheads, and don't enjoy being around "socialists" who like them.
I like Lemmy, but can at the same time dislike people who like things I consider to be authoritarian, even if those people created the platform in the first place.
Viewing lemmy.ml content on 'All-Top' is a rather happy medium for me, still get to see some of the best memes
I’m definitely not a socialist. .ml is where I landed when I joined due to not knowing any better and joining the largest (at the time) instance, and honestly the outside hate is keeping me there.
I actually like the slower pace. There's no constant stream of content but I find that helps me to moderate my usage. It also helps me take a more active role because I don't just see what I'm subscribed to. I'll hop over to the top posts over the last 6 hours and find something that's really hot elsewhere, or I'll hop on to scaled and find something obscure. It's slower and cranky but it embodies a lot of the old elements of scrolling that I miss.
People complain about Lemmy having limited content and engagement.
I do. And that's also why if you consciously choose Lemmy as your first line of internet discussion, I encourage you to help build a critical mass to sustain your particular niche or topic.
I encourage you to help build a critical mass to sustain your particular niche or topic.
I’m going to keep posting my insect and spider pictures then! :)
i see people going back to reddit, assuming they dint get shadowbanned, if content disappears.
Yeah, there's definitely still some bullshit and editorialized clickbaity headlines to sift through, but it's not nearly as much and overall the content here feels much more human.
There's just not much incentive to generate engagement for the sake of it (unless you're funhole), and far fewer bots and bad-faith trolls in general. Not to say there's none though.
People complain about Lemmy having limited content and engagement.
Maybe I would have thought this at one point? I remember when you could get to the bottom of the All feed in one session.
Lemmy is probably the fastest paced social I go on now. I've got my people I follow on masto and a handful of forums. So coming to lemmy from those feels downright metropolitan.
As soon as there is "unlimited" content, the vast majority of said content is shit
Lemmy as far as I can tell is mostly dup posts and blind links, especially links to youtube. The absence of Spez is of course priceless, but otherwise Lemmy is duller than plenty of single-issue blogs or forums, or even the still-decaying corpse of Usenet. That article is about Mastodon, which has a different crowd than Lemmy does. I'm not big on the "follower" model though, so I'm not there very much.
I really would like to somehow convince more people to adopt the idea that, like, Facebook and friends are run by bad people and you can choose not to use their products. Just stop. Find another way. Be uncomfortable for a little while.
But people aren't up to the challenge.
People are fucking addicted to instagram and I'm the annoying "get rid of that shit" preacher to everyone I can. My gf has reduced her usage, but still checks it from time to time.
I always ask "Do you really need to use it?" - and almost always, their answer is "not really, but it's the only place I can find X". Some of my gf's friends use it to find new places to go. Some of my boardgaming friends still use it, mostly to "know what events are coming up" or what new games are being released.
Instagram is essentially this age's yellow pages of a telephone list, small businesses are super dependent on it and they're forced to post fucking stories everyday or get erased by the algorithm
It's one of those self fueling problems. Businesses post on Instagram because people go there, and people go there in part because that's where they found out about businesses doing stuff.
Better options are possible, but the big money is backing this hell. Less money to be made from RSS feeds , web rings, and email newsletters.
I don't use any social media other than this. I find out about bands I like playing from their email lists or bandsintown. I'm on a couple "things happening in the city" email newsletters. It doesn't demand my attention.
Honestly people are more likely to just quit those websites rather than join new places. I support that though. And I am seeing a lot of people around me are going away from these platforms recently.
I wouldn't say it's "not up to the challenge" insomuch that like when you want to convince someone to not use Chrome, you're running into the problem that you have to create a framework under which the amount of problem Chrome can be can actually be measured/registered.
People always assume "Yeah but the average user doesn't care", but never truly read that line and realize what it implies.
It's not that my mum opens Chrome, sees that it's 74/100 on the problematic-software-you-shouldn't-use-scale, and then decided to use it anyways.
She opens it. That's it. It ends there.
There is no "This is a 74/100 problem".
There is no problematic-software-you-shouldn't-use-scale.
There is no scale.
There isn't even the conceptual idea for it, and hence no reason or impetus to ever internally have such a scale.
And now comes an important question: Why? Or rather, why not?
And the answer is both easier and also impossibly harder than most of us trying to convince others would want to accept: Because it doesn't matter.
