New here. Migrated from Reddit. Still trying to figure out Lemmy - what’s everyone’s experiences like coming from Reddit and does Lemmy serve as a good alternative? Pros and cons/differences?...
You just have to choose the right instance. Federation does address those problems.
Right now our options remain limited because its still early days and the platform isn’t large enough yet. But in the long run, whichever servers do a good job of limiting extremism without being overly authoritarian in moderation will continue to thrive and grow, and servers where the admins are petty and/or politically biased will slowly die.
If you ran afoul of a moderator, sure, you could create another subreddit with a name like r/xyz_2 or r/xyzAnarchy. But it would only ever be an alternative, it could never replace the original community, partially because the name was already reserved.
More importantly, if you ran afoul if an admin, there was nowhere to go. The reddit admins exercise absolute control over the content that is allowed on that site. On Lemmy, people will just leave the server if the admins pull a spez.
I hear some cities call the larger area as metro (Vancouver) and other cities call it greater (Toronto). Is there a functional difference? Generally speaking, is one more urbanized than the other?
NYC is a bad example because it’s an extreme outlier in terms of size and density. But the metropolitan area is actually much larger than the urban area; here’s a map of all the counties within the NYC metropolitan area.
It covers 8,200 square miles, just slightly less than the area of New Jersey.
Metropolitan areas are quite large and typically include the core city along with the entire surrounding area that is economically and culturally heavily linked with the core city.
Here is a map of all the metropolitan and micropolitan statistical areas (MSAs) in the US. Micropolitan areas are essentially defined the same way, except the core urban area of a micropolitan area is <50,000 population, while a metropolitan area has a core city of >50,000 population.
You can see that metropolitan areas include vast areas that are not even remotely urban. Beyond that, there is also a category called the Combined Statistical Area, which often combine multiple metropolitan areas.
Here is a map of LA where the red areas are urban areas, the beige counties are part of the Metropolitan Area, and the yellow counties are part of the CSA.
The CSA for LA is a whopping 34,000 square miles, or slightly larger than the island of Ireland or the state of South Carolina. However, it only contains about 2,300 square miles of urban area. Estimating the urban area is even more of an imperfect science than the metropolitan area, so I’m not sure how they calculated that number.
When people say Greater Boston or Greater Toronto, they are usually referring to the MSA, but might also be referring to the CSA. So the short answer to OP’s question is that “Greater” and “Metropolitan” are roughly synonymous. FWIW, I think that metropolitan areas used to be significantly smaller and more urbanized, but they had to modify the definition over time due to trends of suburbanization and decentralization in American city development.
There are a lot of tanky posts coming from lemmy.ml. Their whole purpose seems to be to troll and spread their bullshit far and wide. They are nearly as bad as the alt-right. They argue in bad faith and celebrate authoritarian oppression. The beehaw mods might want to consider defederating.
Might as well take this opportunity to point out that beehaw is still defederated from sh.itjust.works. I thought it was a bizarre decision at the time and the fact that it hasn’t been reassessed after all this time is even more baffling. Beehaw and SJW are two of the best moderated instances on Lemmy, and yet we aren’t federated with each other.
You can view the original announcement from beehaw here and the reaction from SJW here. You’ll also note that beehaw has since refederated with lemmy.world.
I have been informed that beehaw is still defederated from lemmy.world, my mistake.
Nearly a year later, it’s obvious that the decisions of beehaw admins during that critical period of time when redditors were first trying Lemmy were highly disruptive towards the development of the platform as a whole. The first level of disruption came from the direct fragmentation of communities caused by that defederation decision.
The second and more devastating impact was the impact on the perceptions of new users, who were given a manifestation of their worst fears about Lemmy and it’s federated structure. Many potential users were turned off Lemmy because they didn’t like the fact that they could suddenly be blocked off from major communities on other servers due to arbitrary admin decisions, and beehaw essentially provided the perfect example of that at a critical growth phase.
At the time that they defederated SJW, Beehaw was more that 3 times larger, at about 12k total/3k monthly users. Now, SJW is more than 5 times larger than Beehaw, which has dwindled to just 450 monthly users.
