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 hornyposting and leftist infighting
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
I don’t think I have ever felt this validated in my entire life, thank you.
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…
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 for the post
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
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
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
- !askgaming@piefed.social
- !games@lemmy.world
- !games@sh.itjust.works
- !gaming@lemmy.ml
- !gaming@lemmy.world
- !gaming@piefed.social
- !nintendo@lemmy.world
- !patientgamers@sh.itjust.works
- !pcgaming@lemmy.ca
- !playstation@lemmy.world
- !xbox@lemmy.world
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:
- !pcgaming@lemmy.ca
- !linux_gaming@lemmy.world
- !pixeldungeon@lemmy.world
- !factorio@lemmy.world
- !steamdeck@sopuli.xyz
- !zocken@feddit.org
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.
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)
Lemmy has pretty active communities for both bunnies and foxes.
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.
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.
there are a lot of video game communities already
- !askgaming@piefed.social
- !games@lemmy.world
- !games@sh.itjust.works
- !gaming@lemmy.ml
- !gaming@lemmy.world
- !gaming@piefed.social
- !nintendo@lemmy.world
- !patientgamers@sh.itjust.works
- !pcgaming@lemmy.ca
- !playstation@lemmy.world
- !xbox@lemmy.world
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
As a new user (I started using PieFed 2 months ago), the UX can surely be improved, but I feel like the main issue is relative to how users are supposed to use the fediverse: I still don’t have a clue on how the fediverse works and how to use it properly.
And I’m motivated in learning to use it.
But for someone who isn’t motivated, it’s a huge “no thanks, goodbye”I think we should just hide all of that complexity and just set defaults for everything that the user can decide to change if they want. You don’t have to understand how the Fediverse works to be able to use it. Most people don’t understand how email works, they just use it.
BlueSky has 40+ million users, and it’s also technically decentralized like the Fediverse.
aka. you can use the eurosky.social or bluesky.social server etc.
Can BlueSky really be called decentralized when 99% of it is bluesky.social?
No, that’s why I said it’s technically decentralized.
They have 40 million users though, they focused on UX first, and will now hopefully not be dicks and actually become decentralized
Not a chance unfortunately, bluesky doesn’t work without an all-seeing-eye that brings people the content they want. At best there will be some satellites running on atproto, fully decentralized, but the core will still be bluesky and it will still be completely centralized
That is probably true, I do wish for a future where people can migrate to say https://www.eurosky.tech/ and alternatives, while benefiting from having so many users already
It’s not decentralized although it tried really hard to be.
I don’t want to google/remember the exact details but IIRC basically they run a centralized identity server that is impossible to avoid. At best, you can set up an island instance that doesn’t federate with BlueSky proper (like Truth Social vs Mastodon).
I’m not sure what can really be done about that; the fediverse is, by its very nature, pretty complicated. It’s at least as complicated as http or email, and those things are widely used but probably not that well understood by the average person.
I think people are accustomed to using things that they barely understand the inner workings of (car, microwave, computer, etc.) during their daily life. So, I guess my question is, to what degree do people need to know “how the fediverse works” in order to use it?
If anything, we probably have to change the way we talk about the fediverse to make it more streamlined for people. For example, instead of suggesting that people “join lemmy”, it would be better to send them directly to a specific instance that we would like to see grow.
Then there’s the friction of actually joining an instance. Some instances won’t let users view content without registering, and some require you to “apply” for registration, pending approval. Both of those things are reasonable and justifiable, but at the same time I think they do create a barrier of entry that we may not want if we are going to try to attract more users.
I find it really simple. I joined a site, I found communities, I posted.
It was honestly no different to using reddit, well without the spam and shitty far right losers.
There’s just one little hurdle: choose an instance when joining. Maybe it could just be some sort of “choose for me” and every instance gets equal new users, random. Of course with the option to “nope, I’ll choose instance myself”. Everything else is technical and a casual new user shouldn’t be bothered very much by it. Some are very interested and dig in to the knowledge, some just want to scroll cat pictures and call it a day, and that is fine too.
that’s kinda already how it works
https://join.piefed.social/ suggests you just join the default instance
https://join-lemmy.org/ gives a random default
Okay cool!