To my mum, she couldn't give a flying fuck what others think about Chrome, she wants to open a web page. She has actual problems in her actual life, she doesn't care a rat's arse what the tiny computer she looks up the weather and contacts her kids on does to allow her to do that internally. She's worried about her health, about her colon surgery healing or about her mum (my grandma is 93) having fallen down.
Well, yes, "why don't you care about things?" is a timeless problem. People don't like to see beyond the immediate. Probably because in pre-history, the creatures that focused on right now did better than the ones who went "but if we keep cutting down the trees, eventually it's going to cause problems."
Well, now we have many problems, and our brains have not advanced.
I also wish they would, but ive realized a lot of people have no self control or discipline. I guess I do because of some challanges during my life. But for most people, its difficult to even stop eating unhealthy food, and thats not even difficult. :)
But for most people, its difficult to even stop eating unhealthy food, and thats not even difficult.
It is if you are poor. Healthy food costs more than junk, in the short-term.
Ah yes, didnt think about that. I dont blame any poor people for doing what they need to survive. I would steal food and do what is required if I needed to.
That's not even difficult? Get out more, man.
I dont think its difficult. Nobody has a gun to my head forcing me to do it.
Difficult things in life are things like being permanently sick, disabled, being poor, being ugly, being bullied, being with a toxic partner, having a toxic boss etc.
But not eating unhealthy food, thats not difficult. Unless you are poor, like someone said above. Then its difficult because you cant choose something else.
See I had forgotten the one golden rule of capitalism. To thrive in capitalism one must be amoral. Now you can be wildly sickeningly successful with morals but you cannot reach that absolute zenith of shareholder value. Either you accept a lower share price and don’t commit atrocities or you become evil. There is no third option.
Spot on.
Even better.
Most instances have human moderation, gating for bots, and yes, and you actually have to take 5-10 minutes to figure out how it all works, so the stupid people are automatically excluded by sheer complexity.
I fucking love Mastodon.
Plenty of stupid people in the fediverse so I dont think we will win any prices for that, guys. And plenty of people who think they are smarter than average, and zero people who think they are dumber than average. The usual stuff.
What if someone KNEW that they were dumber than average - wouldn't that make them smarter by definition? :-P
That's not the problem. The problem is how fucking slow it is. It has such few users, I see the same post in the early am as the late pm. IRL I'm an introvert, but online I'm a social fucking butterfly, and I need to give and receive attention. Also, you are highly overestimating yourself if you think dumb people can figure this out, because I'm dumb af
I know you probably didn't mean this, but I don't think accessibility barriers are good. Diversity of thought is strength and bad comments naturally sink to the bottom.
After seeing how many terrorist ideologies have been allowed to thrive by claiming First Amendment protection since 2016.
No.
"Diversity of thought" my ass. I'm sure your wonderfully-diverse thoughts are just what all of us need to hear, but if they can't pass muster under human moderation, they're not worth platforming.
Turning to authorities to suppress fascism doesn't seem practical. We need to cultivate good democratic systems and education systems that create citizens capable of thinking critically and turning down bad ideologies on their own. Citizens should be empowered, not coddled.
LOL
Referring to self-hosting, human moderators as "authorities" is hilarious.
I remember when, here in Missouri, the people wanted to regulate predatory payday lenders. Those opposed called their fucking organizations "Such and Such for Equal Credit Access". Sounds nice right? Almost like the term "Diversity of Thought".
What you refer to as "empowerment", I refer to as a cancer. It needs to be cut out, like they did back in the day on Cable Street.
If you feel so disempowered, go have a conversation with Grok. He'll make you feel super special.
Apologies, I think we are talking past each other. I think I misunderstood your initial comment. It read like a suggestion that lemmy's more extreme communities were terroristic and a criticism of the first amendment, which suggested that you believe the government should be allowed to dictate what kind of speech is or isn't acceptable -- in particular on these little platforms. My comment was in response to that notion.
Re-reading it with your second comment, I think you're saying that "terrorist ideologies" have been allowed to develop on conventional social-media by claiming first amendment protections in order to not moderate communities, and 2016 was not in reference to early lemmy but to the MAGA movement. That makes more sense, and I generally agree that conventional social-media follows irresponsible stewardship practices.
Pretending these comments only come from "stupid" people is abelist and provably false.
I am defending those with barriers, not fascists.
