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Personal anecdotal experience here. Many subreddits have outright collapsed and will almost certainly never return. But the subreddits that stayed seem to hit

Personal anecdotal experience here. Many subreddits have outright collapsed and will almost certainly never return. But the subreddits that stayed seem to hit the frontpage and attract new followers... All the Redditors looking for new hangout spots. Post quality has declined as a result, but the subs who stayed have seemingly absorbed the traffic. ------ Lemmy.world usage spiked dramatically, as has Mastodon.world. I think these alternative open source communities show lots of promise, though many decisions at Lemmy seem naiive right now. The adults seem aware of the Lemmy problems however so I remain hopeful. If your community is text based, Lemmy is likely a good fit. Picture based communities have a NSFW / trolling problem that is still an open question. If trolls can post CSAM to threaten the moderators / admins, what are Lemmy admins supposed to do about that? DeFederation (and temporary DeFederation) are okay tools for this problem... But better tools need to be built into Lemmy. Random server #244 doesn't necessarily deserve to be defederated if just 20 or so trolls are posting CSAM and threatening Admins. Nominally, a tool that more selectively bans users (or new users only) instead of cutting off the whole server would be ideal.

davidgerard 3y ago
Lemmy's main problem is that the software is a buggy, insecure mess. I speak from helping with a small Lemmy* where a couple of subs decamped. (Both are going very well, and one has actually taken off like a rocket.) The answer is, obviously, "patches welcome." But this stuff is a bit janky. The other big problem is that the Fediverse is a collection of software that doesn't quite talk to each other - ActivityPub is a bit underspecified in practice, and you're gonna have to test combinations of actual running code. We've been having a bizarre time just trying to talk to Kbin reliably, i.e. software intended to do the same Reddit-alike job as Lemmy. We almost have two-way Mastodon story and comment flow working, except when the Mastodon has authorized_fetch switched on. Etc etc etc, the problems are a string of little glitches. OTOH, it basically works well enough to sustain discussion, both local and federated. So everything else is fussing, really. * https://awful.systems/ https://awful.systems/ official refuge of SneerClub and TechTakes
- dragontamer 3y ago
  > The answer is, obviously, "patches welcome." But this stuff is a bit janky. Yeah. I'm optimistic on this front. Bugs are one of those things that "everyone agrees upon", although you're right in that the Lemmy development environment hasn't taken off or expanded as much as it probably should have. Still, bugs will be fixed because its low-hanging fruit. Everyone gets bothered, someone will get bothered enough and then a patch will be submitted. The advancements from 0.17 to 0.18.0 to 0.18.5 have grossly improved Lemmy in substantial ways. There's enough bug-progress that I'm happy. There's plenty more bugs, but progress is largely all that I care about. -------- The deeper concern of mine, and I alluded to this earlier with my "Naive" comment, is that Lemmy is very ideological right now. Ex: There was a week or two where people were against Lemmy Search Engines, worried that they'd track us. (Thankfully, someone made search-lemmy.com and life is better now). But now we're running into a "Privacy / anti-tracking" problem, directly in relation to this new-user / trolling issue. The most direct solution to the trolling problem is to have a way to track new-users and their early posts to see if they're a bot, troll, or otherwise a fake malicious account. Reddit does this through its Karma system. But Lemmy is fundamentally against Karma-tracking at the moment, meaning an _actual_ solution to this "trolls just create a new account from an unmoderated server" cannot rely upon karma (right now). I'm hoping that the politics shift enough that we can start talking about Karma-tracking (or other simple statistics that grossly diminish trolling behavior), but its going to be a while before everyone gets convinced IMO. --------- I think the "Adults in the room" know about the problem. But there's also the need for the underlying community to believe in the problem and have an ideological shift to successfully keep the community in unison. Or to get more specific: I know the Beehaw.org server wants to join everyone else in the federation. And we all know why they aren't doing so, and everyone respects everyone else's opinions and situation. Until this trolling problem is... addressable (not necessarily solved, but "addressed", so that we have tools to deal with it), it will be best for some instances to just remain de-federated (especially from open-registration servers who are prone to these coordinated trolling-assaults).
  - davidgerard 3y ago
    Blocking obnoxious servers on the lemmy/kbin network works well enough, same as on Mastodon. There aren't Mastodon-like lists as yet, but there are some servers that just aren't worth talking to. Blocking obnoxious individuals from your server helps keep them from crapping up the home versions of the groups. Our only worry about the software is that it's run by weird tankies. But if they become intolerable we're pretty sure there will be enough people to maintain a fork. Probably with our admin as a main guy, lol. Nobody actually wants that to happen, to be clear.

