- cross-posted to:
- fediverse@lemmy.ml
- fediverse@lemmy.world
- cross-posted to:
- fediverse@lemmy.ml
- fediverse@lemmy.world
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.
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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.
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!
True, Lemmy feels this way almost exclusively because it’s small and hasn’t been noticed by mainstream media enough. The second that changes this place will become what reddit was pre-ipo.
We take it for granted that as the fediverse grows in numbers and nodes that it will continue to stay mostly contiguous.
My hope is that it will always be a little too disjointed to hold that kind of attention for long.
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.
This is how I see it. If fedi proper becomes mainstream then us old heads will just recreate the old fedi and guard who we federate with very closely.
Most people aren’t here for commerce, so I think it makes sense to keep some areas aggressively social only.
Malls versus parks or libraries kind of thing.
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.
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.
I think the community is a good size right now. Popular enough that we guarantee getting any content of relevance I care about, but not popular enough to have all the problems you mentioned. I hope the community stays this size and off the radar indefinitely.
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.
Yeah, there’s definitely still some bullshit and editorialized clickbaity headlines to sift through, but it’s not nearly as much and overall the content here feels much more human.
There’s just not much incentive to generate engagement for the sake of it (unless you’re funhole), and far fewer bots and bad-faith trolls in general. Not to say there’s none though.
As soon as there is “unlimited” content, the vast majority of said content is shit
People complain about Lemmy having limited content and engagement.
Maybe I would have thought this at one point? I remember when you could get to the bottom of the All feed in one session.
Lemmy is probably the fastest paced social I go on now. I’ve got my people I follow on masto and a handful of forums. So coming to lemmy from those feels downright metropolitan.
Lemmy as far as I can tell is mostly dup posts and blind links, especially links to youtube. The absence of Spez is of course priceless, but otherwise Lemmy is duller than plenty of single-issue blogs or forums, or even the still-decaying corpse of Usenet. That article is about Mastodon, which has a different crowd than Lemmy does. I’m not big on the “follower” model though, so I’m not there very much.
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.
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.
Stupid people can just use AI, so nothing is truly barred, not like it requires more than a 3rd grade reading level either. Your post being upvoted this much shows how easy it is for the average NPC to make an account.
I know you probably didn’t mean this, but I don’t think accessibility barriers are good. Diversity of thought is strength and bad comments naturally sink to the bottom.
After seeing how many terrorist ideologies have been allowed to thrive by claiming First Amendment protection since 2016.
No.
“Diversity of thought” my ass. I’m sure your wonderfully-diverse thoughts are just what all of us need to hear, but if they can’t pass muster under human moderation, they’re not worth platforming.
Turning to authorities to suppress fascism doesn’t seem practical. We need to cultivate good democratic systems and education systems that create citizens capable of thinking critically and turning down bad ideologies on their own. Citizens should be empowered, not coddled.
LOL
Referring to self-hosting, human moderators as “authorities” is hilarious.
I remember when, here in Missouri, the people wanted to regulate predatory payday lenders. Those opposed called their fucking organizations “Such and Such for Equal Credit Access”. Sounds nice right? Almost like the term “Diversity of Thought”.
What you refer to as “empowerment”, I refer to as a cancer. It needs to be cut out, like they did back in the day on Cable Street.
If you feel so disempowered, go have a conversation with Grok. He’ll make you feel super special.
Apologies, I think we are talking past each other. I think I misunderstood your initial comment. It read like a suggestion that lemmy’s more extreme communities were terroristic and a criticism of the first amendment, which suggested that you believe the government should be allowed to dictate what kind of speech is or isn’t acceptable – in particular on these little platforms. My comment was in response to that notion.
Re-reading it with your second comment, I think you’re saying that “terrorist ideologies” have been allowed to develop on conventional social-media by claiming first amendment protections in order to not moderate communities, and 2016 was not in reference to early lemmy but to the MAGA movement. That makes more sense, and I generally agree that conventional social-media follows irresponsible stewardship practices.
Pretending these comments only come from “stupid” people is abelist and provably false.
I am defending those with barriers, not fascists.
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.”
