domination is inevitable
EDIT: we just crossed 30K 🥳
We are now at 28.5K users (see https://lemmy.fediverse.observer/list). The top 10 instances also got a decent boost in user count. With the exception of beehaw.org which defederated, the Fediverse is thriving 🔥
Funny thing for me, is that Beehaw was the first bit of the Fediverse I ever came across. Tried to sign up, twice, didn't work. So that's how I ended up on .world, the first group I found that didn't want an essay to sign up.
I was on beehaw until they defederated, just seemed like the wrong answer to me and one that will just end up being damaging to Lemmy, especially the way they went about it.
Defederation is kind of a core concept of Lemmy isn’t it?
Well if I didn't understand that I'd not be on this instance now. I just didn't like how they did it with 0 warning when those instances were increasingly a big part of my Lemmy experience, and they could have just asked for people to volunteer as mods. Regardless of how I feel about it, the reason it's damaging is because of how people who don't understand it will view it.
But if you're not on their site, they're not responsible to you. They are responsible to their local community.
They maybe could have spared your admin the courtesy of a "if you can't control this right now, we'll have to defederate" email or something, but if the tools aren't there to keep up, they're not there.
Yeah. People struggle with the idea of "independent websites" when you can view posts from them on other websites.
And when there isn't a hedge fund backing them.
A server has every right to run however they want. I agree.
What I have a problem with are the server discovery tools and sites still listing beehaw as if it is participating in the fedeverse the same way as all of the other truly open servers.
Are you originally from beehaw? I've seen you defending them many times and I almost always agree with your points. Keep up the good work 🫡
Nope. I've never actually directly been to the site.
I just stumbled into Mastodon last April to watch people flee Twitter, and fell in love with the whole distributed social concept.
The Internet was a digital anarchist space when I first encountered it in the 90s, and that's what I want it to be again. And the right to disengage is tied up in that.
Cool. You're a valuable contributor and I hope you stick around. I was also hoping for an opportunity to apologize to beehaw on behalf of my server 🤷
This exchange right here, sir.
Wholesome. Thank you.
It is, but also federating is a core-er concept of Lemmy
I was on beehaw too. I'm not happy with the defederation but I understand.
I left but I'm happy it's great if it's working for them. This is why a federation is great, there is option for everyone.
Same. I don't mind a few words to try and convince someone I'm not a bot but it should still be a semiautomatic system (e.g. auto-approve after a few hours if you don't get explicitly denied). I think approvals simply got backed up because 1 or 2 ppl were approving these and it suddenly turned into thousands of applications per hour.
I heard you have to personally fellate the beehaw admins to get approved.
But they do want your email address. Even Reddit didn't require that.
Even if they don't require it, it's always a good idea to setup your email, it's necessary to recover your password in case of problems.
On these types of forums I always figure if I forget my password then it's time to make a new account anyway.
Nothing I post here is essential to me, and I can always find past exchanges from any random account.
And personally, I figure the longer I post under a single persona, the easier it is to connect that persona to my real identity. So account switching is good every once in a while.
I don't think so. I've signed up on beehaw without an email address.
Only if you sign up through old.Reddit. And that’s because old Reddit is still using legacy code that didn’t require it. The default new Reddit sign up requires an email or signing up through Apple/google accounts.
I like lemmy.world because it seems to be neutral and doesn't have heavy handed moderators. Communities are allowed to bloom and grow. It's scalable.
I respect what Beehaw wants to do, but their goals are not realistic if they want to be a platform of any significant size.
So far I also like the communities I've seen on Lemmy.ml, but there have been a lot of technical/server issues.
As I understand it, they don't care about being big, they care about having a community of people that align to their principles.
Problem is, if you don't pay too much attention to their server description, you might not realize what their principles are.
I think they got so big because many people were just trying to join any instance under the massive influx, without thinking much about it, and beehaw became much bigger than they intended to be (or expected).
Now that they have defederated from lemmy.world and sh.itjust.works, people "not intended" to be there are leaving, that should bring them "more down" than they currently are, I think that's what they actually want.
Beehaw controls their sign-ups. What they don't like are people they have not vetted commenting on posts in their communities. They don't like it because some people were 'trolling and spamming' and they can't keep up with the moderation.
They have 4 admin ls trying to do everything and they are not going to open up until they get moderation tools that make it possible to run a large site with just those 4 people.
