If Lemmy and Mastodon continues to get popular, we will eventually get Instance wars.
If the descentralization of social networks continue, we will have to prepare for the eventual rise of the instances wars, where people will start to fight about which instance is better and which one is weird to be in and so on, but that's for the future of us all.
And that's exactly what's supposed to happen. Instance wars and eventual defederation and fragmentation are important moderation tools, and will progress the culture and feel of instances and regions of the Fediverse. Many instances will form federated cliques that are highly connected and have similar vibes and cultures, and some will be federated with multiple cliques, showing users a variety of cultures and situations.
If the Fediverse reaches a large enough number of people, it can support multiple independant cliques, and enable users see entire mini-universes with different communities and vibes.
imma have undercover alts everywhere for the sole purpose of getting all the cats communities in one page.
Your legend well be carved into the pages of history as the first person to complete the catalog!
My man !
A man or sheer will and and an unhealthy amount of love for cat photos on the internet
One benefit that people don't talk about enough is it naturally tends towards smaller community sizes than in a centralized system which is a better fit for our tribal human brains.
We're not great with speaking into a room with 1,000 people in it, much less a million.
The problem is that it's worse for keeping topics centralized and fragments communities for external reasons. It's antithetical to the idea of a link aggregator where you centralize all of your news if you need to use several of them to make it work. Defederation should be a last resort to protect the admins from legal action, content manipulation, or brigading, not because beehaw thinks open signups harm their safe space. Making the internet a safe space is how we got to this point with Twitter/Google/meta/reddit, and everyone wants to do it all over again to rebuild their echo chambers.
I agree, and I've already seen this happen!
One popular instance, Beehaw announced that they defederated from lemmy.world and shitjustworks to protect itself from an onslaught of new folks. Beehaw's admins say that lemmy.world and shitjustworks have let in a lot of folks who aren't well vetted and are the focus of most moderation action, so they're restricting access from those two instances.
And I'm over here on an instance with 600 users like, "Hm. That's a pity. Glad I'm not as basic as those poor folks."
I don't get how this is insightful.. The internet already has 4chan, okbuddyretard, whatever, people will always form communities
Damn, this actually made me feel chills. This is actually a universe in the making. It's new life.
That’s really freaking cool. I hope it plays out like that
There is nothing better than a good old tribe war.
One of the oldest human pastimes, hating people who are different from you in some way, no matter how inconsequential.
“You ever notice that? Any time you see two groups of people who really hate each other, chances are good they're wearing different kind of hats. Keep an eye on that, it might be important.” - George Carlin
Ah shit they should bring back tribes, I miss that game.
Goddam you made me nostalgic. Wonder how slow i would be today... Sloooooow
Nothing drives down real estate prices like a good old-fashioned gang war.
The biggest problem with lemmy and decentralization right now is that for optimal performance you need to spread out the load relatively evenly between instances. The problem is that users tend to go where other users are (otherwise why go there) and that naturally leads to clumping on one or few instances which causes it to overload.
The way to solve it is to avoid having generic "anything goes" instances and instead have instances be focused on a specific topic. For example, have gaming instance, a personal finance/investing instance, all things home ownership and improvement instance, etc. You can have multiple communities per instance as long as they stay within the same general topic. This way users will naturally spread out by subscribing to different instances based on topics they're interested in. And that will solve the performance issue we're seeing with lemmy.world or other popular instances.
I'm pretty much brand new to lemmy but the thought of having to switch instances to see cooking conversations after conversing about Raspberry Pi projects in a different instance just seems unwieldy. But I guess as long as my instances are all federating with each other I don't need to switch instances. I'm a technical guy but this needs to be easier for joe sixpack or it's not going to catch on. And if it doesn't catch on there's going to be less interesting content...
Correct, as long as the instance your account is in federated with all other instances you're subscribed to, you don't have to switch accounts.
Now, defederation is another issue if you want to see the widest possible amount of content. What's going to happen is ideologically opposed instances are going to defederate each other, so left-wing instances are going to defederate right-wing ones and vice versa. So if you're a user who wants to see the content from both sides, you'll have to create multiple accounts in each "cluster" of federated instances. It's kind of annoying to be honest, it makes it hard to discover communities just because your instance admin decided to defederate from them and encourages echo chambers, but it it's the best we've got.
Another way to solve the issue is to have users and communities be instance-independent where the instances only provide storage for communities and users they want to support.
Where would user information be stored?
Would this require you to switch between instances to view all the content you wish to follow? That doesn't seem very appealing as a user.
