Totally disagree, the more tech savvy can spin up their own single used instances if they want, be fully in control of their own content and participate just like anyone on any large instance bar being defederated. All for basically free
this post was submitted on 15 Jun 2023
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Technology
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Each of the three largest instances now are working to be a standalone replacement for Reddit and are in direct competition with each other.
I think it's clear Beehaw isn't working to be, or wanting to be, a replacement for Reddit at all.
This commentary wasn't particularly targeted at beehaw. I was just saying that I don't see the appeal of generalized mega-instances going away.
You did post this on the biggest community on Beehaw after all, haha. It's to be expected that some people will think you're talking about us.
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There seems to be quite a few folks here that basically want the Lemmyverse to be Reddit with new management
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Beehive blacklisted Lemmy.world? Mhm and that's why we need decentralised instances. I don't care about how beehive views Lemmy world as I can access still both as I am from an entirely different instance :)
There's still one issue that bothers me about Beehaw blacklisting lemmy.world though.
For example, if someone from lemmy.world posts to c/gaming@beehaw.org, then only other people on lemmy.world will see that post because Beehaw will not sync it for any other instances to see.
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this is the way its supposed to work, reddit is a bunch of fragmented communities too, the only thing you share is a domain.
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Beehaw only defederated from Lemmy.world because of the currently limited moderation tools in the software. This is not going to be a problem forever.
I hope people can find communities both on large instances (Beehaw, Lemmy.world) as well on as very small niche instances. Discoverability is a bit a problem but I think over time we will find communities we like, and participate in them. What instance they are hosted on is not all that important.
I'm on kbin and I have to say I like what they are doing better than Lemmy as far as ease of use and UI. It will be interesting to see how this all shakes out.
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And this is why I didn't sign up for a large instance.
I'd rather join a smaller one that doesn't block any instance, neither is it blocked by other instances.
I just want to slowly find new communites and join the ones I think have good discussion, regardless of where they are hosted. I don't need babysitting.
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Hot take. I think the instances that are trying to be Reddit are the ones that give their users carte blanche to create new communities without any thought of looking to see if the same community exists elsewhere. I'd prefer that community creation be limited to the admins of each instance, that way they could at least do a cursory search to see if the community exists already and then just add it to THEIR instances subscriptions. There's a reason why every community shouldn't be on a single instance. It's a single point of failure.
That's not a hot take.
That's where I think the threadiverse/lemmyverse/fediverse/whatever is (hopefully) going to end up.
The big instances are like browsing /r/all. The focused instances are going to be where it's at.
"Oh, rust? Yeh, you want the rust instance, or maybe the programming instance. Not here in the gardening instance"
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Counterpoint, allowing people to create their own communities is how new ideas for communities come up. If it wasn't for that freedom, people wouldn't have come up with ama, meirl and all the other weird concepts that took off
I'm not saying you shouldn't be allowed to create a new community. I'm saying that due diligence should be taken BEFORE creating a new community, to be sure that community doesn't already exist.
Mental bandwidth. By adding the requirement of a mod approval before creating a new community will cause most people to not bother at all.
As a counterpoint to that: any new community that gets created on an instance is now a possible liability the site admins have to own.
Makes a lot of sense that you wouldn't want anyone to make anything on your site, since that's how you end up with /r/jailbait, and /r/fatpeoplehate and so on.
Seems reasonable you'd want to make sure you understand who is creating what and why on a platform you're ultimately responsible for.
It's really not difficult to delete a unwanted community. The cost benefit analysis I think still leans towards open for all, as a breakaway success story makes up for it.
It's not just the difficulty, it's that the fediverse runs on reputation.
If you get a reputation for being an instance that has offensive/illegal content, you'll get defederated and your users will get a materially worse experience than the rest of the instances that are federating with each other - and it really only takes one or two things to get that reputation.
sh.itjust.works is a prime example: it didn't take an awful lot to get them down the defederation road, and I suspect most admins would want to maintain their reputation and an easy way to do it (until we get like... moderation tools) is to just gatekeep what communities show up on your instance.
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although having the same community in different servers might serve a purpose as well, I try to subscribe to the "same" community in different servers, this way you don't have centralization since if one goes down, the others are still up, and you can post to whatever server and interested people will see the post (assuming everyone does the same).
I would rather a lemmy instance only supported a single community. That would force the horizontal scaling better
That would be extremely wasteful in a resource sense. You would need more overhead, more domains, more everything to support that.
Yeah, I do like throwing hot takes out there. XD But I do think that you are asking a lot when you ask people to limit the scope of their instance.
