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Try Lemmy.world. Currently the fastest growing Lemmy server. It feels basically like any other social media site, like Hacker News or Reddit. I was using it, an

Try Lemmy.world. Currently the fastest growing Lemmy server. It feels basically like any other social media site, like Hacker News or Reddit. I was using it, and seeing people post from other servers was pretty seamless and felt intuitive. Honestly, I say this all the time but I think people just need to treat federation like it's email. The difference is that the "email threads" are public to all, rather than in your inbox.

ihateolives 3y ago
As it happens, another big server, Beehaw, just defederated lemmy.world today. So drama has already begun. https://beehaw.org/post/567170 https://beehaw.org/post/567170
- tazjin 3y ago
  What's the reason? US culture war stuff?
  - open-paren 3y ago
    "It is too big and we can't deal with that many users".
    - omniglottal 3y ago
      Albeit indistiguishable, trolls should not be consdered equivalent to users.
  - dingusdew 3y ago
    [dead]
  - ihateolives 3y ago
    Sorry, added link with source now.
  - archargelod 3y ago
    Beehaw is moderated by 4 people. There was a wave of trolls from lemmy.world and one other instance, that doesn't restrict account creation. So, they decided to unfederate from those instances atleast as a temporary measure, until there are better moderation options.
  - mock-possum 3y ago
    dismissing the ongoing campaign for equal rights as 'US culture war stuff' is awfully heartless, don't you think?
- ZunarJ5 3y ago
  Nothing new for the Fediverse. It'll stabilise.
  - TechBro8615 3y ago
    This seems like it could be solved by shifting the federation to the client. Let me choose which servers to subscribe to, and let my client merge comment threads when the same story is posted to multiple servers. And let me choose a mod team to filter stories and comments for me. If the fediverse is like email, then filtering should happen on the client. It's not like I expect gmail to "defederate" an email server that's used by people I don't like. I expect it to facilitate my emails with anyone else, regardless of which mail server they use. And I want gmail to do some spam filtering for me, but I expect that I can see the filtered messages and show the filter what it missed or wrongly labeled as spam. If we leave the federation up to the servers, we'll just get a "fragmentverse" of walled gardens instead of a single big one.
    - VWWHFSfQ 3y ago
      > not like I expect gmail to "defederate" an email server I'm pretty sure gmail defeds email servers all the time. IP blocks are the oldest tool in the toolbox
      - AnthonyMouse 3y ago
        The difference is that email is a one-to-one medium, so it's easy to define spam. It's something the recipient doesn't want. Anyone who sends this or willingly serves users who do is unambiguously a malicious actor, so they get blocked. With forums there are arbitrarily many recipients of any message. A lot of people may not like furries or communists or what have you, but demanding that every other instance ban them as a prerequisite to interoperability is how you kill the network by suppressing everything but the lowest common denominator. This problem is created by tying accounts to instances. Because then other instances, instead of banning the accounts they don't want from only their own instance, can try to get them banned from everywhere by threatening any instance that allows them with disconnection. Which is poison.
- BaseballPhysics 3y ago
  It's not "drama", it's protecting their community from an instance that's currently being bombed by trolls. Seriously, the concern trolling around here regarding federation is almost comical. Apparently when major private corporation admins or volunteer mods arbitrarily intervene in the functioning of a platform it's totally fine, but when local server admins do it by moderating locally or de-federating from problem instances (whether temporarily, to deal with a flashpoint problem, or permanently in the case of problem servers), suddenly it's a huge problem and an indication of "drama".
  - JumpCrisscross 3y ago
    > the concern trolling around here regarding federation I clicked, excited. I closed the tab when it required me to select a server. I don't want to read up on what rights server admins have over my account, why I should choose one versus another, which servers are de-federating which others, et cetera. This is a real and recurring hurdle to the adoption of these technologies.
    - BaseballPhysics 3y ago
      Yeah, definitely better to just blindly click through a ToS on some private corporate social media service...
      - JumpCrisscross 3y ago
        > definitely better to blindly click through a ToS on some private corporate social media service Philosophically, no. Practically, yes. Because it actually delivers the product. Creating an ideological and technical filter at the mouth of the funnel is absurd. This is heading straight for either Reddit getting its act together or one of Facebook, Twitter or Substack taking the prize. Because they spent two seconds thinking about onboarding. Perfect is the enemy of good.
        BaseballPhysics 3y ago
        > Creating an ideological and technical filter at the mouth of the funnel is absurd. So then just pick a large, popular instance and be done with it. You've already made it clear you don't care what the platform's policies are, so why are you pretending this is a barrier?
- sudosysgen 3y ago
  Beehaw is basically the only server that's super defederation-happy. It will pass.
- comte7092 3y ago
  That’s kind of part of the model. Governance is up to individual instances/communities rather than one faceless megacorp. It’s a feature not a bug.
  - Loughla 3y ago
    Yes, and what I don't think you're hearing is that Joe Blow consumer doesn't care who is in charge of governance. They care that it's easy to use.
    - chongli 3y ago
