This is a big problem. It creates the illusion that /c/cats on one particular instance is the real /c/cats.
This is the root of re-centralization and it must be pulled out.
I think part of the issue is that all the different Lemmy and kbin instances are trying to be Reddit themselves. By which I mean there are a bunch of instances with no focus. They’re all “kitchen sink” instances, each with their own Politics, Tech, Cats, etc.
Lemmy.world, lemmy.ml, kbin.social, fedia.io. All of them are generic reddit alternatives, but the real reddit alternative is the amalgamation of subscriptions from multiple more focused instances.
Startrek.website is a great example of the opposite: it’s an instance focused on one topic, where some people will want to sign up as a user and others will want to just subscribe to one of their three (!) boards from their own instance. They don’t need their own Politics topic, users on the site that care about it will subscribe to a politics topic from another instance. The startrek admins and mods only have to care about their one focus.
My ideal fediverse feed would be pulling individual topics from a few dozen more focused instances instead of one generalist instance. I think that’s what’s going to end up happening.
I like the idea of topic dedicated instances. Warframe, one of my favorite games ever, has their own instance and it’s chugging along.
There are 3 instance for *.nz, lemmy.nz, no.lastname.nz and feddit.nz
@Dave@lemmy.nz and I (no.lastname.nz) have been workin together so we don’t overlap with nz based communities, with Dave concentrating on general NZ communities and I’m concentrating on more environmental type communities (Wildlife/Outdoors/Trees[therapeutic use based])
We probably need more collaboration for smaller communities, but there will always be different takes on topics and moderation.
I am a lemmy.ml user and don’t think it is being or trying to be reddit. Maybe some of the users but that isn’t the instance in awhole. Your idea sounds nice until I learn I have to signup to all thesee diffrent instances, or am I missing something?
You don’t have to sign up on multiple sites, you just subscribe to specific channels you care about from the site you signed up for. For instance, signing up to lemmy.ml’s Politics, Lemmy.world’s Tech, and fedia.io’s Cats.
For instance, here’s a link to !startrek@startrek.website that you can interact with and subscribe to from your Lemmy.ml account: https://lemmy.ml/c/startrek@startrek.website
I believe that from any given instance, I should be able to search other instances without having to rely on a third-party tool. That is the core of my complaint. However, I do understand that all forums on all instances may not be what I am looking for to search. I think each instance should have the option of making public or selecting which of their chats should be searchable by other instances (defaulting to all). Then, from any given instance, I can do a search of other instances and get a list of what I might be interested in subscribing to without having to view all the chats that are likely only relevant to a particular instance. Something along those lines.
I don’t believe most Lemmy users will tolerate maintaining more than one account on once instance. If I can’t see it from my account, then it doesn’t exist. This is all starting to sound like old school phpbb forum with new paint.
Why would you create a new account to browse the startrek dedicated instance instead of subscribing to the community that lives on their instance?
Also, this might just be personal experience, but so far I’m finding it far easier to browse a single community on no matter what general instance rather than going through a separate topic-focused instance.
You create an account there probably because you are a star trek fan and want to show it off
Hell, they could’ve disabled account registration and just hosted the communities. Lemmy allows for that kind of flexibility
When using email, be aware that george@aol.com is the real George. All other Georges on all other email servers are fake.
+1 The provider you choose has complete control of your account. You only have access when their server is up. They control updates.
If they don’t have good backups you could lose everything. It may be unpopular but I think most would be wise to pick one of the already established major instances.
I think this is incorrect - federation depends on a “true” version. A community is tied to an instance, that’s where the true version is. When you’re logged into another instance and you comment in that community, your comment gets copied to the true version, as do comments from other federated instances, and all of them get copied from the true version to a version on yours.
When one instance defederates with another, that copying stops happening. If a copy of that thread is still on your instance, and you comment on it, your comment won’t get copied to the true version, so it also won’t get copied to other instances; only users on your instance will see it.
That’s my understanding, but I’ve only been here a few weeks.
That is essentially what happens and it’s a technical issue, not a philosophical one. If one instance is denied posting to another, the user should be notified at some point about that. There are a lot of silent errors right now with the setup. If you disable signups for example, users can still try but never see that it will never work.
However, that also adds confusion for someone trying to figure out whether or not to use the service in the first place.
So they need to choose an instance. How do they pick an instance? There’s all this talk about defederation and all of that, so do they need to do a bunch of research to figure out who is where, to register? Oh wait, one of the big instances aren’t taking signups, and another is restricted, based on application.
