We have been dealing with some DDOS attacks and are still taking extra measures to get everything more stable but we are working with people in different timezones so it’s not always as easy to react.
Sorry for being a bit harsh, but I have little sympathy for the admins of lemmy.world. Instead of looking for ways to disperse the people around other instances, it seems that the people behind .world are rushing to grab mindshare and concentrate as many people as they can in their own servers.
The threadiverse is not healthy when almost 50% of the active user base is in the same instance. The lemmy.ml admins basically shut down their instance for registration and said “please look elsewhere”. Why can’t you do the same?
They’re not advertising or telling people to come to lemmy.world… people are coming here and they’re just accommodating them instead of blowing them off
To be honest, what upsets me is the amount of communities that already existed elsewhere but they decided to recreate under their own service. Why does everything need to be under their umbrella? Why not point the users to the already existing communities? It would even help avoid the issues they are having now.
It’s not that we can not handle the load caused by users or by the amount of communities. It’s because of DDOS attacks and even with cloudflare some of these attacks are challenging due to the way lemmy works. No instance is safe from these attacks but the bigger instances get targeted. We weren’t the only instance that went down today.
I don’t think we do anything wrong here? None of us are being paid, we all put in a lot of time and effort to keep things running. You don’t know how many passionate people are involved “behind the scenes” seeing you call out the admins of lemmy.world.
You can’t please everyone, and some people will always find a stick. But I still think a lot of people believe in our team, our policies and what we are trying to do here. If that’s not your thing, fine, you can look elsewhere.
Is there a post or blog somewhere that goes into detail about why DDOS is such an issue with lemmy or activitypub? Or are you saying that about DDOS in general?
I’d love to, except lemmy.world went on to a huge land grab, cloned every possible popular community on reddit and is not giving any signs that will stop. Almost 50% of the user base is unreasonable and it goes against the ethos of federation and decentralization. An instance going down should not be newsworthy, but because it’s so big (relative to the others) it introduces systemic risk and approaches “too big to fail” status.
The instance itself did not do a “big land grab,” users on the instances made the communities. And, as you should know, the fact that there’s a community on one instance doesn’t mean that the same topic can’t be on another, there are several of those kinds of duplicates.
I signed up for .world because I liked the policies, it didn’t seem to be heavily communist or hosted in an authoritarian country, and it seemed to be robust. Nobody told me I should make my account there; I saw zero advertising. I’m not sure what you think the admins did to make other people settle there.
And the fact that some people are donating to it in no way means they’re making anything like profit. The admins didn’t make a plea for me to donate anywhere that I saw, other than having the link in the sidebar, like many/most instances.
You seem to be taking frustrations out on people who don’t deserve it. If the stability problems become an issue, people will just make accounts elsewhere.
I’m not sure what you think the admins did to make other people settle there.
They opened the gates and let people come in without knowing if they were able to handle the influx of people. By presenting themselves as a place that could welcome everyone, they end up robbing the opportunity for other instances to share the load and to absorb part of the user base. This is what I mean about “land grab”.
A more sensible approach would be to have a feedback loop where they open up a limited number of spots, fill them, see how their instance and the overall fediverse behaves and adjust based on that new information.
You leave out the fact that @ruud was already running mastodon.world before all this. So he does have experience running a big instance. He had a team of moderators from mastodon.world that helped from the start.
The influx of people was never a problem, if you choose the right hosting provider you are prepared for these things. And the hosting company we use provides all those tools to help us grow. We started with a small server at Hetzner.de and gradually upgraded when it was required. They have no limits on bandwidth so that is also something Ruud looked at.
Anyway, you have a lot of say about how you would do things but you had a 3 years head start…
It’s not a technical problem, but a systemic one. Getting way too big relative to the rest of the fediverse paints a target on your back. There is a reason your instance is being DDOS’d while so many others aren’t and one instance being DDOS’d shouldn’t be have such an impact on the overall system.
My point is that the sensible thing to do would’ve been to limit growth of .world and let others catch up. This is what the lemmy devs did with their instance, this is what Hugo from masto.host did to his service (stopped accepting new customers when he got close to 50% of the users) and this is even what Eugen did with mastodon.social and mastodon.online in the beginning.
I agree with your point of view but there is nothing that can be done about it.
It does feel sad to see one giant instance have almost all users and all traffic for me too. I was hoping it would become a proper decentralized platform with hundreds of islands of different servers filled with people and communities.
But fine, we don’t always get what we want. I’m disappointed but will keep using Lemmy anyway. It’s not a big tech service at least which is wonderful, and most people are nice.
Yes, from my comments it seems that I am criticizing the people working on lemmy or trying to paint them in a bad light. I am not saying that what they are doing is wrong, just misguided.