Stupid people can just use AI, so nothing is truly barred, not like it requires more than a 3rd grade reading level either. Your post being upvoted this much shows how easy it is for the average NPC to make an account.
It's also one of the most nitpicky whiny places you can visit. A new open source software/update just got released and it does something cool! "Well it's not {x} compliant so it's trash." Or "If a solo developer or a team decides to use 'AI' then their entire project is AI slop."
There are so many moments where I'm like "just shut the fuck up and enjoy the software/news/updates these strangers are providing for free."
It’s full of leftist purity testing, that’s for sure. And, you can’t say certain things even if they are actually true.
People are far less aggressive with their opinions compared to reddit. 90-95% of people here are decent people though with strong opinions. And as long as I can have a civil discussion with someone I think it's a decent enough place to be, no matter what bias.
Yeah fuck that. I'd rather everyone just be themselves.
Purity testing is a good thing, it keeps shit out of your milk and feds out of your org
i block tankie instances, and tankie posts.
And the eight and final rule of fediverse, if this is your first time discussing linux distros, you have to fight.
I like Plasma KDE. Now grab your stick.
Felt.
One of my policies to make this place less insufferable, is to block people who behave in ways that I object to.
For example if somebody shows up in a Windows thread, and just types in "Linux!" I'm blocking that person. Add something germane or novel or fuck right the fuck off, that's my attitude.
Amen!
This was a great read to start my day, thank you!
The Australian Subreddits got overrun by extremist right wing people who tend to be 20x louder than anyone else, and exaggerate everything.
One even reported me for being racist (successfully) despite the fact that the entire time I was fighting back against the racism
Even worse, you now need to log in to even see it at all in a mobile browser. So f that
I was perma banned for calling someone "A fucking piece of human garbage" as they openly and brazenly advocated for the death of trans people.
I got banned, the person calling for Trans people to be killed did not.
That's unfortunately pretty standard.
Whereas, on Facebook, nobody gets banned. I've literally reported people inciting violence towards others. However, it seems permitted by community standards these days
At least the person who argued with me got swept up in whatever bot was Permabanning people too
The Australian Subreddits got overrun by extremist right wing people who tend to be 20x louder than anyone else, and exaggerate everything.
I don;'t think this is just Australian issue
Probably not. There used to be shitty subs like the Donald and fat people hate too.
Stuff like this is why I banned Reddit first.
Those same fuckers are on a roll now, winning one MP seat.
Yeah. And they were apparently "never going to win in SA either". Everyone was happy with that result. SA is happy they lost, and ON supporters were somehow happy with being absolute failures too 😂
Yeah and if you're IP banned your fucked
If you're not shadow banned
I suspect they shadow banned me first for a few days, and probably pissed off a few racists who kept watching my account.
I had an account for 10+ years before deleting it and creating a new one. My old account never even got banned from a subreddit once in all that time. And I had other accounts Before that, so I suspect I was targeted on the last account I bothered with
Waves
Lol
the only problem is the lack of niche from like in some reddit subs, not main subs, and people there are unlikely to migrate here. plus the bots therer drum all the engagement to get people interested. when an instance vanishes it takes the content with them and i dint see the last one recover from it.
It takes very little effort to open and run a community here, be the change you want to see. :)
I disagree. It's easy if you want to use a community as your personal blog without any interaction from others. It's hard to get an actual community running.
People are more likely to participate if you are. :) But if the space exists, natural discovery can happen too. You do not have to do much more than open the conversation.
I generally agree with activite communities being a self reinforcing feedback loop. That said, one of the challenges federation creates is fragmentation for "the same" community across multiple instances. As a result, each community appears relatively inactive as they're all vying for engagement with each other.
@IMALlama @fediverse Is this bad? Seems like this lets the “best” community rise to the top, for whatever definition of “best” the community chooses. Otherwise you start interfering with freedoms and setting a judge to decide what communities “should” be
That's ok though, this place is a slow burn.
I was just talking about this on discord (unironically). Something I genuinely miss about reddit (among other things) is being able to go to a TV show subreddit and engage on topics by strictly quoting lines from the show back at each other. But to have that meant all the other shit, where you can't quote Wayne's World 2 without automod thinking you're advocating violence. The world I want and the world we have cannot seem to co-exist. And I am not sure it should. I'm just not sure it shouldn't either. And my side is always losing.
