With previous Rexit’s like the API debarcle etc. many users were left looking for an alternative, but with decision fatigue and bad UX etc. most did not find the Fediverse a viable option.
What needs to still improve, how can we be ready this time?
We need more content especially main stream topic and pop culture.
In the fediverse we have too much politics, lgbt, Linux and environmental topics. Don’t get me wrong those topics are great and should continue existing but your average Joe like other topics more.
When I switched during the API blackout, the first issue I ran into was just a lack of content. That’s definitely been resolved since. I think at this point it just comes down to how well they can pick up on the concept of the fediverse, and picking an instance.
The only way lack of content still pervades is in niches. If I specifically like Game X, chances are worse than not that there’s no activity in the community built for that one game.
Basically, I guess I need to write 8 alt-account posts/memes complaining about how the Ghoul is overpowered in Dead by Daylight.
chances are worse than not that there’s no activity in the community built for that one game.
Bold of you to assume there even is a community instead of just a random mention in [email protected] !
Quick, get into a war about your favorite character in Iconoclasts!
Mobile users can be pointed towards alternative clients. Makes the whole thing much more manageable and familiar. I use sync (which no longer seems to be being updated) but there are others. Don’t know if there’s a desktop equivalent but that might help with UX problems.
Also, re onboarding - many Lemmites might be astonished to realise how many non technical ppl don’t know what a server is and are intimidated by the term. Maybe just say something like ‘Click on the place nearest to you or that you like the sound of’. I dunno, a metaphor. Like, your computer is a toilet, the fediverse is the ocean. When you take a crap and flush, your turd goes to the local sewage facility where it parties with all the other turds before being dumped into the sea.
There’s probably a better metaphor, but, y’know.
are we ready?
idk how to get more people aware of fediverse without joining stuff like reddit again and getting banned repeatedly mentioning fediverse.
Let’s hope this time there won’t be a “boycott is over” moment.
There was a boycott is over moment? Isn’t reddit still blocking third party apps?
Basically a lot of people got their anger out, then moved on with their life.
I never boycotted Reddit, I just refused to use their app and new reddit. I ended up just using desktop mode old reddit without an app. If reddit moved to an age verification I would just drop it completely lol.
As a sys admin with a lot of experience, I am still unsure how to maintain and update my lemmy instance. So I am revisiting again, but it seems like we need work on the lemmy docker containers and possibly docker-compose.
pretty sure PieFed is easier to host
Lemmy seems in a great spot. I hope people give it a chance
Only way there is a mass rexit is if the bot accounts get fed up and leave.
Can’t say I’m looking forward to swarms of bot accounts descening on Lemmy
They are already arriving to some degree.
The difference being is that Lemmy and other similar services have zero controls or ability to handle bots or bop traffic if those bots were bots from 2014.
Not bots from today.
It’s a bit of a problem and honestly with increasing bot traffic across the internet and fedaverse being extremely vulnerable to it It’s absolutely bat shit insane, but I don’t see any other option than somehow having some form of human verification.
It’s a problem
One of my favorite tricks that a friend of mine showed me years ago was this:
Put a check box or radio button somewhere on the page that will never end up visible to the end user marked with a label like “check here to verify you’re not a not” or “choose your ethnicity from this list or select prefer not to say”, then reject accounts that ever check those boxes, because a human never would. If you occasionally snare a blind person by mistake,they can email to bypass that with a human admin.
I don’t know if it would trick modern bots, but he said it worked awesome back then.
It’s largely considered ineffective these days. Detecting elements that don’t affect layout is trivial, or elements that are occluded, transparent…etc
Capchas are one of the best options. But even then, LLM users bypass those relatively easily, and LLM users are one of the biggest risk areas for astroturfing.
Human verification? As in “give us your photo” or something?
I mean, fundamentally, yeah.
But we live in a corporate controlled, corrupt, world and now of these larger companies can be trusted with this process.
Some smaller communities and platforms DO this right sometimes, as they build in house processu that respect privacy. But governments world wide are making this impossible through increasingly strict compliance requirements that actually increase data privacy risks and funnel these needs to 3rd party services who just lie about what they do with the data.
===========
I’m not kidding when I say this is a REAL BIG PROBLEM.
bot based traffic and astroturfing will supplement and replace human communication on platforms like Lemmy. Driving the narrative and how we engage to the whims of a few rich people. Bots are relatively cheap, and easy to deploy at scale across many platforms.
There will be no open corner of the internet safe from manipulation and forced division. More people will be forced into walled gardens from corps that implement human verification, as they are the only ones with the resources to do something (While also being the source of the problem, see how that works?)
How do you carve out spaces that are protected from that? Well, you need to determine who’s a bot, and who’s and actual person.
