I think it is a big mistake to underestimate the effect of having reached the critical mass of users. It will not die easily (spez is working hard to achieve this), much less quickly.
I suspect what the article is describing is actually happening, but I’m curious how the writer a couple of quotes deep goes about identifying “emotionally sticky nodes”. They are using verbiage that makes it sound like they are describing something objective, but I have my doubts.
The article does kind of define it, but does a poor job.
An emotionally sticky node is a user who makes other users stay on the site. Examples of this for Reddit would be accounts like poem_for_your_sprog, ShittyWatercolor, Shittymorph, or wil.
There are others, of course, that you may not be able to name - /r/California was mostly kept alive by /u/BlankVerse, who posted 85% of all the articles to that subreddit. You'd never notice unless you paid attention to usernames. Similarly, a small percentage of people made a large percentage of Reddit's OC. Typically you couldn't name them, either, but you'd know if they weren't there because they gave Reddit a soul.
Reddit started off as a bunch of bots reposting links they found, without even a comment section. Eventually real people came and started posting nerd stuff (like programming articles) alongside the bots. Enough of a critical mass was created that a comment section was added, making old Reddit look like what HackerNews or Tildes look like today. The programming and porn were sent to different subsections of the site for the people who don't want to see such things (these became the first subreddits). The default subreddits were slowly created, then anyone could make their own subreddits for their own topics.
Still, it was largely posts to things found elsewhere. People went to Reddit as part of their trip through several other websites. They'd usually gather what they found during that trip and repost it to Reddit. OC wasn't expected; reposts were encouraged. By the early 2010s, a lot of the pictures on Reddit were mainly 4chan reposts. People who had a lot of stuff saved from other sites were the "emotionally sticky nodes" and people would come to Reddit to see stuff that was explicitly gathered from everywhere else - hence why Reddit was the "frontpage of the internet", an aggregate of what people had found elsewhere.
Eventually we started to see OC for the first time. Advice Animals sprung from 4chan memes and really started to go viral across Reddit. Reddit users started making their own native advice animal formats and now Reddit was no longer just "things from elsewhere on the internet" but new content you couldn't see elsewhere. Soon these people making OC became the "emotionally sticky nodes", keeping users on the site.
And, of course, there are other things who were "emotionally sticky" without necessarily posting memes. Reddit became a great place to aggregate news at-a-glance. This is because of the moderation of the news and politics subreddits, ensuring that things posted to their subs were actual articles, post names were real headlines (no editorializing!), and the page wasn't littered with random YouTube videos or self-posts or images or whatever. Good moderation meant that you could go to /r/news or /r/worldnews and trust that you were getting the same effect as looking at the headlines of a newspaper. Similarly, the 2012 election had /r/politics become a great source of information and discussion about the US Presidental Race. These sorts of things made Reddit a useful site and kept people coming back.
Even now, Reddit still has "emotionally sticky" places. They could be individual users like the ones I mentioned above, or they could be entire subreddits that aren't quite captured here on Lemmy/Kbin yet. Neither Lemmy nor Kbin have great mod tools, and a lot of mod teams here are inexperienced and not as aggressive as Reddit mod teams are. You can argue this is a good thing, but aggressive moderation really matters for places like the news communities where legitimacy comes from users avoiding editorializing. This means that these places aren't a good replacement for Reddit (yet) - subreddits where moderation is important are still "emotionally sticky" because nothing can compete with them. (This is why it's important that Lemmy develop good mod teams and good mod tools!)
There are oodles of niche communities that you've never heard of that haven't come over, either - for example, !modeltrains (@modeltrains) and !nscalemodeltrains are niche communities on Reddit, but neither of their fediverse counterparts have much activity (other than me). People on Reddit thus don't want to leave their niche community because it doesn't have any activity over here, and because there's no activity over here, nobody wants to come over here to start activity - meaning there's no activity over here. That's why it's important to make sure you contribute often to niche communities you care about, even if your content isn't "good" - there needs to be something to lure emotionally sticky nodes here and get people to jump over.