I am subscribed to Ukraine on sopuli.xyz and memes in lemmy.ml and a few others on Lemmy.world and they all show up in my feed, so I'm now more confused. Am I viewing several instances or not? Lmao
You are as long as they agree to federate with each other (which they obviously are if they're in your feed)
So what is the point of congregating on a general purpose instance? I ask this because of the snippet from the root comment:
If everything is visible from any (federated) instance, why not switch once you encounter slow down? In my comment, I was just clarifying that I understood the premise.
No, you can see all the content from all instances you're subscribed to, as long your instance admin hasn't defederated from them.
Right, I think this was the potential concern I was vaguely remembering.
This wouldnt be as much of as issue if Lemmy had better support for connecting with other instances and their communities.
The big problem is going to be when someone decides to start spamming and vote manipulating with bot populated private instances that automatically re-spawn themselves under a new name whenever they are blacklisted. Eventually, the standard will have to move to whitelisting over blacklisting, and once that happens the whole premise of federation starts to fall apart.
It’s not harder than what we’ve had to do with e-mail spam. Which has been enormously successful, with 99% of it not even getting delivered to your spam folder but just dropped entirely.
Instances will het as much visibility as they’ve earned through successful engagement across instances. The visibility of a new instance’s posts will increase over time.
This is why yes, there needs to be a feed algorithm. “Just show it to me chronologically” is the most naive thought, and people still have it all the time. There are just so many fundamental things that need to go into a sorting algo. We’re not even talking about personalization.
E-mail spam filter is funded by google and other multibillion megacorporations though, and they just outright block or rate limit unknown providers. I'd say it's not gonna be as easy to do it with fediverse.
Agreed 100% but again, I wonder if we have enough resources to actually make it good while also keeping it free, both in terms of monetization and in terms of outside influence and biases. Twitter and others spend a lot of manhours on it and mastodon still doesn't have it either for example, it's not even being worked on afaik (or nobody talks about it).
It's why I've made fediseer.com to prepare for this inevitability
So I went to the website. It explains what it does, but not much how.. Or maybe I'm too dumb to get it. Could you explain how the verification happens? How does this system work?
Did you read the devlog? I got into more detail there. Just so I don't explain everything from scratch
Hey one thing I learned while canvassing for a politician is that it can be really beneficial to repeat yourself when it comes to articulating a message, instead of articulating it once then passing copies.
The more times you write and rewrite the same explanation the better it will get.
I had not. I see it now. Looks real cool! I hope it works.
I think these problems might be solvable with auto blacklisting instances based on their age, how their users behave and what % of comments and posts of them are flagged as spam
How would an instance grow if it's auto blacklisted by everyone? Doesn't make sense
Thats the problem. It would be very difficult to get a new instance off the ground unless you were an insider or had inside connections. If you have a cabal of existing admins acting as gate keepers you could keep outsiders from abusing the system easily, but you are also walking right back into the centralized control federation is supposed to prevent.
Welcome back to IRC. :)
One thing that is feasible is for established instances to give votes from new instances a lower weight. So, no blacklisting, but until they have been around for a little while to be able to calculate that their activity corresponds to their size and that nothing is off, upvotes and dowvotes could be ignored or given a lower weight.
Yes, age alone shouldn't lead to getting blacklisted. But if an instance is two days old, already 50+ accounts from there were banned on your instance for being bots and besides that there was no real contributions coming from that place, this might be a candidate for auto-blacklisting.
Well non-federated forums can grow by word of mouth and similar. Being federated does lower the barrier of entry for interacting but it's still possible to visit the instance the old fashioned way. You probably still need to rely mostly on word of mouth anyway, even if you are federated.
Ya there probably will be, but in the end it doesn't matter which is the beauty of this platform.
True, and now that i've tried this, the "corporate" social networks feel primitive somehow.
Like going to Six Flags after your first Burning Man.
Cause I tried so hard ...
And got so far
But in the end
Lemmy.ml sucks
It doesn't even matter
c/lemmysings
I had to fall
"Instance wars" sounds like the way "the consequences of my own actions" will be framed at a point.
The far right instances dripping with hate, bigotry and recycled propaganda will be in an "Instance war" with the mainstream instances talking about regular human being stuff - stuff like beans.
Grab your samurai swords, mall ninjas... and inventory your powdered eggs, theocratic fascist doomsday preppers...
The instance wars are coming for your unvaccinated, homeschooled, incel butts!
Email is federated as well, but I never saw anything I could call email instance wars. You can use whichever you want, no one really cares.
Gmail vs Hotmail vs Yahoo was pretty big, and before that, AOL.
Gmail vs Hotmail was easy. Gmail started at 1GB for your emails. At the same time, Hotmail was 2MB. Yes M and B
I mean, email was text or richtext. Occasionally a 35 kB gif that you'd laugh at and then delete.