That’s a lot of legwork for someone who is used to being able to go to “lemmy.social.network”, register, and just go. You don’t have to research Twitter or Reddit ahead of time, to figure out if you ended up in a server-region that was locked out from the others with seemingly no explanation or warning, or suddenly lose access because of some kind of operator issue with some other server.
Beehaw is not federated, it functionally has ceased to exist.
There will not be a winner instance.
If all of the Lemmy federation cannot be read from any random instance, then it already is a failed experiment.
Not 1% of1% of1% of 1% cares what the instance name is or what their rules are. I am probably still missing many orders of magnitude.
The beehaw controversy is obvious. You don’t need to know the specific. I don’t know them and I don’t care about them nor what their story is.
The lesson is clear, tyrannical instance owners exists, and they will leverage your participation against you and cut your relationship.
There exists poisonous instances on Lemmy and they must be disempowered. Instances must be nothing more than portals to the whole. They must have no power.
Beehaw is defederated from two major popular instances and in talks with the admins of those instances about the path for refederation. I’m looking at this post from beehaw. You are taking an event, recasting it as something it isn’t, and trying to use that as evidence of a point. And in fact, you seem to be suggesting that instances that aren’t moderated how you want should be defederated. Which. Yes. That’s. That’s the point. That’s what Beehaw did. And they’re even communicating about how to move forwars
Dude, it’s obvious you don’t understand how lemmy or the fediverse works. You need to read more and maybe ask questions to clear up your misunderstanding before you go around making grand pronouncements about how lemmy should be run. A little bit of humility goes a long way.
Utter bullshit.
You can scroll to the bottom and see it’s only defederated from a handful of instances.
Furthermore these is no fucking Lemmy federation. Lemmy is one part of accessing the Fediverse. Ironic that someone worried one instance might get all the credit has no problem giving it all to one platform.
Honestly I’m not far off thinking removing any Lemmy instance at all is the best bet, Lemtards are getting annoying.
What are you on? So instances should have no say in regards to who they federate with? Also it sounds like you’re advocating for centralization… Why would we want that?
To me it sounds like they’re advocating for decentralization. Defederation means less traffic for an instance. If the majority of users are already on one instance, defederation could end it. I imagine most people want an instance where they can reach the most people. If they, understandably, pick the largest instance, it may not be long before it holds all the power, in terms of user acivity or count, and becomes the center.
I feel like this is how it will realistically happen though. People will flock to one instance and use that one community, otherwise it becomes too stagnated.
The best thing about federation is that if that hugely popular community’s instance were to crash/go down, the community can just join another one. Sure it might take some coordination, but why not have one central place to hang out until it gets shitty?
Imagine youre at your favorite bar. They get new owners and then all their prices change. But hey guess what, you can make an exact copy of the same bar on a different instance! “Hey guys, lets all go to this new bar thats literally the same thing across the street!” and then everybody is happy.
This is really terrible news. This means Lemmy has no chance. It’s just another Reddit. I hope this flaw is fixed and soon.
If the cool bar sells out and becomes a rip off. The community of that bar does up and leaves and then coherently as aunit join another bar.
What happens is, that bar community simply dies. It’s members scatter. The end.
If that was like you said, Reddit community as a whole would already have left Reddit and we’d all be here.
This is a system killing bug.
Lemmy is seen as another Reddit, that’s why people are coming over to use it as a potential alternative.
I’m also not convinced that the community would scatter entirely. Things might be scattering now, but this is more like the entire Earth being blown up for some space highway.
Whereas previously on Reddit, the community might splinter, with some parts going off to make their own subreddits, effectively moving to a new bar. It’s happened before, with multiple subs.
/r/anime_titties was created due to issues with how /r/worldnews was moderated, /r/curatedtumblr was created due to issues with bots and inactive moderation on /r/tumblr, so on.
But moving subreddits is a far cry from moving to a whole other site, with its own communities, quirks, and issues, where they might be losing out on creature comforts, and the identity that they’ve built up on Reddit.
While true, people seem to pretty immediately get it once it’s clear where to see the source instance. If they care, they’re usually surprised, and then the reason magazines on different instances are different makes sense.
I’m not sure what there is to do about it, the impression that there is one magazine is a relic of centralization, all there is to do is explain that it is not the case when people are inevitably confused. I hate simplifying it to “bob@microsoft.com and bob@apple.com are different people” because I know it feels more complicated than that but it seems like it doesn’t take that long to click honestly.