And I totally agree, at least this is not (and will not be) owned by Big Tech.
I am sure that it has nothing to do with you having any financial gains hosting instances. And that you do it all for the good of federation: lemmy.world/comment/1510374
Yes you would do things differently if you were in our position.
He has the trust of every one involved. We are very thankful for the community supporting us as they do and it’s not because income is more than expenses now that it will stay like that. We expect donations to drop off at one point. But whatever happens we will always be open about this. Even you linked to information that is freely available.
I am sure that it has nothing to do with you having any financial gains hosting instances. And that you do it all for the good of federation.
Yes for both, without sarcasm. I don’t think that the donation-based model is healthy or sustainable and I would rather see more service providers like mine.
Actually, I like to see more providers that can make real money and prove that this is feasible. I’ve been running communick for more than 3 years already, and it has been nothing but a small money pit. The managed hosting side of things is just barely breaking even.
You just sound salty now that you quit your job to start a fediverse hosting company and it’s not working out the way you want. Donation-based models have been used for ages and it worked for mastodon.world so why shouldn’t it for lemmy.world? If donations and interest decreases we can always downscale.
Sorry you’re not breaking even, seems like running a managed hosting service for lemmy is not feasible
Donation-based models have been used for ages and it worked for mastodon.world
Maybe I wasn’t clear on the blog post. There are two objections to donation-based funding:
unless everyone working on an instance is properly compensated, it’s hard to say “it is working” or "it is sustainable"
it may work for particular instances, but it stunts the growth of the overall fediverse.
You might not see it that way, but my argument is that relying on donations hides the true costs of running the server from the users and (like in ad-funded business) distorts the “market” in a way that makes the overall system less efficient.
I thought the white house actually runs their own mastodon instance when I read the headline. That would mark the point where mastodon reached mainstream use which is an incredible milestone.
Don’t really care much for what Biden has to say at this point, but I’d prefer if various government orgs would all host their own instances. I don’t want to go to a privately owned company to know about road construction or ballot box locations.
Exactly! How do people not understand this yet? The decline of platforms isn’t magic, it’s very predictable and lemmy’s core design is specifically meant to counter it. Think, people!
Impressive, I guess, but how many of those 2 million posts have a single comment? If 90% of these are just bots reposting things from Reddit with no further engagement…
The problem is that without an effective way to ID bot content then stats like this could be covering up the real trends in human users, particularly in any stat that purports to measure all lemmy instances since we already know there are instances out there filled with thousands of bot users
Yeah, a ratio means nothing if the bulk of the comments are only on a small portion of the posts. If 90% of the posts have 0 comments and the other 10% have 52.7 comments per post, that’s worth knowing.
It does need that, but it also needs dedicated posters for small niche communities that keep posting into the void so that when someone eventually stumbles over they won’t go “aw it’s dead here, I guess Lemmy isn’t for me” but will actually find some content to engage with instead.
Hah, that sounds like me! I started a few communities in places where I knew I could supply some OC, and so far its been mostly just me posting my stuff, but I’m stoked whenever I get comments!
I just subbed to your nature patterns community! I love the idea! I will keep an eye out and hope I can contribute some neat things soon!
And since I notice you are a gardener, you may be interested in my !beebutts community. It’s about bees… and their butts… I’ve also got !awwnverts for the front side of the bees, and all of their adorable invertebrate friends.
Some of content really depends on OP being in the comments, like AmITheAsshole. Just reposting doesn’t give the kind of interaction that the original post would have.
Ongoing discussion—i.e., comments replying to other comments, not just posts—drives engagement as much as content. If the post-to-comment ratio is too high, active commenters are less likely to encounter each other in the sea of automated posts.
Only if the content is organic. Look at !photoshopbattles . Full of bot posts from reddit with 0 comments. Even if one of them gets a comment, it would get drowned out by the subsequent bot posts. Blindly filling a community with bot posts would eventually make people unsub from it.
I’m sure those bots are well intended, but I would rather not see bots just copying posts from reddit blindly. When you sort all by new, it’s just a swamp of bot posts.
Edit: So I checked to verify my claim and most are from @bot iirc and you can just block that account to stop seeing all the automated posts from reddit
I used to lurk like crazy on reddit. I had a nearly 12 year old account that mainly had a few comments here and there months apart, and only a few posts but ever since moving to Lemmy I’ve found myself actually posting relatively frequently to help build some of the smaller communities I’m in that have also migrated.
I’m exactly the same. I feel like the opportunity to have a productive conversation on Lemmy is a lot higher. There are fewer of us right now but we are the motivated minority kicking Reddit to the curb for its terrible actions and we want to see Lemmy thrive.