That's where I'm at too. I never spent much time on the bigger subs on Reddit. Mostly spent my time in the special interest/hobby subs. There were some pretty awesome communities in there. Unfortunately, I wandered out of my lane, and I decided to tell some MAGA assclown that he wasn't just licking boots, he was deep throating them. According to Reddit, this was harassment, even though this prick was going around saying Alex Pretti deserved to die. As a result, I was permabanned. Oh well.
FYI, I'm doing it to build a brand.
Now please subscribe to my newsletter!
The tickets for Fediretreat are selling fast. Grab yours now!
I'm so hyped for fedipalooza
Fedi Wap as Headliner?
Wet ass piefed?
Your ideas intrigue me.
Beans company?
my voyager has counted badly few updoots to you for that!
I’m having a blast here.
Not only because it gives you the content that you choose. And there’s no shorts, no ads, …no superfluous bs (god I hate fb, I fucking loathe it).
But also, everything is within reach. The options are within the options. Done.
People talk a lot about the protocols that power Bluesky vs. ActivityPub, because we're nerds and we believe deep in our hearts that the superior protocol will win. This is adorable. It flies in the face of literally all of human history, where the more convenient thing always wins regardless of technical merit. VHS beat Betamax. USB-C took twenty years.
Hopefully, unlike betamax and laserdisc, the fediverse will trudge on despite the megacorporate protocols
FOSS dominates by sheer persistence growing slowly as everything else burns bright and extinguishes until it's the best remaining option.
It's the slow way, but it's the right way.
you don't need special equipment to use the fediverse, so imo it's unlikely it will "fail"
Yeah and I'd like to see it become increasingly scrappy and decentralised using lightweight fedi software like snac.
i love lemmy for what it is now. it sadly doesn’t have some communities as active here as reddit may, like stuff for soccer in particular for me, but it’s solid for everything else
To me it feels like Reddit mini
The whole "look" of lemmy seems to be an homage to reddit but the hate levels are really dialed down here and there seems to be more reasonable people.
Are you kidding me? I never had devoted haters stalking me on Reddit.
I learnt something new today, cheers
And it has not enough users. If the fediverse ever became popular enough to hold significant marketshare, we'd see similar issues. The upside to the fediverse is that you can defederate from misinformation peddlers.
Fediverse doesn't (as of yet) have a monetization path because of it's "self hosted" structure - I put it in quotes because most people use large instances, but anyone can spin up their own and federate.
The big risk with this is that if it reaches a critical mass where advertisers see potential for profit, the mechanism that would be most convenient, especially with LLMs, is bots.
Say Toyota wants to promote their new car. They contract an advertising agency, who spins up a few dozen LLM agents trained on Lemmy data and instructions to talk up the latest new car. It might make posts, or just comments, but in all cases it will eventually promote that product.
All that for the cost of a few tokens, and the only giveaway would be the "AI phrasing", if anyone catches it.
That's already happening. Bots are posting from open instances, and malicious instances are manipulating votes.
The best solution I see is allowlisting servers you want to federate with.
Add Twitter as well
Good that lemmy doesn't show karma otherwise this place would have become another regreddit.
@ekZepp funny, I thought this is what Google search is nowadays:
"Threads was worthless because it’s the most boring social media website ever imagined. It’s a social media network designed by brands for brands, like if someone made a cable channel that was just advertisements and meta commentary about the advertisements you just saw. Billions of dollars at their disposal and Meta made a hot new social media network with the appeal of junk mail." @matdevdug
@ekZepp @matdevdug "So in this complete breakdown of the press came in the Fediverse. It became the only reliable source of information I had. People posted links with a minimal amount of commentary, picking and choosing the best content from other social media networks. They’re not doing it to “build a brand” because that’s not a thing in the Fediverse. It’s too disjointed to be a place to build a newsletter subscription base."
@ekZepp @matdevdug "Instead it became the only place consistently posting trustworthy information I could actually access. This became personally relevant when Trump threatened to invade Greenland, which is the kind of sentence I never expected to type and yet here we are. It would be funny if I wasn't a tiny bit concerned that my new home was going to get a CIA overnight regime change special in the middle of the night."
LOL Oh dear! LOL
Good read, but I think the author touched on something that is way more troubling. Sure, you can get reliable information from regular people who are living in other parts of the world, but spreading that information with any kind of veracity is almost impossible due to the collapse in public trust of mainstream media.
