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?
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
Lemmy is not capable of dealing with bots at all I believe
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.
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
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.
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.
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.”
reddits arnt coming here, unless SPEZ/reddit decides to a massive purge wave again, which they wont now. because they realize they lost too much irl users to thier AI slop, and now bots/spammers are taking over reddit. they went with more subtle background shadowbans.
how can we be ready this time?
I’m here to chew bubblegum and sass noobs; and I’m all outta noobs.
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.
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.
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 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.
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…
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.
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.
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.
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"
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 !meanwhileongrad@sh.itjust.works 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!:-)
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 !piefed_meta@piefed.social.
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.
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…
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.
Hey! U r dumb and also I’m jorking my peanor
👍
UNACCEPTABLE
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
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
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
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.
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
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.
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’s only a few communities I’d be interested in seeing come over and they’ve already made it clear they’re not interested in moving because of reddits enshittification. I don’t think lemmy should cater to people who can’t be bothered to get over the small initial hump of choosing an instance. We don’t need more users just for the sake of more users anyway. People like that aren’t bringing anything to the table anyway.
It’s a shame because once you get it, it’s actually kinda fun. Like choosing a Harry Potter house lol
The front page of leminal.space is a soothing experience everytime I log on. Their slogan is literally:
Take a break from the slow-burn apocalypse of late stage capitalism’s race to the bottom
I chose the second most popular instance at the time I joined and haven’t thought about it since then except when I have to log into it
Ready for a bunch of teens coming in and trashing the place? No.
Gatekeeping, nice.
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.
deleted by creator
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.
I thought about spinning up a lemmy server but honestly the moderation and being responsible for content is a huge concern
yea, thats why alot of other instance shut down, too much to handle.
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.
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
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’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
Instance selection at sign-up remains the primary barrier to entry.
I think there needs to be a quick question form upon sign-up, going over the biggest differences between instances. Such as: “do you want downvotes activated? Do you want to see NSFW? Do you want little, moderate, or heavy automated blocking of potentially objectionable material?” etc, then have the sign-up page provide you with up to three instance options based on your selected preferences.
Otherwise you’re either forcing users to do this research on their own (“ew, homework just to sign up for social media? no thanks”) or they’re going in blind and selecting at random, very likely ending up on an instance with qualities/features they don’t like.
A separate issue: during the big 2023 rexit (when I moved over), the primary instance that most new users joined, lemmy.world, was a buggy, buggy mess, practically unusable for the first few days. I don’t know if that was specifically because of the influx of new users or if it just worsened problems that had skated by when there were only a handful of users before, but I imagine the bugs turned away quite a few potential new Lemmings. Hopefully that won’t be an issue this time around, but I guess that depends on how big the exodus is and how much Lemmy infra has strengthened in the 2.5 years since.
One option is to do this for them, and just send the link to the instance most suited to your current audience when recommending using Lemmy, rather than trying to explain what instances are, because they don’t need to know that to use it.
I think there needs to be a quick question form upon sign-up, going over the biggest differences between instances. Such as: “do you want downvotes activated? Do you want to see NSFW? Do you want little, some, or heavy automated blocking of potentially objectionable material?” etc, then have the sign-up page provide you with up to three instance options based on your selected preferences.
Dude. I’m saying this completely unironically: A personality quiz recommending you your instance “house” upon sign-up would be fun AF lol 🎉
Ew no thanks. Leave the hufflepuff shit on tiktok please.
