Day 2 here, and I can see the growth already. Personally I really like the notion of how its gonna shape up in the future but at the same time I really feel for the average user as of now its too complex to understand the working and how the cross servers thing is working. I mean yes still early days, UI will improve further leading to a better UX but the core mechanism yet is little tough to get along. For instance, still unclear if I made the right choice by signing up on lemmydotworld why not lemmydotml , beehaw etc… and where does this stop? like in the coming times i it would be like a thousands of servers lemmy.this lemmy.that lemmy.etc or anything.anything. That’s soo confusing for someone who just wanna join a server. Would be interesting to see how “signup anywhere, its the same thing” evolves.
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I moved from aussie.zone to lemmy.world already to get around federation issues.
Now beehaw.org has stopped federating with lemmy.world 🤷♂️I don’t want to have half a dozen accounts so that I can access all the niches of this system, and yet it’s beggining to look like the dream of federation is stillborn.
Yea. I feel like Beehaw cutting a lot of the larger general communities out from two of the biggest instances is highlighting early a major hurdle that’s gonna make the whole fediverse thing difficult to get a lot of people on board with. I don’t want to have to keep making new accounts to access stuff, but like… half of the communities I had subscribed to are just gone now because the admins over there decided they don’t want to play with anyone else, I guess.
To be fair, that’s how things used to be on the internet. You’d sign up for various forums or message boards with different accounts. Then it all became consolidated under one roof, and message boards started dying. What’s happening with reddit now shows the danger of that.
Yeah there will never be a perfect middleway. Either you have a lot of small kingdoms where sometimes some of them go rogue or you got one big one where the Leaders literally rule the whole place.
I think feddiverse will be the better option in the long run after some things get tweaked a bit more.Bluesky has a global identity system where instance accounts are just links to a DID (basically your private key). If you get banned from an instance you have to change your name but you keep all your posts and likes.
I’m personally OK with the old-school way of one account per community/server. All I really want is forums with (1) a nice clean UI, (2) nice mobile app, and (3) open APIs. Most popular forum software meets only one, or even none of these. Lemmy has all three of these. Federation is maybe nice icing on the cake, but I could take it or leave it personally. Maybe that’s denying the whole point of Lemmy, but I don’t care.
Client apps will likely end up managing signup and credentials automagically. We already do it for certain/acme.
It’d be nice if there were some way to link accounts across different instances
It’s a decent argument to host your own instance just for your self and not having to shuffle subscriptions around
I wish there was a turnkey solution for this
I haven’t looked into it but I’ve heard it’s pretty good docker, or otherwise. Self hosting is not quite at the masses yet but this sounds like one of the easier ones
There was OpenID for this, but it sadly also died.
Beehaw has a code of conduct that everyone can read.
They already said that it is hard to effectively mod because the tooling isn’t there yet.
I really wish people would hamper their expectations a bit. With more people coming, there will be more people willing to contribute for tooling etc. These projects are in it’s infancy so growing pains will happen.
Facebook for example pays around 500mil per year for moderating and Reddit has free labor for it. But even then, Reddit is dependent on 3rd party tooling for their moderators to effectively moderate. That is a company that exists for 18 years or so?
At one point I expect there to be tooling available to make it easier to target ban people from an specific instance or even defederate specific accounts from an instance.
But if you are a mod team of 4 people without effective tooling then I hope that people understand the predicament they are in and also support the server in their efforts and try to understand their reasoning.
At least you don’t have to switch to another platform, you can just make an account on the instance and participate.
I have been toggling between instances and accounts per instance for a good week already and I encounter zero problems with it.
If you just make an account and “activate” the keep yourself logged in checkmark than you can easily switch between instances.
In this stage we are self governing to an extent. The behaviour of people can affect a full instance so everyone has the obligation to think before they post.
Just don’t be a dick/troll/spammer/bigot is more then enough to keep federating for your instance enabled.
Yea that sucks.
Now beehaw.org has stopped federating with lemmy.world
Fucking wonderful.
and if i am not mistaken I can’t federate with mastodon either. right?
you kinda have to pick your poison. some groups will naturally segregate themselves, while others will try to remain open for everything. you have to find an instance that matches the way you engage with stuff. Or you can use multiple instances if need be.
I’m pretty happy here on kbin.social and I doubt I’d leave if some other instance ends up blocking us.
Hopefully large instances keep federating with the small, self-hosted ones. I’m not sure how to check but I think really small instances still have the most reach.
I self hosted precisely so I can federate with who I want to. It’s nice to be able to see posts from multiple instances of (for example) self-hosted on different servers within my own instance, and comment on them directly within my own instance.
