7 ms·

I'm cautiously optimistic about Lemmy. Anyone can spin up an instance, so it's decentralized, but instances are connected, so there's community. It may still b

I'm cautiously optimistic about Lemmy. Anyone can spin up an instance, so it's decentralized, but instances are connected, so there's community. It may still be rough around the edges, but to me it feels like the spirit of the old phpBB forums combined with almost 20 years of lessons learned from Reddit.

tayo42 3y ago
Can servers be ad supported? Like can I run a Google ad on my own instance?
- MrVandemar 3y ago
  We know how much we all love ads. Let's have more of them!
  - Angostura 3y ago
    I see absolutely no reason why an instance might not decide to fund itself on local ads. I see no reason why you couldn't choose an ad-supported or non-ad instance
  - tayo42 3y ago
    Forums used to be ad supported, nothing particularly wrong with being ad supported. Problems occur when your investors expect 10x return on something ad supported. But to have something pay for it self. I'd rather not lose money on it
    - MrVandemar 3y ago
      Actually, there is something wrong with ad supported platforms. Advertisers start imposing restrictions on the actual content, or the owners of the platforms enforce restrictions pre-emptively so it never arises. I was on a forum, and the kind of language and even topics for discussion were severely restricted, partly because of advertising.
- Stephen304 3y ago
  There's nothing stopping you, the source code is freely available to edit when you start up your instance. It would probably limit the appeal of your instance to many people and maybe some very ideological smaller instances might defederate, I doubt the other major instances would care much since only those signed up at or browsing through your instance would see the ads.
  - tayo42 3y ago
    I guess if I put enough effort into it I could fork it. Is it that easy though? Or not built in already
kevincox 3y ago
IIUC it's federated,not decentralized. Still pretty good but if a server drops offline it will be pretty inconvenient. The communities on that server will be dead. Matrix does better as the rooms are decentalized so can continue even if the creating server drops offline. But user accounts are still only federated.
m4jor 3y ago
Lemmy.ml's admin is pro chinese government and actively censors comments that are critical. What that means to you is your decision, but I want to make people aware before the mass migration date arrives. https://old.reddit.com/r/Save3rdPartyApps/comments/14k67qt/lemmymls_admin_is_pro_chinese_government_and/ https://old.reddit.com/r/Save3rdPartyApps/comments/14k67qt/l... Highly sus
- BobbyBrownGD 3y ago
  Lemmy's team is very politicized, but even then it took significant pushback to change their minds about an issue that the community was decrying for reasons that were almost entirely technical. https://github.com/LemmyNet/lemmy/issues/622 https://github.com/LemmyNet/lemmy/issues/622 I would not bed with these fellows myself.
  - dangus 3y ago
    It bothers me a little bit that having a strong stance against intolerance is seen as being “politicized.” That should just be normal and expected behavior. Maybe they were abrasive in initially fighting the request to make technical changes to the slur filter, but hey when you ask for free enhancements to open source code you either do the work and provide a pull request or be prepared to be told no. I empathize with their concern about becoming another Voat or Gab. They want federation but they don’t want a Wild West.
    - cycomanic 3y ago
      The problem is that the stance is incredibly shortsighted and in a way bigoted itself. Take a word filter that contains some regex for n**a. They are saying you should never use slurs and this word in particular in public discourse. So the word above word is used in lyrics of a music genre with predominantly black musicians. In addition to saying we don't want our software to be used by racists, they also say "we don't want our Software to be used to discuss certain kinds of black music" (arguably a racist stance just by itself). Talk about unintended side effects.
photonthug 3y ago
<rant> Not responding directly, just piggy-backing for lack of a better place to put this comment. The problem with Lemmy is that one gets sent to some place like https://github.com/maltfield/awesome-lemmy-instances https://github.com/maltfield/awesome-lemmy-instances, is immediately confronted with a ton of weird links like "butts.international" and "badblocks.rocks", what even is this? And about 100000 other servers just named "lemmy", "notlemmy", and "lemmy1". So you click a few at random optimistically, then get hit with login page, or a server error, or an apparently empty test-server. You begin to think you're being pranked, like am I supposed to brute-force click like 50 things to find something that's not a joke? Maybe you go to https://join-lemmy.org/ https://join-lemmy.org/ and it says "After you create an account, you can find communities", so great, it's inaccessible anonymously, the same as twitter. You go to https://lemmymap.feddit.de/ https://lemmymap.feddit.de/ and after 15m of page-loading get a hilariously useless cyberpunk-looking word-soup where you can't click any links, much less search for topics/communities (btw there are 2068431 running instances and somehow butts.international is still front and center in my cyberpunk view) Finally, by ignoring recommended tooling and just using google-search I found a community relevant to my interests, but it has pretty bad content and a whopping 1 user/day. Another google search trying to find a certain topic, I find one, but it has only 3 total comments, and I could not tell what month/year the posts were added. So, clearly I don't really know what I'm doing here, but this stuff is ridiculous. As long as we're crawling 2068431 instances why don't we look at the communities it hosts and the volume/recency of traffic? At least filter totally empty stuff and/or make it easier to get all the test instances in a sandbox! Discoverability is so bad that I can barely get to the point where I'm considering usability / content.
- dizhn 3y ago
  You're making a very good point. I looked at lemmy stuff before but I moved to kbin instead. It has a more familiar interface (to reddit) and it is federated with lemmy. This all sounds good and it is. But even there I basically have no idea what's going on. It has more content than the lemmy instances you visited but every once in a while when I remember to visit I only look at whatever landing page I configured and can't figure out what's kbin, what's lemmy, what "magazine" I am looking at etc. To be fair, it's already a pretty good product and it is likely to get a lot better. That's exactly why I keep trying.

tayo42 3y ago

Can servers be ad supported? Like can I run a Google ad on my own instance?