Best I figure is to have welcoming communities that don’t turn into asshats if someone is confused or asks questions. This doesn’t seem like something you can force people to understand before they run into a problem and try to figure out what’s going on. Eventually there will be an AI bot that answers questions I’m sure…!
It is very obvious what is to be done to honour federation. When you go to lemmy.example.com/c/cats, you get every /c/cats from every instance.
Then your client applies to personal filter list to hide what you don’t want to see. And then it applies the filters of the moderators you are subscribed to.
What you’re describing sounds like topics or tags, which have been requested a couple of times to both Lemmy’s devs and KBin’s devs, and both have just about said if they do something like that it would be as a feature release after they hit 1.0.0 types of stability. The idea would be that you could post to a community on a server with some sort of tag or flag or something that another community or person might be interested in. I like to think of the Fediverse being a country, platforms as being metropolises, and servers as being the cities, suburbs, boroughs, and towns that make up that metropolis. So, what I’m using as a metaphor in this case is that !comics@lemmy.ml, !comics@kbin.social, and !Comics@chirp.social are all different comic book stores. You go, and you hang out at the comic book store that feels most comfortable to you, and that’s your community. You all share comics there, but you don’t hear about the comic book discussions happening in one of the other comic book stores unless you choose to go there (and you totally can!). The idea of topics or flags would act like a comic book convention. A lot more people will be there to discuss comics, though you won’t know as many of the people there as you did at your home comic book store. The conversations will be busier, have more eyes on them, and won’t be as intimate, but it will still be a valuable experience for many people. In fact. Both will be valuable experiences.
The Fediverse is designed less around durability of data, and more around curation of interaction. On Reddit, this was done by splintering communities in some really weird ways. For example, there was r/knives and r/knife_club. It wasn’t immediately obvious which one was which and how they differentiated themselves. But they definitively had a different moderation style and character. You just had to invest yourself in finding out the history of both to figure out which you wanted to subscribe to. On the threadiverse, we can expect these moderation styles to express more on the server level than on the community level. For example, !politics@beehaw.org, !politics@lemmy.ml, !politics@kbin.social, and !politics@lemmy.nz all have RADICALLY different moderation styles and scopes. They’re all about politics, but what you can expect from them is more communicated to you by the server they’re in. The Beehaw one is going to have more discussion around how politics impact women, people of color, and the LGBTQ+ community based on that the server is explicitly set up to be a safe space for those groups. The Lemmy.ml one will have a more pro-authoritarian communism feel to it because that’s what the moderators over there are all about. The kbin.social one will probably be the one that acts and behaves the most like r/politics worked, since that instance is seen as a general purpose instance good for most people, with a moderation style that fits the traditional mold of online forums. Finally, and this one’s my favorite because it’s communicated to you directly in the URL, the lemmy.nz one will be about New Zealand politics.
Whether all that about the servers being different is good or not is up to you to figure out for myself. Me, I like it because community moderation is critical to community curation, and the Fediverse gives you infinitely more flexibility at the administrator level to find what works for you than a centralized corporation ever could. At Reddit, the admins were the admins, and there was nothing you could do if they refused to step in to stop a Subreddit from breaking Reddit’s site wide rules about gaming r/all to get more eyes on propaganda, and nothing you could do either if they banned a community that you felt was really valuable. Here, if you don’t like how Beehaw is administered, don’t join Beehaw.
With all of this said, reading through your comments, it sounds like you don’t like that core concept and would prefer something like Nostr where anyone can post anything and anyone can see it and there’s no moderation whatsoever. Unfortunately, there is not at present any kind of link aggregation or community curation aspect built on the Nostr protocol, and I’d have some serious concerns about how you would do that from a technical level. If you’re dealing with an infinitely diverse network topology of peer to peer hosting, how are you going to define what the community is even about? If I create t/pocket_dumps, how do I ensure it stays on the topic of pulling everything out of your pocket and putting it on the table, instead of say, people pooping in pockets. Ultimately, if we leave it up to the user to define for themselves what a community should be or shouldn’t be, they’re going to spend all their time on the network playing a game of Whac-A-Mole blocking users who post material they don’t want to see, trying to filter uncurated communities, and also dealing with the problem Nostr and SSB both have where it’s REALLY hard to sign up.
Ultimately, where I land is that the threadiverse topographic landscape is intrinsically different from the Reddit one. It takes some getting used to, but I don’t think you could make it more like Reddit without losing what makes the threadiverse special, or without significantly reducing the ease of adoption (which is already a common criticism anyway)