davidgerard 3y ago

Lemmy's main problem is that the software is a buggy, insecure mess. I speak from helping with a small Lemmy* where a couple of subs decamped. (Both are going very well, and one has actually taken off like a rocket.) The answer is, obviously, "patches welcome." But this stuff is a bit janky. The other big problem is that the Fediverse is a collection of software that doesn't quite talk to each other - ActivityPub is a bit underspecified in practice, and you're gonna have to test combinations of actual running code. We've been having a bizarre time just trying to talk to Kbin reliably, i.e. software intended to do the same Reddit-alike job as Lemmy. We almost have two-way Mastodon story and comment flow working, except when the Mastodon has authorized_fetch switched on. Etc etc etc, the problems are a string of little glitches. OTOH, it basically works well enough to sustain discussion, both local and federated. So everything else is fussing, really. * https://awful.systems/ https://awful.systems/ official refuge of SneerClub and TechTakes

dragontamer 3y ago
> The answer is, obviously, "patches welcome." But this stuff is a bit janky. Yeah. I'm optimistic on this front. Bugs are one of those things that "everyone agrees upon", although you're right in that the Lemmy development environment hasn't taken off or expanded as much as it probably should have. Still, bugs will be fixed because its low-hanging fruit. Everyone gets bothered, someone will get bothered enough and then a patch will be submitted. The advancements from 0.17 to 0.18.0 to 0.18.5 have grossly improved Lemmy in substantial ways. There's enough bug-progress that I'm happy. There's plenty more bugs, but progress is largely all that I care about. -------- The deeper concern of mine, and I alluded to this earlier with my "Naive" comment, is that Lemmy is very ideological right now. Ex: There was a week or two where people were against Lemmy Search Engines, worried that they'd track us. (Thankfully, someone made search-lemmy.com and life is better now). But now we're running into a "Privacy / anti-tracking" problem, directly in relation to this new-user / trolling issue. The most direct solution to the trolling problem is to have a way to track new-users and their early posts to see if they're a bot, troll, or otherwise a fake malicious account. Reddit does this through its Karma system. But Lemmy is fundamentally against Karma-tracking at the moment, meaning an _actual_ solution to this "trolls just create a new account from an unmoderated server" cannot rely upon karma (right now). I'm hoping that the politics shift enough that we can start talking about Karma-tracking (or other simple statistics that grossly diminish trolling behavior), but its going to be a while before everyone gets convinced IMO. --------- I think the "Adults in the room" know about the problem. But there's also the need for the underlying community to believe in the problem and have an ideological shift to successfully keep the community in unison. Or to get more specific: I know the Beehaw.org server wants to join everyone else in the federation. And we all know why they aren't doing so, and everyone respects everyone else's opinions and situation. Until this trolling problem is... addressable (not necessarily solved, but "addressed", so that we have tools to deal with it), it will be best for some instances to just remain de-federated (especially from open-registration servers who are prone to these coordinated trolling-assaults).
- davidgerard 3y ago
  Blocking obnoxious servers on the lemmy/kbin network works well enough, same as on Mastodon. There aren't Mastodon-like lists as yet, but there are some servers that just aren't worth talking to. Blocking obnoxious individuals from your server helps keep them from crapping up the home versions of the groups. Our only worry about the software is that it's run by weird tankies. But if they become intolerable we're pretty sure there will be enough people to maintain a fork. Probably with our admin as a main guy, lol. Nobody actually wants that to happen, to be clear.