Basically, they don't have a philosophy of running a server that is compatible with being in a federated environment.
They are not intended to be a large site, at all.
Whether that's compatible with federation or not, I don't know, but I honestly couldn't care less and I don't get why some people still think it's a big deal.
There were 2 big communities of value on their server but there are already growing alternatives elsewhere, so everything is fine in my book, that's the beauty of the fediverse IMO.
It is only a big deal if new people.sign up there, get a poor impression of what lemmy is, and never try any other lemmy experience again.
That is what the big deal is. People want lemmy to be successful and to grow into a network of servers with good participation.
I dont care what beehaw does, I just feel they should not be listed on discovery sites while they are not sanely federated.
You're right, it's a problem for new users unfortunately, beehaw should be quite more explicit on their server descriptions and rules.
Not sure about delisting them, that would be detrimental to those actually looking for a place like that, but they surely shouldn't recommend people to go there as a general instance, it's not just about federation, even if they were federated, that place is not for everyone.
Only because its one of the very few you can actually create an account on because of the mass migrations.
also because it seems sustainable with the donations and Ruud is a gigachad
@Ruud@lemmy.world and his team need to get some applause. It is not easy to scale with how quickly lemmy.world is growing.
Don't forget to donate if you can. I think the links are in his account bio.
also on the sidebar when you go to the homepage
Hats off to the creator of LW, it can’t be easy running a server this big. I do hope we don’t just dominate the fediverse though, would kinda defeat the purpose of it.
Kbin.social user chiming in here! I haven't checked out Lemmy but I'm content with what kbin offers me so far.
If I browsed mostly on a laptop or desktop then kbin is great. On mobile I think it's just barely passable and I was quite annoyed not having a dedicated app.
Same. I can't deal with websites on mobile
I use both so far, but prefer Kbin (the UI/design is much better IMO). It's especially nice that it's compatible enough that we're posting this on lemmy.world :-)
I love kbin, but I recently noticed it doesn't seem to have a way of saving posts/comments? At least not one that I can find, it's probably in there somewhere, I can't imagine they just Wouldn't Have that as a feature
If you 'boost' a comment/post it saves it to your profile under 'boosts'. Though I just checked a post that I boosted and am getting a 503 error at the moment so might not be working right now?
I don't even see a boost option on any of the lemmy instances I'm on (using through mobile web apps), I thought that was a kbin-only thing for Mastodon compatibility, but I might be wrong
Sorry yes you're right, that's a Kbin feature that's not on Lemmy.
I have a little star for me on lemmy.world if I hit the 3 dot 'more' settings on comments and it shows automatically on posts for me to save posts/comments.
Could be an instance specific setting?
We are also the biggest lemmy instance that still accepts signups ATM
I’ve been unable to get the sign up process to finish on Lenny.world. Fill out the fields and the submit button just spins forever.
There is already a user named Teh in lemmy.world so maybe that's why You are unable to create an account
@AlmightySnoo
I'd rather not see one instance become overly dominant, it just acts to centralize content and puts undue strain on that instance.
Thing is, as long as it's not possible to merge similar communities from different instances, large instances are actually preferable from a User uxperience point of view.
@hardypart
Agreed; I was more concerned with the possibility of the vast bulk of communities ending up on a couple instances rather than having major communities spread out. Having some way to keep similar communities connected and effectively moderated would be a great boon for us. How we best go about that, I'm not sure.
I enjoy everything being in one place but it seems to defeat the purpose of the fediverse.
It’s gotta start somewhere though. It makes sense that as refugees flock over they’ll gravitate towards the largest instance, because the expectation is that’s where the usage is and they don’t yet grok how the Fediverse works. As they settle in, I’d expect a number of them to spread out a bit. Once we can migrate accounts I’d expect the load to be distributed even better.
Load would not be distributed though right? Because all the user data / activity would just be copied to every federating instance. Fediverse is more about redundancy & lack of centralized control, rather than load balancing.
Yes and no? Maybe? I’m still figuring out how all this works lol. I know that instances take on the load of their users and communities.
As I understand it the federation protocol is copying all the data from instance to instance. I think data is probably going to be the most taxing part of running a social media site, but since all the data is replicated, there wont be much load sharing there. Each instance will be taking care of the cpu/load requirements of rendering/serving the pages for their users, so there is some scaling benefits there to distribution. Anyway, I'm also still learning as well! I think we all are lol
Yeah, also still learning of course, but that's my understanding of why Beehaw.org defederated. Too much new data getting copied over.