I still check Reddit every couple days on my laptop. I don’t think they maintained a majority of their users. Engagement is way down. Most of the posts on my front page are barely hitting 2000 updoots, compared to well over 10,000 prior to July 1
I said “We should all do our best to comment on various posts that have no engagement to encourage others to engage.”
You did not say that, you said “The more random ass comments the better”, which I disagree with.
Two completely different factors. One is a genuine engagement with social media. The other is not.
If you’re insulted because I implied your comments aren’t genuine, I’m sorry. Genuine is a very subjective word “natural” might have been a better choice. So to reiterate, I really just prefer natural content personally. We don’t need to astroturf the site.
Not going to continue this conversation when it started on braindead circumstances and is somehow still going downhill. Goodbye.
I recently compared it to sitting in a comfortable little cafe that serves delicious food and looking around and saying, "Gee, I wish this was a McDonalds."
It just doesn't even begin to make sense to me.
And I'm with you - gatekeeping or no - anyone who wants Twitter or Reddit or Facebook content can already go to Twitter or Reddit or Facebook to get it, and that's exactly what they should do.
It's appropriate because that kind of shit happens irl, too. Small city with a cool local vibe becomes popular, people move to the city because it's popular, all the popular stuff gets priced out and paved over to make room for more Starbucks. Then people whine about how cool the city used to be. Gee, I wonder what happened to it?!
Having gone through that, there are also Starbucks suits and the owners of the buildings housing the Starbucks yelling at you that this is WHAT YOU NEED!
More like a small town that used to have real restaurants that got driven out of business when McDonalds came to town selling shit on a plate so cheap it was impossible to be price competitive with food suitable for humans.
The mere existence of McDonalds dramatically hurt the options available.
I'm not talking about any effect I think it might have on me, because yes - I can just avoid the instances favored by morons.
To belabor the analogy a bit more, it's not quite accurate to say that they want this neat little cafe to be McDonalds - they want the entire town to be McDonalds. They want to be able to open up their door snd see nothing but McDonalds, stretching to the horizon in all directions.
That that literally can't happen - that the decentralized nature of the ActivityPub means that the most anyone can ever do is turn instances into empty wastelands of brain-dead "content" one at a time - doesn't make their viewpoint any less perplexing to me.
That’s what had me confused at first when people were leaving Reddit but going “bRiNg ReDdIt CoNtEnT oVeR aNd DeLeTe ReDdIt!” and using the whole “we need content” as a reason.
Like, if y’all want content from social media platforms… use those social media platforms. In my mind’s eye, I see the Fediverse as more of an old-school forum where people can make any forum for specific communities, not as a content-vomiting platform.
The issue I have with this analogy is that the food here isn't quite that great. Maybe the service is better and it's less crowded and more friendly, but the menu is pretty limited and not everything it serves even matches the fast food's quality. I guess there's merits from being loyal to your local cafeteria and its community even if it's not always the best, but lets not exaggerate the quality being delivered here.
I used to browse reddit for gaming news, especially indie games, and the communities I found for this on Lemmy didn't pick up any momentum yet.
Mm... you do have a point, but I would argue that the content is generally better at the very least to the degree that it's actual people sincerely posting things rather than bots, shills and karma farmers spamming and/or astroturfing.
And yes - niche communities are extremely underpopulated here.
I don't think the solution to that though is to aim for more generic "content" with the hope that it'll lead to broad growth and that a byproduct of that will be to bring more people who happen to share your interests. The solution IMO is to get on the communities you want to see grow and start contributing stuff, right now. Even if you're just posting to one person, keep at it, and pretty soon it'll be two, then three, then...
But I’m here because I can’t get reddit content anymore in the format I want to consume it. I didn’t have an issue with the content of reddit, just the owners.
I don't necessarily disagree, I just think that the solution is to cultivate the content here. Not connect with the same old corporate platforms that caused the problems in the first place.
I got a tired of the cliched site culture and some people’s attitudes. I suppose it’s because it’s such a large slice of the public that you get more people being dicks and leaving drive-by jerky comments. The overdone in-jokes and pun threads got to be a bit much too. I needed something like Lemmy to demonstrate what I was missing on reddit.
Also, I don't think that the way to deal with "there is content on a platform that I don't like" is to run from it. It's to make better filtering systems to choose what I want. Two reasons:
First, some people like different things. They shouldn't have to use different platforms just for that.
Second, stuff like spam will show up anywhere that has decent size anyway eventually, once there are enough eyeballs for it.
I think that the goal should be to have plenty of content of all sorts on the Threadiverse, and then just have good filtering tools that are hard to subvert.
Reddit didn't let people build the filtering tools they wanted in and in some cases -- like when it came to their own ads -- were actively opposed to that. The Threadiverse solves that problem for me.
