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Comparison of different Lemmy Instances

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Re: Comparison of different Lemmy Instances

#131

Post by hombre_fatal »

BizarreByte wrote: post #129

Federation is never going to work with normal users and this thread alone proves why. The top comments are bickering about defederation and fragmentation. Normal people don't care, this is all too complex and the community politics are mind numbing. It's no wonder centralized systems continue to win. I'm a technical person and I don't even want to bother with this kind of stuff.

This list is about as interesting as a list of all phpBB/vBulletin communities: there's almost nothing actionable about scrolling it beyond clicking at random.

Might as well just google "best internet forums" and do the same.

Re: Comparison of different Lemmy Instances

#132

Post by Vvector »

SoftTalker wrote: post #85
mikae1 wrote: post #3

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> They say the instance you choose doesn't matter that much I would way that's not true. Mostly speaking from a Mastodon perspective, but should be true for Lemmy/Kbin too. Healthy small ones with active moderation should be a good choice as they have a lesser chance of being defederated. Many smaller instances recently defederated mastodon.social because of spam. You should also choose one that doesn't defederate ot…

What is the practical effect on the user of an instance being "defederated?" People compare these federated social platforms to email, as there are many email providers and they can all exchange mail with each other. But there's no concept of being "defederated" in email. Or is there? I just don't understand the term.

Defederation would be like if GMail stopped working with Outlook.com. Millions of users with no way to contact each other.

Re: Comparison of different Lemmy Instances

#133

Post by SkyPuncher »

BizarreByte wrote: post #129

Federation is never going to work with normal users and this thread alone proves why. The top comments are bickering about defederation and fragmentation. Normal people don't care, this is all too complex and the community politics are mind numbing. It's no wonder centralized systems continue to win. I'm a technical person and I don't even want to bother with this kind of stuff.

10 years ago, I’d be all over this. Nowadays, I have so many other more important things that I have no interest in the mental load that comes with Lemmy.

Lemmy’s type of social media is mindless, timing filling. Having to figure out the nuance of federation defeats the entire point.

Further, the primary reason for federation seems to be anti-censorship. While there are absolutely cases where censorship is applied to destroy/control, most of the topics I engage in on social media have little to no censorship. It seems like the only people that care about “avoiding a central authority” are those looking to stir hate and trouble on social media.

Re: Comparison of different Lemmy Instances

#134

Post by hombre_fatal »

jefftk wrote: post #93
SoftTalker wrote: post #85

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What is the practical effect on the user of an instance being "defederated?" People compare these federated social platforms to email, as there are many email providers and they can all exchange mail with each other. But there's no concept of being "defederated" in email. Or is there? I just don't understand the term.

Defederation in email would be a.example putting in a block where you can't receive email from users on b.example. With email this pretty much only happens because of spamming, so it would be very surprising for, say, Hotmail to block Gmail.

What I don't get is that this seems like something you would want to do for yourself as a user, not something you'd want your instance/server admin doing due to whatever drama of the week is going on.

Re: Comparison of different Lemmy Instances

#135

Post by newZWhoDis »

SkyPuncher wrote: post #133
BizarreByte wrote: post #129

Federation is never going to work with normal users and this thread alone proves why. The top comments are bickering about defederation and fragmentation. Normal people don't care, this is all too complex and the community politics are mind numbing. It's no wonder centralized systems continue to win. I'm a technical person and I don't even want to bother with this kind of stuff.

10 years ago, I’d be all over this. Nowadays, I have so many other more important things that I have no interest in the mental load that comes with Lemmy. Lemmy’s type of social media is mindless, timing filling. Having to figure out the nuance of federation defeats the entire point. Further, the primary reason for federation seems to be anti-censorship. While there are absolutely cases where censorship is applied to…

> most of the topics I engage in on social media have little to no censorship.

How would you know that?

Re: Comparison of different Lemmy Instances

#136

Post by nulld3v »

surajrmal wrote: post #113
8organicbits wrote: post #77

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Are they? I'm seeing self-hosted Postfix as the most common mail server in scans. For free, personal email hosting I agree but that's just a fraction of the market. https://lightmeter.io/global-email-map-2021/

Wait until Lemmy spam becomes a problem. Consolidation will happen at that point and smaller instances will simply be restricted to being read only.