When I signed up to lemmy.world, I thought I was choosing one instance to use. I didn't intially realize they were ALL available from RVERY instance.
Since then I've joined Lemmy.ca, lemmynsfw, and beehaw.
But then you're still not getting it? You don't need to join other instances, you can subscribe to communities from any instances in the Fediverse without joining another instance.
That's what I'm saying, when I joined I thought I HAD to, since I didn't understand federation.
Now I know how it works
@AlmightySnoo fediverse is supposed to scale with more servers, not bigger servers
Rather, more instances, not servers. An instance can scale out using as many servers as the owner can tolerate.
I certainly wouldn’t want to be the one managing a horizontally scaled fediverse instance on a cloud platform though, that shit adds up fast, and no way in hell is anyone going to donate here.
I honestly don’t get how that’s supposed to work indefinitely, that’s usually where ad money comes in and… god dammit we’re back to square one lol. I’m here for a good time, not a long time 😎
People actually do donate here! Check it out :) https://www.buymeacoffee.com/kbin
I'm new here but if I stick around long enough I'll probably get up my own server/instance(s) for the various parts of the fediverse I participle in. Mostly because it sounds neat and partially because it would allow other people I know to have a fediverse "home" operated by a familiar face (if the fediverse gets popular among the mainstream).
Right now it's just Lemmy, but I may eventually participate in Mastodon, Matrix, Peertube, Owncast and.
I'm going to wait first though to see if the Lemmy userbase (and platform) remains healthy and/or grows. Then would come the hard part of setup, I'm familiar with technology, but nowhere near a professional or a hobbyist (unless you count gaming).
I set up our instance at Lemmy.pro for pretty much those same reasons, just to contribute in some way (I read messaging at Lemmy.ml when I first came around that adding instances helped) and make a space I could control my own account from.
@corytheboyd By "more servers" I mean "more instances".
I figured, just saw my chance and shot my shot for the passers by
@corytheboyd Other fedi projects changed their public terminology to use "servers" instead of "instances", which is why I said "more servers".
Noted, thanks. Honestly, in conversation I use server and instance interchangeably anyway, so I mooted my own point lol
I definitely think that ads will start appearing on the bigger instances especially since the overhead will most likely outpace donations. I could also see a lot of super small instances pop up just for people to host for their friends. I'm thinking about creating an instance just for me and a few friends but I'll definitely have to deviate from my standard Reddiy username, can't let that cat out of the bag.
I've said it before, but I really think that "Reddit Gold" was an excellent non-invasive monetization strategy.
Gold didn't really do much but put a little coin above a comment, and it supported the site for a long time without having to pump in advertising, which many people would block anyway.
I gilded a total of 3 times maybe, over the years. And that $12 or whatever was way more than Reddit ever got out of me from ads, since I block them all.
We need a charity running this, like Wikipedia or Internet archive.
@econpol @corytheboyd i wonder what makes anybody think nobody will donate, quite a few fedi servers manage to survive off of donations
i think a couple of fedi servers are semi-private with paid accounts on a subscription basis, too
Mostly the pessimist in me talking about the general case. Getting many people to pay for something that is free somewhere else is an uphill battle.
When the service is good enough, I don’t at all mind throwing in ~$5/month. Example services like that I pay for: Fastmail, Bitwarden, Mullvad
Doesn’t mean it can’t work, and success is much easier at small scale (like you said, paid private).
There is nothing wrong with having ads on a server. A server / instance should monetize itself like crazy if they want to. If users don't like it, they now have options! They're not stuck in a place like reddit.
That's why I'm so excited by federation.
There will be both. I think many will appreciate the simplicity of large instances.
I'm betting that is going to occur with growing out communities. They will probably have disagreement with admin then move or just want a more focused community that people can click local & get what they want.
We have to see people show up, learn, and start to enjoy it. A big instance has some perks for the time being and everyone might want to see its sticking power before dealing with headache of running their own instance.
And to think I made this account because it was a nice small instance with only 100 active users. That worked out well.
Where's the Dodge!? That was the best part about this meme.
i'd rather have a mesh of small-ish instances instead of several huge ones, that aside the more people the better.
I think that will be a lot more feasible if the capability to migrate user accounts between instances is added.
Right now for a new user joining the fediverse, the largest instances are the best option since they are the most likely to remain up and federated with most other instances. Why would you join some random smaller instance when there’s a clearly established one already there?
