This feels like pain from growing too fast, right? The sudden shock of the Reddit decimation revealing weaknesses in the platform? Hopefully Tildes is weathering the storm better, considering the...
This feels like pain from growing too fast, right? The sudden shock of the Reddit decimation revealing weaknesses in the platform? Hopefully Tildes is weathering the storm better, considering the invitation barrier.
It’s always interesting when an online system suddenly has to scale up, and the people behind it try to slow that down. Perhaps that’s a good thing to see? Considering we’re in a world of tech startups where blitz-scaling is the ultimate goal.
I think going for a slow and organic growth is the right approach and it's admirable that the admins on here don't give into the fear of missing out on users jumping ship on Reddit. I'm really...
I think going for a slow and organic growth is the right approach and it's admirable that the admins on here don't give into the fear of missing out on users jumping ship on Reddit. I'm really optimistic for Tildes!
Also while I'm a big advocate for FOSS and the principles behind it I don't think the federated approach of Lemmy will work out. Scattering your userbase on different instances and then even allowing the mods to cut off big chunks of the userbase seems problematic. And the answer can't be to just register multiple accounts like people suggest in the comments there.
I will be very surprised if it works out, and I will definitely have to re-evaluate my own opinions on decentralized platforms if that's the case. But currently I agree with you, I don't think...
I don't think the federated approach of Lemmy will work out.
I will be very surprised if it works out, and I will definitely have to re-evaluate my own opinions on decentralized platforms if that's the case.
But currently I agree with you, I don't think federated lemmy will work out. Personally I don't think any single thing will replace Reddit. Many of it's problems stem from the fact that it is controlled by one group of people whos interests don't align with that of it's communities.
A federated approach like Lemmy where ID management is handled by each instance just creates chaos, these sort of de-federations will happen every time the users of two instances get into enough drama.
I actually believe federated approach can work but it would need: ability to down vote (BeeHaw blocked that on their server) as they perceive down votes create more hostile environment. That's...
I actually believe federated approach can work but it would need:
ability to down vote (BeeHaw blocked that on their server) as they perceive down votes create more hostile environment. That's great and all when you curate users (tildes seems to have similar opinion) but as number of users grow this is unavoidable. Even if you have invite system and only give access to well behaved people you don't have control if for example the account is sold to someone.
I think what a federated system needs is to link upvotes/downvotes of users to the server they reside on. For example somebody using BeeHaw sees a bad comment and downvotes it, that user gets downvoted as usual. But as more and more lemmy.world users are being downvoted by by BeeHaw then other users on that server would have lower reputation on BeeHaw by default. This would motivate admins of lemmy.world to act if they don't want to lose reputation. If they wouldn't act, then low reputation would motivate users to just use different server.
The consequences are tricky because it affects the design of everything else. What do you get from centralizing usernames? It’s a way of guaranteeing that when you see a username on both sites,...
The consequences are tricky because it affects the design of everything else.
What do you get from centralizing usernames? It’s a way of guaranteeing that when you see a username on both sites, it’s the same person. This is linking accounts when often, people don’t want their accounts linked for privacy. (Though you could create another account to avoid that, and using the same username is a pretty good hint that it’s the same person, if it’s sufficiently unique.)
If the accounts are linked in this way, it’s easy for someone to create a profile of a user’s activity on all the sites. Might as well make it convenient like a Reddit profile.
If user profiles are centralized like this then the main server ends up with pretty much all the data and the other servers are replicas of the main server. Alternatively, users can have different home servers and their activity gets partially replicated, which is how the fediverse does it.
If the data is truly decentralized like git repos then it becomes easy to impersonate users. You can create a repo with commits that have any email address you like. This can be prevented by requiring signed commits, but people often don’t use them.
All this sudden interest in federated servers smacks really hard of the prior fad with sticking "crypto/Blockchain" terminology to anything and everything where it didn't belong. Wonder how long...