But we can’t do that, so the alternative is we are ran over by bots and astroturfing till we’re at each other’s throats like good culture war puppets.
The future is bleak…
Answer, in my opinion, is local communities.
Perhaps it’s a bit of nationalist of me, but I think we are flooded daily with unnecessary information about what happens in other countries. In my personal opinion a random person from, say, Berlin or Paris shouldn’t be bombarded daily with news about another school shooting in backwater american town. Nor should they know what happens in politics of each other nations.
A community of my town would be useless for bots, especially if it banned all politics and ads from beyond my town. Elections of president? No dice, the only elections we care about is our mayor.
I do not live in USA. I shouldn’t know about Trump as much as I do, I shouldn’t be talking daily to americans. What relationships could I form with them? We will never go together to restaurant, bar, bowling alley etc. But place where my countrymen, and americans, and french, and germans etc. are herded together is the best place for bots.
A local community also makes it much easier to check humanity vs botness. Just summon the members to an open meeting at the local cat café and exchange GPG keys or something, like in the good ol’ days.
Lemmy is not capable of dealing with bots at all I believe
This is a small one. I’d like to see a full screen edit window like Reddit has.
we need more hornyposting and leftist infighting
Let’s be honest, go to any left wing party and you’ll see most people are dating liberals hahaha
Those are irl, whereas the toxic AF perpetually online among us here (e.g. hexbear and Lemmygrad and lemmy.ml) are likely not dating at all.
What’s the deal with lemmy.ml by the way? I know a few marxist-leninists IRL who, as you say, are quite normal.
Is there beef with that .ml instance on Lemmy? I’m new here as you can see.
Lemmy.ml was created by the lemmy developers following the quarantine of ChapoTrapHouse on reddit. ChapoTrapHouse was the largest tankie subreddit and extremely toxic.
Following the development of Lemmy, lemmy.ml split into Lemmygrad, where Lemmygrad is where they hold their more extreme opinions and lemmy.ml is supposed to be the more presentable side. However, the users are largely the same. One’s mask-off, one’s mask-on.
Welcome to the Threadiverse! You will enjoy it here, once you find your peers:-).
Lemmy.ml only claims to be for marxist-leninists - for actual real ones you may prefer e.g. slrpnk.net or perhaps lemmy.dbzer0.com. The lemmy.ml admins are (in)famously authoritarian, banning people from communities that they’ve never so much as heard of due to comments made elsewhere, citing a rule that does not exist - nowhere is it written down, yet everyone knows that you are not allowed to criticize Russia, China, or North Korea (or not praise them hard enough?). Mind you, they are free to do as they please, but to enforce an entirely different set of rules than the publicly announced ones… yes that generates much friction across the Threadiverse.
The fact that they (both users and even admins) routinely celebrate murder of everyone who merely lives in a Western civilization (collaborators?) kinda puts most people off from them, and also aside from that, their communication style where your consent does not matter puts aside the rest. They famously brag about creating alt accounts to get around bans - for them no does not mean no, but merely that they have to get a bit more clever about their proselytizing. So yes there’s beef, but mostly despite what they claim, it is not mere political differences, and due more to their incel culture that is the leftist version of MAGA’s Alternative Right, upholding “alternative facts”. Plus in true echo chamber style, banning anyone who attempts to say otherwise, and also in general harassing people in other communities, with appeals to their admins to reign in their users falling on deaf ears.
If you are interested, see an absolute mountain of details in the [email protected] community, such as the pinned monthly megathread “Documentation of Lemmy.ml’s Extremism [Megathread]”, but you can also read other more focused topics such as “Lead Lemmy Developer, Dessalines, denying the Tiananmen Square Massacre and praising the Uyghur Genocide” and “[Transphobia Warning] Nutomic’s Stance on Transgender People”, etc.
Personally I user blocked the entire instance, and have never once regretted that. You do not have that option btw, on a Lemmy instance (unless you use one of the rare 3rd party apps that provides it), you would have to switch to a PieFed instance to get that along with just an absolute ton of other features that Lemmy lacks but PieFed has had for months, and it will take Lemmy years and years to catch up, if ever. Also fair warning you do have something that claims to be a user block of an instance, but it is extremely misleading - to the point of disinformation even - as it merely blocks communities located on that instance while still leaving users on it to read, reply to, and manipulate the vote on your content, as well as to send you DMs, even triggering notifications, and there is no way to stop any of that. A better term than instance block would have been a community muting.
And just in general the level of discourse with people on Lemmy.ml accounts seems to be significantly lower - not always but by far it is generally the case, as the most toxic and generally batshit insane comments that you see tend to come from users on that instance.