If I say something with any degree of authority or confidence, someone in the comments will inevitably chant the ancestral magic spell "Source?!" and suddenly my evidence of a conversation with a stranger on the internet is reduced to merely anecdotal at best. Able to be dismissed outright without thought or care.
However, if I post a link to some legacy media rag, existing in the modern day as a mere husk being puppeteered by corporate oligarchs, wearing the skin of a legitimate and trustworthy news source, the credibility of the information is then called into question by anybody reasonable - knowing full well that right-wing governments have managed to capture most of the remaining independent reporting, or at least have threatened them with who-knows-what in an attempt to influence their press releases that would otherwise paint the government or any of their cronies in a negative light. If someone decides that the provided source doesn't line up with their narrative, it's hilariously easy to attack the reporting itself as being "fake news".
The brain shuts off, and information gets siloed. Objective reality is no longer shared. We are still living in a state of simply believing whatever we want to believe and the few people who are able to break out of that are not going to be influential enough to have an effect on anything. We can pat ourselves on the back for not being a group of people concerned with being brand-builders, I guess, but in the end it's a meaningless victory.
Welcome to the post-modern era of truth. Where objective reality doesn't matter, only personal truth and reality. If what you're saying doesn't fit my personal truth, you're using fake news or making it up. Even scientific research is fake news if it doesn't fit my narrative. Just look at who funded the research.
Honestly, idk what we're going to do. It feels like with all the age verification laws being pushed, the mass surveillance, and the quelling of dissenting opinions, the world admins are looking at 1984 as a guidebook. Are we going to get a Ministry of Truth established soon to "verify" what is accurate and what is not?
Not sure I understand your point. Your self reported experiences, as a random internet stranger in a sea of bots and malevalent actors, IS only amecdotal at best.
Personally, I think you just proved their point. Anything they know from talking to people who know things is immediately dismissed with "oh, it's anecdotal at best".
Source? ;)
So here is a stupid question
What exactly is the fediverse? What's included in it? I've hear much about fediverse and Lemmy, but is Lemmy part of it or not? Are other systems like Blue sky a part of it or not? Do I transparently see posts from all those different systems?
What exactly is the fediverse?
Servers that can federate over ActivityPub protocol. Any server that uses ActivityPub can be considered part of the fediverse.
What’s included in it?
Clones of corporate owned sites: twitter (mastodon, misskey), tumblr (wafrn), reddit (lemmy, piefed), facebook (friendica), plus others
I’ve hear much about fediverse and Lemmy, but is Lemmy part of it or not?
Yes, it is
Are other systems like Blue sky a part of it or not?
Bluesky isn't, since they use a different protocol, but it's possible to bridge and interact with it. Wafrn does it.
Do I transparently see posts from all those different systems?
This is the biggest "it depends" situation. For instance, by default, lemmy ignores most posts from mastodon and similars. However, mastodon users can post to lemmy communities if they use the proper @, but they cannot specify a title - their post body will also double as the title. They can also reply to comments, they're easy to spot because they always have an @user when replying.
Some server types integrate the different things better than others. Friendica and Wafrn seem to be the best for "variety integration".
You asked five questions, none of them are stupid.
What exactly is the fediverse? What's included in it.
I have heard two definitions in use. The first is narrower, it refers to the collection of servers running compatible Reddit-alike software including Lemmy, Mbin and Piefed which are pretty much 1 to 1 compatible and communicating with users on one from another is more or less seamless. The big, distributed Reddit alternative that allows you to post from lemmy.ca onto lemmy.world and me to read it from sh.itjust.works.
The second is the broader, simpler definition of "anything that runs on the ActivityPub protocol and is federated with something else." Which includes all of the above plus the likes of Peertube, Mastodon, Pixelfed, Loops etc. They are technically cross-compatible, I'll get to that later.
Is Lemmy part of it or not?
Yes it is, Lemmy runs on ActivityPub.
Are other systems like Bluesky part of it or not?
Some are, some aren't. A few examples:
- BlueSky. Not part of the Fediverse, it uses a different protocol, their own thing. It is sort of designed to federate but not really in practice.
- Diaspora. Similar concept of federated social media, but not compatible with ActivityPub. The Coke to our Pepsi.