All this sudden interest in federated servers smacks really hard of the prior fad with sticking "crypto/Blockchain" terminology to anything and everything where it didn't belong.
Wonder how long it's gonna take to see "federated" come up as a buzzword for video game lootboxes, "federated" virtual storefronts, etc.
Also, "federal" government. :-) Jargon often does get borrowed and watered down if it's used a lot, but I think it's pretty reasonable jargon for now. Are you concerned about the terminology being...
Also, "federal" government. :-)
Jargon often does get borrowed and watered down if it's used a lot, but I think it's pretty reasonable jargon for now. Are you concerned about the terminology being used badly, or with the design pattern being overused?
I think what I'm seeing is similar circumstances surrounding the two, and it's enough to stoke worry in me, but at the same time I know full well that it takes three to be a pattern, and the...
Are you concerned about the terminology being used badly, or with the design pattern being overused?
I think what I'm seeing is similar circumstances surrounding the two, and it's enough to stoke worry in me, but at the same time I know full well that it takes three to be a pattern, and the circumstances are just different enough some comparisons begin to break down.
Interest arose in bitcoin after the 2008 economic recession, where emotional investment was at breaking point with one's bank account. Years after, people start using this new, relatively untested technology in ways not really envisioned, as a reactionary response, and thus the "digital currency" age (as short lived as it was) came to pass.
Interest in federated servers arose after Elon Musk bought Twitter, and rattled people's emotional attachment/investment to social media. As a response, Mastodon comes into existence using this new, (old?) relatively untested technology (for the use-cases involved) as a reactionary response to moneyed interests and enshittification.
It's clearly not enough to make a pattern, and it might be just good ole' paranoia, but there are some similarities to note. People get emotionally invested in a thing, wealthy decide to take away the thing, people build a "decentralized" version of the original thing that by nature can't be as good as the original, and less savory elements swoop in to take advantage of that fact while people who got swept up in the decentralized version can't let go due to their emotional attachment to the original thing.
The part that fails comparisons is the last bit. Lemmy hasn't ripped off people, or if it already has, no way its ripped off people to the extent that all the digital coin services did in their heyday.
I think there’s a pattern, but it’s a vague one. There are fads. People are going to try stuff, and often it fails and then they might try something else. This isn’t enough of a pattern to predict...
I think there’s a pattern, but it’s a vague one. There are fads. People are going to try stuff, and often it fails and then they might try something else. This isn’t enough of a pattern to predict what’s going to succeed or fail. Hopefully newer attempts at making social networks will fail better. Not all lessons are learned and some failures repeat, but some things get fixed.
So how bad are the failures and are people protecting themselves enough?
For cryptocurrency, a decent approach if you tried it at all was not betting more money than you can afford to lose. Many people were cautious, but some lost a lot more. The indirect effects are harder to predict. (I doubt anyone expected that cryptocurrencies would end up using so much electricity. Even the enthusiasts probably didn’t expect Bitcoin mining to get that big.)
The direct harm of wasting time on a website seems minimal but it’s easy to imagine all sorts of wild indirect effects, just based on what’s already happened on social networks at large scale. Some people risk more than others. Sometimes it’s because when you’re more vulnerable, sharing things about yourself is more risky.
Federated identity with OpenID is a pretty popular one, though most people won't ever see that term but see their favorite site allowing them to login with their Facebook/Google/Steam/Github...
Federated identity with OpenID is a pretty popular one, though most people won't ever see that term but see their favorite site allowing them to login with their Facebook/Google/Steam/Github credentials instead.
Federated authentication is also a possibility: I log into one instance with another's credentials, it authenticates against my origin server, and we're in. All you meed for that is to allow authn...
Federated authentication is also a possibility: I log into one instance with another's credentials, it authenticates against my origin server, and we're in. All you meed for that is to allow authn against the server with no risk posed by its content.
