I've been one of the people saying "we don't need more users. we need quality over quantity" and i was wrong.
the way it's going, lemmy needs active users who post content sothat the network stays relevant. networks like the fediverse benefit from network effects and that means that if we have more users, that improves the value and quality of the fediverse overall.
So please, everyone, when you can, make advertisement for the fediverse in your personal area. Go talk to friends, make attractive stickers and put them everywhere, stuff like that. We would all benefit from it.
edit: source for the graph
I just don't get why people would stay in reddit when lemmy exist :(
Because Lemmy, to this day, doesn't do what Reddit does. Yes, the UI is similar, but there's two big downsides to Reddit. One that's important now, and one that's important later.
This horrible scalability means that right now instances are getting close to their limits (see e.g. lemm.ee closing down exactly due to these reasons).
Lemmy has 40-50k monthly active users. Reddit has 5.16 billion monthly active users, so about 100 000x. If everyone on Reddit were to move over to Lemmy, Lemmy would be done. Just one day of Reddit-level traffic would be enough to jam up the history of Lemmy content so much that nobody could ever afford hosting a Lemmy instance again.
Eh, if the original instance removes the CSAM - the ban and removal federates out to everywhere else, so this isn't always true.
As for the scaling of Lemmy - absolutely, but it'll never get to Reddit sized levels. Down the line, the answer here would be for the federative structure to change so that an instance only hosts its own local content, and doesn't need duplicate content viewed from external instances.
That's not why lemm.ee closed down. It wasn't financial.
But if it doesn't, then other instances removing the content on their side doesn't federate. So you can either trust every instance that you federate with with your legal security, or you will have to moderate everything yourself as well, just in case someone missed something.
This would be extremely important, but I don't know if such a low level conceptual change can still be performed with a reasonable amount of work. Remember, for such a change you need to get every instance on board. That would be difficult now, and only more difficult later.
Tbh, it would have been much smarter if the setup would be basically a bunch of independent phpBB-like boards with federated single-sign-on and an app that transparently connects you to whatever instance hosts the content you are looking at.
No, it was specifically because of the moderation issue: https://lemmy.ca/post/45390962
Sure, you're right there - but an instance that kept having problems with removing CSAM would find itself defederated.
Well it would be built in from Lemmy or Piefed. The devs would have to spearhead it. But were the load ever to get to that point, I suspect that would be the obvious move.
Yes, so not financial. You seemed to be implying it was financial.
Depends... Imagine it also contains some of the most relevant communities and defederating would mean you lose users. That's not such an easy decision any more. Also, at that point hosting would likely be so expensive that for-profit instances would emerge, and for those defederating an important community wouldn't be such an easy choice either.
But it's not only CSAM. For example, there's illegal speech in quite a few parts of the world. In Germany, for example, a lot of nazi-related stuff is illegal. In russia or china some regime-critical speech is illegal. I wouldn't be too surprised if the US also joins this club sometime in the near future.
Actually, if you are a non US citizen and you and you want to travel to the USA, it's already troublesome if you are hosting a website with anti-Trump content.
That kind of stuff is unlikely to be deleted on the original instance if that instance isn't hosted in the same country.
Sorry if that came across. I said lemm.ee was shutdown because of the scaling issue. I could have been more clear with that I meant the moderation scaling issues.
I don't think that would save it, to be honest.
People would just clone the communities on other instances and rebuild.
I suspect eventually lemmy/piefed federation will not be automatic, but subject to approval.
No-one cares what Russia or China thinks here. Germany? I mean, sure, but this is also a complication for any regulatory bodies trying to police social media sites. As "Lemmy" or "Piefed", as you know, are not singular entities.
Yeah, in part because they had a "no defederation" policy which came to bite them back.
People living in Russia or China might care.
UK might be much more difficult, btw. They now ban all porn without identity checks. So if you host a lemmy/piefed instance that's accessible in the UK you will need to delete all adult content that makes it to your instance, if you don't want to violate UK law.
Cloning communities isn't quite that easy. Were you present when feddit.de went down? Their communities didn't vanish. The replications are still up on all other instances, and you can still post there. There's no indication to a casual user that the instance hosting the communities is down and thus federation doesn't work. To the users it just looks like participation dropped like a rock with no obvious reason.
