If you mean to choose a Yet Another Small Community of Users, there’s never been a shortage of those, and there’s barely a need for the federated space for that.
If you don’t want to see how abusing power to remove and drive users away from communities removes and drives users away from communities, I don’t know what to tell you, but I think people are coming to the federated space seeking alternatives to reddit and twitter, not just small communities, so unless something is done about the federated architecture, what happens to access to the biggest communities will always matter in regards to population numbers.
If a user gets their account banned and purged for barely any reason but extreme escalation, I think that will always be a concern - you have no assurance that users will simply create another account and remain. If there’s going to be abuse by the leadership in the alternative, why would anyone who comments on RedditMigration simply remain in the fediverse and not go back to Reddit? If you are going to get falsely accused accused and banned for shit reasons, even to the point of an admin of the most popular instance fabricating accusations that you are an alt of a CSAM account, why would most people remain?
Nothing is stopping the user from accessing lemmy.world communities from the alternative instance they chose (unless it has defederated). It’s just that in this case lemmy.world did not want to be responsible for the user’s content.
Abusing admins is nothing new and with reddit you have absolutely 0 recourse besides making a new account at the mercy of the very same admins. On Lemmy at least you can select another instance and still access the same content.
My point is, if you are going to be dealing with it anyway, why would you participate in the social network that is order of magnitudes smaller? You can access content on reddit without an account, the problem is participating alongside the community.
For all intents and purposes, since you are still locked out on lemmy from doing because of its server-centric communities regardless of which instance you choose, it boils down to the same outcome for the same desired goal - creating an alt - except with an order of magnitudes smaller reward - far less population and engagement than on reddit.
So rather than sticking to lemmy, it seems natural that people go back to their old but bigger platforms.
Federated is great for maintaining persistence of your account beyond the whims of fickle admins, but that’s a tertiary problem. No one is that exited about keeping their user history, they are excited about participating with everyone else about the topic that is being discussed.
It’s not worthless, but I can understand it explaining some of the decreasing population numbers if they encounter it even just once after months of participating on the platform because of how disruptive it is. No one is normally going to stick around a community when only the fraction of the local users in your own lemmy instance can view it.
It’s because when you go to /c/books , the default view is not every /c/books on every server. But one /c/books on one server. Therefore Lemmy is doomed and the dev refuse by principle to fix it.
The difference is that Lemmy is an answer to Reddit, not Discord. If a Reddit user wants to see if there’s a community for woodworking, he can search for “woodworking” and find it.
If a Lemmy user searches “woodworking” and the biggest woodworking community isn’t on your instance, you have to leave Lemmy and use an external service to search more instances and even then you might not find what you’re looking for.
I don’t use that spyware but it’s probably the same as every tech bro Reddit like.
Everyone flocks to the one big “books” community and that sucks the air out for any alternative.
Lemmy’s one thing going for it was that it’s was supposed to be decentralized and prevent concentration of power.
But you end up with one big community, and a unaccountable minority owns that community and does what every they want with it. Just like Reddit, they can sell your grandmother, we know users don’t care enough to do anything about it and they’ll just stay. The 2nd biggest will never matter.
This means there isn’t a lemmiverse books community, there is one big books community, on one person’s server, moderated by one guy and his disciples and that’s it forever as far as Lemmy is concerned, the same end as Reddit.
Ideally, the user should search for “books” communities and the top result should be the largest/most active community. If they don’t like that community, they can try the 2nd, 3rd, and 4th result to see if they are better. Unfortunately, the Lemmy sort algorithm needs a lot of work.
For the communities I have searched for, both “Hot” and “Active” sort are bad (the main community about a topic is barely top 5, no other relevant results at the top of the list). When I switch to Top Year, I start to get good results.
You end up with one community with 8000 user , second community 17.
Unless there a major fuckup, only the biggest community is viable and gets seen by anyone. It sucks the air out for everything else. Because nobody is going to manually subscribe to 50 microscopic /c/books communities on as many servers.