- Truth Social. It is my understanding that The Church Of Trump is basically a fork of Mastodon. They don't federate though, they turn that feature off thank a long list of random deities and WWE wrestlers.
- Threads. Meta/Facebook's Twitter clone. IS part of the Fediverse, it uses ActivityPub and has federation turned on, though a lot of instances defederate with them on principle. You can interact with Threads from a Lemmy instance. ...If it still exists. Is Threads still a thing?
Do I transparently see posts from all those different systems?
Yes and no. You can kind of think of the Fediverse like the Universe itself in that there's nowhere you can stand and see the entire thing. You and I are from neighboring star systems in the same galaxy, we're both on servers running Lemmy, so we can communicate completely seamlessly. I see a comment immediately above you from someone on piefed.social, they're on a server running Piefed, not Lemmy. That's another Reddit-alike, they can communicate with us pretty easily. You might occasionally see someone on Mastodon chime in. You can usually spot this because they the users they're replying to. It would be really cool if a Mastodon user could reply to this message to demonstrate. As you get farther afield, it kinda stops working. It's difficult to interact with Peertube from Lemmy, for example. I have commented on a Peertube video from a Pixelfed account though.
I mean, over in Twitterlike fedi it's called "the fediverse" there, too!
-- Frost
Not a stupid question at all. Loosely, I think, it's any site that trades information using the ActivityPub protocol. Because they use the same underlying protocol, they can easily trade content/posts with each other and yes, Lemmy is part of the Fediverse for that reason.
This is also why you can see posts from lemmy.ca or piefed.social or whatever.domain users while browsing lemmy.world - anyone who sets up a site with the Lemmy software can participate in the network and trade posts with all the others - these are individually called instances. These sites can decide that they don't want to trade posts with certain other sites (ie: trolls set up a farm on their own instance) and exclude them from their users being able to see them, this is called defederation.
In theory, a Mastodon instance could see content from a Lemmy instance (and Pixelfed and Loops and so on) as they all use the same underlying protocol to trade information, but in practice, it seems that sites basically stick to trading with other sites in their wheelhouse.
BlueSky also started with ActivityPub but I believe they did something to their software to make it proprietary.
The usefulness of all this is: no member site can get a monopoly on content. The largest Lemmy site is lemmy.world and I have an account on there. I switched to dbzer0 because I disagreed with some of the actions taken by lemmy.world (they defederated from some content that I wanted to see) so I came over here and now I can see that content.
Anyway, that's my understanding of it.
In theory, a Mastodon instance could see content from a Lemmy instance (and Pixelfed and Loops and so on) as they all use the same underlying protocol to trade information, but in practice, it seems that sites basically stick to trading with other sites in their wheelhouse.
Whenever you see somebody linking to the user they're replying to at the beginning of their comment, you're likely seeing somebody posting from Mastodon because their UI is user-feed-oriented instead of thread-oriented.
Interesting, that never occurred to me. I said that about the wheelhouse because I have a Mastodon account I read from time to time and I can't recall ever seeing any Lemmy content show in my feed. I never did Twitter though so I'm kind of lost, it might be I just don't know what I'm doing. I followed like 40 hashtags but I still don't get a huge amount of content.
@HAL_9_TRILLION @grue It looks like this! I looked up the comment URL on my mastodon account, which enabled me to reply from there.
BlueSky also started with ActivityPub but I believe they did something to their software to make it proprietary.
Friendly correction: BlueSky tried to use AP(ActivityPub) but they had problems with it (like user migrations). So they made their own protocol called the AT Protocol (Authenticated Transfer). ATProto is also an open protocol like AP and they are currently working to get it standardised: https://atproto.com/blog/kicking-off-the-atp-working-group
All software BlueSky uses is open source and self-hostable and already a bunch of different implementations have started to pop up independently. Sadly BlueSky still has the vast majority of users (like 90%) using their infrastructure.
While I don't like BlueSky as a company, the software they are using is open.
All software BlueSky uses is open source and self-hostable and already a bunch of different implementations have started to pop up independently.
Oh that's cool. So where can I sign up to interact with BlueSky users if I don't want to sign up to BlueSky?
Here is eurosky: https://portal.eurosky.tech/
Here is blacksky: https://blacksky.app/
Here is bookhive (a lot smaller): https://bookhive.social/
I found all of them by looking through the PDS index: https://atproto.at/pdsesand selecting ones with enough users to signify open registration.