So now you know!:-)
I wouldn’t recommend dbzer0. Since the AI purge, where many users who were critical that you can’t be pro-AI and anarchist at the same time were banned, the instance has been largely taken over by tankies. Even their own admins are self-proclaimed tankies, and all their popular users are tankies who have accounts on Hexbear. They’re, at the very least, openly a tankie bar.
Is that just some of the communities, or the instance itself, do you think? I thought their overarching tolerance policy was because they are anarchists, not actual tankies - like, would they be equally as tolerant of conservative viewpoints?
Anyway thank you for posting the link to learn more.
Wow, thanks for the effort post, I had no idea lol. I guess leftist infighting prevails even on Lemmy, but I personally do find leftist who think Russia Good because USA bad are cringe.
Anyways, can I ask you more about PieFed? It sounds like it’s another technology (which is my jazz ngl, I am trying to not get so involved in politics as I’ve been in the past, sorry for changing the topic so abruptly), are you saying PieFed can federate with Lemmy fully? That we can all interact here despite using (I assume) different technologies? That’s insane.
If there is an iOS app I’m all into trying it. Do tell me more if you’re willing to. :) and thank you for the warm welcome.
its the ones distilled from other platforms like reddit, or another where they get banned.
Yes PieFed can federate with Lemmy fully, although the reverse is not true since there are just tons of features present in PieFed that are lacking in Lemmy - a few that are relevant here are community polls, user and post flairs, and hashtags, none of which Lemmy can display since Lemmy does not realize that such things exist. There are also still yet another ton of features that are not as directly relevant to this discussion as well, but highly worth switching to use PieFed for, such as categories of communities, user-customizeable and shareable Feeds, the ability to choose whether to receive or arguably more important to cease receiving notifications for pretty much anything at all (comments written by other people, users, whole entire communities - this one most useful for low-volume and/or highly interesting content, or you may quickly become overwhelmed, and yet the notifications also allow you to separate the different types of triggers for them so even then you can still use your PieFed instance even if you are not fully caught up).
Both Lemmy and PieFed are different implementations of the ActivityPub Protocol, both - along with Mbin and some others (nodeBB, perhaps soon flarum, etc.) - are part of the Threadiverse, which is the subset of the Fediverse that is centered not on users as Mastodon or Friendica are but rather on topic-based (aka threaded) centered around communities of a particular interest, like Reddit (except fuck spez).
So Lemmy lacks entirely some post types that PieFed has, since it does not know how to render those (e.g. user polls), and for those types that do overlap, the PieFed version is usually a much-enhanced version - e.g. it collects together all comments across all cross-posts, so that you can visualize them all at once without having to keep clicking on each one individually. This really helps with discovering new communities that you might not become aware of otherwise.
PieFed also has a new user sign-up wizard that walks you through all the questions, signing you up to communities that you express interest in, and asking if you want any content filters, e.g. how many posts do you want to see with keywords like Trump or Musk - all, none (not perfect, e.g. that keyword filter will not block images of the topic in question), or just some. The problem of onboarding new users is entirely solved now with PieFed!
Here is the major caveat: PieFed is new, and while all of the above is available both via its webpage browser UI, and also encoded into its API for use by 3rd party apps, many of the latter have not yet caught up to implementing all of the available features. I don’t use 3rd party apps so I am not really current on that state, though I will note that even using PieFed as the back-end still offers strong advantages over Lemmy, even if the rest of the daily interactions are identical - e.g. PieFed offers the ability to block all users from an instance, whereas Lemmy only claims to offer that but… it does not. That said, note that the 3rd party apps don’t usually allow you to set up such features (yet), though imho having to visit the webpage interface rarely to set up each such aspect just once is not so bad, whereupon after that your app would continue to show the data being sent by your PieFed instance. Having vs. not having the feature in the first place is much more important to me than having super convenient access to it within a particular app of choice.
I am not the best person to ask for recommendations there, but I did enjoy Voyager when I was checking apps out, and it is the most popular one (also Blorp is supposed to be really good at integrating with PieFed? I’ve never tried it so I have no idea).
Definitely check out https://join.piefed.social/, and maybe start with https://join.piefed.social/features/. The devs are super responsive, amenable to feedback, and very active in communities such as [email protected].
Whatever the reason may be - usage of Python + flask vs. Rust and having to customize all UI elements, or perhaps simply programmer skill - that allows significantly faster development time, PieFed unquestionably has the lead over Lemmy in pretty much all respects (faster, more stable, lighter-weight code, see outsider perspectives such as this one), except that ofc Lemmy was first and so has many more users. But again, you will see all Lemmy posts on an instance that runs PieFed, even though the reverse is not true. Case in point: I am on PieFed right now, while you are on Lemmy, and since none of those more advanced features are involved (like polls), this impedes us not at all. Likewise people could comment here from Mastodon, Friendica, nodeBB, etc. - for Fediverse content the absolute best experience will be had from using the software that is designed for, but others can work and I see comments from instances running those other software platforms in this community all the time.