It will always be easier to just add another community under a larger instance than to go out and self-host your own niche from scratch. There's certainly a temptation for an instance to go mega and general-purpose.
I'm not disagreeing that a single instance is a point of failure- just that people are willing to make that trade-off.
I was never insinuating that an instance owner should limit their scope. But just because you run an instance doesn't mean you have to be the home node for all the communities you are interested in. It goes against the idea of federation. If a community already exists on another instance, as an instance owner you should subscribe to that community rather than making your own. That increases resilience.
Interesting. Do you think there will be steps to make communities more focused? Like a hypothetical deal where lemmyworld will give up "gaming" if kbin gives up "technology"?
Honestly, I hope not.
For example, if all the "programming" communities ended up on a single instance, that is still a single point of failure. I think it would be better if they were spread out a bit. That way if the programming themed instance went down unexpectedly it wouldn't take ALL the programming communities out with it, only the ones it hosts.
There's nothing stopping anyone from creating a programming themed instance and then subscribing to various programming communities on other instances and then creating their own local communities to fill in the gaps. And ideally, I think that's what should happen.
I'm often wrong, but I have a hunch that it will be necessary if the goal is to avoid centralization. I do think it would be sensible to limit the broadest communities (politics, tech, gaming) to two central "node" instances; very curious to see if it will get to that point.
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Very frustrating for sure, I feel like I'm constantly playing ping pong with new users.
New user doesn't understand lemmy and searches for community on service like lemmy.ml. Community doesn't exist so the spam the "Create Community" button or spam the admin for it. Admin is overworked/doesn't know/busy building the site and says "okay", meanwhile there is already a community of 100+ members on another instance.
For me, I built my instance to take some weight off of the main instances, thought "hey here's a group of communities that are pretty close knit that don't need to put pressure on the already overloaded servers", and I still get people who are posting "I made ____ community on lemmy.ml come join!" and it's like dude, ffs.
For example, I run an instance that focuses on a genre of music. Thus, I'm pretty dang open to anything even remotely open to that.
- If it doesn't exist seriously you could have made it on my instance and modded it, give the central servers a break. I'm all for spreading the love but seriously, don't just make it by default on the popular instances
- If it does exist, ffs just look around. At this point most communities on Reddit have something analogous here, or ther'es something similar you could post in first asking if there is one. "If /c/cyberpunk2077 doesn't exist maybe ask /c/gaming first. (and yes, cyberpunk2077 does exist)".
- This is separate from if you don't like a community and you want to truly create your own. That's great, you should feel empowered to do so, but don't just spam the "Create Community" option if you haven't even tried to see if it's out there yet. At the very least, search out some instances and figure out where your best home should be. At this point it probably isn't lemmy.ml or beehaw.org.
That turned a bit more ranty than I expected.
Community discovery that spans all federated instances should be one of the top things that development should be working on. And it should be integrated into Lemmy, not as a separate website people have to go to and search.
Peoples are lazy. They don't want to have to go to some separate website and then search for something. And lets not even get started on the difficulties of adding a remote community if your instance doesn't know it exists, its wonky at best.
If a user cant type "Stephen King community" in the search bar on their instance and then get results, they are either going to assume it doesn't exist and give up OR they are going to be hitting that "Create Community" button.
For sure, as much as I want users to be smarter... well my experience in development tells me they never will be. I literally had one user ping me on Lemmy asking how to join, I gave them pictures detailing steps. They were on mobile and gave up because "The subscribe button was in the sidebar and it was too confusing"
That's what we're up against. The extra button click was too much for some users.
Lemmy has to get more user friendly when it comes to subscribing. You're absolutely right it needs to be one search and click "subscribe". They should bring the feddit browser into lemmy really.
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Reddit isn't totally free of this problem (feature) either--You can have multiple subreddits dedicated to the same topic.
IMO while the federated communities might feel fragmented if you are used to reddit, it's the main benefit of using Lemmy and something that should be embraced. Concentrating content into only a few instances defeats the point of federation.
Take the current issue as an example: A gigantic community defederated from another gigantic community leading to a comparatively large wall between the content of those communities. Had they been smaller, the impact of this issue would therefore also be smaller. This affects other communities which get content from beehaw as well, since there's now less interaction between a large portion of the fediverse user base.
It's only natural that large communities will bubble to the top however, and there probably isn't a good answer to how to 'balance out' those communities, or if that's even beneficial at all.
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It sounds like you are describing new user experience.
And I understand, coming from Reddit, how this can be a shock.
However, that's how Lemmy works.
Similar to how twitter users got a shock moving (or trying to move) to mastadon.