I’m in the same boat. I want Lemmy to be a firehose of content, the overwhelming majority of which I won’t ever want to interact with. I want that because different people are interested in different things, and that’s what allows for even the niche communities to find their footing with more than a small contingent of people.
I think the tools at our disposal as users and administrators of Fediverse systems are already good enough to manage and control your own experience, and I’m confident that they’ll continue to improve at a rapid click. The experience of using Lemmy as a Reddit replacement has already improved dramatically since June 12th, and it does so every day. I appreciate that others may feel much more strongly about the “dumbing down” of the overall content and community than I do, and for those folks joining an instance that outright defederates is a great option.
Folks are quick to tell people how they should be using Lemmy. “Don’t sign up for one of the big instances, you should use a small one instead because federation” is a big one - but there’s a lot of appeal in this model with being signed up to the instances generating the majority of the content the broader community is consuming because it makes finding that content easier than it otherwise would be. My hope is that the larger instances like lemmy.world will at least test the waters with Threads federation to see what it actually does to the community before taking the step of defederation, because right now those large instances are what’s feeding the rest of the rest of Lemmy.
As it stands, having those large instances federated with Threads and having smaller communities defederated seems like a best of both worlds scenario, because a small instance defederating with Threads won’t lose out on the other content being generated by those larger instances, but those who want to trudge through the mire of mass appeal can do so in one place.
What this shows us is that more people are joining lemmy, but even more people are either leaving or going into lurker mode, as Lemmy only counts people who have commented or posted in that time period as active users, whereas most social media counts any activity while logged in as active. You have to realize that people who use reddit as Google search results don’t usually interact with the content there and most won’t even make an account.
On the upside, with fewer people, it’s easy to get noticed here just by contributing good content since you don’t really get drowned out here because of the democratic upvote based sorting instead of black box personalized recommendation algorithms. So with relatively low amount of effort, you can make sure your content is being seen instead of relying on analytics and metrics.
The last thing to in mind that Lemmy is only one aspect of ActivityPub, and Mastodon’s growth is currently the highest right now because of the ecosystem created by the whale fall of Twitter, which indirectly grows Lemmy as Mastodon users can post directly to federated Lemmy communities.
Well, as mentioned that is also covered by the Monthly Active Users metric that already is available. But in addition to that, I think it would be interesting to see the number of users who read and vote but don’t post or comment. Even though posting and commenting is the biggest part, actively voting is still an important part of the ecosystem.
I changed the algorithms in programming.dev to take into account voters in the activity. Since stats are all calculated locally you can view any community from programming.dev to get the monthly active users including that change
I dug through the code and turns out the post read table does store when its read (with number of comments when it was read stored in a person post aggregates table), it just only stores it for people from your instance so I cant get accurate numbers from all of lemmy (and why it seemed like there was a low amount)
I just got recommended this site after posting on reddit re: predatory algos and the necessary regulations needed to protect people and how algos have manipulated the UX so much its disrupted the originally intended purposes; ie insta has effectively become a marketing and advertising platform.
So in response someone suggested finding alternatives to the popular social media sites and used Lemmy as an example.
I have been loving it thus far - its old school reddit.
There’re always going to be hotheads and bad faith actors in any platform, but I have noticed it is much more rare here on Lemmy. Much less vitriol as well.
Agreed on it being old school reddit! There are some UI wrappers that make it look and feel like old school reddit that I use and love you might enjoy. The wrapper is called mlmym and is open source. There are a few hosts you can use, I use this one: o.opnxng.com
I recently commented on !memes in a post that shouldn’t have been there about the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, and instead of removing the post they removed my comment while lying about the reasons, and the modlog is full of those.
All of lemmy.ml should be considered suspect, and I’m not sure if lemmy itself shouldn’t be as well - anonymous voting, comments removed from communities are also removed from personal user profiles on your user host, no warning when your comments are removed … it’s basically everything that was rife for abuse with reddit, except handed to developers who get the first say about where lemmy is heading who clearly have fringe questionable political biases.
It’s funny, because from lemmy.ml on a clean session, I’m not seeing the same politically charged posts being prioritized as I’m seeing on lemmy.world to their platform … I’m considering switching to my kbin.social account - which begs the question, shouldn’t there be an option to migrate user accounts between servers?
I’m moving to China for work, so I’m interested in alternative points of view on Chinese society from the usual U.S. mainstream media CCP hate boner. I checked out hexbear, and… my goodness.
They cheer for a version of China that the Chinese themselves would be embarrassed by. It’s clearly driven by 14-year-old white boy edgelords who are enamored with a hardcore Marxist-Leninist vision of China that never existed, most likely in reaction to a dislike of modern Western capitalism. I mean, they referenced “struggle sessions” with nostalgia and cheer for Bashar al-Assad because China is being friendly to him.
