Can it be set up so you never have to worry about account switching? Unified feed from all accounts, then if I load up a Lemmy.world post, it defaults to the Lemmy.world account, but if I want to post to Dbzer0, can I set it to shift to that account automatically?
I’d argue the front ends should also provide users ways to see a more complete, instance-agnostic version of Lemmy. Like the first thing a user should see when they show up is just…Lemmy. not a page that suggests instances and all kinds of other things that they’re not going to understand.
Part of what made Reddit work is that it was a shared site, a shared hub, and every user saw the same thing depending on what they were subscribed to. I get that certain instance admins have problems with other instances, and I get that they might defederate from some for legal or security reasons. I know they also might police their servers for content and comments they don’t feel “fit”, and that’s their right.
But ultimately I don’t believe the user’s experience should suffer for that. If admins don’t want to host certain content on their servers, fine. I think that’s where the front ends and apps should come in.
Provide ways of unifying the experience of different user accounts on different instances into something more…well, unified. I don’t believe I should have to care about what instance I’m looking at Lemmy “from”, I should just be able to see the whole thing based on what I’ve subscribed to.
I know that’s a very complicated suggestion, and it might involve a lot of redundancies and crossed wires, and how the moderation would look is definitely a discussion (maybe a drop down list “see this community as moderated by ______”?)
But genuinely I think if an app can achieve something like this, it would go a long way towards making the experience more universal and attractive for an audience looking to come from elsewhere. They do not care about decentralization or instances, and we can’t make them care by lecturing them. So we do the next best thing and create a sort of facsimile of centralization.
I think it more likely that over time, after threads has captured enough of the user base fleeing Twitter and other social media platforms, threads will start pushing a sub-fediverse of sorts that will involve most of the major fediverse platforms, i.e. the ones run by people who attend the get togethers Meta invites them to. Slowly but surely that will be cemented as the primary “section” of the fediverse, “the Meta-fediverse”, and in order to join it, you’ll have to commit to their standards. And just like that, the decentralized platform has become centralized.
They’re willing to play with all the kids on the playground right now, but that will change. It’s bizarre to me that the fediverse has such a strong population of left-leaning users, that all came here spitting on the capitalist-poisoned platforms they fled, and yet somehow there are so many people around here that don’t see the danger of letting Meta in. They will find a way to fuck all of this up.
Committing to the idea of the fediverse will not benefit their bottom line in the long run. It is antithetical to the platform dominance that creates their profits.
Centralization is a product of social behavior. People will gravitate to the place everyone else is. They won’t “decentralize” naturally.
Very true…as long as the federation of servers remains as it is now, but I’m increasingly worried it won’t.
I mean, yes, Dbzer0 still exists, and yes, you can access it from other instances, but Lemmy.world is the biggest one and users here being cut off from it from here will strangle the amount of activity it gets. Visibility is important for the health of other instances and their communities. There’s a good reason why alternative subreddits never outgrow the main ones.
There’s also a sentiment among some admins and some of the contributors to both Lemmy and the Sublinks project that feels like it runs counter to the premise of Lemmy as whole: an unwillingness commit to a truly shared space or adhere to a standard for what federation is supposed to mean. Instances are not only encouraged to do whatever, they’re being given more tools to. And that’s good for fighting spam, child porn, and malicious instances, but it doesn’t stop there.
I really hope an app or frontend comes along at some point that will seamlessly combine instance accounts and “fill in the blanks” created by instance admins so users can have a clear picture of Lemmy, regardless of the instance they’re on.
There is no granular federation options. Only domain blocks and that’s it.
As it should be. The whole point is this is all supposed to mesh together seamlessly, and there needs to be a standard for what federating actually means.
This isn’t a lack of moderation tools. You have the moderation tools. You can moderate by defederating.
What you want are curation tools, and that’s against the spirit of this. It’s not supposed to matter what instance you’re on, you’re supposed to see the same fediverse except for the case of defederation which should only be for extreme cases or hostile instances. This push for the ability to curate granularly is worrying, because it just comes off like admins not being willing to commit to the idea of this platform, but still wanting all the benefits of having other instance’s content.
Domain blocks are always publicly visible.
Mod logs are always publicly visible in the public) mod log.
Good. Users should know what the admin and mods are doing so they can make an informed choice about whether or not they want to remain on that instance.
We should not be encouraging shadow moderation and invisible curation like this. This should be a place that works on transparency.
Communities should know what their mods are doing. It’s an important stop gap against abusive moderation tactics.
I’d like to think that too but I still go to Reddit and browsed a lot of those threads. In almost all of them, people were making the claim that there was nowhere to go, with maybe the occasional person chiming in to name-drop Lemmy, followed by a couple more comments from people bad-mouthing it.
People are definitely mad at Reddit but there does seem to still be this overall sense that Lenny is not good enough yet
Yeah it’s weird to act like people were being unreasonable for pointing out that Lemmy was on a decline when the numbers quite literally showed a decline.
And it’s worth noting, no matter what the numbers say, the if users come here and it doesn’t feel as active as the numbers suggest, that’s still an issue.
In what way? I saw you make the same claim on the other post you made.
Reddit moderation wasn’t perfect but I’m still not understanding why you deem this the superior way when it doesn’t seem to address the primary issue with reddit moderation: the people who were actually the mods.
I don’t see how this system fundamentally fixes the problem of terrible individuals abusing authority. In fact to me it feels like it exacerbates it, by entrenching power users at the expense of everyone else, under the assumption they will somehow be more trustworthy and curate a healthier community just because they’re there a lot.