MrVandemar 3y ago
We know how much we all love ads. Let's have more of them!
- Angostura 3y ago
  I see absolutely no reason why an instance might not decide to fund itself on local ads. I see no reason why you couldn't choose an ad-supported or non-ad instance
- tayo42 3y ago
  Forums used to be ad supported, nothing particularly wrong with being ad supported. Problems occur when your investors expect 10x return on something ad supported. But to have something pay for it self. I'd rather not lose money on it
  - MrVandemar 3y ago
    Actually, there is something wrong with ad supported platforms. Advertisers start imposing restrictions on the actual content, or the owners of the platforms enforce restrictions pre-emptively so it never arises. I was on a forum, and the kind of language and even topics for discussion were severely restricted, partly because of advertising.
Stephen304 3y ago
There's nothing stopping you, the source code is freely available to edit when you start up your instance. It would probably limit the appeal of your instance to many people and maybe some very ideological smaller instances might defederate, I doubt the other major instances would care much since only those signed up at or browsing through your instance would see the ads.
- tayo42 3y ago
  I guess if I put enough effort into it I could fork it. Is it that easy though? Or not built in already

kevincox 3y ago

IIUC it's federated,not decentralized. Still pretty good but if a server drops offline it will be pretty inconvenient. The communities on that server will be dead. Matrix does better as the rooms are decentalized so can continue even if the creating server drops offline. But user accounts are still only federated.

m4jor 3y ago

Lemmy.ml's admin is pro chinese government and actively censors comments that are critical. What that means to you is your decision, but I want to make people aware before the mass migration date arrives. https://old.reddit.com/r/Save3rdPartyApps/comments/14k67qt/lemmymls_admin_is_pro_chinese_government_and/ https://old.reddit.com/r/Save3rdPartyApps/comments/14k67qt/l... Highly sus

BobbyBrownGD 3y ago
Lemmy's team is very politicized, but even then it took significant pushback to change their minds about an issue that the community was decrying for reasons that were almost entirely technical. https://github.com/LemmyNet/lemmy/issues/622 https://github.com/LemmyNet/lemmy/issues/622 I would not bed with these fellows myself.
- dangus 3y ago
  It bothers me a little bit that having a strong stance against intolerance is seen as being “politicized.” That should just be normal and expected behavior. Maybe they were abrasive in initially fighting the request to make technical changes to the slur filter, but hey when you ask for free enhancements to open source code you either do the work and provide a pull request or be prepared to be told no. I empathize with their concern about becoming another Voat or Gab. They want federation but they don’t want a Wild West.
  - cycomanic 3y ago
    The problem is that the stance is incredibly shortsighted and in a way bigoted itself. Take a word filter that contains some regex for n**a. They are saying you should never use slurs and this word in particular in public discourse. So the word above word is used in lyrics of a music genre with predominantly black musicians. In addition to saying we don't want our software to be used by racists, they also say "we don't want our Software to be used to discuss certain kinds of black music" (arguably a racist stance just by itself). Talk about unintended side effects.

photonthug 3y ago

<rant> Not responding directly, just piggy-backing for lack of a better place to put this comment. The problem with Lemmy is that one gets sent to some place like https://github.com/maltfield/awesome-lemmy-instances https://github.com/maltfield/awesome-lemmy-instances, is immediately confronted with a ton of weird links like "butts.international" and "badblocks.rocks", what even is this? And about 100000 other servers just named "lemmy", "notlemmy", and "lemmy1". So you click a few at random optimistically, then get hit with login page, or a server error, or an apparently empty test-server. You begin to think you're being pranked, like am I supposed to brute-force click like 50 things to find something that's not a joke? Maybe you go to https://join-lemmy.org/ https://join-lemmy.org/ and it says "After you create an account, you can find communities", so great, it's inaccessible anonymously, the same as twitter. You go to https://lemmymap.feddit.de/ https://lemmymap.feddit.de/ and after 15m of page-loading get a hilariously useless cyberpunk-looking word-soup where you can't click any links, much less search for topics/communities (btw there are 2068431 running instances and somehow butts.international is still front and center in my cyberpunk view) Finally, by ignoring recommended tooling and just using google-search I found a community relevant to my interests, but it has pretty bad content and a whopping 1 user/day. Another google search trying to find a certain topic, I find one, but it has only 3 total comments, and I could not tell what month/year the posts were added. So, clearly I don't really know what I'm doing here, but this stuff is ridiculous. As long as we're crawling 2068431 instances why don't we look at the communities it hosts and the volume/recency of traffic? At least filter totally empty stuff and/or make it easier to get all the test instances in a sandbox! Discoverability is so bad that I can barely get to the point where I'm considering usability / content.

dizhn 3y ago
You're making a very good point. I looked at lemmy stuff before but I moved to kbin instead. It has a more familiar interface (to reddit) and it is federated with lemmy. This all sounds good and it is. But even there I basically have no idea what's going on. It has more content than the lemmy instances you visited but every once in a while when I remember to visit I only look at whatever landing page I configured and can't figure out what's kbin, what's lemmy, what "magazine" I am looking at etc. To be fair, it's already a pretty good product and it is likely to get a lot better. That's exactly why I keep trying.