Breathe in the free air of FOSS. No Algorithm pushing things at you. Yes in-fighting because we are humans (would you like to be forced to read MAGA content?), but this is a very different atmosphere from Reddit! You are going to love it here!
Casual endorsement or sympathy for summary executions based on class alone. With or without, “just joking bro”
A failure to accept the possibility that societal collapse will probably hurt more people than it helps.
I know a few marxist-leninists IRL who, as you say, are quite normal.
Really? How does that work? Like, in what way are the ml?
Just surprised and curious.
they love CCP and russia for example in its current state. thier go-to instead of woke, is calling things 'shit-lib"
But those countries just have a sign out front that says “communism”, with little to no actual ideological communism taking place inside. Surely those alabaster pure ideologues seek out the Platonic form of perfect ideology, rather than this DPRK-like fun-house mask covering up an entirely different ideology.
Please explain your definition of toxicity. Or maybe you just did
You’ve just posted a great example.
Many leftists started out as liberals, it makes sense they’d believe others could also change.
-signed, a vegan married to a butcher, so don’t listen to me lol (at least he’s a leftist)
My wife started out with tons of republican views, she just didn’t vote ever.
Through conversations about the state of things, pointing* out hypocrisy, and validating the feelings her religious family was telling her to suppress, I’m happy to say I’ve managed to marry a leftist. She didn’t even really have the liberal pit-stop many of us take.
I’ll take 100,000 leftists married/dating/whatever to 100,000 liberals over 200,000 conservatives any day of the week.
She didn’t even really have the liberal pit-stop many of us take.
Glad to hear I’m not the only one. Imagine my chagrin after years of rigorously checking the assumptions and programming of my conservative upbringing and converting to liberalism, when I found out that leftism and liberalism are actually different things, with a diversity of opinions and worldviews that I then needed to parse in order to determine where I stand…
This mentality where “If you weren’t born leftist and raised leftist and been leftist all your life and all your friends are leftist, then you’re fascist scum who needs to perish in the revolution” is doing incalculable harm to any genuine leftist movement.
more
I keep saying “We can’t keep alienating potential allies if we want to unite the working class” but they hit me with the “class traitors don’t matter / we don’t want to work with anyone who was formerly conservative [(as if anyone is to blame for their upbringing…)] / you’re just a fascist apologist who needs to die in the revolution too / only our flavor of leftism is true leftism and anyone who disagrees with us is fascist scum who needs to die in the revolution / if you don’t unquestioningly accept everything we tell you without any nuance then you’re an enemy of the proletariat and need to die in the revolution”
They’re really making leftism as a whole look bad, and they don’t even realize it. I mean, how can you claim to represent the proletariat while simultaneously claiming that 60% or more of the proletariat need to be executed as class traitors? It’s like they’re trying to conform to the caricature that the right-wing depicts “radical leftist liberal communists” as. You’re not going to catch many flies with that vinegar.
They’ll say things like “we don’t need help from fascist shitlibs” and other unironic and oxymoronic absurdities of that nature, but if you want a popular uprising then you’re going to need to convince a majority of the population that you’re all on the same team, otherwise you’re nothing but an authoritarian reactionary.
It makes me really not want to take part in their supposed “revolution,” especially when you see what the bolsheviks did to the soviets and anarchists after they helped them win theirs…
I feel like the split between leftists and liberals really isn’t that big at all, assuming the people being talked about aren’t diehards behind people like Schumer or are scorched-earthers. There’s a vein of liberalism that builds towards the same exact goals that are leftist in nature.
I see progressive liberalism for instance being focused on working within what currently is built out to get to those goals of helping people reach self-actualization and living stable lives without having to be concerned about if you’ll be able to retire, have healthcare, have childcare, housing, food, disease, or other common concerns.
I agree with you, but if the tankies were listening they’d be very upset! (I say let them rupture a vessel but hey)
The Left eats its own. The Right too… eventually, though seems to do a better job (especially lately but also historically as well) of putting aside their differences in the short-term in order to strategically attain their goals. e.g. they will accept a trans person of color voting for them… for a time, before they eventually put them to death.
This probably helps explain the global rise of fascism since WWII. Fascism is winning, and will do even more so given modern technology like surveillance tools.
