There is perennial discussion about what fediverse servers (Lemmy or otherwise) to recommend to new users. I have a proposal, perhaps not very original but I haven’t seen it made often.
Let’s just recommend that newbies pick an instance that is located close to them geographically. That’s to say: their country, their region, or (ideally) their town.
Some context. Personally, I am not totally sold on social media, federated or otherwise. The evidence is now pretty clear that it causes major social harms. One way it does this is by fuelling polarization around hot-button national and international debates, at the expense of local issues. Reviving democracy is going to mean boosting communities at a local level. This could be a small way to do that.
Maybe I could see country or even general region, but town?? Why would I want to publicly give away my location like that?
Your choice, it’s just a generic recommendation.
That’s exactly my point. Giving away the exact town you live in to strangers on the Internet is not good advice to give people generically.
If the user likes none of the regional instances he/she knows of, should the user recommend things he/she doesn’t like?
Similarly, some instances have more clear-cut niches. If the user finds such an instance to be a good recommendation to someone interested in the fediverse, should he/she avoid it if it’s too far physically from the interested user?
A niche instance can also be a good home, especially if the person identifies strongly with the theme. Regional is a good starting point for users with mainstream interests.
When I think a regional community could be good:
If the user doesn’t speak English, or if neither the one recommending nor the one interested know at all what the latter wants.
And in the second case, a generalist instance like Lemmy.World or Mastodon.Social would be better, I think.
Everyone can do what they like. I just believe we have a small opportunity to strengthen our offline communities, and we should take that opportunity.
There’s only one mexican instance, it uses a whitelist and it fucking federates with grad so… Yeah, out of options.
I’ve been here since the reddit API exodus and I’ve never seen a latinamerican comm in my feed, much less latinamerican spanish posts.
And hosting an instance is not that simple, it requires effort, content, time, some originality and money (even if a little)… And people who want to join, but I’ve seen maybe 1 mexican (who I assume lives in México too) other than me… Because mexicans love being strangled by meta, so there’s little to no incentive into creating a space for us in the fediverse.
It surprises me a whole lot how few Hispanic instances there is, as far as I know feddit.cl is the biggest and kinda the only proper one.
And I’ve never seen their posts on my feed… I’ll try searching some comms from there to here and see if it was just missing active federation.
And being the cynical asshole that I am… It doesn’t surprise me at all, the technological ignorance is huge in latinamerica and we are stubborn as fuck, people just don’t want to learn or try anything different, even if it could be better.
There’s only one mexican instance
Join it and make it better.
it uses a whitelist and it fucking federates with grad
Change that fact, or accept it, or use blocking features (which are not lacking).
Sure, these won’t be popular suggestions, but IMO social media should not be just another form of shopping, where we pick exactly what agrees with us best, and annoys us least, and then lock the door to keep everything else out.
Your views here go against the nature of the fediverse. You’re telling people they should go there and be unhappy with their choices. That’s not how the fediverse works.
The fediverse way to to spun up a Mexican server which does have the views and federation people want, and encourage others to join naturally.
Well, if the true nature of the fediverse is to encourage people to silo themselves into echo chambers where they never have to deal with others who don’t already share all their values and opinions - if that’s truly the point of this thing - then yes, apparently I’m wasting my time here. I still hope there’s a better way.
Ah I believe this is the Either/Or logical fallacy.
People not wanting to see hate speech or propaganda does not mean they are in echo chambers. Those are two different things.
It also doesn’t stand with my original statement. Go set up your own instance that is welcoming. That would prove that it’s not an echo chamber and expand the fediverse. Win win from what I see. Let us know when it’s up.
People not wanting to see hate speech or propaganda does not mean they are in echo chambers.
You know that bad guys are now calling your ideas “hate speech” and “propaganda”, right? And they believe it as much as you do. How do you propose to get out of this mess if not by talking?
And I believe this logical fallacy is Moral Equivalence.
We’re not comparing here, I’m not biting on the rage bait. Again, the proposed solution stands. Set up your own instance and prove us all wrong, show us how to make this utopia you promise.