Real-life China is quite different from the depictions you see on main Lemmy instances, but it sure as hell isn’t anything like what the tankies are jerking off to, either.
It feels like most Western CCP cheerleaders are basically cheering on a pre-Deng version of the CCP and haven’t quite noticed that the CCP of today would totally purge anyone pushing the pre-Deng/pre-1978 views of the CCP.
“China” isn’t “embarrassed” by lemmy.ml or hexbear.net. “China” just shuts down access to non-Chinese social media sites as they are discovered. Any social media site that isn’t currently blocked in China is on numbered days until they are blocked, whether “pro-China” or “anti-China”.
This is true. I was kidding. That said, the Chinese government does engage in social media. And they probably would see lemmy users as a poor messenger, if they cared about lemmy.
ML stands for Marxist leninist, which means they love authoritarian regimes that don’t like the US. The number of them that unironically stan Stalin is baffling.
.ml domain names used to be free (together with .ga I think it was) through freenom so it might just be that they snagged themselves a free domain that just happened to be ml.
Not saying you couldn’t be right but not everything is quite as well thought out as it first seems.
ML is machine learning. It means they love teaching AI to overthrow the illuminati government lizard people. Can’t believe u didn’t know that, kinda embarrassing
Sees some use in Mali and for some websites about machine learning. Use is relatively rare elsewhere.
.ml is the top level domain for Mali, it doesn’t have anything to do with Marxist-Leninism by itself. They may have chosen it as a tongue in cheek reference, but it is also a cheaper alternative to other more popular tlds like .com.
Here is the rest of the story: the people who chose the subdomain chose .ml because they want it to mean marx-lenin… that’s why it means that for them.
Generally you are right. In this specific instance it was chosen for the fascism.
Okay, but. Are they Marxist-Leninist? Pro-China? Socialists? Anti-capitalists? Looks like: yes. Was the whole thing founded on the grounds of free, shared things and anti-corporate thinking? Also yes. Do we absolutely know for sure that the ML domain was chosen because of this? No, because the fucking register of the domain himself said it was chosen because it was free.
It was simply just free. People and their “knowledge” about topics they don’t know anything about…
Dessalines is the owner of the domain, one of the owners of the ML instance and one of the full-time devs of the Lemmy code.
I think an overwhelming number of people simply chose that instance becuase it was the instance, made by the devs themselves. At least it was the case for me.
That’s amazing, I hope all journalists and government alerts have their own instance. It’s way better than a blog because it can be updated so easily, they’re used to twitter and their alerts and it’s open to see while they control everything about it. Happy to see it.
even if that’s true, which it isn’t, wouldn’t that still be a hundred times bettee than shit like Fox News? or what Bezos did with news company he bought?
If you look at the structure of the BBC, it’s an INDEPENDENT, publicly funded news organisation. The government has no say in its editorial. It has exposed many British government scandals in the past.
While the person you’re replying to seems to be trolling, there is a legitimate argument that the BBC is influenced by the current government. The argument is that the current government has had a hand in appointing the current BBC director, and he’s a member of the Conservative party or a donor.
I haven’t looked into it for a while, so am not up to speed on the details, but if the detractors are correct, it’s not a good look for the BBC.
Unfortunately, BBC news has been corrupted from the inside. It used to be impressively independent of the UK government. It was happy to hold any politician’s feet to the fire. This is why the conservative party worked so hard to put their own stooge at the top. Careers now stop progressing, if you are overly critical of the government, at least in the news department.
Overall the BBC still leans slightly left, and produces a lot of good material. I no longer trust it to report evenly on our government anymore. It’s still a lot better than most news organisations overall however.
Why an instance instead of joining an existing one? They can join the effort and do few ones where several publishers can use to create official accounts
Edit. Why you guys are downvoting a discussion? Is this place becoming reddit? We are just chatting, relax
Because then someone else would be able to control and censor their content. Really every business should make their own server to ensure that they’re the ones fully in control of their content - this is the entire point of federation.
Having their own instance as a public organization adds more legitimacy to their publications. Think of government officials using the organizations domains for email instead of gmail.
Because they can control who is on it, they’re journalists only, and still be out in the open with no sign ins. What would be the benefit of them joining other instances? That would be an odd choice.
exactly this, they can control what is on it, give their journalists, shows, etc accounts and it being a self contained hub for everything bbc, while interacting with rest of the fediverse.
Im guessing they will also get more statistics and information from hosting it themselves as well. its a no brainer.
If you look deep enough you’ll see caveats like “supplemental service provided by NWS” and “Twitter feeds and tweets do not always reflect the most current information”, but the truth is that a lot of people (and news organizations) depend on Twitter as their main interface to the NWS, and rarely if ever go to their website.