It reminds me of this:
https://lemmy.zip/post/47438646But yeah making the process of signing up and using the fediverse easier for users will go a long way. As much as I dont like bluesky, one thing they did right over Mastodon is making the sign up process dead easy for end users.
Sure, but Bluesky did that by not really being federated at all, especially during the early rush.
Bluesky is certainly a step or two better than Twitter, but I would imagine it’s still de facto centralized around the main bsky.social server, as that’s what the vast majority of users are probably using.Nowadays it’s getting more federated, but it seems to still be very far behind where ActivityPub is.
So they avoided the challenges of federation by not really being federated in the first place. Mastodon doesn’t have that luxury, since it was fully federated and self-hostable from the start. There was no half step and nobody else to copy.
it’s weird that, because once you’re in it’s basically seamless. it’s just that first step of picking a server based on your interests that trips people up, because aren’t you supposed to pick interests after you get in? more national instances would probably solve that, i think, so you can just go to your local one.
I have never understood the importance of choosing an instance, especially at the beginning. Sign up for any one, try it for a while and if you need to change later, you can do so without problems.
On sites like mastodon where followers are essential it can be a problem, in lemmy where karma is not even accumulated, changing servers does not make you lose more than the 5 minutes it takes you to do it
It’s a bit of a faff to export and import your followed community list
I have changed instances several times and it seems to me to be the simplest mechanism humanly imaginable.
more national instances would probably solve that, i think, so you can just go to your local one.
That’s roughly how I chose my instance… I thought I’d choose an instance geographically close to me for latency reasons and such. I didn’t know anything about different Lemmy instances at the time and didn’t (for example) know that my instance actually hosts very few popular communities, so I’d be participating mostly in remote ones. :D
yeah but, again, it’s seamless. my instance only hosts content in swedish, but that’s not really a problem. sorting by scaled means i still see things that happen locally mixed in with everything else.
I’m on my 4th instance. Dropped my first be cause of old Lemmy’s autorefreshand other issues. 2 and 3 died as maintainers went away. I had to start over from zero again each time
More instances with minimal/no defederation would help. That way you can just tell people to pick one of those instances and it doesn’t matter which one.
i mean maybe. i initially chose one of those instances for mastodon, but it turns out when you don’t defederate from anyone, others defederate from you because you act as a proxy for the nazis and pedos to reach other instances. so i couldn’t talk to my friends. it’s a bit of a hassle.
PieFed.zip is very new-user friendly (see very minimal instance block list). I don’t see the requirement for an endless barrage of new instances being a blocker - the amount that we have now is sufficient to handle far more capacity than the entire Threadiverse is currently capable of demanding from the servers.
Quite the opposite: most stories I see about people talking about the Threadiverse is how toxic AF we are, and elitist leftists, not welcoming to liberal centrists e.g. in the USA. So if the goal were to bring on more people from Reddit (setting aside for the
morningedit: moment whether that is truly a worthwhile aim), then more censorship of toxicity is what would more readily make that happen, not less moderation. e.g. one glance at hexbear and your average Redditor will never come back here again:-P.I disagree, you def would need to block the worst places. A good new-user friendly instance would block far-right and authoritarian content.
PieFed.zip takes an interesting approach: it blocks the most controversial instances but not as defederations i.e. at the instance level, and instead does so automatically for every new account upon sign-up, then sends the user a message explaining how to remove that block. From there they can unblock, reblock, back and forth as they choose at will. It thus makes federation with hexbear and Lemmygrad as opt-in rather than opt-out or obligatory or neglected as all other instances across the Threadiverse do.
I do not recall if it does this for lemmy.ml as well - I would suspect not, sadly, but then again it would be fairly unique in that respect if it did, as virtually no major instances do so.
And as far as far-right instances, those do not really exist, though nonetheless the historical ones are in the defederation list (exploding heads, freespeechextremists, and ofc threads.net:-P), and surely over time new instances could be added as well.