Since when am I proposing a utopia? I’m proposing that people talk to people in their physical communities. Nothing more ambitious than that.
They said why they don’t join there: federation with unsavory instances
Yes and I answered that argument
But then you’re supporting an instance that in turn supports something you don’t agree with. lemmy.world federated with a furry server and I don’t mind just blocking it because I don’t want to see it…but if something like hexbear gets federated, I’m gone.
This - IMO - is the kind of thinking that has got US politics into the state it’s in today.
Nah, being tolerant of intolerance is how we got here. Don’t need to hear from the “other side” anymore
That’s exactly what they’re saying - and believing - about you. Meanwhile they have the power. Good luck.
As a US-based person, just no. It is not desirable to host anything here or to trust any US-based service for a number of reasons.
I think ICE is the scariest thing the US has done in decades. The online world is not even important compared to the evil stuff they are doing.
It just shows a mentality in Trump that is similar to Hitler. Also that he murders people on Venezuelas boats without any trial or legal actions. Just murders them.
So yeah. I will actually move my stuff away from aws even. I dont want any US in my life.
Now this is a good reason to move a community to a different region.
This need not concern the physical location of the servers, just their purpose and audience.
Gotcha, I suppose I was reading into this a bit too much:
pick an instance that is located close to them geographically
Definitely agree with your idea in this case.
Right. Midwest.social is not hosted in the US, but it’s for the Midwest region of the US.
If we look at how toxic and racist the local city groups are on Reddit or Facebook, I’m not sure this is a good model. If I’m a black trans woman living in a small town in Mississippi, my local instance might not even be a safe place, for me.
Similarly, I would encourage blind folks to join us at rblind.com rather than a local instance, because a local instance might not take our needs into account: many have captchas, some use inaccessible themes, etc. At rblind.com you can be sure that we won’t deploy an update or configuration change that will break accessibility, because the server admins and moderators are all blind ourselves. But the beauty of federation means that you can talk to everyone else on other instances, so being part of a particular identity group doesn’t limit you to just talking to other members of that group.
Well the solution to living in a toxic locality isn’t just to seclude yourself and stick to non local social networks, things only improve if you try to improve them despite the hostility and resistance, you have to take up space and confront those racists and homophones locally, but at the same time I see no reason to stay away from larger non local platforms that are supportive and help you
Sarcasm: Yup. The black people who were lynched should have just participated in local communities and confronted the KKK! That’ll fix everything!
Anyway, online isn’t the place to take up space and confront people. You do that in person. Online is where you come to get support, encouragement, and resources for the in-person fight. And that doesn’t work if your online profile is also local. For many people, there online participation cannot, and should not, be geographically local. Remember the “good old days” of the local BBS that you had to dial into? Isn’t it interesting that every single documentary full of sepia toned reminiscences about how wonderful those local communities were is entirely created by and featuring old middle-class white dudes? No women, no homosexuals or transsexuals, no people with disabilities, and no ethnic minorities? I wonder why!
Again, speaking from personal experience: blind people had NFBNet, but it wasn’t local. And the local BBS’s had so much ASCII art and other accessibility issues that we couldn’t participate.
And now, on local Reddits and Facebook groups, nobody uses alt text. I guess that’s my fault for not participating in a space that is completely inaccessible to me. I’m the problem with democracy!
Didn’t black people intentionally go into segregated venus and refuse to leave in order to confront the racists and push back against the discrimination, I’m not saying you need to fight for inclusion in online spaces, I meant in real life
This is a shit take. OP doesn’t know how the internet works. Join any instance that you like, and subscribe to the community that has a topic based on your geographical region.
I’m a member of the .world instance but I don’t even live in this planet.
Suckers.
Yeah I looked into migrating to earth but overall it didn’t seem like a great idea. Most of the world is rife with hatred of aliens and has a very much higher percentage of trafficking aliens than native peoples. They seem to be highly focused on competing against each other rather than helping their societys grow together. When was there last war, today… that number hasn’t changed in thousands of cycles. An atmospheric scan shows catestorfic changes making it inhabitable for many life forms on the planet and yet still while thousands of species have died off around them, the primary “intelligent” species ignores it while lying to their peers trying to swindle themselves into a better standing so they can think they are better than others while dooming near everything. Maybe I’ll go in after the next thaw in about 65,000 cycles.