Which makes the attitude of the so-called “leftists” on e.g. hexbear or lemmy.ml seem all the more odd to me. It appears as if the emotional “high” of incel-like whinging supercedes any actual irl progress attempts to be made. It is very juvenile. In their defense (if it can be called thus) they exist inside of echo chambers and so are kept in that juvenile state artificially. Right or so-called “Left”, it is really difficult to break out of such a cult-like existence.
And the Threadiverse does not seem eager to either help them break out or at least protect new users and thereby expand the Threadiverse to a much wider audience, by e.g. defederation. In large part since people prefer to use the Lemmy devs to continue to develop that software, regardless of the consequences that will have upon the state of the Threadiverse overall (tbf, Lemmy was genuinely first there, and yet many of us are only here because first Kbin, then Mbin and now PieFed offers an alternative?). Thus, the enhancement of PieFed is my first real hope there (well, ever since the demise of Ernst’s Kbin) that things can get better.
I’m happy to say I’ve managed to marry a leftist
The Good ending.
signed, a vegan married to a butcher,
This sounds hilarious! Thanks for the good laugh!
But it is as legit as anything haha, leftist here married to a Christian conservative (at least she doesn’t vote lol 😶🌫️) and yes “I can change her” is definitely on my mind.
I don’t see much of the former, but the latter seems pretty ubiquitous already: vegans hunting vegetarians for sport, communists splitting socialists into equal chunks among them, clones clawing over one another to be standing more to the west than each other.
“The Left: Where the Perfect is the Arch-nemesis of the Good”
yeah but you’ve been away for like two days
the meta has shifted
Hey! U r dumb and also I’m jorking my peanor
👍
UNACCEPTABLE
I hate being left wing sometimes https://www.youtube.com/shorts/vHfbUIQeW_A
Well, we have seen that when right wing disagrees, they go to the extreme and fucking shoot each other a la Charlie Kirk and that guy who tried to shoot Trump, so…
Byt yeah perfect is the enemy of good…
I don’t think I have ever felt this validated in my entire life, thank you.
Purity testing sucks but “left unity” as a concept has been compromised by tankies
I avoid harshly criticising the left, while continuing to do so for liberals (but still being welcoming for the; the wider the antifascist front, the better), and outright rejecting far-right.
Keep in mind that infighting was often initiated by the CIA, in order to undermine the Black Panthers. Likewise we may see such attempts.
i encourage party vanguardists to support anarchists and other free leftists. the stronger the left, the better
do you think the same is true for the hornyposting?
my perspective? nah, hornypost all you want (keep it to nsfw communities tho if it’s “hard” nsfw as opposed to “soft”) - that makes it easier to sort.
or use a nsfw tag
no i meant do you think it’s the cia doing it
the cia would try anything, but hornyposting isn’t their main thing. They’d try that with high-profile individuals.
I recall them having made a fake sex video of Sukarno (the first leader of Indonesia), and trying to blackmail him. Upon seeing it, he said he was delighted and wanted more, lol. Here’s a source.
This. Tagging is so important… In my opinion we could use some more tags to sort stuff. At least some nsfl and politics tag.
For politics I just use a keyword block. If it contains terms related to that orange or such, I block.
Piefed does have a nsfl tag option, a bot filter, as well moving communities to another instance.
Imho, those are the three big things that most fediverse places should have. Being able to move to another instance is a gamechanger, should an instance disappear or get seized by asshats.
I would actually make the bot filter on by default. Is this the case?
For piefed, my main criticisms are these;
Voting Privacy – Votes can be private (not federated); in meme communities, upvotes don’t affect reputation (optional).
Enabling private votes may make it easier for bots, but as these votes are not federated, it should not affect what other users see, I think. Upvotes not affecting reputation in meme communities is an issue because this way someone could make a far-right community and call it a meme community, and get off scot-free. How do Piefed devs tackle this?
Likewise;
Default Comment Collapsing – Comments at -10 score or below are collapsed automatically.
Low Reputation Indicator – Identifies consistently downvoted users.
This can be an issue, with bots en masse downvoting comments to have them be less visible. How is it ensured that the bot filter would work, without far-reaching measures like “age verification”?
Nothing will ever be truly perfect, it is rather an arms race where defenders construct barriers while attackers jump those hurdles - often easily but it does act as a barrier and some bad actors simply give up rather than do so.
In this case, PieFed has several relevant options, one being a per-community setting that only counts subscribed members of the community, which has the effect of reducing the impact of drive-by downvoters from All, but obviously won’t stop a coordinated attack vector. The former scenario is real though, so the feature has actual benefits despite not stopping everything bad that could possibly happen, as it does improve the state of things incrementally.