Finally I will add that I’ve never seen the tiniest hint of documentation for any of this - not in https://piefed.zip/defed_policy, or the welcome messages in their !announcements@piefed.zip or !home@piefed.zip local communities, and now I don’t see their listing anywhere in the instance picker site, despite trying multiple host instances of that including themselves. I only know about this since I too questioned how Newbie-friendly any instance was that federates with the above-mentioned pair, and the instance admin told me about this, but even now months later I still don’t see an official description written down about this somewhere easily accessible by people.
The Threadiverse is still very much a Work-In-Progress! But… it’s getting better, and PieFed.zip is a major part of that progress, it looks to me.
Welcome to PieFed! I see you’ve got an account and you know how to post comments. What else do you need help with?
I’d explain it like this. I hope that that works.
An easy analogy
View the fediverse like a few forests, linked by many wild bridges. PieFed might be one forest, Peertube and Mastodon yet other ones. These forests have a lot of different trees.
An instance is like a single tree. And a community a branch. Users are leaves. You can help keep the tree alive, by giving donations as nutrition.
Some parts of the fediverse allow leaves to move and join another tree.
Traditional social media, on the other hand, are comparable to a single, isolated and big tree, far away from other trees. You cannot jump to other trees, and cannot easily go to a forest.
More technical explanation
Social media are built on ‘protocols’. Protocols tell for example social media what they can do and how to ‘talk’ to each other.
The Fediverse is a group of social media that use ActivityPub, Diaspora, or AT Protocol. These three protocols allow something special that ‘traditional’ social media like Facebook and Instagram don’t: they can communicate across each other, without using a centralised server for hosting content.
It’s comparable to email; you can mail to someone not using your mail provider, and vice versa.
On one of these fediverse social media, people self-host or join a self-hosted group. Such a group is called an ‘instance’. Each instance functions independently and can have its own policies.
Instances (and users) can decide with which other instances they allow their own content to be seen. They can also decide what instances their users can see content from. An instance that is connected to another instance is said to be ‘federated’ with the latter. If that is not the case, they are ‘defederated’. Instances are supported through donations.
Within each instances, there are many communities. There’s a community for Linux, a community for cat pictures, a community for nature, and so on. Users can subscribe to many of them, receiving their content.
Wow, thanks a lot, this is the best explanation that I was able to find so far!
What do you think about https://phtn.app/ ? Sadly the PieFed support is in Beta for quite a while now, but I do like how clean everything looks. You can also hide away a lot of the complexity but I am not sure if that is the default.
I didn’t know it, and I’m trying it. The UX is really nice, though I don’t understand why I needed to submit the reasons why I wanted to subscribe, and why I have to wait to be subscribed to the different communities… But thanks for the suggestion!
That is odd, normally you are only asked for a reason when you sign up for a new account and not when you just subscribe to a community. Can you share the community you were trying to subscribe?
I have to wait to be subscribed to the different communities That is unfortunately in the nature of the decentralization. Your instance cannot be sure that that the instance the community is on will respond in a timely fashion so it shows it as “pending”. The only thing we could maybe do about this is to be overly optimistic. Most requests to subscribe a community go though without a problem so we could just show it being subscribed even though are are not, but that would introduce other problems.
My bad choice of wording, they asked me for reasons during sign up, not subscribing to communities. Anyway, thanks for the explanation, any chance you can share also android apps? I’m currently using Summit linked to my PieFed account
Im not sure if you are aware but you do not have to create a new Account on there. Photon is another client just like Summit is, so you can login using your piefed.social account. Sadly im not on android anymore but will be coming back soon! There are couple to choose from, just from the looks i like sync and interstellar but im not sure how well they support piefed. Lemmy was first so it was first supported.
https://join.piefed.social/docs/piefed-mobile/ https://piefed.social/community/fediverse/wiki/piefed-app
Ready for a bunch of teens coming in and trashing the place? No.
Gatekeeping, nice.
deleted by creator
Teens will probably find a way to verify using fake info. It seems like it’s generally the old and jaded who are willing to dump things out of stubbornness.
Get off my lawn!