The only issues I’ve had is the comments can take a bit to federate across, but that’s to be expected.
It goes both ways though, if beehaw isolates itself enough the rest of the fediverse will make its own communities that effectively replace the ones we lost from them defederating.
As of now they’re blocking 387 communities according to this
If I’m not mistaken both Beehaw and Lemmy.world are pretty big mainstream instances.
Why has Beehaw decided to stop federating with lemmy.world?
The stated reason is that there’s too many bad actors coming from here, so it’s too hard to moderate:
https://beehaw.org/post/567170
Hopefully (as they state in their post), federation will resume once things settle into a new norm.
Or I forsee beehaw losing relevance as it continues to pursue an isolationist policy.
Thank you!
A scary thing about the Fediverse right now is that some instances have many of the bigger communities. And the owners of the instance can literally shut it down at any moment (or stop federating with you).
And right now there isn’t an incentive to keep instances alive.
I like how matrix handles the rooms, you can have aliases on other servers for the same room. This would be also nice for communities. So once there is a server split you at least keep the old content on the other servers simmilar to when one matrix server goes away everyone can still be in the room which is an alias for it.
May be worth keeping some local communities in that case, which can also serve as sort of backup for wider community from other small servers. For example, if there is “Knitting” on a big instance, you can consider creating something more specific like “Knitting full RGB sweaters” on your smaller instance. Then there is a basis for sustained discussion there, and more people can come if something breaks. I have some ideas for comms like this that I’ll maybe come around to creating.
I don’t think we need to keep full centralization be-where-everyone-is mentality here. Or maybe be where everyone is, but don’t make it the only place where you talk with people.
True, I’m not really concerned about the active users dissapearing, because most of them would just join the second biggest community about that topic.
I’m more concerned about the ammount of information/knowledge that would be lost.
I get what you say about not having a be-where-everyone-is mentality. But the fact is that following 15 communities about the same topic is really inconvenient, and people tend to congregate (look at how many users each instance has and you’ll see that a few instances have like 80% of the total users).
If we want the fediverse to succeed we have to simulate centralization for a better user experience, while being decentralized. And that means that there should be some sort of protection to prevent whole communities from dissapearing.
Yeah, I’m not disagreeing there is a convenience and ease angle, but I think there’s a middle ground where we have 2-3 communities for major interests with somewhat different vibes or approaches, so there is a topic reason for them coexisting. This already happens in the old school forums ecosystem. Fediverse’s advantage here is that you hopefully don’t need separate accounts.
Re: loss of knowledge, if some instance/community does a purge, I’m assuming the old posts are still there, at the very least on the instances that used to be federated with them. I suppose it would be a nice to have a feature for admins for “freezing” their public backups of mirrored communities when they get defederated. It’s not that different of a scenario from standard Internet drama, we just have to handle this nicely.
I agree with other people that the right to defederate is to be respected. If we rely on one hub community somewhere to congregate, this is only kinda decentralization. At the very least the central hubs shouldn’t be on instances that are too defederation-happy.
On the other hand, I see the argument that many users means more difficult moderation, where defederation might be a band-aid as they say on beehaw. The question is if they have too ambitious moderation goals to handle being a central hub, and maybe indeed it would be better for their communities to be sort of internal to them.
On Mastodon there’s a self-destruct command that in theory deletes your content from all of the instances that are federated with you. I thought the same command was on Lemmy but it might not be the case.
Then you would be right that the old posts should remain on the federated instances.
Ok so apparently it’s a pinned post in their community.
Tldr Lemmy.world has open registration, which means more trolls/extremists and they are tired of dealing with them.
What federation issues were you having with aussie.zone? I used that one for a while before creating my own instance.
The issue was the owners choice of not federating with anything nsfw.
By moving to lemmy.world I could still post as much as I wanted to [email protected] AND upvote boobs.
about the defederation, this comment about it is great: https://kbin.social/m/[email protected]/t/22433/Beehaw-defederated-us#entry-comment-90015
"I think it’s easy to take this personally but I think it’s more about the moderation tools in Lemmy not being adequate at the moment so this is the best bandaid solution for now. We need to quickly put effort into developing better moderation tools like limiting other servers without fully defederating, limiting specific communities, forcing nsfw on communities/instances, proxying reports to origin servers so admins have better feedback on their instance user’s bad behavior, and many other things if we want to prevent defederating like this from being the only option.