That recreates Reddit mod power problem and it will kill Lemmy in the same way.
Maybe Lemmy simply already isn’t viable, just a Reddit clone with meaningless federation feature that only decentralize unimportant stuff but not the strangleho lady that moderators have on communities.
The second community will never be viable because even if the first community messed up as bad as Reddit, we know less than 5% would even change their habits.
Lemmy is not spez proof, it empowers the spez as much as Reddit.
Except even on Reddit we saw large communities split due to some issue (for example r/questionablecontent and r/QContent, one has 13k and the other has 5.3k subs).
Yes, many communities have these kinds of fuck ups. In the best case scenarios you have a new community half the size and with its attention split. The newcomers still get split between the schism after it happened. The result is multiple weaker communities.
And it take a really monumental fuck up to even get this low level of user action.
Look at reddit, the admins fucked over absolutely everyone and they’ve made it clear they’re only starting. Look how hard it is to get people to come over.
While on the other hand, if most users go to /c/books and by default they see every /c/books on every federated server, then the problem is sidestepped entirely.
No single mod team can get a stranglehold on a community.
Each user gets to choose, by applying or subscribing to a blacklist/while of users or servers. Or they can raw dog it with the click of a button.
But if most users who go to /c/books end up on the “one big /c/books instance” then every other /c/books community except the biggest one, will be a desert that is not worth your time to post to.
Assuming you merge instances, how would moderation work, especially if mods cannot agree on rules or interpretations? What about instance specific rules? Would a post be moderated by whatever instance the OP posted from?
If the mods have to agree on rules, you have the same exact asshole mod problem but now with extra name squatting.
Basic way, mods censor their own instance. What is not on their instance does not concern them.
Advanced way, mods actions are published as a filter, enacted on the client. User choose their mods, subscribe to them, their client obtain those mod action list and use them to filter the raw feed.
This way mods can “delete” things on other instances too.
In practice, every user is now a mod. You can include any user as being a moderator for you.
Very advanced way, the user’s client, for a piece of content obtains all moderator actions, for each moderator automatically evaluate credibility and reputation score, weight mods action in proportion to that score, take all actions for all mods taking weight into consideration to determine “consensus action” and then apply this action to the piece of content.
There are many many other ways to do this. All of them better than current centralized abuse-prone Web 2.0 garbage
A system like that can’t have a second books community, let alone a second or third. The current books community has 133 user. They’re not going to have 13 communities split between them.
Instead they all have to accept, whoever is the biggest, (realistically, whoever is first) community, gets to shape the books discussion on lemmy forever. That’s just how first mover advantage, compounding advantage works in this obviously broken system.
This will certainly spell the end of Lemmy. You think defederation is a problem, You’ve seen nothing yet.
what do you mean refuse by principle to fix it? the solution that comes to mind is for a whitelist that is implemented either in federation broadly or lemmy specifically for certain categories (think TLDs) which are agreed to have a certain focus, like on literature or video games or music, where the instances themselves can join or link to.
kinda bypass a community being held hostage (or kept isolated) by an instance, the whitelists can be determined through a simple majority (first past the post) or any other method by members of communities rather than instance moderators/admins.
i get that many folks don’t like hexbear and i have nothing against them, i certainly don’t want to force them to see content they don’t want; giving granular control over specific content (not just a blacklist like per-user instance blocking) seems ideal.
When you go to “/c/books” on any server, the default should be an agglomeration of all /c/books on all federated servers (notwithstanding the already ongoing defederation wars)
The -USER- then decides if they want to filter by whitelist or blacklist, the user decide what server or community@server goes on the list. Realistically, users will just follow other user’s lists, which should be sharable easily. You might even subscribe to someone else’s blacklist/whitelist and get updated automatically.
But none of that is possible if the baseline view is not the ability to “see all /c/book on the entire fediverse in its raw unedited form”. You can filter out data you can’t access.