Not normal teens either. The tiktok/ipad kid gens who developmentally missed the bus for normal critical thinking skills.
Get ready for sleuths of comment spam with only “Bro thinks” “crash out” and “Not that deep” lmfao
Wow, discrimination really makes this place that much similar to reddit. I’d really consider who really is the one trashing the place.
From a technical standpoint: No.
I’m on probably my dozenth account now. The majority of my jumps are because the instance I’d chosen became unstable, had long and/or frequent outages, or just died and went away completely with no warning.
Even the biggest instance I’ve ever joined, lemmy.world, choked whenever there’s a large exodus from Reddit or a lemmy upgrade or a bug farts in Belgrade.
The instances with fairly open enrollment will likely break under the load. The smaller instances with ridiculous sign-up requirements and/or a need for manual approval of accounts will discourage people from using Lemmy at all.
And because of those technical issues…
New instances will pop-up quickly from determined Redditors, because the stuff that’s already around can’t keep up. Then those new instances will become the heavy hitters. The ones we have now will be vulnerable to atrophy and becoming insular. The overall Fediverse will be vulnerable to the silo effect, diluting its value to folks, as it will basically be RedFed versus OldFed.
From an end-user standpoint: Also no.
The “culture” would shift practically overnight. I’ve already seen that happen. When I first got here, people were actually kind to each other. Users stood up for others and disparaged others for being hostile, aggressive, overly negative, etc. Then we had the API-calypse surge. Now those radically kind days are long gone. It happened fast. I tried to keep it up in my own small little corner, but even I don’t do as good a job as I should.
While the Fediverse may be “strong” overall, the individual pieces are too fragile to handle a significant Rexit onslaught. If even a small fraction of all Reddit users came to the Fediverse en-masse, this place as we know it would be gone.
Yeah IMO getting popular ruined reddit.
The upvote/downvote system destroys communities over time. It’s only a matter of time, not if it will happen.
for big communities, we can sort by New Comments instead, Reddit doesn’t have that
I like switching between Subscribed+Scaled to see stuff from my smaller communities, then Subscribed+New Comments to see the active stuff
May I ask what your prior instances were?
It’s been so many over the years and I really don’t recall the names of a lot of instances I’ve been on. I’m here on .zip because .wtf was having major stability issues a while back. Every time I’d get on, it was down. This happened for days/weeks at a time and I got irritated. Prior to that it was .world, similar story. Lots of stability issues on days and times I’d normally try to hop on there. Plus there was an update fiasco, or some other issue I don’t recall, that took it down for a bit. Prior to that I was on one of the kbin instances that is gone entirely now.
I don’t recall the first instance I joined when I first signed up. I had read that new folks should help spread the load by going to lesser used instances instead of all signing up for the big ones. That first instance was only around for maybe a couple of months. There was one that used the “magazine” concept for subscriptions, maybe kbin, I dunno.
As I said, it’s been a lot and I’ve been around long enough that I can’t recall all the names. Plus, the kicker to all this? Those site status trackers are highly, highly unreliable. When lemmy.world was down, at one point for like a full day or so, the site monitoring link showed all green. It’s one reason I stopped even bothering to try and troubleshoot on my end in case it’s something I’ve done because that started to become a major waste of my time.
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 !games@insta.nce !
Quick, get into a war about your favorite character in Iconoclasts!
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.
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.
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)
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.
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.
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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
Well, from a technical standpoint I am more prepared as an instance admin compared to Summer 2023. We’re running on powerful dedicated hardware after all.
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Lemmy seems in a great spot. I hope people give it a chance
User experience.
It is frustratingly bad for people just wanting to sign up. The idea of creating a single account, tied to a single instance that may or may not be federated is a confusing concept when most places online now are centralized. Then you have to choose which instance you sign up to, then depending on the instance you may need to go through an application or some other hoops to finally have a working account.
Then you may later find out your instance is not the community you thought it was, may be un-federated from other communities you had wanted to engage with, or the instance just shuts down one day, you loose your account and have to start all over again. That frustration and confusion is enough to turn away most casual and less techy users.
