Wish that was around when I moved from lemmy.world to lemm.ee some time ago. It would have saved me a bit of time. Nice that it’s there for the future, though.
The part that annoys me is that this was done silently even though last time they said they would ask their users. Hopefully it was just an admin that didn’t get the last memo.
The speed that this happened suggests they might have gotten spooked by something. Put down the pitchforks mates and give them a chance to explain first.
Wouldn't be surprised if they got some personally delivered letters from the legal department of a big media company, given that they blocked visibility to some magazines on other servers.
because lemmy.world is yours as much as it is ours.
It’s funny because someone on their team started banning people from that thread for disagreeing with their stance then when called out for it they quietly changed the instance bans for community bans, in an awesome display of pure pettiness one would normally see on Reddit.
When I described the previous removal as LW having a feud with dbzer0, that was why.
A paranoidal schizophrenic and a single dev of Temple OS thought thar he’s watched and messed with by federal agencies. He knew, because he could see a glowing aura around them undercover agents. After his ramblings about it, 4chan boards users who watched his streams as a lolcow (a person of interest who can be milked for lulz) took this slang term from him. Then it spread everywhere.
Sigh. At least the benefits of federation include being free to move into other instances while LW can pull stuff like this (probably because they get the heat from being the largest instance).
If we’re to have any chance at convincing more Reddit users to join the Fediverse, the main Lemmy and Kbin instances need to stick together. While the piracy community being among the biggest arguably doesn’t make for great optics (having a greater variety of communities above the 50k user mark would help bring more users to Lemmy), a fragmented federation only helps Reddit. Beyond that, this community has rules in place to ensure that posts stick to the discussion of piracy, and not piracy itself.
Nah I wouldn’t want Lemmy to attract anti-piracy bootlickers (specially considering why we left Reddit for Lemmy in the first place). This being the largest community is a good filter imo.
The vast majority of those (on the dbzer0 list) are obviously just copied from someone's medium-sized mastodon blocklist, which in this case mostly includes instances that definitely deserve it. I recognize only a few dubious choices in there, and none that are completely indefensible.
The current fediseer censured list seems much larger and correspondingly more problematic in places. You've started out with a good list, hope you exercise due caution in adding to it.
Yeah, sorry, I've never really looked at it before. But its web UI just shows them all as one big list. I wouldn't mind seeing a list of those censured by more than 10 instances, or all of a selected group of instances... is that in the API?
While the piracy community being among the biggest arguably doesn’t make for great optics
I’d argue otherwise. It is great optics to have a thriving piracy community. It keeps the corporate boot lickers out, and attracts the kind of crowd that we should want on Lemmy.
While it’s great to have a thriving piracy community, it being one of the only thriving ones inevitably makes potential users associate the platform with it and convinces them to either choose another Reddit alternative or simply avoid the inconvenience of switching platforms. While we may disagree with them, the failure of the Reddit blackout demonstrated that they make up the lion’s share of users from large communities that have yet to materialize here. Better to have many communities with a diversity of opinions than only a handful of echo chambers.
For me it’s about all the subreddits that didn’t migrate to Lemmy, and the ghost town feeling caused by only having 55,000 monthly users versus Reddit’s 850 million. With Lemmy’s active user count slowly dropping instead of rising, everything needs to be done to bring more redditors to Lemmy, whether they are supporters of piracy or not.
Yeah. Lemmy’s entire population is about as large as some of the smaller gaming subreddits. Even /r/mildyinteresting has over 200k subscribers (4x as big as Lemmy), and that subreddit is a misspelling of /r/mildlyinteresting.
before there was reddit there were message boards and these message boards tended to be pretty small and niche. They would have low thousands of users, if that. I don’t think having low user counts is something to be afraid of - especially for sites run and paid for by volunteers.
Message boards like that have dedicated userbases for their subject matter though, something that is missing on Lemmy for most subject matters. Since I’d like to be on Lemmy for more than just, for my interests at least, a piracy message board, more users are needed to build interest in communities that weren’t promoted by a subreddit.
But a federation is fragmentation. If the only thing that doesn’t help reddit is another centralized system, then that’s really just a claim that private ownership of the internet is good, actually, so long as we like the owners.
I assume they mean more like what’s happening on Mastodon, where instances mass defederate other instances for not having the same instances defederated
A few of the bigger instances have been very open about the fact that they're anti-piracy, anti-porn, etc and removing this community is par for the course with such a stance.
What does that mean for the average user? It means there's more incentive to move to better instances. It's when instances have such a monopoly on users and communities that people should not only move, but advocate for other people moving to smaller instances.
Also a major benefit of not being federated by large instances is that there's less surface area for search engines and thus resources last longer.
Imo the issue here is that how Lemmy works right now, or maybe just its apps, seems to have the trend of pushing most people onto the largest instance(s) like .world
If the point of the Fediverse is to have a decentralized userbase, that trend needs to be reversed.
