A community to talk about the Fediverse and all it's related services using ActivityPub (Mastodon, Lemmy, Mbin, etc).
If you wanted to get help with moderating your own community then head over to !moderators@lemmy.world!
Learn more at these websites: Join The Fediverse Wiki, Fediverse.info, Wikipedia Page, The Federation Info (Stats), FediDB (Stats), Sub Rehab (Reddit Migration)
The Australian Subreddits got overrun by extremist right wing people who tend to be 20x louder than anyone else, and exaggerate everything.
One even reported me for being racist (successfully) despite the fact that the entire time I was fighting back against the racism
Even worse, you now need to log in to even see it at all in a mobile browser. So f that
Those same fuckers are on a roll now, winning one MP seat.
Yeah and if you're IP banned your fucked
the only problem is the lack of niche from like in some reddit subs, not main subs, and people there are unlikely to migrate here. plus the bots therer drum all the engagement to get people interested. when an instance vanishes it takes the content with them and i dint see the last one recover from it.
It takes very little effort to open and run a community here, be the change you want to see. :)
I disagree. It's easy if you want to use a community as your personal blog without any interaction from others. It's hard to get an actual community running.
People are more likely to participate if you are. :) But if the space exists, natural discovery can happen too. You do not have to do much more than open the conversation.
i love lemmy for what it is now. it sadly doesn’t have some communities as active here as reddit may, like stuff for soccer in particular for me, but it’s solid for everything else
To me it feels like Reddit mini
I’m having a blast here.
Not only because it gives you the content that you choose. And there’s no shorts, no ads, …no superfluous bs (god I hate fb, I fucking loathe it).
But also, everything is within reach. The options are within the options. Done.
@ekZepp funny, I thought this is what Google search is nowadays:
"Threads was worthless because it’s the most boring social media website ever imagined. It’s a social media network designed by brands for brands, like if someone made a cable channel that was just advertisements and meta commentary about the advertisements you just saw. Billions of dollars at their disposal and Meta made a hot new social media network with the appeal of junk mail." @matdevdug
@ekZepp @matdevdug "So in this complete breakdown of the press came in the Fediverse. It became the only reliable source of information I had. People posted links with a minimal amount of commentary, picking and choosing the best content from other social media networks. They’re not doing it to “build a brand” because that’s not a thing in the Fediverse. It’s too disjointed to be a place to build a newsletter subscription base."
@ekZepp @matdevdug "Instead it became the only place consistently posting trustworthy information I could actually access. This became personally relevant when Trump threatened to invade Greenland, which is the kind of sentence I never expected to type and yet here we are. It would be funny if I wasn't a tiny bit concerned that my new home was going to get a CIA overnight regime change special in the middle of the night."
I am having a great time exploring the Fediverse and of course having a blast here in Lemmy. That said I have found a lot of limitations as well that makes the Fediverse work "for real" when you want to go in deep into the federation part of it. For example I was really trying to move away from instagram and I wanted to create my own instance of Pixel fed. The expectation is that I have my own instance in the fediverse I can own and I can connect to the rest of the network. The reality is that from your little bubble you can't see old posts from accounts on other servers. Only new ones. Which does not really make it work for real. There are plenty of other use cases that work better, but assuming that's the "only way" and it's perfect is not being fully honest. A lot of people like to shit on ATproto, but it's a protocol that feels less extreme on federation and more friendly on the "normal person" usability part of it. Every person have their own needs in the end.
It's also one of the most nitpicky whiny places you can visit. A new open source software/update just got released and it does something cool! "Well it's not {x} compliant so it's trash." Or "If a solo developer or a team decides to use 'AI' then their entire project is AI slop."
There are so many moments where I'm like "just shut the fuck up and enjoy the software/news/updates these strangers are providing for free."
It’s full of leftist purity testing, that’s for sure. And, you can’t say certain things even if they are actually true.
i block tankie instances, and tankie posts.
And the eight and final rule of fediverse, if this is your first time discussing linux distros, you have to fight.
HAHA! THEY'VE BEEN BAMBOOZLED! HOISTED! WHAT BUFFOONS!
People talk a lot about the protocols that power Bluesky vs. ActivityPub, because we're nerds and we believe deep in our hearts that the superior protocol will win. This is adorable. It flies in the face of literally all of human history, where the more convenient thing always wins regardless of technical merit. VHS beat Betamax. USB-C took twenty years.
Hopefully, unlike betamax and laserdisc, the fediverse will trudge on despite the megacorporate protocols
FOSS dominates by sheer persistence growing slowly as everything else burns bright and extinguishes until it's the best remaining option.
It's the slow way, but it's the right way.
you don't need special equipment to use the fediverse, so imo it's unlikely it will "fail"
See I had forgotten the one golden rule of capitalism. To thrive in capitalism one must be amoral. Now you can be wildly sickeningly successful with morals but you cannot reach that absolute zenith of shareholder value. Either you accept a lower share price and don’t commit atrocities or you become evil. There is no third option.
Spot on.
People complain about Lemmy having limited content and engagement. Not in this article so much. I’m sure there were fewer posts in the past too. But what I found is that there are real people on here and you don’t have to wade through bots and shills which makes this community feel much more whole to me.
I actually like the slower pace. There's no constant stream of content but I find that helps me to moderate my usage. It also helps me take a more active role because I don't just see what I'm subscribed to. I'll hop over to the top posts over the last 6 hours and find something that's really hot elsewhere, or I'll hop on to scaled and find something obscure. It's slower and cranky but it embodies a lot of the old elements of scrolling that I miss.