      Yes. Joe Blow consumer just wants access to all the amazing free content on Reddit. Unfortunately, the people who create that content (1% of users) are currently getting screwed over by Reddit. So my appeal to join lemmy is not aimed at Joe Blow, it’s aimed at the actual contributors who make communities possible. If enough of them switch over then lemmy will gain critical mass, and the rest is history. Joe Blow can go wherever he wants. I doubt he’ll stick around at Reddit when the content stream disappears.
      - Nextgrid 3y ago
        > it’s aimed at the actual contributors who make communities possible Contributors generally create content because they want it to be seen by more than a handful of nerds and don't want it to disappear within weeks because their instance has ran out of money. Those contributors will either stop contributing for good, go back to Reddit (because it's still a better experience than any of the "fediverse" bullshit) or jump ship the second an actually competent company builds a centralized alternative that just works.
        rakoo 3y ago
        Look at the history of Mastodon. Contributors come in all shapes, but all of them want to be able to create without being harassed, insulted, mocked, trolled. Control over your means of communication is a mandatory step for that. Yes, your audience will be few. But few people listening to you in a wholesome way is miles better than masses barely seeing you, harassing you and overall not being heard. There's always someone who'll compare their audience on the fediverse vs twitter, and the conclusion remains: quality is better than quantity.
- sngz 3y ago
  its a feature not a bug. calling that drama is disingenuous. They are protecting their own instance from trolls that they don't have the tools / resources to handle. Don't like that they de federated? then join a different instance.
- COGlory 3y ago
  This is a feature. Besides, everyone knows how on reddit, joining one sub can result in auto-bans from other subs. How is this any different?
  - joemi 3y ago
    I didn't know that. And I've been on reddit for at least a decade. What are you talking about?
    - ablatner 3y ago
      Subs that are supposed to be safe spaces sometimes auto-ban users that post in subs known for bigotry.
deleted 3y ago
[deleted]
babypuncher 3y ago
lemmy.world's fast growth is working against it. The site has been flooded with low effort content, leading others to start defederating them. The instance I use hasn't defederated them yet, but I've already had to block most of lemmy.world's communities from appearing in my feed.
- beowulfey 3y ago
  That's why I recommended it as a Reddit alternative ;) Nah, just kidding, it's a good point. But it's a good starter server, and once people get used to the idea, I think they'll naturally gravitate to other servers.
- jayknight 3y ago
  And it seems the whole site is down right now.
  - sumedh 3y ago
    18 hours later, I still cannot sign up.
compsciphd 3y ago
sounds like a reinvention of usenet...
- TechBro8615 3y ago
  Yeah, or even Gopher. I would love an app that lets me run custom scrapers to fetch content, or post my comments to threads about that content, on whatever sites that one of my scrapers can read or post to with my account details. For example, an "NYT article fetcher" could implement the "content module" interface, to fetch an NYT article, remove the paywall, and render it for me. Then a "reddit fetcher" and an "HN fetcher" could implement the "discussion module" interface to fetch reddit and HN comments about the NYT article. And then the app could merge it all together into a nice unified interface, and give me tools for posting replies to Reddit or HN, or whatever sites are supported by my installed discussion modules and my locally saved credentials. Let developers create each "source" of content or discussions, packaged into a module ("NYT article fetcher," or "Reddit discussion fetcher"), and let me choose which modules to install. Then delegate the infrastructure for executing scrapers or curating feeds to a set of federated servers that I can opt into. Or better yet, execute the scrapers in a local sandbox on my own device, so that the NYT can't block me because my requests are my own. You could argue it's just another form of a web browser.
  - rakoo 3y ago
    Here you go: https://woob.tech/ https://woob.tech/
cdelsolar 3y ago
I’m a technical person and I still don’t understand what federation is. I also read somewhere to treat it like email. What is like email? To who? I don’t understand how all the servers are interlinked and what it means to post from one server to another. Do I have identities on all the servers?
- basscomm 3y ago
  It's kind of like email in the sense that I can email someone @gmail.com from @hotmail.com. As long as I have an email account on some server somewhere on the Internet I can email anyone else that also has an account on some server somewhere on the Internet, even if the accounts live on different servers. The fediverse is set up kind of the same way. You can interact with people if you know how to find their account, the address of which is formatted similarly to an email address. You and whoever you're interacting with don't have to have accounts on the same server to communicate with each other.
- zelifcam 3y ago
  I can log into Mastodon and search and find the user I created on lemmy. I can also search, follow and look at the posts @technology@beehaw.org. All from my Mastodon app/account. I think what we are seeing is a taste of what could be, as the technology improves and the UIs of the clients become more friendly and add features to leverage the tech. We are watching it all happen in real time. Problem is everyone wants a polished experience day one. It’s going to turn a lot of people off, but I’m not sure there’s anyway around it. Once refined, this is the kind of tech could be key to the people controlling the future of social media.
  - mahogany 3y ago
    Couple questions as I try to understand: > I can log into Mastodon and search and find the user I created on lemmy. I can also search, follow and look at the posts @technology@beehaw.org. All from my Mastodon app/account. So is your user registered at lemmy? Or at lemmy.world? Is there a difference? And you can view the posts at @technology@beehaw.org - but do you have to have a separate beehaw account to post?