Whitelists, of course, are poison were just just deem everything to be garbage except “the chosen ones”, usually handed down from above by your betters.
A public blacklist model would be much better. You could then build your own blacklist by scanning all user profile for what is on their blacklist and use that as a basis for building your own blacklist, this is mostly how spam filters work. Because in the world of email, if you say “everyone I don’t already know is garbage” well, then you might as well just abandon email entirely.
Why does this matter? Do we need to appease the shareholders or something? Do we need endless month over month growth, lest the world completely stops turning?
It just signals that this platform is flawed to the point where it’s bleeding to death. Keep in mind, a bigger userbase = more active community = better platform.
If there are no users, there will be no new contents added.
If there are a lot of users (many more than there are now), there will be enough people around to support all sorts of niche communities, like Reddit had.
Active user count is probably the single most important metric to whether a platform is successful and stays alive. Even above quality of content, as proven by many other social media platforms that thrive despite being flooded with trash content.
As a Lemmy shareholder, I’m outraged. If Lemmy doesn’t get more users soon, I am going to stop the thrusters that keep the world turning. You have been warned.
I find this all very irrelevant. I deleted reddit, account and all, and have never felt better. If I need to tell you you’re great more to keep people here, then I will.
I love lemmy but I was researching some home audio receivers this weekend and had to resort to Reddit. There’s just not nearly as much information on lemmy. But for some quick entertainment it’s entirely replaced Reddit for me.
While that’s true, I find it a bit sad that I have posted a question in the community of a 200000+ population city 3 months ago, and it’s still the most recent post.
Honestly I still use Reddit quite a bit because Lemmy just doesn’t have the content that Reddit does.
Lemmy’s left-leaning communities and tech communities are active but past that it is a ghost town. I think that’s why a lot of people did not stay.
I have also experienced bullying and harassment here that I had never experienced on Reddit and I do wonder if other people experienced similar and left because of that.
Out of privacy/tech bros and far left extremists, there’s nothing else on this site. This place doesn’t appeal to the general public because there’s nothing here for them.
I prefer things without powermods, corporate and government influence, profit motives, censorship, groupthink, karma farming, excessive banning, etc etc.
If people really miss an endless content feed then they can just switch to one of the social media giants - it’ll only take a couple of clicks - and Keep Lemmy Good.
It was founded by a Communist, and decentralization appeals to leftists. The non-Communist lemmy is Reddit, basically, or making your own instance or finding an anti-Communist instance.
It’d be cool to see hosted lemmy instances where people can pay for their own without having to go through the setup process, then curate their own feeds. Unless that already exists somewhere.
This is why Lemmy will never be anything more than tiny a niche platform. It’s a place for the far left by the far left. There’s nothing here in place for anybody else. I don’t just mean politics wise, I mean everything. There’s nothing for fandoms, shows, movies, sports, or anything really. You have to be privacy/tech nerd or some left wing extremist to really enjoy this place more than Reddit. Since the portion of the population that this platform is trying to appeal to is extremely small, this platform will always be small. There’s little to not attempts by the devs or the community to make this place appeal to everybody else.
There are few things the developers could do. For example, they could make the platform easier to use. Many people don’t even reach this place because they’re not that tech savvy or simple don’t care enough to figure it out. It’s much easier for them to just create an account and get started on Reddit or elsewhere. This leaves extremists with nowhere else to go and tech bros… which are the two groups that dominate this place. The process of getting on board and finding instances/communities needs to be easier. There needs to be something like centralized site/app that is easily accessible and shows all the different instances and communities in one place.
It’s not that complicated, go to an instance and sign up.
What actually dominates Lemmy are groups of people that value bottom-up organizational structures, decentralization, FOSS, and other general structural decisions made with creating Lemmy. This leaves people that like these principles, and actually care enough to move to an instance despite mass adoption of a more top-down, Capitalist site like Reddit.