I think infighting about this decision and differing moderation styles instead of focusing together on moderation challenges and tooling deficiencies risks tearing the community / federation apart and is counterproductive to the goal of being better than reddit."
there will be growing pains.
What were the federation issues with aussie.zone?
That’s lame. I just run my own instance. I’m based in Perth and the server itself is in Sydney, so nice and fast.
I somewhat went through that. Signed up on one instance cause it seemed a cool science based one to check out but then realized that if I wanted to make a community for anything else, I couldn’t do it there
Ah interesting point, never thought of it but you’re right, in this regard with lemmy it is kind of important where you have your account. Good point! I had the feeling that with lemmy it really doesn’t matter where you have your account but this is a very valid point.
If you don’t plan on running communities it’s a non issue but otherwise, yeah
Welcome to the fedoraverse
on kbin there was a long period of no federation and so I think we kinda ended up with this “kbin is kbin and then there’s this other stuff” mindset. I think it helped ease a lot of us into this fediverse stuff lol. the analogy I use is email :) why pick yahoovs gmail vs protonmail? same idea.
Email, the true OG federated protocol.
Pretty sure that was Usenet
That analogy doesn’t hold when yahoo can block gmail and proton can block all yahoo content, etc.
they can do that though. it just doesn’t happen with big email providers. but many large email providers auto-block smaller ones.
Yep, so now its very difficult to run your own mailserver. Extrapolating this to Lemmy, I guess large instances will start autoblocking small instances by default.
Now we are federating, properly.
naturally, we’re posting on [email protected] right now lol
I agree it’s somewhat complex for the average user, but I 'm questioning whether they really need to understand. I subscribed to kbin, started using it like reddit. Federation is now enabled, too, but if I hadn’t seen a post about it, I wouldn’t even have noticed. The cool thing is you don’t need to care where the content is if you don’t want to, you still can enjoy the platform ang get a lot out of it.
Why did you post this to selfhosted? lol
that i just realized, lol
The sign up process is a bit non-standard, but I have mostly browsed via app (Mlem) and it makes the cross-community sub and commenting fairly seamless.
I’m new here, can someone explain how this whole federating thing works?
You know how discord has multiple servers?
Now imagine if those servers where actually owned by a person (self-hosted), and each server could connect with the other servers, so you can see content on whatever server you are.best explanation I’ve seen for the fediverse
For reddit folks - imagine there are 10 different reddits with all of their own individual subreddits. You have the ability to only view and comment on yours, but also can look and comments on all of those others ones if you want to.
Someone on my server came up with a mall analogy which I am extending upon, might be helpful:
Sites are like cities (kbin is a city, lemmy is a city, etc)
Instances are like malls (kbin.social is a mall)
Stores inside a mall are like magazines
Cities can have multiple malls, and the malls all talk to each other and give each other information about what’s happening in their mall in relation to their stores, which is why we can see posts from other instances of the same site.
And what’s more, malls (instances) in different cities (sites) can also talk to malls in another city and pass information about their malls to the other cities’ malls. Cities talk to other cities. Translation: The sites share content with each other.another analogy: Federation in the fediverse is like a group of islands with bridges connecting them. Each island represents a different platform, and the bridges allow people to travel and interact between the islands. Even though each island has its own unique features and rules, the bridges enable communication and sharing of ideas across the entire network of islands.
I hope this didn’t further confuse you lol. my protest server has extensive explanations and one on one help with this if you’d like.
The instance you sign up on doesn’t really matter. For technical people, the server you sign in on, can be important, but for the average user it doesn’t. In fact, you could make an account on mastodon.social and comment on this very thread. That’s pretty much the goal of federation.
This feels disingenous to say. Each community has its own rules and culture, which you may agree or disagree with. Beyond that, there’s the matter of trust as the instance admin holds everything on their server. This isn’t even getting into the whole mess of defederation. like with Beehaw, who seems intent on forming an isolative culture despite having some of the largest communities on the site.
I believe it will improve over time as the Fediverse matures and grows to handle larger loads and less techy people, but I think saying that to people will do more harm than good. A lot of the newer people have been reasonably freaking out in response to losing access to several large communities they frequented because they were told “instance doesn’t matter”, when quite frankly it does at the moment.
Entirely fair, we are in the midst of significant drama between the reddit burndown, and the infancy of the lemmy platform as a whole. For someone wanting to talk to people, and get their feet wet in the fediverse, I think its reasonable to say that the server doesn’t matter. Once you have used the platform, and know what you want then exploring the options is highly encouraged. The exact circumstances of server federation will absolutely change, probably a lot, in the near future.