ihateolives 3y ago

As it happens, another big server, Beehaw, just defederated lemmy.world today. So drama has already begun. https://beehaw.org/post/567170 https://beehaw.org/post/567170

tazjin 3y ago
What's the reason? US culture war stuff?
- open-paren 3y ago
  "It is too big and we can't deal with that many users".
  - omniglottal 3y ago
    Albeit indistiguishable, trolls should not be consdered equivalent to users.
- dingusdew 3y ago
  [dead]
- ihateolives 3y ago
  Sorry, added link with source now.
- archargelod 3y ago
  Beehaw is moderated by 4 people. There was a wave of trolls from lemmy.world and one other instance, that doesn't restrict account creation. So, they decided to unfederate from those instances atleast as a temporary measure, until there are better moderation options.
- mock-possum 3y ago
  dismissing the ongoing campaign for equal rights as 'US culture war stuff' is awfully heartless, don't you think?
ZunarJ5 3y ago
Nothing new for the Fediverse. It'll stabilise.
- TechBro8615 3y ago
  This seems like it could be solved by shifting the federation to the client. Let me choose which servers to subscribe to, and let my client merge comment threads when the same story is posted to multiple servers. And let me choose a mod team to filter stories and comments for me. If the fediverse is like email, then filtering should happen on the client. It's not like I expect gmail to "defederate" an email server that's used by people I don't like. I expect it to facilitate my emails with anyone else, regardless of which mail server they use. And I want gmail to do some spam filtering for me, but I expect that I can see the filtered messages and show the filter what it missed or wrongly labeled as spam. If we leave the federation up to the servers, we'll just get a "fragmentverse" of walled gardens instead of a single big one.
  - VWWHFSfQ 3y ago
    > not like I expect gmail to "defederate" an email server I'm pretty sure gmail defeds email servers all the time. IP blocks are the oldest tool in the toolbox
    - AnthonyMouse 3y ago
      The difference is that email is a one-to-one medium, so it's easy to define spam. It's something the recipient doesn't want. Anyone who sends this or willingly serves users who do is unambiguously a malicious actor, so they get blocked. With forums there are arbitrarily many recipients of any message. A lot of people may not like furries or communists or what have you, but demanding that every other instance ban them as a prerequisite to interoperability is how you kill the network by suppressing everything but the lowest common denominator. This problem is created by tying accounts to instances. Because then other instances, instead of banning the accounts they don't want from only their own instance, can try to get them banned from everywhere by threatening any instance that allows them with disconnection. Which is poison.
BaseballPhysics 3y ago
It's not "drama", it's protecting their community from an instance that's currently being bombed by trolls. Seriously, the concern trolling around here regarding federation is almost comical. Apparently when major private corporation admins or volunteer mods arbitrarily intervene in the functioning of a platform it's totally fine, but when local server admins do it by moderating locally or de-federating from problem instances (whether temporarily, to deal with a flashpoint problem, or permanently in the case of problem servers), suddenly it's a huge problem and an indication of "drama".
- JumpCrisscross 3y ago
  > the concern trolling around here regarding federation I clicked, excited. I closed the tab when it required me to select a server. I don't want to read up on what rights server admins have over my account, why I should choose one versus another, which servers are de-federating which others, et cetera. This is a real and recurring hurdle to the adoption of these technologies.
