Lemmy needs better integration/federation. Too much content is hidden. A community on the biggest instance was not visible to me on another large instance.

Anon518@sh.itjust.works to Fediverse@lemmy.world – 195 points –

I did a search from shitjustworks for "reddit die" and did not find https://lemmy.world/c/watchredditdie so I made https://sh.itjust.works/c/watchredditdie (unnecessarily). This should really not happen. When someone makes a community there should be a "ping" sent out to notify all other federated instances.

And from what I know, if I post to !sh.itjust.works/c/watchredditdie only users on sh.itjust.works will see the posts until other people from other instances randomly come across it somehow and subscribe? This really needs to be improved.

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The devs actually talked about this in the AMA from a couple of days ago. Sounds like the current plan is to have all federating servers send their entire list of communities to each other on a regular basis.

The other thing that I think is worth mentioning is Lemmy Community Boost which is basically a bot that serves the same purpose.

Thanks for reminding me that there was an AMA I forgot about lol.

I'm surprised there was no issue filed for this already, maybe I just failed to find it, but I made a new issue

https://github.com/LemmyNet/lemmy/issues/4412

if anyone wants to give it a thumbs up reaction then the devs will know to prioritize it, and if you have any ideas you could leave a comment there

Edit: that was somewhat a duplicate of this issue

https://github.com/LemmyNet/lemmy/issues/2951

Give that one a thumbs up

The community you're trying to subscribe to only has one post, and I believe that post may predate your instance spinning up.

It's not really a good example of federation on Lemmy, because it doesn't have content to federate.

Even your ping idea wouldn't have worked here

Even your ping idea wouldn’t have worked here

Why not? When the person created the sub it would have sent out a ping to all federated instances, and thus when any account on a federated instance searches the keyword they would find that sub. IE: each instance would have a list of subs of all other federated instances. Like a sitemap.

As I said, I think the only post in the community you were looking at was made before your instance was up and running and able to be pinged

Why not? When the person created the sub it would have sent out a ping to all federated instances

No it wouldn't? Unless you mean that's what you think it should do?

Anyway, there are tools to do this manually if you make a new community and want it to appear it popular all feeds.

No it wouldn’t? Unless you mean that’s what you think it should do?

Yes, and it seems that the devs have this in mind on their to-do list.

Lemmyverse.net show both communities: https://lemmyverse.net/communities?query=watchreddit

It probably didn't show up in the first place it only has 66 subscribers, and probably none on SJW.

About your second point, you indeed have to promote your community, using !newcommunities@lemmy.world, or related communities. This works quite well usually.

I will add that in your case, people knew about your community as you posted in other communities, but as discussed then, people seemed happy with the existing Reddit-focused communities.

This works quite well usually.

I definitely don't agree. I think this is very problematic. I rely on all to find new communities. I don't think one newcommunities sub is a valid replacement. It would suffer from the same issue -- people would have to spam their post to every single instances's newcommunities sub, which is ridiculous and not even viable.

Relying on !all to have your newly created community to reach most of the people could work, but using the Scaled sort as it wouldn't have enough subscribers to push it using Hot or Active.

There is only one !newcommunities@lemmy.world, it has 15k subscribers, seems like a pretty good way to promote it.

I'm not even subscribed to that, and even if I was, and it was a default subscription for every new lemmy.world user, I don't think it's a good replacement for a functional search or an all that includes all posts from federated instances. I see lots of posts on all-hot with 0-5 upvotes so it seems fine if it actually showed all communities on federated instances (which it doesn't).

There is a security issue by allowing automatic federation with any federated instance: an attacker could just create a huge number of communities, with a large number of posts, exhausting the resources of small instances.

That's what I guess it the main reason why it works like it does now: the server only gets the content if someone is interested.

Folks have given you a half dozen solutions here and your answer is consistently dismissive.

Did you want your problem solved or did you just want to bitch and argue?

I don't agree that they are solutions. The only proposed solutions are in the new github issue that someone created.

did you just want to bitch and argue?

I want lemmy to be better. I want it to be a viable alternative to reddit so people will leave that site.

I want it to be a viable alternative to reddit so people will leave that site.

Most of us here do, but there is probably more benefit talking about Lemmy on Reddit that waiting for Lemmy to become perfect

I do encourage people on reddit to come here, but as another reddit mod recently said on lemmy, they're waiting for improvements on lemmy (like /r/toolbox, RES) before being able/willing to move over.

RES is here, at least for keyboard navigation

https://github.com/vmavromatis/Lemmy-keyboard-navigation

Keyboard nav is not a RES feature I've ever used. Tagging is a main one. As is subscribing to threads to be notified of new comments.

Hopefully those will come. Thread subscription would be nice indeed.