Making it possible to change instances would remove some of this friction - then your choice of initial instance isn’t important.
recent events with beehaw have shown that being on a large instance does not guarantee federation.
i'm all for roaming profiles even though i think the best option is hosting a personal or a friends-only instance - unless you're a colossal asshole nobody will defederate you, you're are not depending on anyone but yourself for your profile and subscriptions, etc etc. this obviously isn't for everyone but the barrier of entry is sufficiently low for people interested in tech and fediverse to do just that.
email has started as a fully distributed system but - for reasons too many to count here - ended up centralized over several huge providers, openly dictating rules to everyone else. i'd rather fediverse not followed this road.
Right. There are a bunch of instances being created by people leaving reddit. A lot of them are not likely to survive. And if that's where I created my account, it's just gone. I can't even access it from elsewhere in the fediverse.
Yeah, and I moderate a few communities. If an instance disappears so do my communities.
I think federation wars will cause that end point. If I wanted to start a community- or group of communities- I’d put them on their own instance and not have user signups. That minimizes exposure to conflict - either you like sports communities / Pathfinder communities / whatever or you don’t. If beehaw wants to lock themselves down it doesn’t affect my community. If Lemmy.world gets blocked by a bunch of instances it doesn’t affect my community. I don’t have to deal with the consequences on other instances of users coming from my instance.
I’d go a step further and say that identity management should exist separately from content, but that would probably break brains already struggling with the concept of federation.
100% this, it’s kind of weird that it’s not.
Just like you thought of having your own instance for a custom set of content with independence, I made my own instance for pretty much an identity base I can maybe control well.
We’ll try to make a good community or two, but I don’t know if I’m good enough or have enough time to grow and moderate one well.
unless you depend on a third party, this is a nontrivial problem.
check https://fedidb.org/current-events/threadiverse instead, we have MUCH more users than you think.
Edit: also note that beehaw isn't completely defederated. They only defederated from sh.itjust.works and Lemmy.world.
They defederated from dozens of instances actually
Obviously censorship of any variety is a slippery slope, but holy hell some of what's listed there is problematic. If I joined Beehaw in the hopes of enjoying a safe community for various minority groups like they are trying to promote, I'd feel decidedly un-safe seeing posts from skinhead instances and others with outright racial slurs in the names.
What is the skinhead one? It said it was pro lgbt?
I decided to check on the skinhead one, because maybe it's not nazis, but....it's nazis.
i figured it was. i guess they just post that to lure people in or something.
The world is varied. It's probably better to accept it and start living in it, instead of hiding in a corner.
They already have to do that in the real world. There is no reason they need to put up with it online too.
Holy cow! It would probably be easier do just allow those they want to see lol (whitelist instead of blacklist)
That's possible, so i think they might do that at some point haha
Oh nice, you can edit the link and run it for any instance.
Lemmy.ml Lemmy.world Lemmy.ee Sh.itjust.works
If you want to check several you could do the main site
Edit: theres one with 20,000 defederations lmao https://fba.ryona.agency/?reverse=lol.lamp.wtf
Lmao that's nuts. I'm just glad lemmy.ee isn't in their list, they're federated with everyone :D
Also, it's nice that I can see your edit! Edits didn't seem to federate from lemmy.ml.
That's total users tho, I think OP is referring to lemmy.world users only.
They linked to fediverse.observer for the entirety of Lemmy tho 🤔
the 28.5K (now almost 29K) I mentioned are for lemmy.world only obviously yes, I linked to fediverse.observer so that one can also check the growth of the other Lemmy instances 😁
That's what I said?
This is so exciting, each day I feel more and more at home in the fediverse
I like the small instance I belong to. It's represented by one or two of those buildings in that picture and that's okay.
We are all in this together.
Yeah, I also like my small instance (BTW: donate to your instances!) I really hope that each instance ends up with like, one dominant community, so the traffic gets spread out and doesn't accidentally crush anything
Yeah, Ruud seems like a cool dude, and lemmy.world has been rock stable for me.
I signed up for both kbin.social and Lemmy.world as I'm figuring things out. So I'm sure there's plenty of cross over between the members of each community. I just wonder how much.
For me it was just that I was so noob I didn't know they were connected, oh well :D
Kbin was having trouble federating for a while there due to the traffic but the admin has fixed most of the issues so all is well now.