  - BaseballPhysics 3y ago
    Yeah, definitely better to just blindly click through a ToS on some private corporate social media service...
    - JumpCrisscross 3y ago
      > definitely better to blindly click through a ToS on some private corporate social media service Philosophically, no. Practically, yes. Because it actually delivers the product. Creating an ideological and technical filter at the mouth of the funnel is absurd. This is heading straight for either Reddit getting its act together or one of Facebook, Twitter or Substack taking the prize. Because they spent two seconds thinking about onboarding. Perfect is the enemy of good.
      - BaseballPhysics 3y ago
        > Creating an ideological and technical filter at the mouth of the funnel is absurd. So then just pick a large, popular instance and be done with it. You've already made it clear you don't care what the platform's policies are, so why are you pretending this is a barrier?
sudosysgen 3y ago
Beehaw is basically the only server that's super defederation-happy. It will pass.
comte7092 3y ago
That’s kind of part of the model. Governance is up to individual instances/communities rather than one faceless megacorp. It’s a feature not a bug.
- Loughla 3y ago
  Yes, and what I don't think you're hearing is that Joe Blow consumer doesn't care who is in charge of governance. They care that it's easy to use.
  - chongli 3y ago
    Yes. Joe Blow consumer just wants access to all the amazing free content on Reddit. Unfortunately, the people who create that content (1% of users) are currently getting screwed over by Reddit. So my appeal to join lemmy is not aimed at Joe Blow, it’s aimed at the actual contributors who make communities possible. If enough of them switch over then lemmy will gain critical mass, and the rest is history. Joe Blow can go wherever he wants. I doubt he’ll stick around at Reddit when the content stream disappears.
    - Nextgrid 3y ago
      > it’s aimed at the actual contributors who make communities possible Contributors generally create content because they want it to be seen by more than a handful of nerds and don't want it to disappear within weeks because their instance has ran out of money. Those contributors will either stop contributing for good, go back to Reddit (because it's still a better experience than any of the "fediverse" bullshit) or jump ship the second an actually competent company builds a centralized alternative that just works.
      - rakoo 3y ago
        Look at the history of Mastodon. Contributors come in all shapes, but all of them want to be able to create without being harassed, insulted, mocked, trolled. Control over your means of communication is a mandatory step for that. Yes, your audience will be few. But few people listening to you in a wholesome way is miles better than masses barely seeing you, harassing you and overall not being heard. There's always someone who'll compare their audience on the fediverse vs twitter, and the conclusion remains: quality is better than quantity.
sngz 3y ago
its a feature not a bug. calling that drama is disingenuous. They are protecting their own instance from trolls that they don't have the tools / resources to handle. Don't like that they de federated? then join a different instance.
COGlory 3y ago
This is a feature. Besides, everyone knows how on reddit, joining one sub can result in auto-bans from other subs. How is this any different?
- joemi 3y ago
  I didn't know that. And I've been on reddit for at least a decade. What are you talking about?
  - ablatner 3y ago
    Subs that are supposed to be safe spaces sometimes auto-ban users that post in subs known for bigotry.