Part of the issue was that Hotmail was completely inept at blocking spam, which had lots of text and images. I ran out of space daily
I completely forgot that there was almost no spam filtering back then. It was awful. I takey smart machine learning spam filters for granted.
If I see an sbcglobal, aol, hotmail, or yahoo, I will assume tech illiteracy
haha, I do have a @hotmail.com account. Granted, nowadays I use it mainly as my "spam" account (to be clear: I'm not sending spam, it's the account I give when I'm required to give an email or create an account) but hotmail was a big thing in the old days before gmail and that account still has sentimental value to me.
I chose my Gmail name when I was invited to it (it was invitation-only at the time), and it's not the greatest name. I use it because I have decades of tuning it with filters and rules. But when Microsoft launched "outlook.com" I made an account with my real name as soon as I could, which I use for resumes and similar reasons.
I no longer assume Hotmail users are less literate than users of other email providers. Gmail or iCloud seem to be the default platforms for illiterate people today. Who only get an account because they have to for their phone. It's so weird to me that my kids think email is archaic. I was a teenager before my family got email. And yes, we had one family email address. We had one family computer and one family landline. I was in college before I got my own email address and telephone number (thanks to my dorm Landline). Yet to my kids, it might as well be a fax machine.
If I ever saw @aol.com as front desk in a hotel, I knew I was potentially in for a bad time!
What did @hotmail.com tell you?
Yeah, I definitely never judge people for having a comcast.net email address.
💀
What if there was an app that let you log in to multiple lemmy accounts at once, aggregated the lot into one seamless feed, and used the relevant account for each interaction? Maybe even going as far as to automatically cross-post any submission to duplicate communities and aggregate that too.
I'm actually working on this haha.
It's definitely a v2 feature, but it's in the works
Use wefwef.app
This would be the best of all worlds. Instances get to choose who to federate with, users get to choose want instances to use.
Sign me up.
@doopen @macisr I’m not sure why you would need multiple accounts actually. (Posted from mastodon).
Would an app that pulls directly from each server (anonymously) or an app that pulls from dedicated servers (while logged in/subbed) be better? The first is more efficient but the instance owners likely won’t be [financially] supported, while the latter requires duplication and is prone to defederation issues. In the end I suspect overcoming defederation will be a significant design goal of third party apps.
Don't we kinda already have them?
bombastic side eyes at Beehaw
I don’t want it to be mainstream. I just want it to be Good.
I mean, we already see small skirmishes here and there.
As long as there are more than two humans left, we'll always find something stupid to argue about
Will not!
Will too!
I guess Reddit is on a good track to eliminate flame wars.
Any good guides on all the instances?
I want to pick sides early so I can feast on the blood of those who dared choose differently.
Just stay away from Lemmy.nz we....I mean they are VERY southern
https://github.com/maltfield/awesome-lemmy-instances
Begun, the instance wars have.
Too late, it is.
What about the defederation of the wookies?
Already happening. Have you heard of Beehaw?
Competition is good. Competition keeps us strong.
It's not a war...
I swear people here have no damn idea what they're talking about...
But it is competition. When someone separates themselves now they are competing for the resources they decided not to share.
It wasn't ever intend as a competition either. If they're feeling overwhelmed and want to separate from big instances for a while, then they should be able to. Everyone's taking it super personal when it's not meant to be.
what about beehaw? i've seen it around, but know not of any instance wars.
Why is the Shower Thoughts community essentially meta discussion of Lemmy and not, well, shower thoughts?
Because lemmy is new and its one big circle jerk right now, and I like it!
Yeah peeps are in the honeymoon phase.
folks, I prepared the meringue and the butplugs, let's talk about lemmy...
lemmy is too new for its users to have used the shower yet
Wow this is a shower thought itself 😂
Just be glad we're actually taking showers.
Because that’s all we thinking about in the shower these days. Clever things to say about lemmy on lemmy.
Pretty grandiose to refer to discussions with a bit of trolling as a war.
Or, more likely, trolling with a bit of discussion.
You want a war, bruh? I'll fite you right now!!
I can just imagine some controversial post and the replies saying “of course it’s a lemmy.world user”
I mean--that's kind of already happened, hasn't it? The whole business with beehaw defederating is really just the first shots of the Instance Wars, and that's not even mentioning the pejorative view a lot of folks have for some instances (ahem, furries). I was accused of being a right-winger for even broaching the subject that beehaw defederating might not have been for entirely altruistic reasons.
I think we can expect to see a lot more of this in the future, especially once corporate players throw in their hats and realize they can weaponize human sociology as part of their EEE strategy. Once you have most of the users and most of the communities, just wall off (defederate) anybody you see as a threat to hegemony. Sure, people can migrate, but there's a mental cost associated with that that many aren't willing to pay.