That said, some places absolutely have made the jump successfully (!196). But for most places there's a while to go before Reddit gets to the point where it can't maintain itself as a site.
There's a link to the full thing. It should have more context
Not really. There is some discussion of "emotionally sticky nodes", but they aren't really defined, just described. Which is fine, and it's actually an interesting article, but when you start throwing around terms like "nodes" it makes it sound like you want your readers to think you're talking about something that is empirically valid, not just giving your opinion.
Reddit is a bunch of people asking each other to rate them now, including their clothes and wedding dresses. I don't understand the appeal of any of those subs, especially when we already know some of them were specifically created by 4chan to try to get people to kill themselves 😬
This article kinda makes me hope for reddit to survive. I want all the toxic, angry assholes to stay there, not desperately flee to the fediverse in search of their fix.
If they all want to pile into exploding-heads, it would at least make them easy to contain.
I wonder if there could be a way to effectively shadow-ban entire instances.
There is. Lemmy.ml is currently shadowbanning kbin for unknown reasons.
Lemmy.ml is blocking the bots kbin uses for federation. The devs have ignored anyone asking why. It's been weeks and only applies to Lemmy.ml, so it appears to be intentional. They're running slightly different code on their flagship site than what all the other instances use (which makes me wonder what else Lemmy.ml has changed compared to what's publicly available).
I believe that's what "defederation" is. It's when a server decides to no longer import or share content with another instance.
No, defederation isn't shadowed. If an instance defederates from you, you stop receiving content from them, and it's pretty obvious to anyone paying attention that you've been defederated.
Plus, on Lemmy at least, block lists are publicly viewable.
That's not how I understood defederation. If an instance defederates from you, that instance stops seeing stuff from your instance. But not necessarily the other way around, as defederation is a one-way action.
So if the Cow instance defederates from the Poopie instance, people from the Poopie instance can still see content and comments from Cow users. But Cow users cannot see content or comments from Poopie users. For the scenario you're describing to take place, the Poopie instance would also need to defederate from the Cow instance.
That said, it's still not quite shadowbanning. The admins of the defederated Poopie instance would be aware that Cows were not seeing their content. It would depend on the admins to inform the Poopie users that they've been defederated. If the users were not aware of the defederation, then it'd effectively be a shadowban.
If an instance defederates from you, that instance stops seeing stuff from your instance. But not necessarily the other way around, as defederation is a one-way action.
I invite you to check out, say, technology@beehive.org from lemmy.world, and from beehaw.org directly. You'll notice that .world isn't receiving updates from beehaw. A couple of posts seem to have filtered through somehow, but there are almost no posts or comments coming from beehaw.
The group is completely out of sync with its origin. And it's not because .world has blocked beehaw. Beehaw very much still appears under .world's list of linked websites.
Blocked instances are blocked, and when you block communication between sites, that's usually a two-way street.
Edit: Hi Lemmy users! You can't see the screenshots I've attached to this comment. I've just learned this thanks to @B1naryShad0w. If you'd like to see my comments with the screenshots, please view this comment thread via kbin by clicking this link.
(1/2)
I've looked at a few examples, and I'm just super confused now. I've also tried searching for a simple explanation of what exactly defederation does, and I keep seeing conflicting descriptions.
Let's look at two examples (please bear with me as I only know how to attach one image to one comment at a time.) On this comment let's look at AskLemmy, a lemmy.world community, from Beehaw:
Notice that all threads (with one exception) were posted almost a month ago when defederation happened. That one exception was a Beehaw user who posted to AskLemmy 5 days ago. So we can see that BeeHaw, having defederated from lemmy.world, is blocking 100% of new content from this lemmy.world community, except for that one thread published by a Beehaw user who seems to be out of the loop 5 days ago.
