Coming from reddit, Lemmy isn't great

I appreciate the decentralized architecture and the privacy that comes with it, but it's organization isn't great.

I'm not sure if I understand why certain instances can choose not to federate with other instances. It just seems to limit the content that is accessible to me. I don't want to have to switch between 4-5 Lemmy accounts that I switch just to curate what I to see. Its impractical.

I'm not happy with the changes on reddit and will most likely ditch entirely soon. Lately I've only been using it for tutorials. But at least I wasn't closed off from viewing anything and everything I wanted without sifting through instances. I hope great things come for Lemmy, competitors are great, but in its current state it just seems doomed.

Uniquitous,

A more positive mental attitude might improve your experience of all things across the board. If this is the energy you bring, it's no wonder you're not happy.

Astongt615,

Are you going to provide the positive perspective of the same points (not all the other things great with Lemmy, but directly what OPs points were)? Two complaints (if that's what you want to call it) are not any more constructive.

steakfries,

he's trying and he wasn't completely disgracing the place. Just saying its difficult coming from reddit to here. I myself am having the same troubles. I'm bringing a "positive attitude" and trying to learn but this place is much much more confusing than reddit and im not sure i even understand half of whats going on rn. this place is just confusing to the average person. you should have a better attitude towards people adopting this over reddit if you want more people to come here.

Kurt,

Based on the feedback I've been receiving, a user can just run their own instance on not be bound by the various internecine instance blocks. I will be looking into doing so myself.

CaptainBlagbird,

certain instances can choose not to federate with other instances

I've not seen this yet, how does this manifest?

sandblast,

Can't access lemmygrad.ml from this instance. Not going to complain since I understand the reasoning and am grateful for this instance.

I haven't run into others, but if lemmy actually takes off there will be more fragmented instances. Seems to be an inherent pro/con depending on how you look at it.

redditrefugee,

I'm not super impressed yet and I'm kind of confused with this whole thing so far. Whatever, screw reddit, I was done with that place anyway so I'll give lemmy a shot.

knighthawk0811,

I was already getting to a point where I spent too much unrewarding time on reddit and wanted out. this is the perfect time. there is an alternative that is close to the same, but different enough that I feel fresh.

lvxferre,
@lvxferre@lemmy.ml avatar

I’m not sure if I understand why certain instances can choose not to federate with other instances. It just seems to limit the content that is accessible to me.

Because certain types of content and users might have negative value in a given environment.

I'll use a mild example to illustrate that. Let's say that you got two instances:

  • alicelemmy - it's just a place to shitpost, chill, chat, and throw jokes. Serious discussion is frowned upon.
  • boblemmy - serious discussions only; joke posts are banned, you're supposed to quote your sources, all that procedure.

If both instances are federalised you'll see alicelemmy's posters doing shitty jokes in boblemmy, and boblemmy's posters trying to argue the jokes in alicelemmy. Both communities became less useful for their respective users, because now alicelemmy isn't just a place to shitpost and chill, and boblemmy's content has become less serious.

This happens a lot in Reddit, as a consequence of the Fluff Principle and the lack of barrier between subs. However in the Fediverse you can somewhat avoid it, by not federalising instances together.

In the meantime, if you enjoy both shitposting and serious discussions, nothing prevents you from accessing both instances separately.

barrett9h,

why are communities not enough to separate alicelemmy from boblemmy?

after all, a user could want to participate in both

lvxferre,
@lvxferre@lemmy.ml avatar

inb4 sorry, wall of text. [Also, note: this is my personal take.]

I think that communities are not enough because of a few things.

One of them is that most people expect to be able to behave the same way, abide to the same rules, and contribute the exact same way, to have the same level as expertise, as long as they're in the same site. Sometimes this is not of the best interests of the group.

You see this a lot in Reddit, and I believe to be one of the main factors behind large subreddits going downhill, no matter the best efforts of their mod teams. r/linguistics is a good example of that - the sub was supposed to be for people at least familiar with Linguistics, sharing information, but most posts and comments there nowadays are from laymen assuming shit out of nowhere, because that's how your average redditor behaves.

You could follow the local rules, sure; but most people will not. Unless there's a higher degree of separation between both group.

Across instances however it's clearer that you're in a different site, with different rules, that you may need to behave in a different way. And that a contribution that may be welcome in one instance might be harmful for another.

Another is that different instances host different demographics. My example is too mild to show it, but imagine the following two instances instead:

  • charlielemmy - intended as a safe space for trans people. Mostly so they can chill together, shitpost together, nothing too serious.
  • danlemmy - intended for people who have a really dark sense of humour, and who'd gladly poke fun at everyone, including trans people. Definitively unsafe.

If you're the admin of one of the instances you definitively do not want people from the other instance. In charlielemmy this would make the environment unsafe for its target userbase; for danlemmy it means that you're going to get people pissed at the dark jokes, and potentially starting arguments.

after all, a user could want to participate in both

Federation makes it easier to handle: register in both alicelemmy and boblemmy.

Barbarian,

Lemme give you 2 scenarios to explain why defederation is an important option:

  1. An instance with views and forms of diacourse wholly incompatible with yours. As a hyperbolic silly example to illustrate, let's say there's a community of cultists who believe in Cthulhu. They encourage a steady diet of kidnapped babies, and ritual drownings. They brigade like crazy, and their moderators encourage them to do this. Anybody who doesn't follow the great old one is an idiot, an asshole, and they express this in extremely vulgar terms. If they were a reddit community, they'd get banned. Here, they get isolated to their own little corner where they can't scream obscenities at people.
  2. An instance with thousands of bots spamming out innocuous looking links that lead to malware. Again, if they were a reddit bot farm, (hopefully) they'd be banned. Here, as it's an open source project and you can't restrict who uses it and for what, defederation is the best you can do.