With regard to lemmy.ml, I think the main issue is that beehaw has disabled downvotes. The tankies are significantly outnumbered on Lemmy as a whole and a combination of downvoting and active moderation from other admins effectively minimizes the problem for most other major servers. But because beehaw doesn’t allow downvotes, has dwindled to a small userbase, and has isolated itself from other non-extremist servers (SJW), you have been left much more exposed to the tankie propaganda, with your only recourse being the nuclear option of defederation.
Obviously, my point is that beehaw admins should accept that they made a mistake and refederate with sh.itjust.works. I would also recommend upgrading to the latest version of Lemmy, because it at least gives users the option of instance blocking. I understand that you intend to move to Sublinks or another platform in the future, but in the meantime you are neglecting your users by allowing the current implementation on Lemmy to languish.
I don’t mean this to be an attack on the beehaw admins, because I think they have done a number of great things for Lemmy and the fediverse and I believe that our objectives are generally aligned. But I feel that I must express these frustrations, because as I have just explained, the actions of the beehaw admins also have direct consequences on fediverse users from other servers.
I think that beehaw admins, not dissimilarly to hexbear admins, tend to disregard how their actions impact the fediverse as a whole and focus solely on the proximate impact on their own userbase. This is a faulty mindset, because the fediverse is the ecosystem which we all share, and that ecosystem needs to be protected and maintained in order for all of the different organisms (instances) residing therein to thrive. Without our connection to the fediverse, all of our instances would simply wither away.
Thank you. I don’t necessarily think beehaw is going to die and I agree that it doesn’t need to get bigger.
But this was just my perspective as a sh.itjust.works user and admin that I’ve been wanting to get off my chest. SJW got cut off from beehaw users and communities soon after I joined Lemmy and it’s been bothering me ever since and this seemed like a good opportunity to communicate my perspective.
Thanks for the response. I didn’t realize that you had conducted polls about refederation, that’s good to hear. I’m familiar with the situation with the Lemmy developers.
I understand why you have chosen this course of action and I don’t mean to say you’re responsible for the health of Lemmy. I was just pointing out that from my perspective, a rising tide lifts all boats, and it’s helpful to have a network of similar communities because it makes each one stronger.
For instance, if someone on SJW complains about us being defederated from lemmygrad and hexbear, I can simply tell them to make an account on lemm.ee, thus allowing them to remain a part of any communities on SJW but also allowing them to have the experience they wanted. And lemm.ee also gets a new user out of it. When you don’t have those options, the disgruntled user is much more likely to stop using the platform entirely.
However, you obviously already have plenty of experience cultivating and maintaining a community, so I have faith that you will be able to continue to do so regardless of the extent of federation that you deem appropriate or which platform you use, and I wish you luck going forward.
I’ve spent a lot of time trying to evangelize Lemmy on reddit, and one of the most common criticisms is the possibility of defederation and getting cut off from major communities. Most people who have been using Lemmy for a while understand that it’s way less of an issue than it sounds like, because there has to be a major reason for a defederation between servers and it doesn’t usually happen out of nowhere.
But in the case of Beehaw, it actually did happen quite abruptly, and it involved 3 of the largest servers at the time. We know that Lemmy slowly bled tens of thousands of users in the months following the reddit API exodus as users drifted back to reddit. Although it’s impossible to know how many of those users were annoyed by the defederation drama, I think it’s safe to say that the number wasn’t zero.
The steep decline in active users on Beehaw in the months following the decision is probably the best source of hard evidence supporting my claim.
The removal of downvotes is not something that I have any particular problem with, although I wouldn’t choose it for myself. I’m just pointing out that in this specific situation of wanting to mitigate tankie posts, the downvote is self-evidently an effective tool.
I think this goes back to a lack of moderation tools and poor moderation in other instances, not to Beehaw’s relatively smaller user base or defederation from other instances.
Can’t it be both? If certain moderation tools existed then you could use them to solve the problem. But they don’t exist, so other instances are currently using the strategies that I have mentioned in order to deal with the problem as best they can.
