I noticed my feed on Lemmy was pretty dry today, even for Lemmy. Took me a while to realize lemmy.ml has been going up and down all morning, and isn’t federating new posts.
But, since this is all still federated, I can still create and read posts on other instances while I wait. Even this one! Any other service would just be unavailable completely right now.
I do miss the larger communities on lemmy.ml - asklemmy, memes, and I really wanted to watch the reddit fallout on /c/reddit. Maybe I’ll look around for some good replacements for those. Open to suggestions!
The only problem with federation is duplicate communities, and I don’t even see that as being necessarily a bad thing. I’ll subscribe to multiple communities for the same thing and if, over time, I end up getting annoyed with some of them I’ll just unsubscribe.
Yeah, I think it has a certain charm. However I fully agree, without it being addressed this will lead to issues and setbacks in the future trying to build communities. For now I’m subbing to all and trusting the process that creases will eventually iron themselves.
I think, kept this way, instances should be more clear what kind of ‘country’ they want to form. For example a group that has tech as the primary interest, should go about starting the instance as such, and setting ground rules for communities therein. Tech related, even if loosely, and differentiated from the masses. Or a better example would be, a European - English Instance could require a suffix like EU or UK like newsUK or photographyUK simply to attract the more locally relevant audiences.
A more involved solution could be to tag your community like Twitter into topics it wants to show up in feeds for (as well as tags that exclude it)… like ‘technews’ tagged in the ‘news’ and ‘technology’ but excluded from ‘politics’ and ‘finance’ and ‘onion’
Another one could be to allow communities to federate with one another. If a news community spots some large news audiences in other instances, the moderators for each community could federate with one another and create a supercommunity (like a multi on Reddit), allowing the super to operate on both instances but share hosting of something along those lines.
You could also have moderators agree to join forces by migrating one community over to the larger server and closing up shop. This may happen naturally with time.
We have to solve the content curation problem IMO. If we all love lemmy.world or sh.itjust.works and post 1000’s of hours of content to either and one of them just “shutters” the server then all that content is GONE. Or, am I missing something about how all this works?
If we want to “join” servers we need some type of content migration tool that allows the user to determine where their content is actually “hosted”.
We may see individual servers for heavy content creators as they’ll want some way to ensure that all of the federated servers can continue to access their content right?
Yeah good point actually. Independent servers is a strength but not future proof. Allowing larger servers to store back ups that other instances can link to in the event of down time, or allowing themselves to be absorbed if they shut down would keep the place running, there would just need to be a system in place where an instance can nominate another instance to hold a spare set of keys, so that duplicates don’t start fracturing the system.
It’s not necessarily a bad thing, but especially with the amount of news users (and subs) migrating from Reddit there is a certain potential for chaos for sure.
However, for me the pros of this approach still outweigh the cons as, like you said, it also provides more choice with which community you want to interact.
Like chess, but are a bit tired of googling en passant? Just find a community, that is more focused on the game on a different instance.
Can someone explain to me what is the link between Mastodon and Lemmy? From the Wikipedia chart, it looks like ActivityPub links them together in some fashion; I just don’t get how.
In theory, Lemmy and Mastodon are compatible with one another, as they both use ActivityPub.
In practice:
Mastodon users can only see Lemmy posts as Boosts (“retweets”), and from what I hear, it’s fairly annoying and not a good experience
Lemmy users can’t see anything on Mastodon at all, Lemmy doesn’t have a way to federate with Mastodon instances yet.
This is the first time Lemmy has seen this many users ever, so I’m confident both of these issues will be fixed sooner or later. When they are, you’ll be able to see Lemmy posts on Mastodon as if they were posts (“tweets”), and you’ll be able to see Mastodon posts on Lemmy as some kind of post (not sure if the format has been decided yet).
Just to clarify, Mastodon users can already make posts to Lemmy communities, just not the other way around yet.
Definitely agree it’s not a good experience yet though.
I’m really interested in the idea of these different kinds of websites being interoperable because of ActivityPub. Like the different websites are basically different frontends for people who prefer link aggregators or micro-blogs or other kinds of websites. It’s a really cool idea!
@pankkake @ubergeek77 I’ll actually use this as a an opportunity to test something - I copied your comment’s link into mastodon and am replying to it with my mastodon account. I can see the thread in mastodon, and in theory, this reply should show up properly in Lemmy too.
It looks no different than any of the other comments to me. Though I haven’t been here for even a day, so… :))
@julianh @pankkake @ubergeek77 I, too, am testing this mechanic
@ubergeek77 @pankkake you can comment and make lemmy posts from Mastodon and others. I’m on Friendica for example and made this comment from my Friendica profile.
It’s all a little arbitrary. When you create a new service (like Lemmy, or Mastodon), you can have them link with anything, in any fashion you like. The defaults are mostly sensible.
For example, I’ve just made a mastodon post asking /r/casual a question. Once that synchronizes across, you’ll see the topic over there.
All those users who were told “Please move from lemmy.ml to somewhere else. It’ll crash. Please spread out” are now seeing why :))
Likewise, it was feeling a little dry here today and I finally figured out the same thing you did. Being able to subscribe across many servers is wicked sick, and having an instance sitting “in front” of them the way we’re using it makes it slick as heck when those other instances are unavailable or spotty.
It would be great if the instance kept a pulse on how federation to other instances is going and showed a health check in the app sidebar and near instance names to temper user expectations.
I’m honestly surprised at how useable Lemmy is as a whole. Mastodon shit itself during the Twitter migration. Idk if it’s just a lower volume of users or what.
Mastodon is written in RoR, whereas Lemmy’s backend is in Rust. It’s an order of magnitude faster just by being a compiled language with lighter-weight middleware.
I haven’t used Ruby/RoR in half a decade but even in the early 2010’s it was memingly slow compared to many alternatives.