Decentralization isn’t left wing or right wing, that’s just a moronic analysis. Decentralization has a wide appeal but unless it gets simplified and standardized it will never become adopted by the mainstream. Places like Lemmy which are littered with gatekeepers like you doom this place to forever being a niche. If this place ever hopes of rivaling reddit, it needs to appeal to more than political extremists and tech nerds
The simple answer is that Communism does not in fact rely on everyone being perfect and unselfish. The complicated answer is telling you to go read Communist theory.
Why do you hold the belief that Communisn requires everyone be perfect and unselfish to function any more than Capitalism does? Can you describe the principle or structure that leads you to believe this?
Honestly, no I’m far from an expert in political or economic matters. I’m just yet to see a system proposed that could work in reality given how complex humans are and how “value” is almost impossible to define when everyone sees it differently.
Plenty of countries have tried though and none have made it work from what I’ve seen. This is possibly (probably) a gross oversimplification but ultimately someone (or some group) ends up at the top of the tree and unless that group is uncorruptable forever it ends with imbalance.
Asking everyone to share as needed and own nothing would be great if everyone wanted everyone else to be equally happy and nobody was trying to take more for themselves (and if everyone had the same idea of what everything is worth). I think at the very least we can agree that some people are more selfless than others and other people will always exploit that given an opportunity.
How deep of an understanding do you have of these supposed proposed systems? As a leftist, the vast majority of mainstream leftist tendencies have strong theory that specifically deals with what you consider to be their ultimate flaw: an assumption of human good. It’s hard to actually answer for every single leftist Tendency, because you haven’t really given any specifics.
As for your second paragraph, there have been remarkably few countries that genuinely have tried Socialism, and all of them were developing countries. Don’t take this to mean that I’m a fan of Marxism-Leninism, but there are two prominent examples of countries that most would consider did in fact “work,” those being the USSR and China.
Again, not defending the USSR or China overall, but asking for clarification on your definition of working, as they were and are economically strong.
Your point about the top of the tree is, bluntly, extremely bad. You offer no explanation why a Socialist or Communist structure cannot be democratically accountable to any lesser degree than Capitalist structures, and assume absolute power. This goes directly against all leftist theory, even Marxism-Leninism, which is centered on the principles of Democratic Centralism.
Your point about Communism being “sharing everything and owning nothing” is also entirely incorrect, and further proves my point. The entire final paragraph is so divorced from any sense of actual leftist theory, that it can only be a product of someone fully believing a right-wing pundit’s propaganda, and not the actual primary sources for leftist tendencies, to the point where I’ll break down each sentence.
Communism, principly, is a far-future status by which the whole of the productive forces can meaningfully provide whatever anyone wants at any time, and work is done for the pleasure of working, rather than for the necessity of being. As such, it must be built towards over a long period of Socialism, which is chiefly Worker Ownership of the Means of Production. Communism and Socialism are built on the idea of earning what you actually work for, rather than allowing individuals to own the products of other’s labor via ownership of the tools they use. You make the error of assuming immediate implementation of Communism, rather than gradual.
We can partially agree on your second point, but given the actual structures proposed by various leftist tendencies, it doesn’t matter for this conversation, and you’ve yet to prove why.
Sorry for the wall of text! I truly think that you should talk to leftists, actually read some Marx, Bakunin, Kropotkin, Lenin, Luxembourg, and so forth, and actually get an idea of what the various leftist tendencies are actually saying. You don’t have to be a leftist, but you absolutely should understand leftism before attempting to disavow it entirely.
Lack of acceptance for what? Leftism is a group of ideologies, and not necessarily one built around tolerating that which they oppose out of a sense of moral superiority.
I was just asking for what you’ve seen that points to Communism working in theory and not in practice, because so far you’ve explained exactly none of that.