Also, there are lots of apps to pick from, but never a de facto one. While not necessarily a bad thing (in fact it can be generally good!) it does not help with the issues laid out above.
Exactly. Getting my account her took a week. I had to sign up then go through an application process. Like I get it, it helps reduce bots and stuff but golly it’s a pain and the average user isn’t going to do it
lemmy.world is really slow at accepting applications, we should not be suggesting it for new users
but you’re fine to stay there since you’re already in
Well what do you expect when the entire community thinks everyone should sign up for Lemmy.world and make this place even more centralized?
Its really stupid, but thats what it is… Hey look, we have federated technology! Lets all go to Lemmy.world because its the largest instance and users dont know what to pick anyway, so lets just put them there.
Lets make another centralized reddit with federated technology!
Honestly I dont think federation even is a valuable feature. People just want to be where everyone else is. The idea is good, but people dont care about the tech, they just want to use their apps and enjoy the experience.
There are some small advantages to many instances but the trend is to not even federate with instances that you dont like, so… Lol.
IDK I think it works brilliantly.
It prevents the iron grip on users/content like Reddit/Twitter have achieved. Enshitification can be defeated by moving instances, which is way easier when it can be done piecemeal instead of all at once, users can move at will and not even lose their friends and communities. Lemmy.world is less than a third of the Threadiverse, and only like 1% of the Fediverse. Enshitification relies on slowly boiling the frog, but here with federation that would cause a slow bleed of users moving until there’s no one left in your enshitified instance. Finding alternatives is really easy and you’ll already be used to the software since there are other instances with the same software.
If the software tries to enshitify then the code can be forked, instance admins can band together to support the new fork. Or switch to a different platform entirely like PieFed instead of Lemmy. Or even just changing the frontend to Photon or something like that.
I get the sentiment, but I feel that the majority, if not all of those benefits can be achieved by a floss threaded forum server application and companion client applications. So long as the software’s design objectives includes content ownership and portability, you could bail to another instance with all your stuff and re-share it or not as you see fit.
As much as I understand the goals of federation, it introduces many, many, intractable problems with efficiency, privacy, security, moderation, and ease administration in exchange for openness benefits that can likely or definitely be attained in other ways.
I believe that the idea of federation is not fundamentally bad, per se, but seems to have had a hype wave at a really opportune time, that made it the forerunner among the solutions to lock-in being discussed at the time. Plenty of other solutions seemed just as valid, but they lacked newness and novelty that made them less hyped when Reddit alternatives were being heavily discussed.
I think user friction without federation will always result in too much lock-in. Federation is our only chance to actually defeat the network effect and allow new platforms/instances to actually have a fighting chance at competing when they are better.
That could be true. People do seem to tend to tolerate slow declines in platform quality surprisingly long before jumping to available alternatives. I think that’s at least in part due to that ‘critical mass’ effect described elsewhere in this conversation that makes people prefer to stay where they believe everyone else is.
If federation does end up being the only solution that pans out, I hope to see additional approaches beyond ActivityPub. As capable as it is, its design seems to confound any implementations of private communications or revocation of access at many levels where it would be very useful and empowering to admins, moderators, and regular users alike.
I would love to see a federation model where each user has an encrypted profile and content in their own archive that they manage and/or have stored somewhere for them, which they can then use to join servers and choose what data from their profile they share with who else on that server, as well as participate in server local and federated public channels, as well as private data exchanges facilitated but not readable by the server or federated network of servers you have a user account signed up.
I’m not sure it could promise revocation for all data on servers of unknown configuration, but could accommodate info that is facilitated by but not readable by any of the participating servers. Posts in public areas would have and require much lower revocation/deletion assurances, but could still have them in a manner at least as robust as ActivityPub.
I’ve been watching the space as time permits and am interested in a lot of the amazing things people make for free for the ‘love of the game’!
It’s a design feature of the fediverse that larger instances are better. Bluesky goes a long way towards solving these issues. So there’s no point in complaining about people not making sacrifices.