And the eight and final rule of fediverse, if this is your first time discussing linux distros, you have to fight.
Felt.
One of my policies to make this place less insufferable, is to block people who behave in ways that I object to.
For example if somebody shows up in a Windows thread, and just types in “Linux!” I’m blocking that person. Add something germane or novel or fuck right the fuck off, that’s my attitude.
Amen!
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
Stuff like this is why I banned Reddit first.
I was perma banned for calling someone “A fucking piece of human garbage” as they openly and brazenly advocated for the death of trans people.
I got banned, the person calling for Trans people to be killed did not.
That’s unfortunately pretty standard.
Whereas, on Facebook, nobody gets banned. I’ve literally reported people inciting violence towards others. However, it seems permitted by community standards these days
Those same fuckers are on a roll now, winning one MP seat.
Yeah. And they were apparently “never going to win in SA either”. Everyone was happy with that result. SA is happy they lost, and ON supporters were somehow happy with being absolute failures too 😂
This was a great read to start my day, thank you!
I learnt something new today, cheers
And it has not enough users. If the fediverse ever became popular enough to hold significant marketshare, we’d see similar issues. The upside to the fediverse is that you can defederate from misinformation peddlers.
Fediverse doesn’t (as of yet) have a monetization path because of it’s “self hosted” structure - I put it in quotes because most people use large instances, but anyone can spin up their own and federate.
The big risk with this is that if it reaches a critical mass where advertisers see potential for profit, the mechanism that would be most convenient, especially with LLMs, is bots.
Say Toyota wants to promote their new car. They contract an advertising agency, who spins up a few dozen LLM agents trained on Lemmy data and instructions to talk up the latest new car. It might make posts, or just comments, but in all cases it will eventually promote that product.
All that for the cost of a few tokens, and the only giveaway would be the “AI phrasing”, if anyone catches it.
deleted by creator
So here is a stupid question
What exactly is the fediverse? What’s included in it? I’ve hear much about fediverse and Lemmy, but is Lemmy part of it or not? Are other systems like Blue sky a part of it or not? Do I transparently see posts from all those different systems?
You asked five questions, none of them are stupid.
What exactly is the fediverse? What’s included in it.
I have heard two definitions in use. The first is narrower, it refers to the collection of servers running compatible Reddit-alike software including Lemmy, Mbin and Piefed which are pretty much 1 to 1 compatible and communicating with users on one from another is more or less seamless. The big, distributed Reddit alternative that allows you to post from lemmy.ca onto lemmy.world and me to read it from sh.itjust.works.
The second is the broader, simpler definition of “anything that runs on the ActivityPub protocol and is federated with something else.” Which includes all of the above plus the likes of Peertube, Mastodon, Pixelfed, Loops etc. They are technically cross-compatible, I’ll get to that later.
Is Lemmy part of it or not?
Yes it is, Lemmy runs on ActivityPub.
Are other systems like Bluesky part of it or not?
Some are, some aren’t. A few examples:
- BlueSky. Not part of the Fediverse, it uses a different protocol, their own thing. It is sort of designed to federate but not really in practice.
- Diaspora. Similar concept of federated social media, but not compatible with ActivityPub. The Coke to our Pepsi.
- Truth Social. It is my understanding that The Church Of Trump is basically a fork of Mastodon. They don’t federate though, they turn that feature off thank a long list of random deities and WWE wrestlers.
- Threads. Meta/Facebook’s Twitter clone. IS part of the Fediverse, it uses ActivityPub and has federation turned on, though a lot of instances defederate with them on principle. You can interact with Threads from a Lemmy instance. …If it still exists. Is Threads still a thing?
Do I transparently see posts from all those different systems?
Yes and no. You can kind of think of the Fediverse like the Universe itself in that there’s nowhere you can stand and see the entire thing. You and I are from neighboring star systems in the same galaxy, we’re both on servers running Lemmy, so we can communicate completely seamlessly. I see a comment immediately above you from someone on piefed.social, they’re on a server running Piefed, not Lemmy. That’s another Reddit-alike, they can communicate with us pretty easily. You might occasionally see someone on Mastodon chime in. You can usually spot this because they @ the users they’re replying to. It would be really cool if a Mastodon user could reply to this message to demonstrate. As you get farther afield, it kinda stops working. It’s difficult to interact with Peertube from Lemmy, for example. I have commented on a Peertube video from a Pixelfed account though.