Putting aside your insults and arrogant tone, I’ll just stress that my suggestion is political, it has nothing to do with technical factors.
Yes, and no. If you want to run specific community types - it might be better to be on a more ‘general’ or topical instance rather than a community geographically relevant to your country.
Moreover, some national instances don’t have Piefed equivalents yet.
Many (maybe most) non-anglophones are already doing that …
… depending on your definition of “local”. Where are the big anglophone servers located, anyway?
Agreed. And it’s not a zero-sum game.
The fact I’m on english speaking fediverse doesn’t mean I’m not on the finnish speaking fediverse.
And what instance I’m on has absolutely no bearing on which one I spend my time.
It’s frustrating to see the largest instance recommended all the time since it’s rather heavy on censorship
To counter my own argument, that’s partly because that instance is less likely to go away or suffer downtime than one run by a single person and with 10 active users. It’s partly why I signed up to it (also because nobody was telling me to do otherwise).
There currently aren’t many of those.
Due to the rate of federation being limited by latency, instances have actually been re-locating to mostly Europe, so they can more easily keep up with each other.
Basically, every federated event needs to propagate, but the next one can’t be sent out before the last one is received and an aknowledgement comes back.
That means a higher latency makes an instance federate at a lower rate, causing it to fall behind. Eventually, some instances were having activity from .world show up with days of delay due to being on the other side of the world.
But since your point is mostly ideological/cultural, that doesn’t really matter. You’re talking about identity, not infrastructure.
Which kinda defeats your point. Geography doesn’t matter. You can set up a finnish community on a swedish instance and vice versa.
And I’m not sure what you mean by “reviving democracy”.
The fediverse is explicitly NOT democratic. It’s run by a large group of benevolent dictators (admins and mods) who maintain the environment they and the users of their respective instances and communities desire.
They are kept in line not by votes, but by the fact that any one of them can be defederated by the rest, and they can all be supplanted by any one user with the desire to set up their own instance or community.
The reason Lemmy doesn’t have local communities, is not structural. It’s size.
There are some finnish communities that can just barely be considered active. But if you further divided that down to cities, you’d have maybe one post a year.
I’m sorry, this is not how federation works, and if it were truly as limited as “one activity at a time”, moving a community to an entirely different continent is a fantastically short sighted idea.
Moving geographically closer to something else is important if you need real-time savings (e.g. high frequency trading, scientific research). ActivityPub is an asynchronous communications protocol built upon technology with decent if occasionally dubious reliability. Doing something this drastic to shave off ~100ms is not correct.
Please do not condescend.
I know it doesn’t have to work that way, but for a time, it did.
Here is one of the github issues on the problem.
And yes. It led to instance relocations.
It was either don’t federate, and wait for an update with unknown eta, or move closer to the big instances.
Afaik it is a specific implementation issue in Lemmy that causes this. Instances in Australia had problems catching up with lemmy.world because of that.
This has been solved 7 months ago: https://lemmy.dbzer0.com/post/42049808
It wasn’t just a problem. It was literally impossible for them to keep up.
Re-locating the server was the only option, as opposed to skipping events or shutting down until the problem was fixed.
Due to the rate of federation being limited by latency, instances have actually been re-locating to mostly Europe, so they can more easily keep up with each other.
Any examples for that? Latency causing instances not being able to keep up with federation is new to me.
Thanks! Didn’t know Lemmy doesn’t have something like an ingress queue
That issue being two years, I’m not sure what the current state of things is.
But servers did move towards EU to combat the problem, and haven’t moved back for what I know.
Issue was fixed several months ago, but yeah it was a problem for quite a while
Was not aware of the latency issue. But that’s something that can surely be overcome.Apparently it’s been fixed.By “reviving democracy” I mean just that. Democracy is in a bad way and it’s partly because of the changed information environment. The crisis of professional journalism has decimated local news. People don’t know their neighbors or what’s going on in their communities. This is not an original observation.
