Live data from Hacker News

Comparison of different Lemmy Instances

github.com

141–150 of 204 posts

Re: Comparison of different Lemmy Instances

#141

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…

> 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.

There's plenty of censorship on many large Reddit subs already. Just look at the difference between r/worldnews and r/anime_titties (which is also world news, name is misleading).

There's already a ton of posts on HN about this: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28318521

Re: Comparison of different Lemmy Instances

#143
One problem that I experienced is that, after all this talk of "federation" and a "fediverse" with all Lemmy instances and all other ActivityPub apps...

every Lemmy instance has a /c/technology, a /c/anime, a /c/funny, and a /c/linux, and all those community are entirely distinct.

Re: Comparison of different Lemmy Instances

#144

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'm on Beehaw, and I like the way the defederation was handled. Here's the latest from them: https://beehaw.org/post/594843 You can see some positive comments from users about the change and a transparent road map for re-federating. To put it another way, would you want to join an instance that isn't trying (or is failing to) contain harassment and other forms of bad actors? That's the challenge the de-fed is address…

I see some real trash-tier posts from lemmy.world that show up on kbin but not, thankfully, beehaw. I think they were right to defederate.

Re: Comparison of different Lemmy Instances

#145

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 eve…

Are there any examples of federated platforms with mass appeal? The architecture details seem to dominate the UX.

Re: Comparison of different Lemmy Instances

#146

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…

If the Lemmy fediverse is so fragmented... Then shouldn't people like us run our own instances, which then just act like an aggregator and wrapper around our single user account? Or am I federating TOO MUCH in a way that's hard to explain to new people? Because in my head... Each subreddit/community maps almost perfectly to 1 instance, and each technically savvy user also maps almost perfectly to 1 instance. That fee…

I think you'll end up using a lot of storage space; in my totally uninformed understanding, you would end up storing the full contents of any community/sub that you follow.

Re: Comparison of different Lemmy Instances

#147
post #82
post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Spam is one factor, but biases is another that I don't see mentioned often enough. I'm on mastodon.social, see zero spam, and reading through discussions of past bans it looks as if smaller admins banned it because of tiny vocal minorities that might as well be individually dealt with. I also signed up to another instance (which I am not going to mention) and to hachyderm.io (which nominally caters more to techies, a…

> 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…

Same here. I was immediately turned off from Mastodon and even more from Lemmy by my initial interaction with them. As soon as I tried to get involved, I was required to pick from a list of instances with weird-looking descriptions and make myself a member of one of them. That's a lot more commitment than Reddit or Twitter asks me for, and it was enough to stop me from proceeding.

Re: Comparison of different Lemmy Instances

#148

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?

It'd be impossible to prove, but the types of topics I utilize social media for simply don't tend to correlate with highly-controlled/highly-censored topics. Generally, highly-censored topics result in alternative communities in grey areas of the web. I just don't see those types of communities popping up for wood working, programming, or the sports that I enjoy.

Re: Comparison of different Lemmy Instances

#149
post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> harassment Harassment is such a vague term and has been stretched out to cover such a huge swathe that it can basically used to police almost anything.

Agreed. This is a strength of federation. Pick an instance that defines the term the same way you do. Communities with strong usage guidelines, like HN, can feel very safe to use.

To me this is a weakness; it requires me to read between the lines of a whole horde of different instances' statements of principles and try to make an informed decision based on that. Many people don't have that kind of time/interest/inclination, they just want to be able to read some discussions.

Re: Comparison of different Lemmy Instances

#150

Would be quite useful to add the focus of each instance (e.g. tecnhology, music, art, etc). Reddit migrants to lemmy would probably want to join specialized instances that resemble the subs they frequented. p.s. checking out beehaw I realise that lemmy can be run either as a reddit alternative (with lots of subreddits communities on different topics) or as a discourse type forum (with categories). thats good flexibil…

For programming topics there is this one that is growing:

https://programming.dev/

Post reply on HN