Even if we give .world admins the benefit of the doubt and say they got in legal trouble or something this time, having a userbase properly spread across many instances would prevent that instance from being the obvious target.
imo when the devs get tired of .ml being the second cousin and not the biggest or most well-liked instance, they’ll change their website to not surface by size and popularity so much.
You’re not wrong. But people are lazy. They want to go where everyone is and have FOMO they’ll miss something good by not being on the biggest instance.
If Lemmy.world would have full control over it, this community would just get banned, but there's more and it is still accessable from all other places
The optics of a potentially publicly traded company (what ever happened with the Reddit IPO thing?) openly having a “how to steal other companies copyrighted work” forum is more of a negative than IP farming with no method to actually do anything useful with the IP addresses.
Porn is less of a legal liability than copyright claims is my guess.
Also… like… if somebody is dumping money into Reddit as a user of Reddit, which is more likely to make them stop: killing the piracy forums or the porn forums?
It’s not about the legal liability and more that publically traded corporations only want profit. Reddit would need to cater to advertisers who would not like all the porn, it’s why Tumblr and Imgur removed the porn.
Specifically, the executives and shareholders want their Publicly Traded Shares of company stock to be increasing in value. Advertisers are good for getting long term holders of the stock to keep holding and buying, but everybody else is looking to quietly pump up the numbers and sell what they can without upsetting the apple-cart.
I’d bet a shiny metal dollar that after the IPO starts, the porn subs will slowly start being winnowed down. Give it a few years and if any exist they will be private.
Why are people joining .world to begin with? The entire point of this is to decentralize. Joining the by far largest instance beats the entire purpose.
Join smaller ones like lemmy.one, lemmy.club, lemmings.world, lemmy.zip etc. We might need to start specifically recommending against .world and for general purpose instances like those.
Also, funny how even reddit allows r/Piracy but not .world lol
I think it still has highest number of posts and comments per day or something? It’s no longer the highest number in terms of users, but there is some basic metric of activity where hexbear still is quantifiably at the top. But anyway you’re right about the quality, that’s what’s important.
Also, don't put all your eggs in one basket: diversify, diversify, diversify. Make a main account, but have more on at least one other instance. Instances go down for maintenance, software gets updated, owners change moderation policies, so on. If you can't get to Lemmy through your main, use your secondary.
Personally I use lemmy.sdf.org as my secondary. It's run by a bunch of retro-enthusiast Unix nerds who more care about the functionality of the tech than anything else. No blocked communities there, and AFAIK they haven't defederated from any instance outside of ones that were hacked/compromised. That does not mean you can just go there and be a shitbird though, they do have standards.
why? because it feels safer to join a big and longer lasting instance than a random one with almost no users. such small instances can vanish from one day to the bext. i once created a account on such a small instance and not even a week later it was wiped from earth, taking my account with it. so it’s no wonder people chooser rather bigger instances.
If you join a small instance, the chances are higher that it will a) be poorly maintained and b) fold quicker, forcing you to find another instance to join and re-subscribe to all your communities.
I run my own instance that technically does have open registration, but I can’t really recommend anyone actually sign up to use it. It’s not running on very powerful hardware, and my commitment to keeping it running 24/7 is “as long as it stays convenient and interesting.” There are probably many, many of those. But there are a good collection of second and third tier instances now as well, I’m not to worried about .world’s popularity so long as they don’t do something like switch to a federation allow-list rather than a block list.
I’m aware of the risk, but so far the captcha seems to have prevented any mass sign-up, and none of the few other existing accounts so far have any activity. That said, since I have no intention to support a user base anymore, I probably should close it anyway.
In all fairness I applied to 5 Lemmy instances when the Reddit downfall started, including .ca and .world. .ml to date is still the only one to have processed my application. It may have been due to lots of applications at the time but the sheer fact my application is still pending on the other 4 instances leads me to use the one that actually works as opposed to the first one I chose.
Everyone should leave that instance, the admin and the mods on that instance are big time thought police and will find excuses in their vague rules to delete your posts and eventually ban you if your views go against the grain.
Joining the by far largest instance beats the entire purpose.
There’s kind of a tension here between Lemmy’s design and what makes most people join social media websites. Most people want the biggest, most centralized website.
Perhaps have a system of selecting randomly from a set of hand-picked general purpose instances at sign-up, where having less people gives it a higher chance of being picked (if it’s of at least a certain size of course, to prevent spam etc)
The issue is not about the implementation, but the filter: which criteria do you use to select instances that are eligible for the pool of instances? I’m genuinely asking because I think it takes some time to have a look on instances for people to make the best choice.
Because they have no basis on which to decide where to go. It’s like buying toothpaste but there are hundreds of options, none of which you know anything about, so you get whichever seems most popular. It minimises the risk of ending up with something which is unpopular for good reasons.
Some people were forced away from Reddit and don’t subscribe to that idea (yet?) - maybe they will understand that after being here for some time, but I know when my reddit app stopped working I just wanted something to fill the void
I don’t disagree at all but I can kind of understand why a lemmy instance would block piracy communities. Reddit has many millions of dollars and a squad of lawyers to back them up, lemmy admins don’t.
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