Was not aware of the latency issue. But that’s something that can surely be overcome.
I haven’t checked. I may have been already.
As a support structure providing more open communication, the fediverse might help with that. It in itself is not, and is not supposed to be, democratic. It’s its own wierd mix of dictatorship with the option for the community at large to wrest control away from current leaders, should they want to.
As of now, preferring “going local” would hinder more than help with irl democracy. There just aren’t enough users. If you divided them you’d end up with a ton of tiny inactive communities, rather than a bigish pretty lively one.
And it’s not an either or. Or you can have big communities AND small local ones.
Smaller communities are also something that happens naturally, and is already happening naturally. The reddit exodus was the spark for a ton of new niches on lemmy hitting critical mass.
There is also plenty of non-english, more local activity already. You just might not be seeing it due to your language settings.
The latency issue has been solved 7 months ago: https://lemmy.dbzer0.com/post/42049808
As a support structure providing more open communication, the fediverse might help with that. It in itself is not, and is not supposed to be, democratic
This was not my point. My point is that social media will always encourage “niches” (as you hint) and that it would be better for our politics if these overlapped with real-world communities than with, say, obscure hobbies (neutral politically) or political affiliation (the original sin of this new medium).
I don’t agree.
You present two things as if they are mutually exclusive, when they are not.
The very starting point of your argument seems to be that current niche communities can only exist at the expense of local geographic communities.
As such, you seem to suggest sacrificing existing communities in favor of hypothetical “better” communities based on physical proximity.
Such communities are useful in terms of political mobilization, but they aren’t very fun. People don’t bond over tax rates, they bond over tabletop rpgs, cats, music, movies, etc. And you can’t engage in those bonding activities in local communities until they themselves are big enough to contain such niches within them.
And all of these things can exist simultaneously. In fact I completely reject your view that niche online communities do more harm than good.
Boiled down, your view seems to equate to seeing a bunch of people having fun, and telling them to go do something useful, while completely dismissing that it doesn’t matter whether I learn empathy from my neighbor, or someone on the other side of the world.
What you’re asking for, IMO, is for the fediverse to work more like facebook and twitter, which HEAVILY bias their feeds towards local matters. The US would not have been so easy to turn into a xenophobic ball of angry people if their social media were MORE international.
TikTok is even worse about it. The one time I gave it a chance, it was 90% content local to me. But it was mindless trash. At worst, it was xenophobic rhetoric. Local, doesn’t mean meaningful, or good.
You saw it on reddit all the time, how people from the US often didn’t even realize they were talking to people across the world. Because it’s a foreign concept to them. Say what you will but it is the one corporate platform that doesn’t care where you are from. Everyone discussing something gets pooled into the same communities and threads, regardless of age, sex, or even timezone.
That is a good thing. We need more of that, not less. Because online and real-world communities DO overlap. But you seem to be asking them to match. That would isolate them, not empower them.
Online communities today are the one way that authentically bridges communities of people across the world. If online communities matched offline communities, why would I ever develop a desire to understand not just my neighbor, but also people across the world?
How would I ever go and find out for myself, how people across the world think and feel? Whether my government speaks true about the threats around us, or if there is more to it?
If you overlap a bunch of circles, they all become connected. If you match them, you get bubbles.
That is how corporate social media has been functioning for over a decade, and it needs to be stopped, not propagated. If we sort people into only one group (like where they are from), you isolate them.
But when you sort each person into least two groups or more, you connect everyone to everyone, by virtue of almost every group having members in common with every other group.
Seems to be a misunderstanding. My proposal concerns servers, not communities. It would do no more than responsibilize users (“your virtual home here has people who may be your neighbors”) and encourage them to join local communities where they might discuss local issues (rather than, say, US politics).
What youre asking for, IMO, is for the fediverse to work more like facebook and twitter, which HEAVILY bias their feeds towards local matters. The US would not have been so easy to turn into a xenophobic ball of angry people if their social media were MORE international.