Begun, the Instance Wars have. Beans.
How do I get in on Team Beans?
Also, what's the deal with beans?
Your guess is as good as mine. It's basically a viral meme, far as I can tell.
Nevertheless, if you're wondering how you can get involved, don't worry. If you're here, you're already on Team Beans.
of course it's a comment by a reddhat.com user
it seems my prophecy has become self-fulfilled
I have been running a Mastodon instance since like 2016/17 and this has been quietly happening for the entire time I've been on the fediverse. (I can't check the exact date right now as I'm in the middle of upgrading it.)
Do you want to be in the Anime Girl Who Posts Nazi Memes Fediverse? How about the Queer Furry Fediverse? Or maybe you'd rather be in the Mocking Shitposts Fediverse? Perhaps you want the Everyone Has A Photo Of A Human And Thinks Federating With Facebook's Activitypub Is Actually A Good Idea Fediverse? Or how about the TERF/Gender-Critical Fediverse? Or the "Standalone" Social Site That Is Actually A Fediverse Instance With Federation Disabled And The Credits Removed In Violation Of The Source License?
Some of these Fediverses will happily talk with others. Some of them will rapidly defederate from others as soon as they encounter a place that clearly belongs to a Fediverse they are incompatible with. Some of them quickly get defederated from the Fediverses they are incompatible with. Some of them look at the #fediblock tag, some to keep aware of places worth pre-emptively blocking to make a chill place to talk, some to look for fellow people who have been cast out of someone else's chill zones.
Is this a bad thing? I thought kind of, curating who you associate with is one of the benefits
well said
The important thing here is to get back to social networks and away from social media. The important entities here are the humans, not the memes or the money or the uplems or whatever we eventually call them.
Humans connecting with humans in ways that advance our collective well-being is the promise of social networks that Facebook and Twitter started. Once they saw how many users they had (and the bills for hosting and coding) they got hyper focused on making money.
Hypothetically we can avoid that fate here by having the job of hosting and coding spread out among many. Especially if we also come up with a way to crowd fund the costs of hosting and coding.
Leading the pack: beans
Uplemmied you because yo make great points (and also because of "uplems", not gonna lie)
Isn't it already? Lemmygrad, exploding-heads and other extremist instances have already been defederated. But the main feature is the federation itself, which also creates powerful alliances between instances with common values. Platform-wise, it will be just a matter of difference of use and leaning, but federation alliances will work the same
What are they extremist about?
The fact that all instances talk to each other, makes me think we likely won't have wars.
I mean I'm subscribed to beehaw and kbin communities. And everything in between.
That's totally something a kbin user would say.
I'm new.. What are Beehaw and kbin?
Beehaw is a large lemmy instance which is notable for defederating from some other large instances recently due to their own admin policy. Kbin is an alternate federated platform similar to Lemmy, and the two can mostly work with each other.
Is kbin not an instance of Lemmy? As in, using the Lemmy source code?
Kbin and lemmy are different implementations of the activitypub protocol https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/ActivityPub
What are instances and federations?
I just thought that it was Reddit, but with a different backend. But people are talking like there's more to it than that...
Ok so Lemmy itself isn't really a single app or service like Reddit, rather it's a software project that people can run on their own servers. It's a bit like email in that regard, anyone can run an email server, or you can just join someone else's like Gmail (think of instances as being like these). Instances can have their own rules and customisations, but they all still talk email (in lemmys case, something called activitypub) and work together, and you can send and receive content from other people even if they're on a different email provider (lemmy instance). Federating is basically two different instances agreeing to connect and share their content with each other. This generally happens by default. Defederating is the opposite, deciding to stop sending and receiving content from a particular instance.
Email is also a federated platform just like Lemmy. You can have email clients that talk to email servers, but "email" itself isn't really an app you can just run, it's a collection of apps and servers that all work together. Lemmy is very similar.
Also worth noting, the language (or protocol, to use the technical term) that Lemmy uses to talk between instances is called ActivityPub, and a whole bunch of different services such as Mastodon and Kbin use this! Together, these services are known as the "Fediverse" and the really cool thing is that they can all talk to each other because they speak the same language! If you want to, you can technically browse and post on Lemmy from Mastodon, and vice versa, even though they're completely different services. While it's a bit tricky with Mastodon since its much more like Twitter than Reddit, Kbin works really well with Lemmy and is generally interchangeable. People on Lemmy can join in on Kbin and vice versa. The whole system is really neat and if it sounds interesting, you should absolutely google it some more and learn all about it! It's a community project so if you like it and want to get involved, you can help create any part of this from contributing to Lemmy's code to running your own instance.