While that's true, I don't believe it to be a fundamental property of the medium or federation in general. I think what we are experiencing is the result of lack of mainstream attention and traffic.
The people here are much less demographically diverse than the public at large, and have intentionally sought out this space and others like it, so they have more of a sense of ownership and community about it. The more attention it gets, the more the demographics will change to reflect the broader public, and the more it will become like a public space, complete with all the ills that come with that, like advertisers vying for attention, shills posing as enthusiasts, and influencers saying what will get them the most followers, rather than what they think.
I believe it would take extensive moderation and amazing tools to keep places like this the same as they gain users. I haven't ever seen a community survive that kind of growth and retain its original spirit, but I also haven't seen one with no profit motive. If we can get the moderation tools where they need to be, there could be hope!
Also, there is no central power that has to make the line go up. I remember reddit like before 2014 and that was much like here in many ways (in an older kind of way, more racism and smut), but they just had to shoehorn in moar users more and more and more, and forbid any troublesome subs (while leaving other troublesome ones ofc.).
So IMO there is a real difference, we cannot grow too big or we'd just split off into new entities.
There is no effective way to ban a person. As long as that remains true, moderation tools don't really matter.
Israel alone is putting $760 million into propaganda. Lemmy may not be big, but it's worth 0.2% of that budget.
And that's just Israel.
israel is pretty new on the scene, only after '23 they significantly increased thier propaganda funding, russia still beats them with billions per year on propaganda, of course its not limited to just social media.
I think that's trying to solve the wrong problem.
If I had awesome moderating tools, identifying and deleting comments that violate the policy would be effortless. I would not need to ban a person, which as you aptly point out, can reappear forever. But, I can ban all of his violating comments, which are, after all, the true target and violation, not the commenter.
While Lemmy lacks those, PieFed already has both advanced automated mod tools plus other features that dramatically increases the democratization of moderation itself.
e.g. if someone wants to see less Trump and Musk content, keyword filters allow someone to personally set that up, without having to rely upon a moderator to make that decision for the entire community.
Another example along those lines is the automated collapsing or even hiding of content that falls below a certain score threshold - personally I have that turned off, but if someone wants that then again, they don't have to rely solely upon the efforts of a moderation team, and can rely instead upon the community engagement. Again: if they want.
Still another example is showing icons next to usernames - e.g. one shows new users that are <2 weeks old, another shows someone who receives ~10x more downvotes than upvotes, and so on. These are not "filters", just helpful indicators so that you know more about someone's reputation prior to responding. Most conservatives for example have warning labels next to their usernames, in these more leftist spaces.
Also - and I cannot emphasize enough how crucial this is - PieFed moderator reports actually federate. This has been a source of huge pain in Lemmy, and tbf I think a future Lemmy release is planned that will do that... but meanwhile as with so exceedingly very many other features, PieFed has had them for months.
PieFed thereby helps avoid some of the major issues that cause community fragmentation. Which ironically PieFed also helps solves that issue too, by collapsing comments (old example of this phenomena), and with the Categories of Communities suite of features, including the user-customizeable and shareable Feeds.
Also PieFed is easier to install, requires less maintenance, uses fewer resources (even sending 25-fold less data to end-users), and so on. So yeah, I don't think Lemmy is capable of scaling up, despite its reliance upon its sourcecode being in the hyper stable Rust programming language, because of all the other issues with it (database issues requiring constant restarts, and especially lack of moderation capabilities), so I am putting all of my hopes into PieFed. Sorry if this reads like an advertisement - I feel like PieFed is to Lemmy what Lemmy is to Reddit, except that analogy does not begin to come close since PieFed has added features that even Reddit never bothered to, plus some others that it continually tried to take away from people by not retaining it in new-reddit despite how it was present in old.
Even better.
Most instances have human moderation, gating for bots, and yes, and you actually have to take 5-10 minutes to figure out how it all works, so the stupid people are automatically excluded by sheer complexity.
I fucking love Mastodon.
That's not the problem. The problem is how fucking slow it is. It has such few users, I see the same post in the early am as the late pm. IRL I'm an introvert, but online I'm a social fucking butterfly, and I need to give and receive attention. Also, you are highly overestimating yourself if you think dumb people can figure this out, because I'm dumb af
I really would like to somehow convince more people to adopt the idea that, like, Facebook and friends are run by bad people and you can choose not to use their products. Just stop. Find another way. Be uncomfortable for a little while.
But people aren't up to the challenge.
I wouldn't say it's "not up to the challenge" insomuch that like when you want to convince someone to not use Chrome, you're running into the problem that you have to create a framework under which the amount of problem Chrome can be can actually be measured/registered.
People always assume "Yeah but the average user doesn't care", but never truly read that line and realize what it implies.
It's not that my mum opens Chrome, sees that it's 74/100 on the problematic-software-you-shouldn't-use-scale, and then decided to use it anyways.
She opens it. That's it. It ends there.
There is no "This is a 74/100 problem".
There is no problematic-software-you-shouldn't-use-scale.
There is no scale.
There isn't even the conceptual idea for it, and hence no reason or impetus to ever internally have such a scale.
And now comes an important question: Why? Or rather, why not?
And the answer is both easier and also impossibly harder than most of us trying to convince others would want to accept: Because it doesn't matter.
To my mum, she couldn't give a flying fuck what others think about Chrome, she wants to open a web page. She has actual problems in her actual life, she doesn't care a rat's arse what the tiny computer she looks up the weather and contacts her kids on does to allow her to do that internally. She's worried about her health, about her colon surgery healing or about her mum (my grandma is 93) having fallen down.