That just sounds like a clubhouse, not an open community. You don’t need to alter moderation on the fediverse as a whole to make a clubhouse, as plenty of instances have already shown.
Really feels like the disjointed and manipulatable nature of voting across Lemmy is going to become more of a problem as more instance admins learn how to abuse it. There are already popular instances that won’t federate downvotes, and that has the effect of making the scores on their instance appear higher overall, which in turn makes it look more active, as well as manipulating the front page content in a non-democratic fashion.
This lack of a shared reality with the scores is going to hamper lemmy as a reddit alternative if there isn’t some kind of standard or attempt to foster a “true score” across all instances.
Bug reporting in general is kind of confusing for Lemmy users who aren’t intimately familiar with it’s development.
For example, filtering comments by date on user profiles just doesn’t seem to work. You can sort properly, but try filtering them by day, week, month, etc, and it never filters them. It always shows all comments from All Time. But this sort of filtering works fine everywhere else. Happens on the three Lemmy apps I’ve used, and the web UI last I checked.
But I’m not sure where that bug is actually coming from, and I haven’t seen any other bug reports about it. Is that an issue for Lemmy’s dev, Lemmy’s UI devs, the app devs, the instance admins, etc. I don’t know who to submit it to.
I don’t want to waste anyone’s time making them bug hunt something that isn’t under their umbrella.
That’s cool and all, but sorting is only part of the issue.
The other part is that they’re simply aren’t enough people here yet. That will change with time, of course, I’m not too concerned about that. Hopefully the sorting will help draw attention to vacant communities in need of filling.
I promise that’s not it.
Nobody “forgot” anything. They were just too lazy and too unwilling to accept even marginally less polished or content-rich experiences. I think we all severely under estimated how much the average internet user has changed from a decade ago. The entrenchment is real and it goes far deeper than we realized. The days of userbase jumping from site to site might seriously be over. At least in the way it was back when Digg jumped to Reddit.
And that’s really, really sad because that effectively means the boardrooms and shitty admins that run these sites can do anything they like and never face seriously pushback. As long as the content is there, the money will flow. Those of us that give a damn about useability, customization, moderation policies, user control, etc. they have literally no incentive to ever listen to us when they can reliably keep getting income from every teenager that only understands how to hit “Install” from the app store and literally nothing else.
The active daily user count is probably going up because Lemmy is a bit more settled now than it was 6 months ago. There’s far less drama, the “main” communities are a little more decided, the 3rd party apps are all in place and more polished, and it’s all a bit less janky now, with a bit more content to boot.
We’re growing. Slowly. Very slowly. There will be no great exodus, there will be slow trickle.
It took me a second to realize what cardassians you were talking about. I constantly forget the other ones are spelled with a K
Unless you want content and more people to interact with.
Like, people keep saying “oh yeah you can jump instances” as if that wasn’t possible on Reddit. You could go to different subs or make your own. But what good were most of them? As long as there’s a “default”, a main “hub”, people will go there, and that’s where everything will be happening. The alternatives and smaller instances will be starved out.
Centralization is not about the software, it’s about the people. Users centralize where others are. So when the big hubs are allowing threads to poison the well, it’s poisoning the thing most people want to drink from, and the thing new visitors will be most likely to drink from.
Threads represents something that a lot of people came to the fetiverse to escape. If threads wants to join, fine, but I believe it is in the best interest of all of us if there is a large alternative “cluster” that is separate from it rather than being tied up with it.
A separate galaxy in the fediverse, that says in big red neon lights, “Get your corporate bullshit away from us. This is our space, for people, not for you to make money.” And if we let them in immediately, it becomes increasingly difficult for that galaxy to retain that identity.
And I’ll just gently point out that once Threads joins, separating from it will not be easy because you will have Threads users here actively pushing back on the separation.
How is that different from Reddit? If trolls want to search and scrape and find information on people, they’re going to. You can’t put your information on the open Internet and not appreciate there’s always a danger of that.
Not that Reddit wasn’t, but it depended on the sub. Now it’s shaped by instance and everything here just feels stale
Been saying this for months. No one seems to understand what made reddit grow, and it is ironically very much like /r/place when you get down to it:
Reddit was a singular canvas that all users worked on together. Posts, comments, and voting shaped the site as a whole. The front page of Reddit was the result of it’s userbase, and it’s userbase was diverse. Because Reddit forced all users, of all backgrounds and ideologies, to exist together in the same space, and work on the same canvas, it created something living and varied.
You may not have ever gotten along with people from a certain subreddit in th comments, but I promise, the two of you worked together at one point to get a post to the front page or a comment to the top, and you didn’t even know it. Thos little moments where diametrically opposed people shared a liking of something by how they voted. On the surface, everyone bickered. Under the hood, they were all unknowingly agreeing and cooperating all the time, and that was what powered reddit’s engine: it’s diverse userbase’s activity.
That’s why gated communities like Tildes and all these curated instances will never reach Reddit levels: they are starving the engine.
Just becuase you can see something if you change perspective doesn’t make it not censorship if you attempt to block it from view. I’m not getting into a semantics argument; the point is really simple: those with the ability to frame the appearance of Lemmy to visitors using that ability to hide things from certain POVs. Regardless of what Hexbear was, that ability, unchecked, is going to harm the federation’s ability to grow naturally.
Give Summit a try. It’s got all those search options, and it seems to work well enough any time I use it.
If you liked RIF on Reddit, it’s far and away the closest I’ve found.