Corporate social media is only biased towards local if you count the whole USA as “local”. Again, seems to be a misunderstanding. In the US case “local” would mean state or town.
My proposal concerns servers, not communities.
What’s the difference? Servers are communities.
encourage them to join local communities where they might discuss local issues
There’s that false dichotomy again. I think what instance someone is on has very little effect on what content they engage with. And if it does, this change would be detrimental rather than beneficial.
Corporate social media is only biased towards local if you count the whole USA as “local”. Again, seems to be a misunderstanding. In the US case “local” would mean state or town.
We must be using different corporate social media. Of course facebook, twitter and tiktok show different content depending on every factor there is. The thing is, they wont confront you with people from your town that have a different opinion. They are tuned towards NOT changing whatever opinion you already have, unless you’re pre-disposed to going down dopamine-laced rabbit holes.
Meanwhile, the fediverse does confront people with differing opinions. That it doesn’t necessarily do so locally, is a feature, not a bug.
You’re an argumentative fellow! I’m still not sure exactly what it is you’re disagreeing with. My proposal is pretty boring and inoffensive. Everything’s in the post. But if you disagree, that’s fine.
Servers are communities.
No they’re not. Communities have “c/” in front of their name. I’m sure you know that already.
It’s not clear where most of them are based. I am an American living in Czechia. I don’t see any Czech language ones (though I’d be using mostly English anyway), so my assumption is that there aren’t any in Czechia, which is likely wrong and just based on lack of info.
As a bubble-ensconced expat you’re likely in a different category!
But sure. My proposal is that if you sign up from a Czech IP, you get pushed to whatever’s the most local server with more than X active users, or X recent uptime ratio, for example.
I’m in the UK therefore: no.
Threadi is too small for that, if it had 2 million MAUs (50% English / 50 % other langues), what you are proposing would be semi-viable.
Between Lemmy / Piefed / Mbin, we have something like ~50 K MAUs tops.
So the recommended unit can be the nearest server with any critical mass. If you’re in Greece you get pushed to whatever’s the leading
.grserver. Ultimately it doesn’t matter much since we can all interact with everything via federation. My point is that this might responsibilize users more, and encourage communities to overlap with the offline world a bit more - a place where community is very much needed right now.But then you have the question of what do you define as critical mass and which specialized instances to exclude.
Don’t get me wrong, I support your idea and I generally think an instance should always be pre-selected for a new user (with an option to pick your own). Some of it should definitely be based on geo/regional factors.
Then openly express your political and moral beliefs in your community and see how civil your community is with you. Rinse and repeat many times over. I’m sure after doing this many times, you and them will have come to a mutually respectful understanding and have a greater understanding of the world, with your beliefs reinforced by having to defend them, and your views changed by sympathizing with each other. Everyone wins, and a stronger community and democratic consensus will have been achieved.
If you have read the above and thought, “Yes, exactly.” All I can say is, how nice for you. The rest of us have a reality to return to.
If the goal is “reviving democracy”, you need to go where the people are and that’s not the Fediverse.
That means sticking your toe in the local Facebook/Next Door and that can be problematic for a whole host of other reasons.
I disagree. You are just supporting that platform and it’s built to silo you so you will feel like you ke you are being heard but you will never reach “the masses”. Stay here, help build the fediverse, welcome people with open arms and make this a place people want to come. If we really believe this is both batter and scalelable, we need to keep building and more will come.
Yes indeed, but partly the problem with those places is that their bias towards conflict and toxicity is fueled by ad-based algorithms.
Oh, it absolutely is, AND they have many times the population of lemmy, AND they vote, AND they are largely misinformed.
We have an election here on Tuesday, there is only one thing to vote on, a property tax measure to support the local parks.
OMG the amount of bad information floating around on this!
You can deprogram some people, but getting people to understand that they are being lied to when they spout nonsense like “ZOMG! Property taxes going up 75%!!!” is a tall hill to climb.
Oh man, is it. That is exactly what got me banned from Reddit after 14 years. I’m on old.lemmy.zip and starting to spread out and check other instances and am finding so much delightful stuff! All of it is drama-free and I love it.