That obviously creates a tension, which bubbles up in scares like this:
Before last weekend’s storm, the National Weather Service’s Baltimore-Washington office sent this tweet saying that because of a new Twitter policy, automated tweets that show advisories, watches, and warnings might not load.
Contrast that to a world where NOAA (the federal administration which runs NWS) has their own instance: they get the benefit of being able to disseminate updates in a consumer friendly ‘social media’ style and they retain full control of platform and can be sure the service won’t be held hostage, or go down in the middle of a storm.
Finally: if you’re reading this from the USA, consider contact NOAA/NWS to let them know you’d like a fediverse presence, I did!
Finally: if you’re reading this from the USA, consider contact NOAA/NWS to let them know you’d like a fediverse presence, I did!
Good idea! I just emailed NWS.PA@noaa.gov to ask them not only for a Mastodon instance to replace this stuff, but also for a PeerTube instance to replace www.youtube.com/ .
One of Germany’s public broadcasting services also started running an instance for anyone part of the federal media network: ard.social/about
Translation:
ARD.social is a basis for ARD’s appearances in the #Fediverse network, an amalgamation of various platforms and projects. Regional and nationwide brands, broadcasts, programs and institutions of the federal media network can create profiles at ARD.social. The Mastodon instance ARD.social is operated by Norddeutscher Rundfunk (NDR).
Also the Tagesschau, which is the most important television news show in Germany, is there.
It’s so wonderful that Reddit, by making a decision that benefits no user/mod/sub, and actively harms users/mods/subs, all in the name of corporate greed, gave Lemmy the boost it needed to become a viable alternative to Reddit.
Thank you, Spez. We couldn’t have done this without you.
Could we, like, leave the clickbait headlines to reddit? Thanks. The queer.af admins just decided – wisely – not to renew the domain considering who the fee would go to.
The queer.af admins just decided – wisely – not to renew the domain considering who the fee would go to.
So the Taliban being in control of the .af domain. Made the admins not to renew the instance. To put in away, “The instance has been killed by the Taliban.”.
No. The instance being killed by the taliban is the opposite of that is happening here.
The taliban has done nothing, in this case. The admins of the instance have chosen not to keep the instance due to not wanting to fund the taliban in anyway.
This phrasing fucks up which way the action flows, which is important for a headline to get right to remain accurate to the story. Does that make sense?
I feel like the overall engagement has increased. I see a lot more niche communities (like people butchering their VWs in various ways 😂) and it’s nice! There’s generally conversation to be had and such, it feels like a healthy platform.
Lemmy slotted in the gap that Reddit left really easily for me, and I’m getting what I wanted from the platform.
My roomie is German so I share stuff from that community with him from time to time. It might be against the Geneva convention, but I’ve not faced repercussions yet.
One thing I love about lemmy is how easy it is to get a conversation going. On reddit it’s really easy to be buried in a thread, and if you get a response it’s often just a joke or a snarky remark. Here there’s so much genuine engagement. It reminds me of the transition from Twitter to Mastodon. I guess people who bother to make the move are more likely to be more engaged users, too.
Lemmy’s comment sorting does also actively prevent getting buried, unlike reddit (?). Newer comments are biased towards the top, and even heavily-upvoted older comments will fall towards the bottom. The lack of “global karma” and our community’s propensity to heavily downvote anyone doing redditisms like pun threads are also doing a lot of work here.
I didn’t even know about that, that’s really cool. I have noticed that if I come back to older posts there’s often a lot of new activity since I was there last.
Someone better versed in Lemmy may correct me, but isn’t comment activity more of a factor with some of the sorting algorithms (e.g. Hot/Active) here? In which case your upvotes may help but your comment may be even better!
I think of a lurker as someone who doesn’t post - I guess your definition is someone who doesn’t interact at all (besides making an account and subscribing, I assume). But yes, I mean users who only vote are now counted (it’s not using views afaik).
Don’t forget that Reddit was made up of 90% lurkers, and less than 1% of active posters, the rest would comment but rarely post themselves. These numbers are great if we keep those statistics in mind
Commenters were already counted, though, so this bump is really just the vote-only population getting added. Which is still important to maintaining a healthy and varied front-page, mind you.
Why are they not separated out in any way? There should be separate bins for “active posters” “active commenters” and “active voters”. Otherwise you’re going to get some wacky data problems like this.
I’d like to think that too but I still go to Reddit and browsed a lot of those threads. In almost all of them, people were making the claim that there was nowhere to go, with maybe the occasional person chiming in to name-drop Lemmy, followed by a couple more comments from people bad-mouthing it.