Here is a guide to self-hosting: https://atproto.com/guides/self-hosting#pds
All of these are links to PDS servers. These are the servers that contain all of your data. You can log into any ATProto apps using these accounts.
The fediverse is the overarching architecture. So lemmy is part of the fediverse. It is a federated collection of servers that are somewhat independent, but still part of the system. I'm going to make a very poor analogy, but think of it like your spice cabinet. The individual spices are instances while the cabinet itself is the fediverse. Or at least that's my understanding of it. If I'm mistaken, please someone enlighten me.
There are no bots making empty arguments or basing the news.
We want, we post, we dont, we dont.
Simpleverse.
We donut
I am having a great time exploring the Fediverse and of course having a blast here in Lemmy. That said I have found a lot of limitations as well that makes the Fediverse work "for real" when you want to go in deep into the federation part of it. For example I was really trying to move away from instagram and I wanted to create my own instance of Pixel fed. The expectation is that I have my own instance in the fediverse I can own and I can connect to the rest of the network. The reality is that from your little bubble you can't see old posts from accounts on other servers. Only new ones. Which does not really make it work for real. There are plenty of other use cases that work better, but assuming that's the "only way" and it's perfect is not being fully honest. A lot of people like to shit on ATproto, but it's a protocol that feels less extreme on federation and more friendly on the "normal person" usability part of it. Every person have their own needs in the end.
I can't speak to how Pixelfed works, but PieFed pulls in old posts. e.g. when lemm.ee (a Lemmy instance) shut down, several communities were migrated, including its old content.
Perhaps one day Pixelfed will implement that as well.
I really hope so! That was a big let down moment.
Tbf all of these tools - and Pixelfed more than most - are so very new, and being developed on a shoestring budget using volunteer efforts that are not seeking capitalistic remuneration. And being able to pull in old posts is a very niche feature that affects an instance pretty much only once, upon its initial creation and then never again, so it might not be a top priority for its dev team to implement. Though a lot of teams for Fediverse tools (like PieFed) tend to be quite responsive, and pinging them may help them realize that it needs to be done sooner, i.e. communication of that may be helpful rather than annoying?
Whereas ATproto's main downsides lay in it lacking "robustness" for the future - what happens when like pretty much every Internet company that ever existed (Google, Meta, Amazon, etc.), they decide to switch from attempts to attract a wider user base to trying to monetizate its content? Suddenly all those ATproto connections become a liability where someone can access the content held hostage therein without having to watch advertisements that benefit the main branch, thereby switching the collaborative model to a competitive one.
ATproto is strictly better in the short term, and will cause much pain later on, as opposed to the Fediverse that has some onboarding and ongoing pains now but to some people offer better hopes for the future of a more unfettered/unconstrained method of interaction between people, where control is placed more democratically into the hands of the end users rather than centralized authorities.
yo dog. let me tell ya all about the neighborhood you live in!
I watched a Greenlandic toddler munch meat from the spine of a seal with its head very much intact.
I kind of want to know the context of this
Also, do seals taste more like fish or more like mammal? Or like whale?
Idk, it looks disgusting and is overall described as fishy and oily.
There is someone on Reddit saying its like a mix of Ahi Tuna and Moose lmao. Unfortunately I have never had straight Moose steak, so I can't really imagine it.
HAHA! THEY'VE BEEN BAMBOOZLED! HOISTED! WHAT BUFFOONS!
This is weird ass article. It's like the author has never used an Internet forum before and didn't understand how the Internet works.
Don't stop at the Fediverse. Keep going. You've only just begun.
Wow. I had to stop reading this one. Long on words, poor on writing and spelling and neither circling a theme so much as just edgelording on everything social, I'm not sure whether it was ever getting somewhere.
But life's too short for 6000 words on The Things That Suck With Stuff I Don't Use.
Weird I thought the fediverse was mostly delusional leftists talking about how great life is in North Korea, China and Russia and how bad the imperial west is.
Lemmy is a small part of the fediverse and the tankie triad is a small part of Lemmy. Barely ever seen that stuff on Mastodon and co.
Weird. It's mostly techie nerds. Not all lefties are communists.
Not at all but you will encounter a lot of gays and shit
And furries! 🐺
Which are surprisingly interesting!