In the meantime, Lemmy is still usable, and I guess once Reddit will kill old.reddit, RES will stop working anyway.

i mean since you’re gonna be a twat about it, there’s an easy fucking solution: fork lemmy and adjust the federation to your liking.

if you’re not willing to do that, or any of the other workarounds in this thread, you’re just bitching to bitch.

there’s an easy fucking solution: fork lemmy and adjust the federation to your liking

Ah yes, very easy. Thanks for the suggestion.

But your solution would require every new instance to subscribe to every community in existence even if no users there care about certain ones. It's innefficient.

How would you know no one cares if no one can even see them...

"Inefficient" doesn't seem important since if there's no content/activity there then it doesn't use any resources.

I agree community discovery could be improved but let's say I had an instance with 200 users and none speak German. Would it make sense for my instance to still pull everything from the German language communities and clutter an All feed where no one can read it? Or is it better to wait for a German speaking user to register and actively choose to participate in those communities before federation begins?

I think the way federation works as a whole would have to be reworked for your solution. Simply federating with all communities not on your black list isn't the best solution.

Lemmy is pretty centralized in practice and people are on Lemmy.world, mostly.

It's like hotmail or gmail. Default choice.

Yeah, the whole point of lemmy is to not be like that... so it definitely needs improvement.

The whole point of Redditors migration to Lemmy is to replace Reddit. You're absolutely free to deploy your own instance and develop your own fork or extensions to Lemmy's code so it works in a way you prefer on your terms.

Isn’t that intentional though? I don’t believe many instances, especially the small ones, can afford to federate every community. Sure, sometimes it can be a bit annoying but you can always check on lemmyverse.

As a middle-ground, I think it's enough to only sync the community name and user count and maybe the description. More isn't shown in the search anyway and those 3 data points shouldn't take too much storage.

Syncing name solves the problem of communities not showing up. The problem with only being shown posts in a community someone on the instance has already subscribed to is more difficult, as you wrote.

Descriptions can be of arbitrary length. Date and time of the most recent activity might be more realistic and useful.

A good implementation would be a warning at the creation of a community. Lemmy looks if a community already exist on the instances and display them. It would be on top of a better search.

Yeah there's a tool called LCB (Lemmy Community Boost but it's not a perfect solution to this issue. A good idea would be to have something like that built right into Lemmy, where instances can have an internal account that will look for and subscribe to communities which opt into discovery.

Soemthing like how the join-lemmy site works where it finds instances, but for communities. Obviously this would need to be enabled and allowed by instance moderators, smaller instances and personal ones with limited space probably don't want to pull from every community in the fediverse, but for larger ones, such a feature would be greatly beneficial.

Tip is to feature it on the !newcommunities@lemmy.world community, crosspost the first few posts from there to more popular communities, and be sure to link various discussion threads from that community in other communities. Get people interested enough to Subscribe then posts will spread to that instance.

This inconvenience is partly by design in Lemmy. People that start up a new server don't want to have ALL the content across the Fediverse rush through and explode their PC or hosted VM. Or a troll that makes a new community, spams a bunch of posts or puts up illegal material in a new community can easily be caught in the home instance before it spreads to others.

Isn't it mostly text? Why would that be a heavy burden? Isn't there an option to disable local hosting of images & videos?

Lemmy was able to be hosted on 1GB RAM machines, which may still work but less likely to be a good experience if you have too many instances in the federation queue even with just text. With images on, the biggest problem is the storage needs grew a lot.

Sharing/publishing lists of communities on a server to allow for automated subscribing seems like a good interim measure.

Yeah, that's the issue federation for lemmy have. I'm from a very small instance and my "All" feed only shows just a fraction of community from those big instance. If i need more community post showing i need to manually request federation for each and every community. It's not too big of an issue if you're from big instance as people will likely look for more community to subscribe, but for small instance it will be barren most of the time if no one try to look for new community using external browser, which makes people migrate to bigger instance, and defeat the purpose of having multiple instance.

Though i must say, manually federating is quite fast these day, i remember last year i have to keep refreshing for it to shows, and it take hours for the content to federate. The dev surely do magic.

It’s not too big of an issue if you’re from big instance as people will likely look for more community to subscribe

Yeah that's what I thought, and I assumed that shitjustworks was big enough to not have to worry about that, but apparently not. So I think this is one of the biggest problems with lemmy right now.

which makes people migrate to bigger instance, and defeat the purpose of having multiple instance

Bingo.

Yes. Lemmy is deep in "good enough" territory. It mostly works for most people, much of the time. But if you stray outside of the main use cases, you're gonna be disappointed.