Thanks for the explanation and the time taken to write it.
I'm starting to figure it out as I stumble my way around it. For example I've found that Lemmy.World (my 'home' instance) isn't big on NSFW stuff, so I've made an account on another instance and linked the two.
Thanks again!
Somehow, taco bell will win this war, too.
In the year 2027, Tacobell, after buying 137 lemmy instances dedicated to food, coordinated an ideology attack and bought the last fast food franchise in the world, pizza hut, in what is known as the franchise wars.
Taco Bell and Pizza Hut have been under the same corporate ownership for decades, tho. Pepsi spun them out in 1997, fully 30 years before your dystopia.
Taco Bell and Pizza Hut are already owned by the same company, so maybe the wars have already begun
They out pizza'd the hut.
I truly hope this type of hierarchical thinking can stay fun and not create the kind of grating pomposity that pervades every bloody animalistic thing. I want us to grow beyond childish competitiveness.
Ladder of evolution speed run commence
The instance that someone is hosted on is (almost) completely irrelevant to which communities they can join.
I am in a local region instance but can still access any communities on Lemmy.world, Lemmy.ml and even other federated platforms like kbin.social
I may be restricted on what I can do in each of those instances; it there is some disagreement between Aussie.zone and sh.itjust.works I may not be able to post about camping to my preferred community.
Only if the instance wars are described with a star wars screen crawl
E X P O S I T I O N
It has already started :) I'd say around 60% of major instances block exploding-heads, burggit and/or lemmygrad. Lemmygrad and EH in turn defederate a shitton of instances as well due to ideological reasons. Most "civility" or "law" related instances block piracy instances. The dbzer0 piracy instance blocks anything seen as too right-wingy cuz the owner is an anarchocommunist or something. LGBT instances are blocking & promoting for other instances to block instances that aren't too friendly to LGBT or are simply not moderating or even promoting homophobia & related topics. I actually made a tool called federation-checker.vercel.app/ that checks where an instance stands in the federation "war", so I know what instances to register onto if I wanna see some content that has been blocked by the instances I'm on.
Thanks God.
That is pretty cool, but uhh maybe not user friendly. I entered "lemm.ee" and it says "Not a lemmy instance".
It would be cool if it could pre-enter the HTTP referrer, then typing might not even be needed.
lemm.ee crew represent ✊
The fact that things get divided up by the community itself is a positive, not a negative. The "major" network of instances don't have to put up with extreme things on any end of the spectrum while those who do want to take part in that get their own bubble and won't have to cry about censorship.
Instance meme wars.
Each participating instance must choose a "side" from a selection of political systems, religions, world views, etc. whose views it (the instance) has to represent.
The war takes place in a community that is unlocked for all instances, or on a separate instance.
All instances are listed and numbered. The opponent allocation is then done by a /random bot number generator.
The evaluation is then done by a /Poll of all instances.
The loser is kicked out and the new opponent for the winning instance is chosen again by /random bot.
I'm from lemmy-37 where spiderman stopped the thug and uncle Ben survives
Where can I sign up?
sounds lit. do you all take butter and salt with your popcorn?
When you play the game of instances, you either get popular or you die. (I don't think that it's going to work that way, but with enough popularity corporations are gonna want to fuck with it for sure.)
Die? What is it with assuming that small instances will inevitably die? There are people out there who want small instances, they will keep them alive.
Have you tried nutritional yeast?
I'm sorry, but I read that and thought "marmite on popcorn?!"
And I found that idea intriguing.
Not quite the same thing as Marmite. Might be a North American thing?
https://www.amazon.ca/Bragg-Nutritional-Yeast-Seasoning-Premium/dp/B00EHVN1S6
Ah, thanks! I'll be on the look out for this.
It's quite tasty and if one is feeling very generous it could almost but not quite be a substitute for parmesan cheese.
I've also seen it referred to as "nooch" in certain contexts.
hippy
As long as there are individuals, groups will be sought after and created based on the need of belonging and the need to different from another group
Were there mailserver wars?
Yes. In the mid 90's, anyone with an AOL or Juno email address was a noob. Many people on the internet had .edu email addresses, because it was pretty hard to get internet access unless you were affiliated with a university. The rise of Hotmail and Yahoo mail ended up removing the association between email address and internet service provider, to the point where people who were using ISP-provided email addresses by the early 2000's were seen as unsophisticated and usually older.
And now my parents won't change ISP because they don't want to change email addresses
Please do instance wars also on PeerTube, it's noone land right now.
The problem with transitioning from YouTube to PeerTube is that without a critical mass of users it's just not worth it for creators. But without creators the users won't go there, because there's no content.