The very nature of the fediverse works better with more instances, where a single instance has fewer users and the communities are more focussed.
Beehaw hasn't "blacklisted everyone from...". They've defederated. Whilst it may seem similar, it's more nuanced. And that's what a lot of people don't understand.
Block-listing all users from lemmy.world from interacting with beehaw would be an amazing ability. That would put beehaw in a read-only state for users on lemmy.world, whilst still allowing beehaw users access to lemmy.world.
Unfortunately, the current admin/mod tools do not allow for that. And manually dealing with the huge influx of toxic users (posting death threats, illegal porn or trolling) was taking too much time.
Besides, the lemmy.world admin is working on custom tooling to deal with this issue. Because it is their users causing this issue, and it is their problem. And there is no higher authority - there are no Reddit admins to say "stop brigading".
Shitjustworks, last I heard, weren't responding to communication.
I have no doubts that beehaw will refederate as soon as Lemmy.world sorts their mod issues, or the Lemmy framework allows for more nuanced mod tools.
You have to remember that Lemmy is young.
It's been around for a few years, but the shear scale of what is happening now is less than 2 weeks old
It’s unfortunate if the sh.itjust.works folks aren’t speaking, their listed rules seem pretty reasonable and the problem users appear to be breaking the rules of that instance too.
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If big instances are already defederating from each other then I don't see how Lemmy can grow like many of us want it to. I mean, now any new user who randomly chooses Lemmy.World as their server is going to get a much worse Lemmy experience and they won't even be aware of it. (Come to think of it, maybe I'm getting a lesser experience right now because maybe my server defederated from another big server that I'm not aware of.) This seems like a flawed system, or at least it seems like a system that isn't intended to have much user growth.
You can view exactly who your instance federates with. If the instance is public, the instances that are blocked/allowed are publicly visible. New users probably won't know what this means... but certainly could after some time/understanding. No reason you shouldn't know! So let's fix that.
Your instance chose to block the following instances:
lemmygrad.ml
asbestos.cafe
eientei.org
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~~Maybe it should be a common practice to list larger servers that you've chosen to defederate from? Beehaw is being forthcoming about it, so at least people know what they're missing out on. And I don't think they'd have a bunch more hidden away from us. Now, if a community does this and tells no-one, that could be a genuine problem.~~ Making an account on another instance is a little annoying, but it's not that bad if you're old and accustomed to classical forums.
Edit: I didn't even notice the /instances URL on Lemmy. GG, it's already openly out there.
All servers running lemmy are open about it... Check the very bottom of your instance page and click "Instances". In their case it's
And for you it's
Thanks for pointing that out, I didn't notice the instances link down there. I've edited my comment.
No problem! Lots of exploring to do... it's a whole new world for a huge amount of us.
There seems to be a lot of FUD going around with the defederation news. The problem, as most problems seem to currently be, is the population is exploding and the tooling isn't there to support the real growth in numbers. Beehaw has been a community for quite a while, and they were just here first so have more established communities, you can't blame them for that. They have every right to defederate instances, especially when their main concern is being able to moderate content for their users. Each instance serves their users first, other instances lack of user moderation shouldn't be their problem. They said they'll open back up once they can manage the moderation work load.
As for the fragmentation, this is really how lemmy was designed to be. There is talks of adding federated community listings and community browsers to lemmy itself to support discovery. Really, these features just weren't needed a couple weeks ago and now they are. In my opinion, the larger communities should have communities on multiple instances. You can cross-post across instance communities as well. Hopefully in the future the fragmentation can be fixed via the use of tags and other possible organizational tools that help federation but keeps things decentralized.
The established instances have dominance due to the first-mover advantage, which is causing the centralization at present. Overall, the experience is going to be different to a lot of reddit users due to the very nature of decentralizing things. I feel confident solutions will be found for most of these issues, and make the federated experience easier to navigate while still supporting the decentralized nature. But the fact is, this isn't and never will be "reddit' as it was, which was a centralized system with a single authority (the ToS and admins).
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I think instances need to be more focused. For example monero.town, very focused on Monero. If people are interested in other technology, sub to an instance focused on that, etc. I don't see how mega instances that try to replace reddit are viable in the long term, especially if they start to defederate.
I agree fully with this. Centralizing all of the major communities with Beeyah is silly. And I wish the moderation rules were at the community level instead of instance level, but I understand that’s a limitation of the ActivityPub protocol (as far as I can tell).
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So if I'm interested in many topics I have to create an account on every singles instance?
That's not how Lemmy works. You just need an account on ONE instance. And then subscribe to all the communities that interest you, some may be local to your instance and some may be hosted on other instances.
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