Another such feature is the option to only count votes from “trusted” instances. This allows for finer-grained control so that e.g. you could remain federated with an instance, but not allow them to constantly brigade your content. Obviously someone could make accounts on trusted instances to do so, but the subscriber numbers being so low overall for the entire Threadiverse and for Piefed specifically seems to suggest that if it is happening, it is not a huge deal (yet). And the usual measures still apply, e.g. if an account only ever downvotes without ever posting or commenting, then it is likely a brigade account in (a not very decent) disguise.
Sometimes they will get more sophisticated, like repositing comics that seems an easy way to quickly generate many upvotes for the new account. But these seem to be shut down quickly… somehow, and anyway at that point whatever their intentions ultimately were, at least they were positively contributing to the Threadiverse community in the meantime, haha!
The true reddit hornyposting is all in OldSchoolCool
Peace and love among all progressives ❤️🩹
this might be the worst image i’ve ever seen.
…also why is bosnia and herzegovina in there twice
The other is for Herzegovina and Bosnia.
It’s Gunther Fehlinger it has to be there, the lore will gobsmack you. Might kill you
Eh, I’m probably leaving here after lemy.lol shuts down. Have fun!
Decision fatigue? Almost everyone picks lemmy.world, and the UX is the same everywhere, specially if you use mobile apps.
Lemmy.world has about 40% of the pop these days.
I just signed up, and it’s confusing. I used lemmy.world because it seemed like it was the only means to get my registration approved. It wasn’t clear whether or not this account can still view and interact with other “instances”, so I went with the website that had the largest userbase.
When I first signed up - when reddit did the API thing - I was also shocked how empty it felt here. And it is, but when I adjusted I came to prefer that. There’s fewer commenters but also less bullshit. I spend less of my linked screen time doomscrolling and more on other stuff, like reading and gaming.
I agree. This place feels dead? I’m sure I’m just doing it wrong. But, I downloaded Blorp, went to ‘Explore’, and the amount of 'subreddits ’ is so minimal. What am I doing wrong here? Lol
I’m the developer behind Blorp. The trouble with the threadiverse (a term that refers to Lemmy and PieFed) is it’s not tuned by big cooperations to get you addicted. That also means you gotta dig a little more to find the content you’re looking for. I’m happy to help direct you if you have questions!
Thanks for using my app!
Hi there! Thanks for developing the app, that’s quite impressive. Not sure if there’s a good answer to this, but what I was referring to was when I ‘Explore’ and search for something specific, it doesn’t seem to be there. So I thought maybe I was doing something wrong? And if there is something specific that I end up finding, it sometimes only has ~1-10 members, if it’s a ‘Community’. If there are any tips surrounding these things, that’d be awesome!
I’m guessing you’re subscribing to more niche communities. For example, I really enjoyed r/homekit, r/WLED, and r/TvTooHigh on Reddit. I think some of those exist on Lemmy, but they are very very inactive compared to Reddit. But if you look at more broad topics like [email protected] or [email protected], those are way more active.
There are a few exceptions. Lemmy seems to attract lots of Linux and Star Trek fans. I consider those topics more niche, but here they are very active topics.
I know this is easier said than done, but I really want the niche communities here to be more active. If you see a community missing, create it. If you see the one you’re looking for but it’s inactive, post to it.
Yes, it can. I’m from Piefed.social.
Yeah there are like a handful of instances with 90% of the users.
Lemmy.world, lemmy.zip, lemmy.ml, sh.itjust.works, fedinsfw.app, piefed social have the bulk combined. Lemmy.ca and feddit.org not too far behind.
Why is it not possible to have a sort of algorithm that ‘recommends’ an instance to each new user depending on which instances have less numbers?
Is that a bad idea?
That is how https://join-lemmy.org/ works now. I just got recommended thelemmy.club and in another browser it recommended lemmus.org
That’s cool
There is. Someone told me that it recommends lemmy.ml roughly half the time. I tried it personally and it first recommended hexbear.net, so I tried it again and then it recommended lemmy.ml. If I was an American-based centrist Reddit user, being sent to either of those places who literally celebrate and call for my literal and actual irl murder (not joking), I would nope out and never visit the Threadiverse again.
So yes, it is a very bad idea if the goal is to entice people to join from any Western civilization.
you mean https://join-lemmy.org/ ? they’ve removed those recommendations actually
Nope, I still see both of them, very high up in the list too - despite it being sorted by “random”, which would make a kind of sense if it would weight more highly active instances higher, so not true random but with a random component. However, every time I refresh the page both lemmy.ml and hexbear.net consistently appeared in the top 5 instances every single time. So most definitely biased towards them, whatever the underlying reasoning may be.
There was something that removed lemmy.ml long ago, but apparently it is not that one.