Reddit has the same problem, anybody can make an alt and spam random BS on small or large subs. Moderators just deal with it.

Re: Comparison of different Lemmy Instances

#137

Post by youainti »

Pet_Ant wrote: post #106
jghn wrote: post #82

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> and the local timeline is full of To me this highlights my top issue with fediverse replacements for sites like Twitter & Reddit. I always want to be able to see everything . I do not care a single bit about the "local timeline" of my Mastodon instance (also hachyderm.io here). I have no desire to choose a Lemmy server based on its population. The thing I like most about sites like Reddit & Twitter is that they pro…

I think a better model might be that there is one central raw feed, that is universal but that instances just prefilter it for you. That way you can have the raw sewage with spam, or you can view a sensitized version that filters for content, or trigger warnings, or even just users. So it's like a single DB table with many views. So EdgeLord420_69 can see and even respond to comments by PrincessSnowflake... but Princ…

I understand that this is the approach being taken by bluesky social.

Re: Comparison of different Lemmy Instances

#138

Post by supertrope »

newZWhoDis wrote: post #135
SkyPuncher wrote: post #133

Earlier quoted context omitted.

10 years ago, I’d be all over this. Nowadays, I have so many other more important things that I have no interest in the mental load that comes with Lemmy. Lemmy’s type of social media is mindless, timing filling. Having to figure out the nuance of federation defeats the entire point. Further, the primary reason for federation seems to be anti-censorship. While there are absolutely cases where censorship is applied to…

> most of the topics I engage in on social media have little to no censorship. How would you know that?

The usual suspects are porn, gambling, illegal drugs, copyright infringement, National Socialism.

Re: Comparison of different Lemmy Instances

#139

Post by rcarmo »

shafyy wrote: post #5
NoboruWataya wrote: post #2

What instances are people here using? I recently decided to give Lemmy a try. From what I had been seeing I was planning to sign up to BeeHaw, only to find that they had defederated two of the largest instances due to their lax sign-up policies. I can understand their reasoning and it looks like it was relatively well handled, but it still makes that instance impractical. I ended up going to VLemmy as it was one of t…

I've signed up with geddit.social. It's run by stux, who also runs mstdn.social for Mastodon and I think he does a great job there.

They defederated mastodon.art(?) recently and then te-enabled it, and the drama of (thousands?) of broken follows is still playing out on my timeline. I have no way to ascertain who is “right”, but am worried about guardrails and processes to prevent single individuals from doing (or triggering) the same…

Re: Comparison of different Lemmy Instances

#140

Post by nulld3v »

BizarreByte wrote: post #129

Federation is never going to work with normal users and this thread alone proves why. The top comments are bickering about defederation and fragmentation. Normal people don't care, this is all too complex and the community politics are mind numbing. It's no wonder centralized systems continue to win. I'm a technical person and I don't even want to bother with this kind of stuff.

There's no fundamental problem with federation. The UX can be made good enough for the average user.

The problem here is the developers. Federation developers don't seem to be interested in UX. They aren't focusing on adding the polish and ease-of-use users expect out of a social media platform.

90% of the issues with Lemmy isn't because of federation. It's because of basic UX:

- Error messages silently discarded everywhere. Stuff "loads forever" when in reality some error has happened and the operation has already failed.

- Links to other instances are not handled properly (WTF? Links to other instances are a huge part of federation, how could you not handle this properly?)

- To follow a community in another instance, you have to search the community? TWICE! (The first search loads the community asynchronously in the background). WTF?

- They decided to rewrite the entire UI using websockets causing bugs everywhere? WTF? Over-engineering at its finest. At least they are trying to undo the rewrite currently...

- Searching for communities should search through all communities that the instance is federated with. It should feel like there's only one instance. Right now search shows only cached communities. WTF? Are we expecting users to understand caches?

I'm hoping that the influx of new developers (who are more UX focused) is enough to polish the platform for end-user use by June 30th. It's going to be difficult, but it's possible.

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