I treat it akin to someone saying “I want to learn how to play guitar.” I think reasoanble advice is get a cheap used guitar and start learning cords. Once you know if you plan on sticking with it more than a few weeks, go right ahead and start looking at better equipment. I don’t think expecting someone at this stage to start taking musical theory is the best advice. Maybe that is a weak argument, but I don’t think its entirely wrong.
Nah, I get it. I expect it to be a much better situation as the platform matures, but right now it’s really hard. Just like Mastodon, Lemmy will have to go through a ton of growing pains to meet the demands of a rapidly growing userbase. Hopefully we as a community can make this a much better situation for newbies going forward.
that be a thing in the future that ppl would wanna be on the server that allows maximum federations?
Maybe, but I doubt enough instances are gonna go follow the beehaw route for that to take off. The only issue is that Beehaw had a ton of really big general communities that were used by a lot of people on other instances.
@shinnoodles @meteokr This is more or less the big point. You *cannot* sign up for an account on mastodon.social and see the post I’m making right now, but you *can* sign up for an account on whatever site you’re using to view this right now and see this post.
Unless your instance blocks or is blocked by that other instance, which is exactly what beehaw did to lemmy.world and sh.ithust.works, and exactly what I saw happen a lot on Mastodon.
Ultimately, yes, the server admins have final on what content their users see. Not too different than mods within a community. A user, should they want to, can just make an account on a different server though. Should the user not agree with the content moderation of their original server, and can even migrate all their user data with them most of the time.
AFAIK in ActivityPub everything has an ID (which is actually a URL) that ties an Object/Link to the server it was created on, old things will always live on your old server.
If you plan on using the local or all filters the people you share a server with will determine what new communities populate there and likely have a big impact on what you’ll come across
So there’s nothing like hosted instances are using resources, and that can vary?
The server that hosts your account, and the server that hosts the content are independent. They all speak the same language and talk to each other regardless of where they are. So if the server hosting a thread is overloaded, then comments might take a bit to load, but you can still post on another thread on another server no problem. Eventually they all sync up. If that’s what you mean?
I’ve been on mastodon for a couple of years, here’s how I handled instance fomo there. I made an account on a few different instances that I liked, got a feel for each instance’s rules, what was allowed, what wasn’t. Over time, I started to realize what kind of mod styles I liked, whether I cared much about the local timeline vs my subscribed timeline (I didn’t care as much about this on masto, but here, I’m much more interested in the local timeline, which I’ll get into in a bit.) Eventually, I settled on just one account, but really you never have to if you don’t want to, lots of people have alts, even back on non federated social media.
I’m doing this process again here. I currently have accounts on Beehaw, Kbin.social, and slrpnk.net, where I’m posting from currently. No matter which one, I can follow any community I want from any of these accounts provided they aren’t defederated. But, I also get a unique local timeline view, and a specific culture brought on by mods and users for each. I really think this gives power to smaller, more topic focused instances like slrpnk.net. Specifically, I’ve noticed two things it gives me that Reddit didn’t necessarily have
- a quick “show me only posts related to this specific topic I’m interested in” button via the local timeline. (This could technically kind of be built with multireddits, but that wouldn’t quite be the same)
- (what I think is even better) show me more general topics, but hosted by people also interested in this one specific root topic (for my instance, the root topic would be solarpunk, but for others, I’ve seen instances dedicated to star trek, cyberpunk, local towns, the list goes on.) This I think has more community building power in an a way that is unique to here and that I’m interested in seeing more of, personally. After all, someone could make a subreddit called, idk, r/startrekurbanism, but I don’t see that taking off on Reddit. It would be weirdly extremely niche, and the chances of it showing up on your TL (which you need to happen to encourage engagement) over more popular posts is minimal. Here though, I bet a community dedicated to discussing city planning and design ran by Star Trek fans could have some engagement just due to the local timeline bringing it to people’s attention. This has potential to allow Lemmy to be weird and unique in a way previous aggregator sites couldn’t pull off.
Tl;dr: local timelines are cool. try a few instances out to get a feel for what you like (and to get over instance fomo), and give fedi time to grow on you. It may not work out for everyone, and that’s okay, but I really have grown to prefer Mastodon to Twitter, and I’m excited to see a federated alternative to Reddit gain traction.
Or lib.lgbt!
More seriously it’s basically all the same. Just depends what @ you want after your username.
I would say that it depends on that and on if you want to use the local feed or what you want to see there.
But pretty much that’s it.
And it’s hard to know better in advance, but quite important is that you also choose your (instance) moderators — the people who decide in the end what you’re allowed to see and say.