I don’t want to send leftists to a conservative cesspit, and conversely I don’t want to send USA centrists to a leftist (“tankie”) version. Neither would feel terribly welcomed in those respective opposite spaces.
Instead, the list should be curated to show only “Newbie-friendly” instances by default, even while allowing those others to appear as opt-in alternatives. Which, surprise surprise, the PieFed instance picker does do exactly that - see one of those at e.g. https://feddit.online/auth/instance_chooser.
mine just says to join thelemmy.club or lemmus.org as the default, it doesn’t show a list by default
screenshot of default recommendation when you open the https://join-lemmy.org/ page:
We could certainly keep trying to improve accessibility from a technical standpoint, like trying to make it easier for new accounts to hit the ground running. Basically, focusing on good defaults. I’ve heard people emphasize things like suggestions and starter packs based on simple interest questions for instance. UX is often heavily influenced by what apps you’re using for access however.
To be honest though, when I hear this kind of question, I always end up thinking “quality over quantity”. I feel like we need to remind ourselves that bigger doesn’t always mean better, particularly online. Particularly when the question is about attracting Redditors. Reddit is a cesspool, and cesspools often attract and breed noxious organisms.
The point is, it might be best to keep focus on raising awareness and promoting what the Fediverse is to those who might be receptive rather than trying to contort ourselves to suit the wants of those to whom the Fediverse’s appeal is lost. Do our best to be more accessible from a technical standpoint. Then just put out the welcome, open the door, let those masses yearning to break free come, let the rest be.
An exception to this argument is the objective of furthering the cause of federation itself more broadly, but this is a different concern and a completely different discussion.
Reddit isn’t terrible when a user adjusts what they are suggested, but the system they use to ban people pretty much sucks.
If I respond to a user that is suggesting the unnecessary euthanasia of a relatively healthy cat with, “Great. Now it is okay to k*** relatively healthy cats. This is a positive development,” I will get a warning for promoting the abuse of animals. Four of these strikes over any period of time will lead to a permanent ban.
…it’s not sustainable. Since there isn’t any human oversight, I have to heavily censor what I say to avoid being banned from the platform. I’m using an actual example. My appeal was denied.
Biggest problem for Lemmy and similar applications is scalability and controls and detection for bots.
The compute costs to operate instances are astronomical compared to the actual user load they receive.
That’s a bit of a side problem compared to bots though. Bots are a real problem that services like this are not equipped to handle.
PieFed is 25-fold more efficient in its data transfer than Lemmy, fwiw (source: that’s 5-fold less data transferred, despite it being for 5-fold more posts, hence 25-fold more efficiency)
To be honest though, when I hear this kind of question, I always end up thinking “quality over quantity”.
It’s funny you say that. When I first read the post I interpreted more as “We’re about to get a bunch of unruly Redditors. How are we going to deal with the increased workload on moderators.”
I mean… that sounds to me like an entirely valid question ⁉️ - how WOULD we handle such?
Aside from trying to recruit more mods, I have no idea. I think a big influx of Redditors is going to reduce discussion quality here no matter what we can do, and we have very limited resources to spend on damage control.
Hopefully someone more knowledgeable than me can come up with something.
PieFed already provides a HUGE aid to help here, and while Lemmy currently lacks this I believe that a future version is imminent that will help in this regard as well. I am talking about federating mod reports across instances, which will allow mods to remain on their home instance without having to continually check an alt account(s) on the same instance that houses the community. This will increase the pool of available mods for any specific community.
Edit: and this barely begins to scratch the surface of what PieFed offers in this regard. e.g. if someone does not want to see so much Trump or Musk spam, they can use a personal (automated) keyword filter, rather than have to rely upon kids to do all of that work for them. Likewise, users can set personal filters for unpopular content, with more than X downvotes, either to automatically hide it or at least to collapse it, needing an extra button press to see it - I personally have these turned off, but if someone wants them, it is available to them (note how this is different than a mod deciding to ban someone or remove their content: this is a USER decision). Another is the user account reputation indicator, placing an icon next to someone’s username who e.g. consistently receives 10x more downvotes than upvotes - it won’t hide their content, but it is a subtle indicator that helps you realize what you are getting into before you respond (e.g. a sea-lioning situation?)
All of the above literally reduces the amount of effort that a moderator is required to do, in order to make a community a pleasant place to visit.:-) Also, it democratizes the moderation work, placing more power into the hands of users rather than that of centralized authority figures.
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Kindof a tangent there, buckaroo.
Probably more NSFW instances? We barely have one.
I don’t think anyone actually wants the baggage that ecosystem comes with. Like, when it’s working well it has baggage. And you wouldn’t like it when it doesn’t run well.
