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Comparison of different Lemmy Instances

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Re: Comparison of different Lemmy Instances

#151

Post by SoftTalker »

NoMoreNicksLeft wrote: post #94
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.

> What is the practical effect on the user of an instance being "defederated?" The entire instance is sort of "shadow banned". Everyone on it can post, but no one will ever read it (except for the few dozen people on that instance). Since forums have some minimum number of users/readers that if the number falls below this people just give up and go away, it will be dead within a month. Not only is it like being shado…

So the likely fallout of that would seem to me be that if a "federated Reddit" ever got off the ground:

- Over time, a few instances will grow to dominate and nobody will defederate them because they are too big and you'd lose too much/make too many people mad. These will be the Gmail, iCloud, Hotmail, etc. instances.

- As they become larger, instances will be motivated to follow established politics of the big instances so they don't get cut off.

- Small instances will exist as echo chambers for certain unpopular points of view and mostly none of the big instances will federate them. Porn, Nazis, KKK, Anarchists, religious extremists, etc.

- Possible large bifurcations may develop, e.g. "Fox News/Breitbart" vs. "CNN/Huffington"; each has large followings but they would probably not federate each other.

- New users who just want a place to do normal Reddit-like stuff will be confused by all of this.

Re: Comparison of different Lemmy Instances

#152

Post by bacchusracine »

nulld3v wrote: post #141
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…

> 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 s…

>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).

No, see, since it hasn't effected them (yet?)there is no good faith reason to be against censorship. The only ones effected by it or worried by it are the wrongthinkers and bad people and who cares about them?

Re: Comparison of different Lemmy Instances

#153

Post by Vvector »

nerdbert wrote: post #146
VikingCoder wrote: post #74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Won't that happen anyway? A typical instance with 1000 users is likely to be subscribed to greater than 50% of the active communities out there.

Re: Comparison of different Lemmy Instances

#154

Post by [deleted] »

MSFT_Edging wrote: post #58
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…

Beehaw is a bit dramatic. I'm part of one of the most active lemmy instances, It only just brought in upstream lemmy as it forked 2 years ago when the community was created, because lemmy wasn't ready. Beehaw has some weird ideas about harassment and hate speech. Essentially civility and concern-troll like behavior cranked up to the extreme. The instance I'm on is a bit rowdy but has a tight culture and something lik…

[deleted]

Re: Comparison of different Lemmy Instances

#155

Post by praisewhitey »

brainbag wrote: post #32
nologic01 wrote: post #29

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…

How do we explain what instance to join for people if they followed technology, music, and art? I have tried explaining this to friends, and there's new and unique vocabulary. I end up having to explain a bunch of other stuff too and their eyes glaze over. Is there an ELI5 or guided setup for people who don't want to deep dive into federation but want to talk about art, music, and tech (and memes)?

Ideally they would join any instance and follow the topics they're interested like they would subscribing to a subreddit, and the fact that content is spread out over several instances isn't something users need to worry about.

The reality is that discovery is terrible right now and you can't browse a feed of all Tech/Music/Art threads from all federated instances. Hopefully this is being worked on.

Re: Comparison of different Lemmy Instances

#156

Post by aio2 »

ticoombs wrote: post #34
distcs wrote: post #4

Is anyone able to sign up on any Lemmy instance. If I try to sign up, the sign up button just turns into a spinning wheel which keeps spinning for ever. It does not seem to be load issue. When I click sign up, the browser does not seem to send any request to the server either except for a request to "symbols.svg". Is the sign up button even working?

It's probably a problem with your auto generated password. Passwords can't be longer than 20char. It's a bug. Also don't enter an email when trying to join initially, if you can. The UI waits for the email to send before returning. Another known bug. Self plug: come join on https://reddthat.com . We currently don't have email requirements, or any "forms" to fill out before you join. :)

I have a differest experience, I put in over 20 chars for a password and I can register.