People are definitely mad at Reddit but there does seem to still be this overall sense that Lenny is not good enough yet
Lemmy is more work to get on and then find an apk to use. There needs to just be a simple and clear instruction set to get people over. Like a link to an instance they can easily join and here’s a good app to use. Sort by /all and top from last 24 hours.
Right now there are waaaay less users, so content is low compared to reddit, and you can’t just create your own sub at the drop of a hat.
Encouraging everyone onto a single instance kinda defeats the purpose, and I feel it’s not as much of an issue with the new join-lemmy.com redesign, which recommends an instance based on your interests.
I wrote up this post for anyone to reference to help onboard people to lemmy.
I guess, but I haven’t noticed a whole lot of point in picking an instance of interest, since a small amount of content comes from them all right now. I added a ton of instances to my feed so I’ve never noticed tchncs prioritized or specific to myself.
If everyone dogpiles into a single generic instance, it could push that instance into unsustainable territory financially (especially with a mass exodus), unless the user base is willing to donate to support the instance. Spreading the load out over many instances would ease the load on any one server admin.
Maybe make an auto sorting pool that instances sign up for and just evenly assign new users an instance, so they don’t even have to “try hard” to choose one, then?
DECADES long? Facebook didn’t even exist 2 decades ago bud. We know they’re shit but you don’t need to go around exaggerating everything and being so dramatic.
This was being discussed actively months ago. People would say the full embrace, extend… then, but now there’s a somewhat fair assumption that most who are actually on Lemmy might have the reference by now.
All you have to do is say, "what does EEE mean? " without the second half of your statement - no need to get angry.
The point of the second half is to try to dissuade others from simply relying on initialisms. It causes introspection. Maybe accusing others of being angry is uncalled for? It’s possible to want to prompt introspection in others without being angry.
Using initialisms prompt self learning for those that will, and wilful ignorance for those that will not. No one is responsible for anyone elses individual lack of capacity. Funny how your situation only encourages introspection in one half of the conversation.
What is the point of ever asking a question on the Internet if it should always just be met with “do your own research”? For the record, I did Google around and I couldn’t find that Wikipedia article, and when I did see it in another comment, I didn’t still understand the concept. This comes across as incredibly gatekeeper-y. Don’t understand why I’m not “allowed” into the conversation because I’m being barred from context because I don’t understand an initialism and my research failed.
You are allowed, just ask what it means. Don’t be a whiney little bitch that people aren’t hand feeding you every scrap of information, nobody is cognizant of your ignorance so don’t blame yours on them.
The problem is you come across as a demanding jackass and will likely receive a “fuck you” in response rather than the modified behaviour you think you’re engendering.
I don’t believe the people saying “just wait and see” are genuine users. I have a hard time fathoming that after Meta’s atrocious history, as well as the history of what happens when large corporations get involved – I simply can’t believe these are more than paid shill accounts.
Or maybe I’m the one who’s naive, thinking that people can’t possibly be so foolish…
They’re a really good open source contributor with a great track record, I know people don’t like saying good stuff about zuck related things but they’ve helped progress machine learning quite a bit. Pytourch is a great example iirc used in stable diffusion
Throw 50 fulltime programmers at development and crowd everyone else out. Or fork it with something clearly superior since they can afford to pay people to work on it fulltime.
I mean development. It's happened with other projects before when large corps get involved. Of course, the existing developers of a project don't have to allow that to happen.
They implement ActivityPub and connect to all the available servers. A load of new users will see the content here and all the communities here will be absolutely flooded with new content and users.
Extend:
ActivityPub will be extended. Many new features will be added, that don’t really match the standard, but they are mostly useful so some developers will try to add them to let’s say Lemmy. They won’t be blr to develop new features on their own and some stuff with threads will always be broken or half baked. Threads users will belittle the users here, some will maybe go there, cause it just works and is otherwise the same.
New users at the same time will most likely go directly to threads cause it’s backed by a giant company, always works and has more features.
Extinguish:
They will cut the federation.
Communities here will feel empty and most users will just leave. Only the hard core will stay and that won’t be sustainable. The fediverse becomes even less attractive for new users and will devolve into a niche community.
As for funding, the servers are supported on a donation basis, with no big corporations behind them. This leads to a problem concerning user data and privacy, as there isn’t a single accountable entity behind the network.
It’s actually not wrong if you look at it in another way.
Big tech will abuse your data, but it will do within legal constraints, and there is actuall (though weak) accountability of these companies due to the legal system.
On federated services like Lemmy, instances are hosted by anonymous individuals. Most social media laws don’t apply to them, and their legal accountability is basically zero.
Lemmy, for example, does not comply with GDPR. There is no legal notice, no privacy contact person, no banner asking whether you are ok with the fact that your data is sent to unknown servers in random nations, no nothing. Private messages aren’t even encrypted, so any admin can read them without issues.