deleted 3y ago

[deleted]

babypuncher 3y ago

lemmy.world's fast growth is working against it. The site has been flooded with low effort content, leading others to start defederating them. The instance I use hasn't defederated them yet, but I've already had to block most of lemmy.world's communities from appearing in my feed.

beowulfey 3y ago
That's why I recommended it as a Reddit alternative ;) Nah, just kidding, it's a good point. But it's a good starter server, and once people get used to the idea, I think they'll naturally gravitate to other servers.
jayknight 3y ago
And it seems the whole site is down right now.
- sumedh 3y ago
  18 hours later, I still cannot sign up.

compsciphd 3y ago

sounds like a reinvention of usenet...

TechBro8615 3y ago
Yeah, or even Gopher. I would love an app that lets me run custom scrapers to fetch content, or post my comments to threads about that content, on whatever sites that one of my scrapers can read or post to with my account details. For example, an "NYT article fetcher" could implement the "content module" interface, to fetch an NYT article, remove the paywall, and render it for me. Then a "reddit fetcher" and an "HN fetcher" could implement the "discussion module" interface to fetch reddit and HN comments about the NYT article. And then the app could merge it all together into a nice unified interface, and give me tools for posting replies to Reddit or HN, or whatever sites are supported by my installed discussion modules and my locally saved credentials. Let developers create each "source" of content or discussions, packaged into a module ("NYT article fetcher," or "Reddit discussion fetcher"), and let me choose which modules to install. Then delegate the infrastructure for executing scrapers or curating feeds to a set of federated servers that I can opt into. Or better yet, execute the scrapers in a local sandbox on my own device, so that the NYT can't block me because my requests are my own. You could argue it's just another form of a web browser.
- rakoo 3y ago
  Here you go: https://woob.tech/ https://woob.tech/

cdelsolar 3y ago

I’m a technical person and I still don’t understand what federation is. I also read somewhere to treat it like email. What is like email? To who? I don’t understand how all the servers are interlinked and what it means to post from one server to another. Do I have identities on all the servers?

basscomm 3y ago
It's kind of like email in the sense that I can email someone @gmail.com from @hotmail.com. As long as I have an email account on some server somewhere on the Internet I can email anyone else that also has an account on some server somewhere on the Internet, even if the accounts live on different servers. The fediverse is set up kind of the same way. You can interact with people if you know how to find their account, the address of which is formatted similarly to an email address. You and whoever you're interacting with don't have to have accounts on the same server to communicate with each other.
zelifcam 3y ago
I can log into Mastodon and search and find the user I created on lemmy. I can also search, follow and look at the posts @technology@beehaw.org. All from my Mastodon app/account. I think what we are seeing is a taste of what could be, as the technology improves and the UIs of the clients become more friendly and add features to leverage the tech. We are watching it all happen in real time. Problem is everyone wants a polished experience day one. It’s going to turn a lot of people off, but I’m not sure there’s anyway around it. Once refined, this is the kind of tech could be key to the people controlling the future of social media.
- mahogany 3y ago
  Couple questions as I try to understand: > I can log into Mastodon and search and find the user I created on lemmy. I can also search, follow and look at the posts @technology@beehaw.org. All from my Mastodon app/account. So is your user registered at lemmy? Or at lemmy.world? Is there a difference? And you can view the posts at @technology@beehaw.org - but do you have to have a separate beehaw account to post?