Sh.itjust.works does have open signups.
I totally understand and respect your perspective as a beehaw user, even as I obviously have a completely different perspective as someone who has never been a part of the beehaw community but instead has been observing from a distance.
Primitive metallurgy was used to create weapons for millennia before it became commonly used for cookware. Technology has always been primarily used as vector for human beings to control and dominate one another, rather than to assist/improve society.
I see your point, but I would argue that in a world with nuclear weapons, climate change, and all sorts of shit that seems to be an existential risk, plus the media barrage, people today aren’t exactly feeling safe or comfortable. Hence the desperate hoarding of resources and brutal competition.
Nobody said the US doesn’t have a class system? Also the person you’re responding to appears to be a kiwi, not an American.
Non-Americans making fools out of themselves while trying to casually denigrate the US is one of my favorite internet traditions. It’s especially entertaining because there are plenty of valid criticisms, but people often seem to go for the most lazy, inaccurate generalizations and reveal their ignorance.
It is what it is. When the app is this good, the warning doesn’t matter all that much. You can tell by the activity on this community that Sync is one of the most popular apps anyway.
Btw, that’s the first time I’ve seen the redesigned join-lemmy site and it’s pretty slick imo. Not sure when they updated it, but it definitely didn’t look like that when I joined 😅
What are some of your favorite communities that feature topics like literature, science, ecology, aerospace, technology, politics, history, arts, culture, theory, and debate?...
You could also try the Scaled algorithm, which was recently added with the new update. It’s supposed to adjust for the size of the community so that the posts from large communities don’t overwhelm your feed
It’s not your fault at all, I am also confused what exactly caused them to adopt such a hostile tone.
I have noticed that many Lemmings have a strong preference for explanations which emphasize the dysfunction of capitalism as the ultimate source of all worldly suffering. Your suggestion that even in the absence of capitalist incentives, running a modern healthcare system is still an incredibly expensive endeavor that must be funded somehow, disrupts that worldview. Thus, the hostility.
I meant what I said. Most people disagree with the comment, but probably for a wide variety of reasons. It’s not a singular reaction, it’s multiple reactions to multiple insinuations that all happen to be questionable.
For the first time in 28 years, Super Mario 64 has been beaten without using the A button – and it only took 86 hours (www.gamesradar.com)
Is Lemmy a good alternative?
New here. Migrated from Reddit. Still trying to figure out Lemmy - what’s everyone’s experiences like coming from Reddit and does Lemmy serve as a good alternative? Pros and cons/differences?...
What's the actual difference between greater vs metro cities?
I hear some cities call the larger area as metro (Vancouver) and other cities call it greater (Toronto). Is there a functional difference? Generally speaking, is one more urbanized than the other?
lemmy.ml Tankies
There are a lot of tanky posts coming from lemmy.ml. Their whole purpose seems to be to troll and spread their bullshit far and wide. They are nearly as bad as the alt-right. They argue in bad faith and celebrate authoritarian oppression. The beehaw mods might want to consider defederating.
I‘m running out of titles (sh.itjust.works)
Honeypot (lemmy.world)
Welcome to the Golden Age of User Hostility (www.theatlantic.com)
How does South Park get away with trashing identifiable people? Are they sued often? (lemmy.world)
What is an interesting fact that you recently discovered?
400,000 species (lemmy.world)
LJ, what do you think of this warning on join-lemmy.org? (lemm.ee)
(Serious) What are your favorite high quality Lemmy communities?
What are some of your favorite communities that feature topics like literature, science, ecology, aerospace, technology, politics, history, arts, culture, theory, and debate?...
Greetings from lemmy.myserv.one! (lemmy.myserv.one)
Good luck with the project!
Lemmy Active Users looking good (discuss.tchncs.de)
Source: fedidb.org/software/lemmy
A former US surgeon general says he went to the ER for dehydration and ended up with a $5,000 bill. He called the healthcare system 'broken.' (www.businessinsider.com)
The difference explained (social.circl.lu)