Of course there would likely be a mechanism to prevent authentication from "unapproved" servers as this just extends rhe issue to signups, but it can also be corrected with limiting signups or an application/invite-based system.
If it's just authentication then passkeys probably do it better. Access delegation protocols like OAuth will pass additional information along like an email address and avatar. Beyond that,...
If it's just authentication then passkeys probably do it better.
Access delegation protocols like OAuth will pass additional information along like an email address and avatar. Beyond that, there's the question of what "having an account on some other website" really means as far as vetting someone. For example, having a legit Gmail address tells you a little bit of information about them. The account probably wasn't one of thousands created by a spammer, because Google makes that somewhat hard to do.
So there's the question of what other information could be passed on, and whether to trust it, and also how much to trust the user. Typically you still need to vet users yourself. It's similar to how getting a Tildes invite doesn't guarantee that the user won't misbehave later. It's a speedbump and rate-limiter that makes local moderation feasible.
And I think that's part of the issue with fediverse-style federation; any user can let a vampire in by following them. Users effectively get unlimited invites to give out. It works okay for small servers but eventually breaks down at scale.
We could have a whole different topic about the design of distributed social media protocols. I think it's technically interesting but hard. BlueSky is in this space too and they have some interesting ideas. It all seems rather experimental and other people have probably thought about it more than I have.
Roaming user accounts that can access various communities/websites, is something we may very well see in the future. It would assist in moderation and streamline the user experience.
Roaming user accounts that can access various communities/websites, is something we may very well see in the future. It would assist in moderation and streamline the user experience.
I requested to join a few days ago to this site and got the email to sign up today. In my opinion, waiting a day or two to get in will help foster a community of people who feel more invested than...
how slow is too slow
I requested to join a few days ago to this site and got the email to sign up today. In my opinion, waiting a day or two to get in will help foster a community of people who feel more invested than the average platform. Then again, given the popularity of short form content like TikTok and such this might be too slow for certain people.
(And not that it matters, but yes, this is my first comment on tildes.)
I also think that making people wait a day or two means we're not gonna get as flooded with new users who just want to complain for 24 hours and then go back, leaving this site with ten thousand...
I also think that making people wait a day or two means we're not gonna get as flooded with new users who just want to complain for 24 hours and then go back, leaving this site with ten thousand dead accounts, which is what usually happens with drama like this. Like, the majority of people probably request an invite because they're pissed and want to complain about reddit, then they have to wait for the invite, and during that time they cool off and go back. It largely skips the portion of the cycle (which happens every time to every reddit clone) where they flood other sites with posts about reddit and nothing else. Hopefully, the people that actually use their invite, make an account, and stick around in the short term, are interested in staying and actually being a member of the community.
Welcome. I got an invite via reddit that took about two days. Honestly having it small shouldn't matter. If anything it'll reduce the chance of bad actions going unnoticed. Digg "Patriots" or TD...
Welcome.
I got an invite via reddit that took about two days.
Honestly having it small shouldn't matter. If anything it'll reduce the chance of bad actions going unnoticed. Digg "Patriots" or TD style gaming of the system would be faster to spot.
Why does Tildes "need" to grow? The Digg exodus was instrumental in making Reddit what it is today, sure, but we see exactly what the long term consequences of constantly accepting (and even...
Why does Tildes "need" to grow?
The Digg exodus was instrumental in making Reddit what it is today, sure, but we see exactly what the long term consequences of constantly accepting (and even promoting) vast amounts of new users.
If Tildes dies out, it's because people just weren't interested in the discussions anymore, because the community is the only real "feature" on this site. There are no images, no upvotes (that affect an algorithm), and no incentive to try and be the first to post something. For me, this is a place to actually talk to other people about the things I like and current events, not a Twitter/Reddit/Instagram competitor.
In my opinion, the only thing Tildes "needs" is to be loyal to its cause of promoting non-profit, personalized discussion. I suspect more sites like it will be popping up in the near future, and that these communities will be a core part of the next generation of websites.