Mostly makes sense to me so far. Beehaw defedearted from lemmy.world, so Beehaw can't see new stuff from this lemmy.world community. A little weird that there was a new post by a Beehaw user, but that still makes some sense with my previous understanding of how defederation worked, since I think(?) defederation is one-way. After all, if defederation was two-way, then how did a Beehaw user make a thread on lemmy.world?
(2/2)
Now lets look at Beehaw's technology community from lemmy.world:
On the one hand, this is not blocking 100% of the content from this community, which seems consistent with what I originally thought. Lemmy.world is not defederated with beehaw, so lemmy.world can see new content from Beehaw's communities.
But on the other hand, there is a ton of content missing. And it's not just federated content taking awhile to move from instance to instance, as I'm seeing posts from the last 24 hrs from Kbin that are not showing up on lemmy.world. So it appears that there is content that's being blocked from getting to lemmy.world. But it's not 100% of the content that's being blocked?
To make matters more confusing, I can see content published by Beehaw users on a Beehaw community from lemmy.world. Wtf is going on.
I appreciate the effort and have also verified your analysis myself to be true. However, and I don't know if it's just me, but I don't see any images attached to your comments.
Thanks for calling that out. It looks like attaching images directly to a comment only works for kbin instances. This is what it looks like from kbin.social. I just tried viewing this thread from lemmy.world and the images were not showing up.
To be honest, I don't want to go through the effort of editing my comments to correct it right now. But in the future I'll go back to hosting images and linking them in my comments, so anyone from any instance can see them. That's a shame, because attaching images to comments in Kbin is super convenient. Oh well! Thanks again for letting me know.
Yeah, what was unthinkable a few months ago is now an ever growing reality.
If ever reddit had a crisis management division, the people there didn't understand what reddit really was.
Even spez forgot what made reddit special. Or a very big possibility is he never knew it from the beginning at all. It can be argued that reddit was the vision of aaron.
Nevermind crisis management do they not have one sane capable PR person on call??
unrelated but these ai generated article images are fucking creepy
Reddit Migration@kbin.social – 0 points – 
I think it is a big mistake to underestimate the effect of having reached the critical mass of users. It will not die easily (spez is working hard to achieve this), much less quickly.
I suspect what the article is describing is actually happening, but I’m curious how the writer a couple of quotes deep goes about identifying “emotionally sticky nodes”. They are using verbiage that makes it sound like they are describing something objective, but I have my doubts.
The article does kind of define it, but does a poor job.
An emotionally sticky node is a user who makes other users stay on the site. Examples of this for Reddit would be accounts like poem_for_your_sprog, ShittyWatercolor, Shittymorph, or wil.
There are others, of course, that you may not be able to name - /r/California was mostly kept alive by /u/BlankVerse, who posted 85% of all the articles to that subreddit. You'd never notice unless you paid attention to usernames. Similarly, a small percentage of people made a large percentage of Reddit's OC. Typically you couldn't name them, either, but you'd know if they weren't there because they gave Reddit a soul.
Reddit started off as a bunch of bots reposting links they found, without even a comment section. Eventually real people came and started posting nerd stuff (like programming articles) alongside the bots. Enough of a critical mass was created that a comment section was added, making old Reddit look like what HackerNews or Tildes look like today. The programming and porn were sent to different subsections of the site for the people who don't want to see such things (these became the first subreddits). The default subreddits were slowly created, then anyone could make their own subreddits for their own topics.
Still, it was largely posts to things found elsewhere. People went to Reddit as part of their trip through several other websites. They'd usually gather what they found during that trip and repost it to Reddit. OC wasn't expected; reposts were encouraged. By the early 2010s, a lot of the pictures on Reddit were mainly 4chan reposts. People who had a lot of stuff saved from other sites were the "emotionally sticky nodes" and people would come to Reddit to see stuff that was explicitly gathered from everywhere else - hence why Reddit was the "frontpage of the internet", an aggregate of what people had found elsewhere.