I’ve found a good start for your lack of understanding, though! You completely misinterpret the definition and conflate private property with all property, when it is specifically referring to tools and industry, ie the Means of Production. You absolutely own things in Communism, like your house, toys, games, books, etc. You just don’t own Private Property, like factories, restaurants, etc. The definition of Communism is a Stateless, Classless, Moneyless society, and you make the error of pretending to know what exactly that entails by your own worst imagining of your own worst interpretation of said phrase.
Your next paragraph is also very enlightening, you assume Capitalist Mode of Production with Communist consequences! This is precisely what I’m getting at, you believe things like Companies would exist in Communism, when Communism itself is anti-market, and you’re again making the assumption that we can just turn on the big red Communism button and get there, when it must be built over a long period of time, with structures such as worker councils.
Your question about bullshit jobs has numerous solutions, actually. First of all, you’re assuming Communism in modern society, rather than the future, after lots of automation. Socialism would have monetary rewards, even lower stage Communism as well, for performing this labor. Eventually, it would be like your current life. Who cleans your house? You and your roommates, whether that be your friends, or family. In a Communist society, likely everyone would take turns, for whatever bullshit jobs haven’t already been automated away. In lower stages, they would be paid more money until this becomes possible.
Your points on the USSR and China are also wrong. In the USSR, wealth inequality was magnitudes lower than it is in their current oligarchic hellscape, and the Workers actually had a lot of say over how their life went, assuming they didn’t criticize the Politburo. This was referred to as Soviet Democracy, by which worker councils called Soviets decided things democratically at the local level.
No, I wouldn’t live in the USSR or modern day China, because they are developing countries with authoritarian leadership. However, you’ll find that is true across the board for developing countries. Perhaps if the USSR or China ever fully developed and became more democratically accountable, I would choose to live there, but for now you’ll find that quality of life follows development more than structure.
Both Maoist China and the USSR had far less wealth inequality than they have today, both doubled life expectancy, and the USSR had close to 0 homelessness with fully free education and Healthcare. They also lacked luxury goods and had an Authoritarian party controlling the state, but you’re demonstrably wrong about wealth inequality.
I am not a tankie or a supporter of the ML form of Socialism, if it needs to be restated.
If I point to Hitler’s Germany, Pinochet’s Chile, and Batista’s Cuba, does that mean that Capitalism is great in theory and doesn’t actually work in reality because it results in Authoritarianism? The answer is that you must state the why and how this came to be, so as not to repeat it.
Do you genuinely think the USSR and China are the only forms of Socialism that could ever exist?
Please, just read some leftist theory or watch some YouTube videos. All of your false preconceptions are easily debunked even by looking at historical records and doing some light critical thinking. I know you mean well, but you could genuinely have improvements in your understanding.
It depends on which instances you visit, the one I’m in is pretty chill, but slow. Though it does have a Chilean theme going on, so it might be harder for you to find something interesting.
Same, there’s this political circlejerk everywhere I go here, I may agree with a lot of people here, but different POVs on politics would be refreshing…
Wait lemmy is full of tankies? Fuck… When I left reddit and twitter, i thought i would never have to see the terminally online left again.
Oh, and before the leftists come at me, I hate conservatives more, and yall need to admit that joe biden is doing a great job and exactly what you asked.
I am still on Lemmy. It’s still my primary timewaster. I was clean from Reddit until a few weeks ago and I relapsed. The app is shit. Lemmy feels more like what I loved about Reddit but without the content. Reddit still has content but the app doesn’t feel good to use.I m stuck going back and forth. First to Lemmy then to Reddit. I’ll stick with Lemmy until it gets better or it dies.
When I don’t feel satisfied with Lemmy I try to go back to Reddit too, but I was so mad at them a couple weeks ago I uninstalled their app and now when I tried to install the app, they give me a list of my former BANNED usernames as an “option” to log in but they offer no option to log in under any of my VALID usernames. (Yes I do have some accounts that haven’t been banned but they won’t let me login to my good ones.)