But I could be wrong. Who knows. I struggle to wrap my head around how corporations like Reddit operate without the team behind it hating themselves and their job, so maybe I lack the viewpoint.
Grow is the wrong word, but there does need to be a healthy trickle of fresh voices to keep the site reasonably active. Before this latest influx, a lot of posts were going without...
Why does Tildes "need" to grow?
Grow is the wrong word, but there does need to be a healthy trickle of fresh voices to keep the site reasonably active.
Before this latest influx, a lot of posts were going without discussion....I'd wager because most of us here already had a pretty good idea what the discussions would entail....we knew each other too well to discuss some things yet again. Fresh voices help bring old voices back.
Exactly this - it’s the Eternal September issue that seems inevitable with social platforms that grow too quickly. The tricky part is finding the line for what rate of growth is needed (or should...
The Digg exodus was instrumental in making Reddit what it is today, sure, but we see exactly what the long term consequences of constantly accepting (and even promoting) vast amounts of new users.
Exactly this - it’s the Eternal September issue that seems inevitable with social platforms that grow too quickly. The tricky part is finding the line for what rate of growth is needed (or should be allowed) to meet the demand of new users who want to join without overwhelming the existing culture of the site. If you want to get philosophical - if the culture completely changes, is it even the same site in anything other than name? If Tildes opened up and was overrun by political extremists or low effort memes it would matter more to me that it had radically changed than that it had grown.
Too much new seems to fundamentally overwhelm the dynamic of platforms that allow it - Reddit in ‘09 was a different culture than Reddit in ‘23, and for users who were specifically looking for the experience offered by Reddit ‘09, the growth of the site may be the very thing that ruined it for them. You definitely want new users to come in and engage and feel welcome, but not to the detriment of the existing users who helped build your site in to a desirable place to be. I think Tildes is doing the right thing for now by controlling the stampede, especially while discussions about how growth affects the features of the site are still ongoing. Even with the invite system, as a new user I’ve seen a handful of veterans comment on some noticeable changes the past week.
I’ll be watching from the sidelines to see where the dust settles with all these new platforms and the fediverse as a whole, though. Maybe they’ll defy the odds and come up with a solution.
There was more than one exodus from digg to reddit, it started in 2007 with the decss2.0 debacle when digg first deleted the news story and users started spamming the key everywhere. Quite a few...
There was more than one exodus from digg to reddit, it started in 2007 with the decss2.0 debacle when digg first deleted the news story and users started spamming the key everywhere. Quite a few users left at that time already. The bigger one you are thinking about was in 2010 iirc when digg overhauled the UI and user experience.
I'm surprised this isn't brought up more..."Oh Nine Eff Nine" was a pretty bit deal at the time. DRM was a huge hot button issue in nerd circles around the mid aughts. Who can forget Sony's...
I'm surprised this isn't brought up more..."Oh Nine Eff Nine" was a pretty bit deal at the time. DRM was a huge hot button issue in nerd circles around the mid aughts. Who can forget Sony's infamous rootkit scandal? It almost feels quaint now.
I've been waiting for some part of the Fediverse to actually experience a measurable increase in users for a while now, because it was obvious this was exactly what was going to happen....
I've been waiting for some part of the Fediverse to actually experience a measurable increase in users for a while now, because it was obvious this was exactly what was going to happen. Decentralized services are just sorta fundamentally capable of handling masses of users, both technologically and culturally. And I say this as someone who has been using the Fediverse for a while.
It's just not a good model for a social network. IRC could handle occasional netsplits, because IRC was an ephemeral chat protocol, but a social network has so much state that it's devastating every time it happens.
Now note that two out of the three moderation tools administrators of ActivityPub servers (Lemmy, Mastodon et al included) have available to them are to just cause a netsplit intentionally. One of them causes a full-scale netsplit, and one of them causes a partial netsplit only for particular users, leaving the system in an inconsistent state.
