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?
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 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.
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!:-)
I wouldn’t recommend dbzer0. Since the AI purge, where many users who were critical that you can’t be pro-AI and anarchist at the same time were banned, the instance has been largely taken over by tankies. Even their own admins are self-proclaimed tankies, and all their popular users are tankies who have accounts on Hexbear. They’re, at the very least, openly a tankie bar.
Is that just some of the communities, or the instance itself, do you think? I thought their overarching tolerance policy was because they are anarchists, not actual tankies - like, would they be equally as tolerant of conservative viewpoints?
Anyway thank you for posting the link to learn more.
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.
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!
its the ones distilled from other platforms like reddit, or another where they get banned.
Lemmy.ml was created by the lemmy developers following the quarantine of ChapoTrapHouse on reddit. ChapoTrapHouse was the largest tankie subreddit and extremely toxic.
Following the development of Lemmy, lemmy.ml split into Lemmygrad, where Lemmygrad is where they hold their more extreme opinions and lemmy.ml is supposed to be the more presentable side. However, the users are largely the same. One’s mask-off, one’s mask-on.
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.
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"
But those countries just have a sign out front that says “communism”, with little to no actual ideological communism taking place inside. Surely those alabaster pure ideologues seek out the Platonic form of perfect ideology, rather than this DPRK-like fun-house mask covering up an entirely different ideology.
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…
I feel like the split between leftists and liberals really isn’t that big at all, assuming the people being talked about aren’t diehards behind people like Schumer or are scorched-earthers. There’s a vein of liberalism that builds towards the same exact goals that are leftist in nature.
I see progressive liberalism for instance being focused on working within what currently is built out to get to those goals of helping people reach self-actualization and living stable lives without having to be concerned about if you’ll be able to retire, have healthcare, have childcare, housing, food, disease, or other common concerns.
I agree with you, but if the tankies were listening they’d be very upset! (I say let them rupture a vessel but hey)
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 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
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 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
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 content especially main stream topic and pop culture.
In the fediverse we have too much politics, lgbt, Linux and environmental topics. Don’t get me wrong those topics are great and should continue existing but your average Joe like other topics more.
Let’s hope this time there won’t be a “boycott is over” moment.
There was a boycott is over moment? Isn’t reddit still blocking third party apps?
Basically a lot of people got their anger out, then moved on with their life.
I never boycotted Reddit, I just refused to use their app and new reddit. I ended up just using desktop mode old reddit without an app. If reddit moved to an age verification I would just drop it completely lol.
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.
===========
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
Lemmy seems in a great spot. I hope people give it a chance
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.
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 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
are we ready?
idk how to get more people aware of fediverse without joining stuff like reddit again and getting banned repeatedly mentioning fediverse.
As a sys admin with a lot of experience, I am still unsure how to maintain and update my lemmy instance. So I am revisiting again, but it seems like we need work on the lemmy docker containers and possibly docker-compose.
pretty sure PieFed is easier to host
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.
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.
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.
Mobile users can be pointed towards alternative clients. Makes the whole thing much more manageable and familiar. I use sync (which no longer seems to be being updated) but there are others. Don’t know if there’s a desktop equivalent but that might help with UX problems.
Also, re onboarding - many Lemmites might be astonished to realise how many non technical ppl don’t know what a server is and are intimidated by the term. Maybe just say something like ‘Click on the place nearest to you or that you like the sound of’. I dunno, a metaphor. Like, your computer is a toilet, the fediverse is the ocean. When you take a crap and flush, your turd goes to the local sewage facility where it parties with all the other turds before being dumped into the sea.
There’s probably a better metaphor, but, y’know.
Ready for a bunch of teens coming in and trashing the place? No.
Gatekeeping, nice.
Get off my lawn!
Yes. Lemmy is toxic as fuck. They couldn’t possibly make it any worse than it already is.
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.
Wow, discrimination really makes this place that much similar to reddit. I’d really consider who really is the one trashing the place.
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
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.
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.
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.
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’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.
For new users the local feed is the recommendation algorithm. If you are on a instance that caters to your interests you will discover stuff that interests you there automatically. If you’re not, then you might conclude, that Lemmy has nothing for you and bounce off the platform entirely. This is especially true if you are looking for non-English content.
The paradoxical situation with federation and instances is that those least likely to understand it are among the more likely to profit from it if they did.
Why would you use local as a source of recommendation instead of all? I find using the local tab very limiting, it will never be as complete as all my tastes and hobbies
Tbf piefed.zip doesn’t have much of a local so that makes sense for you, but the user above is on feddit.org, which is a long-running German-language (at least prominent) instance so it does make sense for them in that context if they’re German.
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