Re: Comparison of different Lemmy Instances

#157

Post by nobody9999 »

0xffff2 wrote: post #90
VikingCoder wrote: post #74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

You're basically right. The devs have explicitly said that the ideal is for every user to run their own instance.that said, while it's not hard to run an instance it's well beyond the level of effort most people are ever going to spend.

>while it's not hard to run an instance it's well beyond the level of effort most people are ever going to spend.

This. And it's not just lemmy either. Mastodon, pixelfed, diaspora and other fediverse-capable platforms are a pain in the ass to set up and self host.

As a technical guy, I've set up most of these and while it's certainly possible to do, the hoi polloi don't have the knowledge/skills to do so and aren't interested in gaining such skills.

RPM/DEB/etc. packages with set up scripts and windows installers would make a world of difference, but instead we have 'curl |bash' and docker containers.

While I'm not really too upset about the great unwashed being able to access the Fediverse (I wouldn't mind if it were mostly the technically minded, but I can just choose who to follow to get that), the current situation does little to improve the network effects of the Fediverse.

IMHO, the situation is similar to a scenario posited in another discussion[0] about devops, where developers throw their code "over the wall" to let the ops folks handle deployment/operations.

Except the "ops" folks in this case are mostly non-technical end users. With the results being pretty much what you'd might expect. And more's the pity.

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36354049

Re: Comparison of different Lemmy Instances

#158

Post by finder83 »

My impression (which may be wrong) of Lemmy is that a large number of instances are very pro-censorship and heavily left-leaning. Which of course is reflective of Reddit itself. But it doesn't exactly instill confidence in signing up for instances as a relatively conservative contributor, even while abiding by the terms of service of the instances.

Any advice for a conservative Christian trying to find a reddit alternative or Lemmy instance that also doesn't want to be moderated or banned into oblivion (or de-federated because of trolls which I do not represent)? As many conservatives know, even joining /r/conservative and not posting on reddit was enough to entirely be banned from many communities that have nothing to do with politics. Walking into another similarly prejudiced social network (but at a platform level) doesn't sound like fun to me.

Re: Comparison of different Lemmy Instances

#159

Post by itsokimbatman »

Firmwarrior wrote: post #66
phpisthebest wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Seems like beehaw is a very pro-censorship platform, and everything that social media should not be, so it will be a hard pass for me. Social media is a big enough echo chamber Edit: Now having read their "What is Beehaw" Post [1], I can clearly see I was correct and would NEVER want to be a part of that oppressive community, That post is fill with political ideology, plainly false statements, and mental contractions…

Me: Surely it couldn't be that bad Beehaw: On this platform I attempted to address this emerging problem of rationalism

I don’t think they are calling “rationalism” itself bad, but there is a fairly large contingent of people who call themselves “rationalists” who don’t show the slightest hint of self introspection or rational thought. They see everyone else as driven by sloppy or emotional thinking and completely miss that their own arguments and reasoning are sloppy or emotion driven.

The first step to being a true rationalist is to realize you’re as vulnerable to cognitive biases and emotion driven thinking as everyone else, and focus on your own thought processes first and foremost.

Being a rationalist isn’t about lording over other people, it’s about trying to make your own thought as clear and rational as possible, and that requires challenging your own deeply held beliefs and opinions constantly.

Most people I see who call themselves rationalists aren’t that.

Re: Comparison of different Lemmy Instances

#160

Post by n6h6 »

less_less wrote: post #109
MSFT_Edging wrote: post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Beehaw is a bit dramatic. I'm part of one of the most active lemmy instances, It only just brought in upstream lemmy as it forked 2 years ago when the community was created, because lemmy wasn't ready. Beehaw has some weird ideas about harassment and hate speech. Essentially civility and concern-troll like behavior cranked up to the extreme. The instance I'm on is a bit rowdy but has a tight culture and something lik…

Which instance is that, if you don't mind my asking?

I am also curious. The main reason I haven't even tried figuring Lemmy out is because I figured it'd be exclusively full of "free speech" people, like other Reddit alternatives.
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