I still bounce between kbin.social and lemmy.world though cos why not!
Don't tell someone you're playing both sides!
I firstly signed at lemmy.ml, then kbin and then lemmy.world.
I found kbin more convenient personally for pc use, but both are beautiful and evolving.
I've ended up making accounts all over the place since I started over a week ago, just recently found an instance for my country so that's my new home! I freaking love this fediverse, feels good man
Wish I could actually log into my lemmy.world account on desktop. Works in Jervoa, but neither Chrome, nor FF let me get past the spinning wheel of the login button.
This is what it gives me if I try signing in with the credentials of another server. I made accounts on a few before I realized what was what.
Good to know! Hope my login cookie doesn't expire 😬
Oh that's very interesting. I'm having an identical issue with an account I made on another Lemmy instance (feddit.uk). I'm still trying to work out where I'll settle long-term (including whether that is on Kbin or Lemmy) but for the time being the inability to access my feddit.uk account is making the decision for me...
May I ask what in your opinion are the pros in favor of kbin?
If I'm honest, I've not yet discovered hugely different features. My understanding is that kbin allows more integration with the non-threadiverse bits of the Fediverse (for example, Mastodon) than Lemmy, but so far I've not made use of that. Kbin is also newer and therefore seems a bit rougher around the edges, but that will pass.
What initially drew me to kbin was more not wanting to get dragged into the tankie noise around Lemmy, but as the number of instances have grown that seems to have become less of an issue.
What I will say for kbin though is that Ernest (the kbin developer, who also runs the kbin.social instance) seems quite nice and is very responsive and transparent with the community.
Very interesting thank you! Kbin does sound cool, I’m going to check it out.
LOL let’s hope it is one of the big servers. Need to spread users around.
it’s weird to see that picture without the doge face in the sandstorm lol
Time to divide methinks
Imagine we could build a sub for annual fediverse competition and everyone is participating under the flag of their instance.
That could be so cool and it would match the vibe of this whole community.
Other instances shall just be mere vassal-instances in YOUR federated empire.
2nd place!!
What does it mean that beehaw.ord is defederated?
Beehaw defederated from lemmy.world. So anything that a lemmy.world user posts on any instance in the fediverse will be invisible to beehaw users. Any posts made on the beehaw instance won’t be updated to lemmy.world users after defederation. The local “cached” version of various beehaw communities still exists on the lemmy.world instance, so we can view that and comment/post/vote there. However all that activity stays on our instance and is invisible to any users from all other instances.
In practical terms, it means we can’t participate in any beehaw communities. We can see posts made by beehaw users on other instances (say a comment by a beehaw user in a lemmy.ml community), but the beehaw user won’t see any posts made by a lemmy.world user.
Everything on Kbin and Lemmy is "federated"
This is basically just a fancy word to say "no matter what server you're on, we can all talk to each other".
It's kind of like E-Mail where no matter if you use GMail or Outlook, you can talk to your friends and colleagues.
When a server defederates from another server, It's like a two-way block.
People on (in this case) beehaw won't see threads, magazines and replies from Lemmy.world and sh.it just.works and people from Lemmy.world and sh.itjust.works won't see threads, magazines and replies from beehaw.org
Server/Instance admins usually do this when there are instances which spread unwished for content.
This is also why on my profile, there's a link (forum.fail). It's part of my identifier here on the Fediverse (@TGRush@forum.fail).
It means we can't see/talk to them, and vice versa. You may still see old beehaw posts and comments, that were already cached on our side, and can even interact with them, but none of that data will make it to them
Tha k you for the explanation guys, it's clear to me now. One last question, did they do it on purpose and if so why would they?
They did it on purpose because apparently there was a troll attack on them and they don't have enough mod power to deal with it.
Thank you for the explanation guys, it's clear to me now. One last question, did they do it on purpose and if so why would they?
What does it mean that beehaw.ord is defederated?
It stopped receiving posts or comments from other instances like lemmy.world. Their reasoning is that they want a highly moderated "safe" instance, but since moderation tools are still very primitive, they decided to defederate, it was easier than trying to moderate posts from the big instances. They said they will re-federate once mod tools improve.
They only defederated from lemmy.world and sh.itjust.works (don't remember where the dots were in that). If you look at their blocklist they're also defederated from a shitload of other instances, but most of those are some combination of spam, illegal content, and/or Nazis, which is fair.
They spilt off to be their own little island