Eventually we started to see OC for the first time. Advice Animals sprung from 4chan memes and really started to go viral across Reddit. Reddit users started making their own native advice animal formats and now Reddit was no longer just "things from elsewhere on the internet" but new content you couldn't see elsewhere. Soon these people making OC became the "emotionally sticky nodes", keeping users on the site.
And, of course, there are other things who were "emotionally sticky" without necessarily posting memes. Reddit became a great place to aggregate news at-a-glance. This is because of the moderation of the news and politics subreddits, ensuring that things posted to their subs were actual articles, post names were real headlines (no editorializing!), and the page wasn't littered with random YouTube videos or self-posts or images or whatever. Good moderation meant that you could go to /r/news or /r/worldnews and trust that you were getting the same effect as looking at the headlines of a newspaper. Similarly, the 2012 election had /r/politics become a great source of information and discussion about the US Presidental Race. These sorts of things made Reddit a useful site and kept people coming back.
Even now, Reddit still has "emotionally sticky" places. They could be individual users like the ones I mentioned above, or they could be entire subreddits that aren't quite captured here on Lemmy/Kbin yet. Neither Lemmy nor Kbin have great mod tools, and a lot of mod teams here are inexperienced and not as aggressive as Reddit mod teams are. You can argue this is a good thing, but aggressive moderation really matters for places like the news communities where legitimacy comes from users avoiding editorializing. This means that these places aren't a good replacement for Reddit (yet) - subreddits where moderation is important are still "emotionally sticky" because nothing can compete with them. (This is why it's important that Lemmy develop good mod teams and good mod tools!)
There are oodles of niche communities that you've never heard of that haven't come over, either - for example, !modeltrains (@modeltrains) and !nscalemodeltrains are niche communities on Reddit, but neither of their fediverse counterparts have much activity (other than me). People on Reddit thus don't want to leave their niche community because it doesn't have any activity over here, and because there's no activity over here, nobody wants to come over here to start activity - meaning there's no activity over here. That's why it's important to make sure you contribute often to niche communities you care about, even if your content isn't "good" - there needs to be something to lure emotionally sticky nodes here and get people to jump over.
That said, some places absolutely have made the jump successfully (!196). But for most places there's a while to go before Reddit gets to the point where it can't maintain itself as a site.
There's a link to the full thing. It should have more context
Not really. There is some discussion of "emotionally sticky nodes", but they aren't really defined, just described. Which is fine, and it's actually an interesting article, but when you start throwing around terms like "nodes" it makes it sound like you want your readers to think you're talking about something that is empirically valid, not just giving your opinion.
Reddit is a bunch of people asking each other to rate them now, including their clothes and wedding dresses. I don't understand the appeal of any of those subs, especially when we already know some of them were specifically created by 4chan to try to get people to kill themselves 😬
This article kinda makes me hope for reddit to survive. I want all the toxic, angry assholes to stay there, not desperately flee to the fediverse in search of their fix.
If they all want to pile into exploding-heads, it would at least make them easy to contain.
I wonder if there could be a way to effectively shadow-ban entire instances.
There is. Lemmy.ml is currently shadowbanning kbin for unknown reasons.
Lemmy.ml is blocking the bots kbin uses for federation. The devs have ignored anyone asking why. It's been weeks and only applies to Lemmy.ml, so it appears to be intentional. They're running slightly different code on their flagship site than what all the other instances use (which makes me wonder what else Lemmy.ml has changed compared to what's publicly available).
Yikes, wonder why
I believe that's what "defederation" is. It's when a server decides to no longer import or share content with another instance.
No, defederation isn't shadowed. If an instance defederates from you, you stop receiving content from them, and it's pretty obvious to anyone paying attention that you've been defederated.
Plus, on Lemmy at least, block lists are publicly viewable.
That's not how I understood defederation. If an instance defederates from you, that instance stops seeing stuff from your instance. But not necessarily the other way around, as defederation is a one-way action.
So if the Cow instance defederates from the Poopie instance, people from the Poopie instance can still see content and comments from Cow users. But Cow users cannot see content or comments from Poopie users. For the scenario you're describing to take place, the Poopie instance would also need to defederate from the Cow instance.