The several apps thing I don’t see as much of a barrier to Redditors; most are already used to the platform’s official app being garbagepuke and going with something else so they’ll figure that out relatively quickly.
I haven’t yet seen the “Pick an instance to sign up with. It doesn’t matter, well actually it does, for reasons we’re not explaining right now” problem really addressed in a meaningful way. Those lists of instances to join when you go to Lemmy or pixelfed or whoever’s website? Most of them don’t get filled out correctly by instance admins; so they’re either the default boiler plate, or they’re the first two-thirds of the first sentence of a paragraph about what Lemmy is.
Lemmy.world
Lemmy is an open source, federated link aggregator platform powered by ActivityPub, the fastest growing…
I don’t really see how to ‘fix’ the first part because its fundamental to what the threadiverse is
True now, but doesn’t have to be. Could have a site that aggregates and simplifies these steps to one place, allows you to pick and choose your instance with explanations right there to help you make informed decision on your account, and let’s you know upfront on which instances have other restrictions. Filters for those lists, and other quality of life features that people have come to expect in a modern user experience.
I know some have tried sites like this before, and I’m sure there are some kind people out there that may even have the handy excel sheet to share as well, but few to no solutions out there do it all, and certainly not all of it well.
All this is to say, there’s things the fediverse could have better, but it’s really reliant on volunteers to make it what it is and those are in short supply.
we had a larger instance now shutdown and too many people are scattered to the other ones, and i noticed less content on my feed because of that.
Just explain it like you would explain email to a boomer in 1998. It is just another protocol.
On the surface, that works. Problem is, to use the Fediverse you have to get a bit deeper into it than with email.
Email is designed to evoke the UX of the physical post office. To use the post office, or email, you need to know your address, and your recipients address. You need to know where to put outgoing letters, and where to get incoming letters. Even if you’re vaguely aware of Grumman LLVs and letter sorting machines and trucks and trains and whatnot, you can still get away with conceptualizing it as, you put a letter in a box, it is then “In the mail” until it is delivered to the recipient. Email presents itself to the end user as exactly that.
ActivityPub might be “just another protocol” like smtp or pop3 or whatever but the user experience is vastly different in ways people really haven’t had to deal with before. Lemmy isn’t lke the post office, it’s like Reddit, except there’s 90 little Reddits each with their own slightly different rules and a complex web of which will communicate with what. The format of the electronic communique is of no consequence to the end user.
On Reddit, if I write a post in a subreddit and click Post, it is stored on Reddit’s servers, and anyone with a Reddit account can access Reddit’s servers and see it because we’re accessing the same monolithic system. On Lemmy, I’m currently posting to lemmy.world from a sh.itjust.works account in response to an account from programming.dev. On which of those three independent platforms will this message be stored? How could someone from, say, piefed.social see it? I genuinely don’t understand this fully msyself and I’ve been on Lemmy for a couple years now.
On Reddit, if I write a post in a subreddit and click Post, it is stored on Reddit’s servers, and anyone with a Reddit account can access Reddit’s servers and see it because we’re accessing the same monolithic system. On Lemmy, I’m currently posting to lemmy.world from a sh.itjust.works account in response to an account from programming.dev. On which of those three independent platforms will this message be stored? How could someone from, say, piefed.social see it? I genuinely don’t understand this fully msyself and I’ve been on Lemmy for a couple years now.
It’s stored on all of them. Piefed.social can see them because piefed.social is federated with sh.itjust.works, lemmy.world and programming.dev.
I’ve been SLOWLY getting into the Fediverse for a little over a year now. My biggest gripe has always been discovery and availability. I feel like there is a lot more effort required to find people/communities I am interested in. Then if/when I do find them they are often not very active.
So yeah I’ll say what everyone else is saying that UX needs some work. I used Lemmy for a while last year and just couldn’t get used to the interface, I’m not Feddit and like this interface more. But it could use some work on mobile imo.
On mobile Voyager is quite nice imo
Rexited a long time ago. We must encourage (sensible people) to move to Lemmy and Piefed
how can we be ready this time?
I’m here to chew bubblegum and sass noobs; and I’m all outta noobs.