Lemmygrad seems to be a bit of a target of defederation by many instances, and there's probably some history there that I'm not aware of as I'm also new to Lemmy. Even though I may not agree with some of their hardline views, the users seem to be respectful when commenting over here on lemmy.ml, and the very few times I've commented over there, they've been cool. Consequently, I'm glad lemmy.ml federates with them.

EDIT: I should probably state that even though I'm cool talking with the respectful users, had to block a few communities there. I don't want to see the Death to NATO community cheerleading the Russian invasion, for example.

estelle,

Lemmygrad seems to be a bit of a target of defederation by many instances, and there’s probably some history there that I’m not aware

a number of Lemmygrad users conducted a "special military operation to denazify" lemmyml, beehaw, sopuli and the Lemmyverse. Some of the history is here https://lemmy.ca/c/fediverselore. They are credited with putting down wolfballs, an actual alt-right instance to their credit. Some of the conflict very loosely spread to github.

Some senior lemmygrad members have a long history of hostility with PrivacyGuides, see the post here and iirc some on !fediverselore

Barbarian,

They are credited with taking down wolfballs

I found it in your link, thanks. Jesus. I think lemmygrad deserves a medal for that if this post is representative of that community.

uthredii,

It just seems to limit the content that is accessible to me.

Some counterpoints to this:

  1. To my knowledge servers try to federate with a wide range of other servers. They will only ever block each other if the content is problematic.
  2. You can create your own server that federates with every instance you want. Chances are, someone had the same problem as you and is dooing this already.
  3. We could actually see more content than reddit eventually. Some community forums haven't migrated to reddit because reddit would have final control/ownership of the community. This isn't a problem with Lemmy. More communities like this one might migrate from isolated forums to Lemmy.
Melody,

Lemmy is absolutely a learning curve...but once you learn it; you'll basically grok how all fediverse-centric services behave.

Because the fediverse is built decentralized; you can have multiple instances....and it works more like an email account and less like a social network account. You need to know the destination (that's the user or community name) and the instance name (that's the domain name).

As Lemmy is still in development; they maybe haven't gotten around to making all of this information easily manageable yet; but it will improve over time; and I do think you should post your feedback to the devs instead of just grumbling about it. I believe !lemmy_help exists for this reason.

nickajeglin,

What happens if I make an account on a niche instance, and it's operator decides to close it? Is my account toast? If yes, doesn't that incentivize me to centralize more by only making accounts on the biggest and most stable instances so I don't lose my "email" history? Not criticizing, just trying to understand.

Melody,

Not criticizing, just trying to understand.

It doesn't feel like you aren't trying to criticize Lemmy. This defense of your question seems very disingenuous.

What happens if I make an account on a niche instance, and it’s operator decides to close it?

Why would you knowingly make your account on an instance you believe to be unstable? Why would you trust a niche instance to be your "Main" if you couldn't trust it's administration?

As for Lemmy in general; the application is not yet matured enough in it's codebase; there is currently no methods that I know of for you to transfer your account out of a Lemmy instance anyways...it hasn't been developed yet. This feature is most definitely planned; but hasn't been implemented as far as I can tell.

All I can tell you is choose wisely. Or don't. I don't care. The standard on Mastodon has always been you should run at least One Main and One Alt account anyways...so if something about your choice of a main instance unsettles you; create an alt quietly on a 'bigger and more stable general instance' or another 'small-but-stable niche instance' to fall back on depending on your preferences and needs.

As for myself; I'm here because I trust the person I know from the privacytools.io keybase chatroom(s); the developer who literally modded that room and did everything he could to make that original website worth something.

nickajeglin,

I appreciate your answer to my question, but not your aggressive tone. Before yesterday I had never even heard of a federated service, I'm just trying to understand how things work to make the best decision on a "home base".

I wasn't trying to be disingenuous, but just head off attacks from the insecure who might mistake my intentions. Thanks again for the in-depth answer.

mordekaiq89,

I think it's nice that the choice of federation exists. Star trek vibes?

anders,

@sandblast I have never seen a Lemmy instance defederate. Have you tried copying the URL of a post from the other instance and paste in the search field on your own instance?

anji,

Defederation is one of the best things about the Fediverse. It allows people and communities with strongly exclusive views to coexist while preventing harassment, brigading, or having to completely ban one or both of them. There are, or will be, instances which on principle will never defederate, so feel free to join one of those and see everything.

sexy_peach,

That sucks to hear, but I get it. It is a big difference from reddit to lemmy.

I’m not sure if I understand why certain instances can choose not to federate with other instances.

It's only lemmygrad that's not federated by some servers. Everything else works.

Maybe lemmy.one doesn't yet know of all of the popular communities? You can always look for communities on feddit.de or lemmy.ml and copy their address into the search bar on lemmy.one. Your server will then look the community up and show it to you, so you can join it with your lemmy.one account.

There really shouldn't be anything that you could miss!

Happy to help if you have any other questions.

CheshireSnake,

As a reddit immigrant, I have to say lemmy is much more complicated than reddit. That's not necessarily bad, but the learning curve is steeper.

Maybe lemmy.one doesn't yet know of all of the popular communities? You can always look for communities on feddit.de or lemmy.ml and copy their address into the search bar on lemmy.one.

This is a great example. I honestly didn't know about this. May I ask which instance(?) would be good to join while I look for communities I'm interested in? I signed up with lemmy.ml initially but I saw they were having trouble with the influx of new users so I decided to move to lemmy.one without knowing this. Thanks!

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