The only options they give me are to sign in with Google or a previous banned account. They clearly don’t want me there. which is probably a good thing because this evening I went to the gym instead of wasting time on this… What should we call it… discussion format?
Most people have never heard of Lemmy or the Fediverse and were not invested one iota in the API Fiasco because they don’t know what API stands for and they normally use the official mobile app.
So the Fediverse has an uphill battle. For the vast majority of Reddit users, Reddit still does everything they need it to and there’s no great call to migrate over. People that are only peripherally aware of the Fediverse may also think it has something to do with blockchain technology. The technological savviness divide grows larger by the minute.
So true, lemmy provides me with just enough stuff to feel like I saw enough memes, got some news, etc. but then I can just put it down and do other stuff. My interneting / doomscrolling is waaay lower than it was before.
this is an excellent point. perhaps the slowness of the content here is helping those of us who’ve been on reddit forever and are used to just doom scrolling through endless content.
i spend less time here but I feel I get more direct ‘value’ when I do. it’s more small business feel than condy nast breathing margins down the user community’s throats(pre and post gold eras)
I quit the R word cold turkey re: API and now toggle between this and kbin but lemmy with eternity app has been the best baconreader withdrawal breaker for me.
Another big point is that it’s a rejection of the profit motive, ie there’s not even a “small business” feeling like you say for me, but a far more genuine feeling. Nobody has tried to sell me anything here yet.
There are too many dimwits who think Lemmy was made so that they can build their echo chambers. So, there is no discourse, just stupid people encouraging stupid people. Anyone that comments otherwise is immediately removed.
Most mods are dumdums. Most are obviously politically and ideologically motivated. It’s their job to prune anything they disagree with, which means they can’t help themselves and ban everyone. Most of the time it’s a complete waste of time to comment in smaller subs. The dumdums have taken hold either by making the subs and controlling them, or by volunteering as mods with no oversight.
Last week there was a woke-not-woke argument in certain StarTrek post that was like one quite moderate guy against 1000 angry people. At least in reddit there was some debate posible and it was respectful for the most part, here you get dilapidated before even be able to explain yourself. Lemmy is too politically driven as you said. And that’s insufferable.
Six months ago lemmy was infinitely better than reddit in that regard. It’s gotten worse because people from Reddit are here now, and brought their idiocy with them.
I don’t think is the bad people of reddit but the people Who want to fight that found lemmy as a mean to clash with reddit … but once here is not about fighting but make it flourish and build community so… maybe people is unable to stop clashing everywhere. Fight is the nature of … that people.
I tend to think that : where there is a ton of people that adopt an aggressive and absolute position against you there’s a ton of people silent that are afraid or tired of fighting against a tide ( or is caloric economy) . I agreed somehow with the guy but I didn’t say a thing to avoid the pain.
And to be honest this Star Trek thing is going on and on since some years ago so no… imho is not something clear or absolute.
Politics REALLY are ruining a lot of things nowadays.
Funny enough, this is the same exact reason why Reddit sucks. Those same idiots who made that platform insufferable have migrated here and made this already insufferable place even more insufferable.
lemmy still isnt nearly as good as reddit was by a long shot. niche communities suck, porn sucks, c/all content isnt bad but if you scroll once youll just repeat everything on refresh.
but god damn the reddit app is terrible now and the content sucks there now too it literally feels like its trying to be a tik tok clone.
I miss the good ol’ days when everyone on the planet was free to make their own unique websites using JavaScript and HTML. Now all we have is google twitter tiktok instagram LinkedIn
this is a crazy take to make from my comment but i respect ur grind ig
but no, porn and jerking off is good for you abstaining has no benefits and never will. and i can confirm im much healthier and far more shredded than youll ever be.
Pro-tip: sort All by New Comments. Yes, if you refresh, you get repeat content, but you also find the unusual stuff and the repeated stuff is where the conversations are happening.
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