I think so as well. Porn is available in abundance. We don’t really need it here. What I think could be nice is people who like to write erotic fiction as a hobby and post their original content. Or people discuss erotic computer games. Or like relationship advice and NSFW questions in case some country abolishes sex ed. Maybe talking about piracy, mental issues, loss… all the things that are deemed “not advertiser friendly” on commercial platforms. That’d be something positive. But it’s not easy. And it often all gets lumped together under some big NSFW umbrella and 95% of people want to share pron clips anyway. Mostly with zero care for copyright or the creators’ consent.
Ooh \↑↑↑↑↑↑↑↑ second all of this. Sex discourse will always be better than just a constant deluge of questionable nudes.
I guess the longstanding assumption is that any media that succeeds must also succeed with porn. It’s been true for every major media technology innovation before from the printing press to VHS. However some may confuse the causal direction of this. Having porn won’t necessarily make something succeed.
You hear that people? Go set up a camera and show us your genitals! But also, be hot. Or at least interesting. Maybe learn to juggle as you give a blowjob. That’d be fun to watch! If you can do that, the world needs to see it. So why not put it on Lemmy? For the Fediverse!!!
Hehe. Yeah, I don’t think we need more content. There’s already some out there. And everyone can add more, all they need is 20sec of time and a redgifs link. What we really need is more admins run servers to host that stuff. And a bigger admin team for the already existing instance so it doesn’t just randomly go away along with all the content, as well. Maybe one or two lawyers, or someone with expertise in bullet-proof hosting, to set it up properly. (And we likely need moderators as well. Half of the communities on the old server used to be a desert. Claimed en masse by some nominal members who left a long time ago.) But original content is certainly welcome 😆
Doesn’t fedinsfw.app exist?
Well, previously we had LemmyNSFW. That one died, pretty much out of the blue. Now the second admin(?) of it launched FediNSFW as a successor. We have that - for now - I guess? They said they’re gonna try to make sure the same thing doesn’t happen again.
But I guess it’s still a single point of failure. If they don’t properly ensure there’s several people who own the domain and hosting infrastructure, can administer the contracts, server etc, it might still be down to one person and their ability to keep it up. And if there’s legal troubles, uncertainty, not enough donations, law changes or the hoster or Cloudflare pulls the trigger, that might be the end of all of it as well. A severe technical issue/mistake could also take down a singular instance. And due to the delicate nature of NSFW content, they probably can’t afford to be 100% transparent with us, so I wouldn’t know whether they’re in a healthy place or not.
I mean there’s nothing wrong with FediNSFW’s existence. I just think it’s massively questionable to all bet on the same horse, and then call us the “Fediverse”, a decentral platform…
I wish there was more of an active gaming community.
there are a lot of video game communities already
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honestly too many lol, luckily PieFed has feeds to help this issue https://piefed.social/f/games
there’s even more if you include the more specialized communities https://piefed.social/f/allgames
Yeah, me too. For some hobbies there just isn’t a lot of activity.
We have some regular pc gaming communities:
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And some about tabletop games:
Not sure if there’s more, that’s about the ones I’m aware of. Lemmyverse.net has a few more: https://lemmyverse.net/communities?query=gam
We need more cat forums.
This. Video games too. And porn for that matter. We’re overall a little weak on the trifecta of primary internet subject matter.
At least we’re solid on owls though, my enduring admiration to our dedicated owl posters.
Unironically this. We need cute animals. Cats, owls, moths, capibaras, pangolins. If we’re not gonna have one of the two “true movers” of the internet (porn and correcting people who are wrong) we need something good to compensate.
Lemmy has pretty active communities for both bunnies and foxes.
There are a lot of owls. But also cat, dogs, etc - https://piefed.social/topic/wholesome
Oh glad to see there’s quite some representation around.
Now, we have to add to it.
(I should really adopt a non-photogenic cat sometime)
Every time I think about starting a community about one of my hobbies, I look at a random modlog and realize I don’t want any part of it.
The trick is starting a community, but delegating moderation to someone else. Admin ≠ Mod.
There’s some anime titties but not enough to go around.
And guitars.
there are a lot of video game communities already
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honestly too many lol, luckily PieFed has feeds to help this issue https://piefed.social/f/games
there’s even more if you include the more specialized communities https://piefed.social/f/allgames
I’ve genuinely been thinking about starting nsfw fandom (anime/games) communities centered around more female or queer orientated audiences but I don’t know if I’ll want to deal with moderation and having to keep it active…
Edit: I also wish we had more silly mini comms of things. I have a family member who finds a new cat sub like every week, but we don’t really have that here.