Not a stupid question at all. Loosely, I think, it’s any site that trades information using the ActivityPub protocol. Because they use the same underlying protocol, they can easily trade content/posts with each other and yes, Lemmy is part of the Fediverse for that reason.
This is also why you can see posts from lemmy.ca or piefed.social or whatever.domain users while browsing lemmy.world - anyone who sets up a site with the Lemmy software can participate in the network and trade posts with all the others - these are individually called instances. These sites can decide that they don’t want to trade posts with certain other sites (ie: trolls set up a farm on their own instance) and exclude them from their users being able to see them, this is called defederation.
In theory, a Mastodon instance could see content from a Lemmy instance (and Pixelfed and Loops and so on) as they all use the same underlying protocol to trade information, but in practice, it seems that sites basically stick to trading with other sites in their wheelhouse.
BlueSky also started with ActivityPub but I believe they did something to their software to make it proprietary.
The usefulness of all this is: no member site can get a monopoly on content. The largest Lemmy site is lemmy.world and I have an account on there. I switched to dbzer0 because I disagreed with some of the actions taken by lemmy.world (they defederated from some content that I wanted to see) so I came over here and now I can see that content.
Anyway, that’s my understanding of it.
BlueSky also started with ActivityPub but I believe they did something to their software to make it proprietary.
Friendly correction: BlueSky tried to use AP(ActivityPub) but they had problems with it (like user migrations). So they made their own protocol called the AT Protocol (Authenticated Transfer). ATProto is also an open protocol like AP and they are currently working to get it standardised: https://atproto.com/blog/kicking-off-the-atp-working-group
All software BlueSky uses is open source and self-hostable and already a bunch of different implementations have started to pop up independently. Sadly BlueSky still has the vast majority of users (like 90%) using their infrastructure.
While I don’t like BlueSky as a company, the software they are using is open.
All software BlueSky uses is open source and self-hostable and already a bunch of different implementations have started to pop up independently.
Oh that’s cool. So where can I sign up to interact with BlueSky users if I don’t want to sign up to BlueSky?
Here is eurosky: https://portal.eurosky.tech/
Here is blacksky: https://blacksky.app/
Here is bookhive (a lot smaller): https://bookhive.social/I found all of them by looking through the PDS index: https://atproto.at/pdses and selecting ones with enough users to signify open registration.
Here is a guide to self-hosting: https://atproto.com/guides/self-hosting#pds
All of these are links to PDS servers. These are the servers that contain all of your data. You can log into any ATProto apps using these accounts.
In theory, a Mastodon instance could see content from a Lemmy instance (and Pixelfed and Loops and so on) as they all use the same underlying protocol to trade information, but in practice, it seems that sites basically stick to trading with other sites in their wheelhouse.
Whenever you see somebody linking to the user they’re replying to at the beginning of their comment, you’re likely seeing somebody posting from Mastodon because their UI is user-feed-oriented instead of thread-oriented.
Interesting, that never occurred to me. I said that about the wheelhouse because I have a Mastodon account I read from time to time and I can’t recall ever seeing any Lemmy content show in my feed. I never did Twitter though so I’m kind of lost, it might be I just don’t know what I’m doing. I followed like 40 hashtags but I still don’t get a huge amount of content.
HAHA! THEY’VE BEEN BAMBOOZLED! HOISTED! WHAT BUFFOONS!
I watched a Greenlandic toddler munch meat from the spine of a seal with its head very much intact.
I kind of want to know the context of this
This is weird ass article. It’s like the author has never used an Internet forum before and didn’t understand how the Internet works.
Don’t stop at the Fediverse. Keep going. You’ve only just begun.
Wow. I had to stop reading this one. Long on words, poor on writing and spelling and neither circling a theme so much as just edgelording on everything social, I’m not sure whether it was ever getting somewhere.
But life’s too short for 6000 words on The Things That Suck With Stuff I Don’t Use.