The communities were cloned onto a new instance (IIRC feddit.org) but even up to now, people keep posting to the old now-unfederated communities.
Btw: that's another quite critical issue: Lemmy lacks any and all migration tools. Can't migrate an instance to a new URL, can't migrate users or communities to other instances. All you can do is scrap all you had and start fresh.
I mean, okay, but they likely use VPNs to start with. There's already heavily oppressive laws there. The point is Russia and China have no power to threaten Fediverse owners here.
I am from the UK. And lemmy.zip has geoblocked the UK because of this (the owner is from the UK). But no other instances has done anything so far.
Keep in mind that Piefed actually has community migration now. There are moves being made here.
I don't know if you've convinced me to stay or go, but you've certainly convinced me of either or.
Wasn't trying to convince anyone of anything. Just offering a reality check.
Lemmy vs Reddit is like this meme where the one side says "I hate you" and the other side says "Who are you?" (or was it "I don't even think of you", can't remember).
Lemmy is cool. It being small has benefits and I like the political direction here much more than on Reddit. I like that most people I interact with on Lemmy genuinely are humans. On Reddit, that's much more difficult to be certain of.
But Lemmy is not Reddit, it's not a Reddit alternative, it's not even a Reddit competitor. It's a nice little niche forum, a little anti-capitalist experiment, that kinda copied the UI and UX of old Reddit. That's totally fine and it's got it's value. Otherwise I wouldn't have >3000 comments on this platform.
But it's a factor of 100 000x off of being on the radar of Spez and his crew.
Lemmy is great in the techy/gaming, memes, and news/politics fields, but doesn't have strong secondary communities. I no longer have a reddit account but still lurk to keep up with news focused in Ukraine, Japan, Korea, music, history, minecraft, etc.
Also, social media uses the same tactics as casinos to keep people hooked. I remember a podcast in which they compared the new algorithms to slot machines where sometimes you "win" by getting content you're looking for, sometimes you lose by getting fed random crap you didn't search, and mostly you break even & get fed the same repetitive crap (this makes the times you "win" seam more rewarding.) Social media is an addiction and cancerous to modern society.
Reddit is bots. People are on tiktok or Instagram or whatever.
I think the reason is similar with Windows and Linux.
Personally, I like the smaller userbase. Higher levels of freedom speech are still valuable even if only 1000 people may see your post/comment, rather than having you blocked by incompetent AI filter with no way to fight back.
Because reddit coddles nazis and lemmy doesn't.
Also niche communities exist on reddit that lemmy doesn't have the population to support.
I disagree. If Lemmy was plagued with Nazis, it would down the shitter pretty fast.
I don't want nazis here either and I'm glad that lemmy remains hostile to them. I was responding to someone who asked why people stayed on reddit. Given reddit's userbase, they're staying because they're welcome. We shouldn't welcome nazis.
We got tankies on here, though. Not much better.
Too bad centrists think everyone with any criticism whatsoever of anything they do is a tankie.
Haven't seen that happen yet.
That speaks more to your lack of criticism.
What's a tankie and what makes them close to Nazis?
A tankie is a kind of person who likes Imperialism and expansionism so long as it comes from something related to, as the other user said, Marxist-Leninism.
The origin of Marxist-Leninism is Russia, so they support Russia invading things, and committing warcrimes, and make all sorts of excuses for such acts.
Today they're primarily in support of the Russian side in the Russo-Ukranian war, do not consider it an invasion of a sovereign nation, and consider it fully justified as an act to oppose "NATO expansion".
Essentially, to a tankie, nothing "goes too far" if they can somehow connect it to a Marxist-Leninist agenda, and behave the same way about Putin as a right-wing American behaves about Trump.
Nearly forgot; the name "tankie" comes from how Russia overwhelmingly uses tanks to invade territories.
Oh, I don't think I've witnessed one here.
You probably haven't. It's just a word centrists throw around when they want to defederate from instances they don't like for being to their left.
They tend to pool in a certain subset of lemmy instances, and some of the main instances have defederated them, because at one point it got pretty bad.