Something tells me that neither one of those communities are going anywhere anyway. No matter what tweaking is done to Lemmy. The one you mentioned is so dead you might as well have made another. There’s already Reddit themed communities that are meant for the same thing really as that’s all most of us want it to do is die.

reddit@lemmy.world

reddit@lemmy.ml

Does this mean it’s time for /c/watchwatchredditdiedie?

Go for it, I'll subscribe. When that type of community takes off I'll know we've really gotten somewhere haha

Indeed, I mentioned this to OP as well in his post on !newcommunities@lemmy.world a few days ago

/r/watchredditdie is not going to migrate to /c/reddit communities that are mildly-anti-reddit at best and often have pro-reddit content. I'm hoping they'll be willing to migrate to a /c/watchredditdie one.

Still waiting for you to show us that pro-reddit content in those communities, last time you used an !asklemmy thread

Here you go https://sh.itjust.works/post/13700601. Most of the votes and comments are pro-reddit. And a user there also mentions another anti-reddit thread that the mods deleted for a pretty ridiculous reason.

A major reddit critic posts to lemmy and they get trolled or astroturfed, and their thread deleted.

Regardless, I've done what I can to try to get some communities to move to Lemmy, and they don't seem interested. So I think I give up for now.

I don’t think it’s bad thing that content is hidden.

To me, it’s comforting to think of cyberspace as being kind of like the real world. And in the real world, there’s distance. You can be near or far from things. You can travel, and the longer you travel the further you go. Things percolate through at a steady pace, and so everything’s not perfectly mixed but there are different zones with things going on.

When we had cyberspace shown to us in Snow Crash or Disclosure or NetRunner, it was always a space. Like a second world you could go live a life in.

I know it’s a loose connection, but I like how, in order to discover more instances I might have to travel to neighboring instances and then from there to others. Like each user you hear from has an instance in their username. That’s a way to discover instances.

And having redundant communities? That’s a great idea. Then you get that separation and divergent/recombinant evolution in those communities too.

Just a thought. As we add features, and remove constraints, from lemmy, we make serious architectural choices that will affect the way it feels and acts as space for communities to grow in.

We call it a Fediverse not a Fedidatabase. A ‘verse is a place you go through, at a speed, taking time. A ‘verse is a vast and wide place.

The number of subscribers being completely different depending on which instance you search from is really weird/bad too IMO.

that was fixed, I think in v0.19.0, but your instance hasn't updated yet

If instances don’t want to federate with some or all other instances, that is their choice, and that’s on purpose. Some just want to have smaller communities, stronger moderation, and sometimes be entirely private.

If you’re looking for instances that federate with most, you should choose yours accordingly. And I think you won’t have an issue with that, because most popular instances chose to go this route.

This is not about federation between instances. It's about how community discovery within federated instances works. Currently it's definitely sub-par.

There is a design conflict between on the one hand having the capability to locate and reach all instances of a thing, and on the other hand having those things be freely available to people.

This is, incidentally, why pro-2A people are so opposed to the idea of a gun registry.

I'm not understanding what the conflict is between being able to locate a thing and that thing being available for use.

I didn’t say able to locate I said there being a list. But in that case being able to locate is a better term. And I didn’t say available I said freely available, which is an important distinction.

If a thing’s existence always includes a route to finding it, that constrains its existence. Barriers in adding to the list, or in whatever finding mechanism you use, become barriers to the creation of an instance of that thing.

That’s one problem. There are others too, but if we can’t agree on this one then we’ve no hope of discussing the others.

I didn’t say able to locate I said there being a list.

Are you confusing comments?

I see this in the referred comment:

having the capability to locate

While the word "list" does not appear.

But mostly I think we should try to read the message, not focus on single words.

Like, do you need me to break down what happened there for you? Are you asking whether I made a mistake because you don’t know, or … for some other reason?

Yes. I made a mistake. I think it’s weird you’re behaving as if you need me to confirm that, but sure. I thought I said “list”, and didn’t. Oops. Fortunately for me I never lie and hence it didn’t matter if I remembered what I said because I immediately recognized that “locate” is better terminology despite thinking it was your wording not mine so … are we good on that?

What were you gonna say in terms of responding to the message?

Why is it that an instance decides for me which instances I can see? Why is it that mods are deciding for me which comments are censored?

Instances are the ones hosting the data on their servers + things not having mods can devolve very quickly with things like the nazi bar problem or the scam links that have been getting posted and removed in some communities. This is a different thing than whats in the post though, the post is talking about all communities needing to be fetched manually the first time theyre viewed

Ok, so why can't I just host the data on my own device and subscribe/unsubscribe from mods' actions?

Host your own instance and that would be the case

I wouldn't be seeing what mods are censoring elsewhere. It wouldn't be the case.