There is no way to actually delete your data, as the GDPR requires. Deleted posts are only marked as deleted and you can see their plain text content by just pressing the “reply” button in any of the apps. There isn’t any kind of guarantee, that your post will be deleted on other instances. If federation has problems, the post will remain on other instances and is now permanently undeletable by the user.
There are no moderation standards. Some instances will delete nazi content, some basically require nazi content. And some instance admin might even edit your posts to say something completely different. It’s all possible and in the hands of random people on the internet.
Hobbyist-run services are much worse when it comes to availability and reliability. If something happens while the admin is on holiday, nothing will get fixed. If the admin runs out of money, doesn’t care anymore or even dies, the instance with all it’s content and users is just gone.
So there are very real risks attached to a hobbyist-run service with no legal accountability and no transparency at all.
We all know the downsides of Big Tech though, so it’s everyone’s personal choice to figure out which disadvantages hurt them personally more.
That’s a bit misleading to say like that. Go to the website, scroll to the footer and click on “Legal”. Your instance, feddit.de, has a legal notice, with a privacy contact person, mentioning you can request data erasure, and detailing where your data goes. Mine, lemmy.world, has a number of in depth legal documents attached there.
However, yes, other instances they are federated with might not take it as seriously though, and if all your data is going there too, then that’s a hole in your data privacy.
I imagine that this calls for a feature that can erase your data on every other federated server. If the activitypub protocol can send data from one server to another, it should be able to delete it or find a way to disable viewing said data.
That already exists. The person who created a post or comment can delete it. But it only works sometimes, since federation is constantly not working correctly.
Eh, that’s a mixed bag. Absolutely, one could setup shared delete requests, to federate a delete request, but it would be a bit of a lie as anyone could simply… update their instance to simply ignore delete requests.
For now, simply not having a delete feature is a more honest to the realities of the fediverse. There’ll never be a “true” delete, even if they do eventually support one that’s “good enough”.
The GDPR notice on feddit.de is not GDPR compliant, and the link isn’t even visible on mobile.
If you request deletion, they can’t guarantee that the data is deleted on federated servers. They can send deletion messages, but federation is constantly not working correctly, other instances can decide themselves whether they do delete stuff, and if an instance is unreachable for a while, the deletion message will be dropped.
Lemmy, or even ActivityPub are designed to be non-GDPR compliant. (Probably not on purpose, but the way it works makes it basically impossible to be GDPR compliant.)
Very much this. Plus, how easy will instance admin Joe Schmoe fold under external pressure to give access to certain groups, government bodies etc? And how well have Joe Schmoe implemented good security practices on the server and related things? Etc.
Eh, it is a con when there are problems, service problems, bugs, etc…
My instance have had a few of them and for a while our 1 admin was unavailable.
It is difficult or impossible to get it resolve because there is no contact point, nobody hired to fix issues that need immediate triage, etc… which can result in longer outages or bugs on specific instances.
I’m not complaining. This is a fantastic service that is being offered completely free from actual altruistic incentives, unlike corporations. There are a few downsides though.
But feddit.de just became usable again after more than two weeks of being basically unusable - because the 19.0 and 19.1 releases of Lemmy were buggy and there was no downgrade migration possible on the database. No big corporation would break their product for two weeks like this.
Kind of funny how the privacy crowd is big on Lemmy but it skips over the fact that all of its Lemmy data is hosted on the machines of people that have no accountability…
You’re always free to spin up your own server and host it if you’re concerned about the way your data is being handled. Not something you can do with the corporate alternatives
ActivityPub does not have support for private messages. Services that try to shoehorn a direct message as “private” are misusing the protocol. You could configure client-side encryption but thats outside the scope of ActivityPub
No personally identifiable information or private account information is transmitted between instances. The only thing that is synced is the content of your posts, reports and up- and downvotes. And all of that serves a purpose and is shared willingly.
I may be naive, but even though I don’t personally know my admin, this is a person who has a stellar reputation, and who I’d trust far more than some massive corporation that has to abide(1) by some anemic laws
there isn’t a single accountable entity behind the network
Yeah, Instead of a single entity i know will never be held accountable for selling my data and storing my information in an unencrypted txt file, there are unknown entities! Like the Simpsons (d’oh) quote says, “It could even be a boat!”
The illogic reminds me a bit of Google’s new targeted ad privacy settings where your “privacy” is google’s pinky swear that they alone are profiting from you.
When you see takes this weird do you wonder as i do whether it is intentionally worded to push some kind of narrative (though i don’t really know what that would even be in this case), or is it written by someone so deeply in the tech bubble world that they are wildly out of touch? I don’t know.
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