That said, it's still not quite shadowbanning. The admins of the defederated Poopie instance would be aware that Cows were not seeing their content. It would depend on the admins to inform the Poopie users that they've been defederated. If the users were not aware of the defederation, then it'd effectively be a shadowban.
I invite you to check out, say, technology@beehive.org from lemmy.world, and from beehaw.org directly. You'll notice that .world isn't receiving updates from beehaw. A couple of posts seem to have filtered through somehow, but there are almost no posts or comments coming from beehaw.
The group is completely out of sync with its origin. And it's not because .world has blocked beehaw. Beehaw very much still appears under .world's list of linked websites.
Blocked instances are blocked, and when you block communication between sites, that's usually a two-way street.
Edit: Hi Lemmy users! You can't see the screenshots I've attached to this comment. I've just learned this thanks to @B1naryShad0w. If you'd like to see my comments with the screenshots, please view this comment thread via kbin by clicking this link.
(1/2)
I've looked at a few examples, and I'm just super confused now. I've also tried searching for a simple explanation of what exactly defederation does, and I keep seeing conflicting descriptions.
Let's look at two examples (please bear with me as I only know how to attach one image to one comment at a time.) On this comment let's look at AskLemmy, a lemmy.world community, from Beehaw:
Notice that all threads (with one exception) were posted almost a month ago when defederation happened. That one exception was a Beehaw user who posted to AskLemmy 5 days ago. So we can see that BeeHaw, having defederated from lemmy.world, is blocking 100% of new content from this lemmy.world community, except for that one thread published by a Beehaw user who seems to be out of the loop 5 days ago.
Mostly makes sense to me so far. Beehaw defedearted from lemmy.world, so Beehaw can't see new stuff from this lemmy.world community. A little weird that there was a new post by a Beehaw user, but that still makes some sense with my previous understanding of how defederation worked, since I think(?) defederation is one-way. After all, if defederation was two-way, then how did a Beehaw user make a thread on lemmy.world?
(2/2)
Now lets look at Beehaw's technology community from lemmy.world:
On the one hand, this is not blocking 100% of the content from this community, which seems consistent with what I originally thought. Lemmy.world is not defederated with beehaw, so lemmy.world can see new content from Beehaw's communities.
But on the other hand, there is a ton of content missing. And it's not just federated content taking awhile to move from instance to instance, as I'm seeing posts from the last 24 hrs from Kbin that are not showing up on lemmy.world. So it appears that there is content that's being blocked from getting to lemmy.world. But it's not 100% of the content that's being blocked?
To make matters more confusing, I can see content published by Beehaw users on a Beehaw community from lemmy.world. Wtf is going on.
I appreciate the effort and have also verified your analysis myself to be true. However, and I don't know if it's just me, but I don't see any images attached to your comments.
Thanks for calling that out. It looks like attaching images directly to a comment only works for kbin instances. This is what it looks like from kbin.social. I just tried viewing this thread from lemmy.world and the images were not showing up.
To be honest, I don't want to go through the effort of editing my comments to correct it right now. But in the future I'll go back to hosting images and linking them in my comments, so anyone from any instance can see them. That's a shame, because attaching images to comments in Kbin is super convenient. Oh well! Thanks again for letting me know.
@magnetosphere
@db0 or kbin.. *
But kbin is apart of the fediverse
I edited my comment to say “flee to the fediverse” after melroy corrected me. I had originally said “flee to Lemmy”.
@melroy
Yeah, what was unthinkable a few months ago is now an ever growing reality.
If ever reddit had a crisis management division, the people there didn't understand what reddit really was.
Even spez forgot what made reddit special. Or a very big possibility is he never knew it from the beginning at all. It can be argued that reddit was the vision of aaron.
Nevermind crisis management do they not have one sane capable PR person on call??
unrelated but these ai generated article images are fucking creepy