Lemmy has that problem to a much lesser extend because this kind of platform is way more focused on the interaction between users. Or put differently, everyone is a creator here.
A tool that uploads and updates videos across multiple platforms while syncing descriptions, tags, etc is something that would be incredibly handy for creators while also being something that PeerTube could piggyback off of. "Why not upload my video to another platform I've never heard of? It can only lead to more exposure."
You are right. Lemmy and Mastodon are user-centric while Funkwhale or Peertube are more on the artist/creator. For this reason I encourage people to use these sites, supporting artists who decide to use these platforms.
so the owners and mods of instances will have to compete to provide a good experience. I don’t see a problem with this
Who does that select for though.
Those with the most time? The most money? The most aggressive approach?
Competition doesn't tend to produce holistic quality; only efficiency.
Yeah, I don't think instances being competitive with each other would be good for the culture. It'll just produce isolationism, elitism & hostility.
Lemmy.world or bust
Absolutely. I don't think that's a bad thing.
What I do worry about somewhat is multiple forks of the codebase that differ so much as to cause bugs when instances try to interoperate.
My personal hope is that the ActivityPub standard prevents this from happening. After all, I've seen decent federation between Lemmy and KBin and they're entirely different platforms, nevermind a fork of the same software.
This will likely follow a similar pattern to email, since it's starting from a very similar position.
At some point people will begin to assign identities to instances and imagine (rightly or wrongly) that being on an instance says something about a person. People do that with cars, shoes, and yes, even email domains.
From a technical perspective, right now Lemmy is as anonymous as can be — I've yet to see an instance that requires ANY kind of verification. I didn't need to provide an email address, phone number, or any other identifying information to sign up. Didn't even need to solve a captcha. I just choose a name and set a password and BOOM! I was in.
Once upon a time, email worked this way, too. Then came the spammers, scammers, and other bad actors, and this was deemed untenable. Nowadays, any email provider that allows anonymous signup is likely to be blocked by most of the email-using world. You won't be able to use them to sign up for other services, and you might not even have your mail accepted by other providers.
This will definitely become a problem as Lemmy becomes popular, and instance admins will need to crack down, lest they be overrun and defederated by the rest of the world.
I'm not sure what the answer is. This is a problem that has not been adequately solved, IMHO. A few bad apples spoil the bunch. That's been true since long before the Internet.
No joke. During my interview for a bell company my email came up for whatever reason and thier response was "oh! You use Gmail!". Like I was hired on the spot because of it. It was very strange.
Might be true on sdf, but on lemmy.world and sh.itjust.works, there are captchas and email addresses.
I had to verify with email to sign up for this?
Actually tbh I'm not even sure what anyone here is even talking about...federations and instances? I thought this was just a new Reddit but with a different back end.
Okay, it makes sense that some instances are doing that already. I signed up for a few and none of them did, but I'm not on lemmy.world. I'm on lemmy.sdf.org (and a couple others, but this is my main one).
u/kale@lemmy.zip already gave a great explanation. So here we are, three different people using three different servers, all talking in the same thread and generally not even noticing the difference. Neat, isn't it!
Lemmy is a federated link aggregator and forum. Kind of like a hybrid between email and Reddit. I'm a member of Lemmy.zip, but I'm posting on another Lemmy instance (I forget where this post is, Lemmy.world, right?). Lemmy.zip and lemmy.world are "federated", which means if users on one instance interact with users on another, both servers will sync this activity. Lemmy.world will accept lemmy.zip user posts.
And user names are only unique for a server. Just like "chunkylover53@aol.com" is a different email than "chunkylover53@hotmail.com".
Community searching shows the community name and the server where it's hosted. Even though I only have an account on Lemmy.zip, I can subscribe, comment, and post on communities from other instances, as long as lemmy.zip is federated with them.
Recently, Beehaw de-federated from much of the fedi-verse. This means their software works the same, but prevents their users from interacting with the rest of the community, and the rest of the community from interacting with their communities and users.
It's complicated and annoying, but necessary to be federated to prevent the fate of Digg and Reddit.
Also, one instance could require email and 2FA to be safe, and choose to de-federate from an instance that has no verification and becomes full of spammers. Or, someone could create a Lemmy instance that requires verification of identity (like AMA used to do, or the old Twitter checkmark), so if John.Oliver from the "Lemmy.OnePercent" instance posts, you know it's the real John Oliver. There's benefits and complications from federation.
So if I'm understanding it correctly, Lemmy is the Federation and .world is the instance? And then within that instance are it's own communuties?
Not quite. Lemmy.world is the instance. I'm from the instance lemmy.sdf.org and I also hang out on feddit.uk . The instance names are just URLs (.world, .uk, and org are all like .com).
