Fediverse

Glances around

I mean, it's working just fine. 🤷‍♀️

I personally love the way the .Zip admins handled it, both for Lemmy.zip and Piefed.zip. Defederate a very short number of instances (https://lemmy.zip/instances https://piefed.zip/instances?filters=blocked ), hide new joiners unfriendly instances by default for new users onboarding, but still allow people to unhide it.

We’ve also now enabled a similar welcome message and instance block system to what we’re running on Lemmy.zip. This means some of the spicier instances are blocked by default, which users can remove themselves in the user settings.

https://lemmy.zip/post/50200106

That gives enough freedom to power users while still being welcoming for new joiners.

Also, is there any centralized forum that is more active than the Threadiverse (Lemmy/Piefed/Pylova/Mbin)?

Decentralization works perfectly for forums. That's literally how the forums of the '90s worked: "Tom's Hardware" was never the only forum for Windows issues, "Codeguru" was never the only stop fo weird Visual Basic 5 error messages, etc.

Federation is orthogonal, and can cover a number of subjects - it's less about "what's out there" and more about "how do we get in touch". We have for example a sorta federated sign-in with things like OpenID. Lemmy, Mbin etc..., are built on the idea of federating the content. CDNs are literally federated caches.

What are you talking about?

What fragmentation? I have had zero problems like that. Yeah, there is content that I am not directly seeing, but that is some seriously bad-quality content and if I want to fry my brain, I can always go to the home instances of the idiots and see their crud there.

The most important reason why federation is needed is that it's the only known way to keep a forum non-commercial for good. You try adding advertisements to a Fediverse server, you get an exodus of users to other servers that show precisely the same content. If you try adding a mandatory ID check for a Fediverse server, users will migrate to servers who don't have that.

Any non-federated social media will get facebookified/twitterified once it becomes seriously popular. You simply cannot sustainably run a forum without federation.

If you wanted. You could just join an instance or create your own where nothing is defederated, am I wrong?

Is he saying federation is bad because it's working exactly as intended?

Just look at Lemmy and how many communities defederate from one another because of ideological disagreements

Lol...

Decentralizing isn't good if you want everyone in the same spot, that is correct...

But why does everyone need crammed together?

Some people just don't vibe, if no one wants to federate with an instance, they don't have to.

I'll never understand why people who grew up with big social media are so hung up up on this idea that one platform has to host everyone.

Like, a shit ton of fractured forums was the norm for decades, long before Facebook, twitter, or insta. Everyone going to the same place is a new thing, and if people are here it's because they didn't think it worked out.

You don't, you think it's great for insanely wealthy tech ros to control every conversation.

Cool.

Go there, none of us care

It's important you also understand this: You will never, ever see all the content. What you are deciding is who and what determines which content you see.

Do you want Reddit deciding that for you based on their algorithm, moderation, and other policies like API access?

Or do you want to choose based on which threadiverse community aligns with your ideals (including the option to setup your own with full federation to everyone)?

You realize Reddit bans people too, right? The only difference between Reddit banning people and Lemmy.world banning people, is that Lemmy is transparent about it and gives you choices about it. On Reddit when someone gets banned they're gone, there is no more so-called "completeness", it's just an illusion. But Lemmy has no such issue because you can choose who your admins are, you can join an instance that didn't ban them.

Imagine if Reddit bans your friend, not as easy to ignore as Reddit banning a stranger, they're gone and you have to leave Reddit entirely. On Lemmy if lemmy.world bans your friend, you can both just change which Lemmy instance you use to something more agreeable like https://lemmy.zip/

But I realize you're probably only here to advertise your own forum. You've had 7 posts in the past month? And only 3 comments total? Just join the Fediverse! Lemmy, PieFed, and Mbin are open source, use one of them for your server and you'll instantly have an active userbase of over 40k. If you use Mbin (or PieFed to a lesser extent) then it also brings access to microblog posts which means many more users linked in. And then you can allow everyone and not ban anyone.

I see a few "deleted" badges on your forums, I'm now upset that I can't access ALL of the content!

People overall want to have a single website or app where they can access everything interesting to them.

Like, I remember being a teenager 15 years ago and regularly clicking through three, four, five different forums. I don't have time for that anymore. The Lemmy concept allows us to have the best of both worlds: no single point of failure, but also no need to remember to click through many different websites.

Uhm, have you seen the amount of Spam, Phishing, Hacking, no replies we get on E-Mail?!? How is that working properly? It even cancels my attachments etc. And admins have to put in a massive amount of effort, constantly to make it work. Instant messenging isn't great either. Neither is Facebook, X, TikTok and all the other central for-profit social media platforms?!! None of it works on an acceptable level.

Nah.

For starters, who will pay for the hosting and bandwidth of a monolithic Reddit knockoff? How do we prevent it from becoming another shitplug of capitalism? (We don't, it goes exactly the way every other profit-seeking platform has gone)

And, MOST importantly: content moderation is impossible at scale; every Instance operator takes as many users as they can afford, in time and effort as well as money. The operators of monolithic sites end up doing things like hiring people in Africa and making them look at CSAM posts all day, so we don't have to.

No, giant scale is bad. It was always bad. I have been here since 1992, you are really peddling terrible and ignorant ideas here.

When accounting for all defederations between all instances with at least 50 MAU (as of when I last checked in August, at least), the only instances that are defederated with over 5% of other Threadiverse users (inbound or outbound) are lemmygrad.ml, hexbear.net, fedinsfw.app, forum.guncadindex.social, and lemmy.1095.me, none of which are oriented towards the average user moving over from Reddit anyhow.

Less defederation on average is better, but defederation is not a huge problem as it stands, particularly if you pick an instance known to use it minimally such as lemmy/piefed.zip.

The freedom and control I am able to have over what I see vastly outweighs the inconvenience of not having access to all the content always

In fact, I was there for the early days of reddit, I was there before that when most of the internet was a series of disconnected forums. I preferred it, just like I prefer Lemmy. it's easier to find niche communities where you may make real friends.

You don't have to agree with me, but ya, no, I hard disagree with you.

Usenet was great back in the day. Decentralized and mostly unmoderated, full of trolls but you learned to block them. It still exists but barely.

In case the OP isn't a troll...

Do you know why aquariums need to keep oxygenated? That's because the type of life that is put there usually needs the oxygen dilluted in the water to be able to breath. If oxygen is lacking, what's effectively swamp water starts forming, water where few life forms can thrive.

Multiple forums I've seen become a metaphorical swamp water because there was barely any renewal in userbase, all the while the original userbase grew tired.

Moderation's also a hit or a miss, and when a forum's slowing to a halt, even a good moderation can make things worse.

OP's discourse also makes it seem like defederation is being used rampantly and without care across the fediverse. But from my experience at least, usually it's a last measure act, even when communities are ideological opposites.

I personally use Lemmy/Piefed/Mbin/etc. for social news rather than bolted on forum-like features. That's where I think this software shines.

If you want a decentralized forum, I'd seriously recommend you look at Usenet and NNTP. Then again, I promote the usage of network protocols for what they are good at over forcing everything through the web. 😂