Beehaw's statement linked above says that they're doing this because they don't really have the tools available to do anything else, since people can flood them with alts faster than they can ban them. But it's not that Lemmy doesn't provide them with those tools -- these limitations are built into the tech, and not only the tech, but the very concept of decentralization itself.
The value of centralization is that you have a uniform registration process and ban-list. Decentralization's entire point is to get rid of that, Lemmy can't just program around it. It's a cool technology, but I don't think social networks (at least not public ones) are a good use-case for it, and the irony is that if your social network is private, there's rarely any need for it to be decentralized in the first place!
Well said. I was on the fediverse for a bit a few years ago and came to the same conclusions as you. The instruments for managing communities are blunt and when used they add friction and...
Well said. I was on the fediverse for a bit a few years ago and came to the same conclusions as you.
The instruments for managing communities are blunt and when used they add friction and confusion. Meanwhile, federation, by its very nature, means that instances and users are stuck playing a pretty much unwinnable game of whack-a-mole all the time that will only get worse the more the network grows.
I think the federated model works well for a Twitter or Instagram-like format. The content itself isn't really ephemeral in the sense of disappearing after a while, but it is functionally so...
The value of centralization is that you have a uniform registration process and ban-list. Decentralization's entire point is to get rid of that, Lemmy can't just program around it. It's a cool technology, but I don't think social networks (at least not public ones) are a good use-case for it, and the irony is that if your social network is private, there's rarely any need for it to be decentralized in the first place!
I think the federated model works well for a Twitter or Instagram-like format. The content itself isn't really ephemeral in the sense of disappearing after a while, but it is functionally so because nobody cares about your tweets from last year unless they want to doxx you or something. Twitter, in particular, wasn't designed as a personal archive for substantive posts, it was designed to function more like an AIM Away Message. It's very much about "What are you doing right now." Lots of people started using it more like a personal blog, which was a mistake. The most it ever should have expanded into was bulletin updates, like sending out a telegram where you pay by the word, to let your followers know when you had done something new they should check out. The key thing the user cares about is the "social graph" of who follows who with these platforms.
Something like Reddit just doesn't work with this model. It's not about what you're doing right now, it's about the posts and conversations, not the interconnections between actors and entities within the system. If you wanted a federated version of Lemmy you'd need to federate along the dimension that actually cares about interlocking with other elements of it. That's on the subreddit level. Each instance should act as its own "subreddit" and whichever one you're on can browse across different ones or have a personal feed of everything you're federated into. Posts shouldn't just all funnel into one master list.
That's actually pretty confusing to me, as you don't need multiple accounts. I have a single Lemmy account on lemmy.sdf.org which presently has completely open federation. Meaning that I can...
And the answer can't be to just register multiple accounts like people suggest in the comments there.
That's actually pretty confusing to me, as you don't need multiple accounts. I have a single Lemmy account on lemmy.sdf.org which presently has completely open federation. Meaning that I can access, post, and comment on content from BeeHaw, lemmy.world, sh.itjust.works, anywhere. And the fact that the comments on Lemmy are so overrun with the sentiment of "I now need a BeeHaw and a lemmy.world account" is wild, as it shows that all of those vocal commenters have a big gap in their understanding of how federation works.
And, conversely, the people on lemmy.world need one elsewhere to interact with Beehaw. And now everyone on two of the biggest instances needs two accounts. And as more instances defederate,...
And, conversely, the people on lemmy.world need one elsewhere to interact with Beehaw. And now everyone on two of the biggest instances needs two accounts. And as more instances defederate, everyone in the whole system needs 10 accounts, each with access to some incomplete fraction of the community.
And if everyone is doing that anyway, so everyone is seeing the content they're trying to get rid of by defederating, then what is the point of defederation to begin with? Now the only thing it accomplishes is forcing people to switch between a handful of different accounts every time they want to read the new threads in a given community, manually keeping track of which accounts have access to which instances. It's a mess.