Handwavy explanation because I'm fuzzy on details: Federation is the magical interconnection between instance lemmy.sdf.org and instance lemmy.world that allows me to see posts/threads/users on the lemmy.world instance .
Hmmm...I think this is the best explanation I've had so far.
I certainly don't mean this negatively, but I get the impression a lot of the people here that actually understand it are also bad at explaining it to normies like me. And people like me are very much in the minority at this stage in the growth.
Aww, thank you.
It's a hazard of really knowing what you're talking about that leads to overestimating what other people know. I don't have that problem 😉. Relevant xkcd: https://xkcd.com/2501/ .
@fluke is this a joke?
@fluke in case this is not a joke, yes instances host communities, but the lemmy.world is just a domain name. Federation just means lemmy.world and another server/instance such as geddit.social can share and exchange communities, comments, and threads they host with each other. I'd be happy to answer additional questions you might have, but I'm not as expert as I don't share links in that format much.
Is what a joke?
Wait - what kind of proof of identity do Gmail, outlook, Yahoo, etc require to make an email address?
I just hope that most people will be open-minded and that most instances will federate. But that's probably being optimistic.
No, this is exactly what will happen, though there will be bubbles of similar minded instances, no doubt, but given the federate nature of this all, I don't think someone will make their instance incompatible to the rest, except of course some corpos get their hands on it... looking at meta
I remember the war between /r/me_irl and /r/meirl back in the day on Reddit
Me_irl gang for life personally 😤
It is absolutely already a thing
of course a lemmy.nz user would say that.
Spotted the Aussie
Screw you, you...
...wait. You're on my team. Rock on!
Does it really matter? So long as they remain federalized you can still access and interact with those instances.
Federated*
Thanks, language confusion
True, but i think that it could as well come to "if you're from this instance you are a bad person" situation. I don't care like you say, but some people will.
Sounds good to me since there are genuinely bad people on social media, often using it as a platform to groom more reactionaries and extremists.
Corporate social media has always been slow to react to these groups and they often take the stance of "as long as they don't go fully mask off" in order to preserve as many ad impressions as possible.
With the community in control, they can act much faster to limit astro-turfing and hate speech, pushing the far-right back into the obscure shitholes of the internet.
I kind of disagree, not totally, i agree in the fact that freedom breeds assholes, but i have to say as well that freedom breeds freedom and better and more intelligent people as well. I don't think that we need witch hunts or bulllying to build safe instances, just intelligence. Now my opinion about your last point is that there's hate speech everywhere, not just from your right, your left is pretty extremist as well, and pretty full of assholes. Assholes are everywhere. As always, the rule of thumb is think for yourself and don't be an asshole. All that said, this is just my opinion man.
I can imagine other instances defederating from each other over minor or uncontrollable reasons. I'd hate to keep switching to new instances if that were to happen.
Then I'll going to self host my own instances.
I'm gonna host my own instance, with blackjack, and hookers!
With blackjack. And hookers. In fact, forget the instance!
This is the way. Freedom by design.
Most future proof solution, actually.
Its actually not that expensive especially if it is a small instance from my very small amount of research
Go for it, that's the beauty of this!
This very much feels to me like the beginning of a Civ game, where we're all fresh nations with different starting conditions that are exploring our territories and building up armies....
The first schism is gonna be fairly dramatic, I'll bet.
Beehaw is going to pull a Ghandi when their negative aggression value rolls over...
Fun fact: This bug is a myth.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_Gandhi
That's sounds ... actually like something I want to witness
Good. This is what free speech looks like contrary what the muskmen think. Anyone can start and share but no one's entitled to be listened to.
God, I never thought of that or I would have transitioned here months ago to start prepping.
Start editing those memes and stocking up on beans.
You never know what the other side might weaponize.
Or, just make it fun friendly competition and start a quiz show like tournament of teams from each instance, no need for war.
How about a red-blue team style hacking tournament, but battle royale?
I'd prefer if it was up to users to block instances, and maybe have defaults handled by the instances themselves.
You can host your own instance too.
Forgive my ignorance but if you federate an instance, does that instance have to federate you back? In order for you to comment/upvote/see posts etc?
Nope, assuming the default settings - that is, they've not explicitly decided to allowlist selected servers or block yours - there's nothing that instance has to do if you subscribe to a community on it.
They'll push content to you and it just magically works.
TLDR: federation is basically a push from the origin server (the one the community belongs to) to any server that subscribes to that community.
If I made my own instance with only me as a member and I only subscribe to showerthoughts.lemmy.fmhy.lm then that's the only community/push update my instance would get?
I'm not the right person to ask.
Where could I go to learn how to host my own instance? I’d be interested if I could control my own up time and be the only user so I didn’t have to worry about moderating other users.