You can, it's called hosting your own instance. It's literally one of the points of the Fediverse (i.e. 'Fuck you I don't like how you're running things, I'll go make my own with blackjack and hookers'). If an instance admin does things you don't like, you get to leave, go to a new instance, and follow the same communities you did before via that one instead.

So you're telling me hosting my own instance is called "hosting my own instance" what in the fuck

I still wouldn't be seeing the content that mods are censoring elsewhere.

Any community that isn't 100% fully owned and operated by you, yourself, Mango, is going to run into the risk of a mod 'censoring' or deleting something that you wanna see.

Any and every community. Here, Reddit, Facebook, any social media, any forum public or private. If you yourself don't own and run it in its entirely, that's a problem you cannot avoid.

So I mean this without any real intended offense but: shit or get off the pot. Run your own community that connects to no other system or service run by other people and hope the people you wanna talk to drop by, or tbh get used to it ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

Edit: Can revenge-downvote me all you want Pepsi but I'm right on this one lol.

You know how ublock origin works? You pick out lists of filters that people have made. You're basically subscribing to moderators.

I don't think I'm interested in a platform that doesn't function that way. It's the only way to make sure moderators aren't just deciding the narrative for everyone else. It doesn't matter if the majority of people agree with a moderator's decisions of those decisions are wrong.

Well I wish you luck in finding what you're looking for, but Lemmy/Kbin by definition isn't it.

I might have to make it.

Nostr is what you're looking for. People who hate mods, defederation, and want a free speech chamber, look no further. You can host your own relay if you want but it doesn't make very much of a difference since accounts are independent from servers.

Just be aware that most people dislike this undermoderated enviornment due to how toxic it can get, but it seems like that's what you're looking for so I don't think it'll be that much of an issue for you.

I'm not against moderation. I made the Artisanvideos subreddit and moderated the shit out of it myself. I just think it'd be better for moderators to be a matter of user choice like block filters in ublock origin.

Thing is, it's not in the mods or admins' best interest to leave it up in the name of "user choice" and "free speech", these platforms host the content on them and the people hosting it are liable for it, plus making people be able to opt-out of moderation actions would attract unwanted people to the community, the kind of people who would seek that violating content and interact only with that.

Lemmy is NOT a "free speech" or "user choice", nor are the majority of fediverse platforms. I think that's one of the biggest misconceptions when it comes to the fediverse, it's that people think it's that. Really Federation is ultimately the same as a centralized site, that is self hostable, but with the added benefit of these different self-hosted sites communicating and cross-posting to each other. While this would be considered decentralized at the end of the day the site owners are the ones calling the shots, the can delete anything they want, ban anyone they want, or sever connections to servers if they want. They are within their right because they own the site and pay hosting and/or maintain the servers. Why should they put themselves at risk for the sake of "user choice" or "free speech" when they don't owe you the user anything?

With Nostr it's different because operators can purge whatever data they want off a relay, but your account isn't bound to a relay and information doesn't need to be copied to every relay like with Fediverse's ActivityPub. It offers the "user choice" and "free speech" experience by cryptographically isolating the user from the relays and by using them as... well... relays instead of instances.

In short the reason they don't do it is because the way the Fediverse is built isn't really suited for it, due to both liability, and the function.

One could make a tool like Reveddit or Unddit for Lemmy though that fetches the removed comments from the modlog and puts them back in the thread, but that wouldn't be like bypassing or disabling moderation.

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I run a modabuse community for whining about mods and hopefully holding them accountable

That's all well and good, but my issue is with what I don't see because it's hidden.

the modlogs are public

And that helps me how? Should I have to check the mod log every time I open a post?

I make a habit of checking the modlogs, and I also browse from mastodon, sometimes: Lemmy mod removals don't impact the mastodon cache

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The modlogs public to see removed comments. Just a bit difficult to navigate through currently

That's ok for auditing a moderator, but no good for seeing everyone's stance on the particular topic or post I'm interested in.

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Because you’re too lazy to make your own instance.

Speak for yourself.

Fuck are you talking about? You’re on Lemmy.world, crying about Lemmy.world instance mods.

You can hop to another instance whenever you want. Lemm.ee has a very neutral defederation policy, if that’s you’re concern move there. If you want total control over federation, spin up your own instance

Otherwise stop whining

Get over yourself. I'm complaining about the format of the software, not this specific instance, though this instance IS shit.

I think moderation removals should only censor for the people subscribed to that moderator. Stuff that needs removed for reasons like people using an instance to dump data or illegal content and whatnot should be admin territory.

If I make my own instance, I'm still not seeing what moderators have removed elsewhere. It's removed.

Demands software they didn't develop and servers they don't run abide by their self-proclaimed criteria

Tells others to "get over yourself"

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