Eventually? We already had that two weeks ago!
https://lemmy.ca/ Best instance in NA.
I rolled my eyes at the idea of instance wars. Then I saw this post claiming that my instance is the best, and I almost upvoted.
Take this as a stark reminder that a monster lives in each of us.
https://midwest.social can't beat the great lakes.
Reminds me of the good ol IRC days.
IRC was fun, then people chose corporate poisoned simplicity (AOL, MSN) and that spelt the doom for protocols, until now.
Because you’ve been down that road, Neo, and I know that’s not where you want to be.
The kids just don't know the struggle
Technically Truth and Gab are activitypub compatible right? We can already fight with them
You mean this is built on an open standard that can go beyond lemmy?
Already in it. Where've YOU been? I'm in the trenches here for lemmy.one
It's like consolewars (fuck Nintendon't) but more federated.
What's the Gentoo equivalent of an instance?
Building a CLI ActivityPub client from source.
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It's so dumb, yet it's so natural that even knowing it's dumb sometimes people end up devolving into tribe wars by complete accident.
And then some do it because it's the easiest way to get people to do what you want to them to do. It's definitely best to try to keep it in the back of your mind as much as possible to avoid falling into the habit.
One of the most enjoyable bits in REAMDE was about how the users of an MMORPG split into two warring factions over whether they preferred the default color palette or a custom version.
Got a linkie? I wanna read details
Maybe that would be a good community. You know, like 2westernEurope4u but instance-based memes and banter.
I really hope that it'll be something we'll be able to avoid. We're all on the same federated system, we don't need to do this pointless "I would listen to you but you're a instance.lemmy.com user" unless they're from an instance that supports hateful content.
So I shouldn’t make a post asking which is the best lemmy community under 1k? I am tempted to create like 10 accounts and just hang out in these local “slow” communities.
Tbh I’m still confused on the differences and have literally zero attachment to the one I chose
Friendly discourse. If it gets bad maybe instances might black each other.
Just some blood for the Blood God, only natural.
Big instances are gonna have the most easy victims you know.
I mean there were subreddit wars so i think it is bound to happen.
I would prefer people to be spread across different forums and form their own identity
This is the way. After seeing how lemmy.world handled the load, I created a new account on another instance with less people.
I would prefer people to be spread across toast.
Because people are my jam.
Then the Highlander games will begin.
Garden Wars, more like
Kbin for the win
Cool, yet another shard
Naah we'll be the referee :)
def prefer small batch instances, keep it wierd
I only use ethically sourced, farm-to-table instances.
Nothing like good doers to make the world go around.
I only consume memes in sub-Dunbar communities where each person has achieved at least a red belt in karate.
Mastodon is on a decline already. It is different than, say, Lemmy. Mastodon's contents are produced mainly by mainstream content creators, and they do not migrate from Twitter its counterpart.
I think it would be better if everybody selfhosted a instance of their own. Make it super hard and complicated to find communities but, keep things nice and clean
Yeah we need an opt-in central registry of communities and people.
Obviously lemmy.robotra.sh is the best one because it's mine and only people I know can be there ¯\(ツ)/¯
SA vs Fark vs Ebaums all over again. Can't wait.
Can we just go back to BBS where you have dial in with your land line to post on a board? The difficulty of use acted like an awesome protection from any community growing too large too fast and was super easy to moderate. I just want to pull my socks up to my knees, yell at the clouds, and dial in to the NG BBS...
A lot of comments are assuming a negative outcome but there could be some fun and positive 'wars'. Best Instance Photoshop Battle anyone?
I think we'll gravitate to our own tribes. R/Donald fans will hang out on one instance. BernieBros on another.
Decentralisation means we'll be in our own bubbles more.
What was good about Twitter and Reddit was that it was the Agora, the commons, where you bump into others who really need you to see their cats or Excel art while you browse for your own picadillos.
True, your twitter example exemplifies it for me. When i used it a lot, like 7 years ago, it was for knowing and meeting people in my zone and interest range. Now it feels like tik tok. It's so unpersonal.
The difference between the Agora and reddit was that you could be banned from reddit without any major violation.
I’m sure rights were relatively constricted in ancient Greece but nothing like what we find in privately-owned cyberspace.
And reddit is still there, for those who want the Agora. I personally was banned from reddit so I’m very happy to come to a place where it’s harder to ban me just because I don’t conform.
Until someone is willing to build a centralized place that is devoted to free speech, siloing is the price to pay for the architectural decisions necessary to permit all voices to participate.
thanks to the federation of communities, nah.
The instance drama is kinda fun tbh
It's like instead of getting mad at reddit/Twitter, we can talk to the people who run the communities directly (usually)