I would say it's a good thing to see. I don't know why the most popular narrative seems to indicate that a successful reddit protest or successful reddit transition involves reddit imploding...
I would say it's a good thing to see. I don't know why the most popular narrative seems to indicate that a successful reddit protest or successful reddit transition involves reddit imploding overnight as everyone moves to lemmy/kbin etc., rather than seeing it as a multi-step event over a much longer period of time. I'm not even saying the current alternatives will last a long time either, but so many people here seemingly never experienced the internet before web 2.0 and think that success = millions and millions of users all at once on an ever-growing platform with echo chamber algorithms that are designed to bring in profits rather than enrich your experience.
There's not a single one of these platforms that anyone looks at as good, whether it's Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, Reddit etc. they're all a bunch of shit, yes they either make a ton of money (don't confuse this with profit exactly) or they have the potential to make a ton of money, but why is that the only measure of success? Why should any of us care whether someone builds a platform that takes all of reddit's users? Why should anyone want that? If you expand the idea of success to something that you view positively in terms of how it benefits you rather than just what money it brings in to people that aren't you, then none of those other ones are successful, so why are we asking for something else to take its place in the same exact way? A good portion of the cynical people on reddit saying nothing will change etc. aren't like some huge reddit fanboys that love the site, a great many of them will probably say they dont care and it's just something to kill the time or that it sucks but there's nothing better etc. and even the non-cynical people are mostly just the ones that fall in the latter who will say reddit sucks but there's nothing better.
I know I'm different than I was 15-20 years ago but it was actually fun to explore and find new things and there was so much less NOISE on the internet that it wasn't as hard to find them. It seems so much harder to find unique things because as the internet grew, the interest business had in the internet also grew, and the money poured into getting the attention of all the new people using the internet grew with it, and that is noise. Because so much of what we see involves money behind it, and the more money there is, the more visible it is, the harder it is to find things that aren't backed by big money interests. I know there wasn't as many Youtube-type creators that had in-depth researched subject matter and expert opinion type topics that you could learn just about anything back then, so I'm not saying it was all sunshine and roses compared to now, but I just don't know if there is some sub-layer to all of this noise where you can cut through most of that shit but if there is I'd love to return to it.
Tildes to some extent so far gives some of this back I feel like, because of it being invite only and not-for-profit there is less noise here than there was on reddit or on some other platforms. Of course it's impossible to avoid the fact that much of what the users of Tildes see outside of Tildes is very heavily influenced by what money is behind it, that does bleed into here on some level or another, but I'll take whatever I can get at the moment.
Federation appears to be all good in theory but the programming implementation just gets too complicated and overwhelmingly complex before you know it. You must be so specific about all the tiny...
Federation appears to be all good in theory but the programming implementation just gets too complicated and overwhelmingly complex before you know it.
You must be so specific about all the tiny details like the definition of a "sync", what information will be synced and how, who will initialize the sync and how will it be accepted, how will the instances know about each other, will there be a tracker or broadcasting server?
On top of that, when you try to put all these things into an abstract standard in a bid to federate another entire system (mastodon) with this one, a whole new pandora's box gets opened! I think they should have made the lemmy network robust first before trying to bring in mastodon.
IMHO standards are more useful for interfacing between two systems which are very different and agnostic of one another, not building those systems themselves. A classic example is the FTP...
IMHO standards are more useful for interfacing between two systems which are very different and agnostic of one another, not building those systems themselves. A classic example is the FTP protocol for transferring files, it doesn't care whether the host or server is windows, linux or a mac. It doesn't need to know that which is good in that situation.
But if your objective is to build an entire system from scratch (a federated network for eg.), adhering to standards results in more hindrance than help. The more you obey generic standards, you'll loose the freedom or flexibility in implementing specific functionality in code. It's like how Drupal failed because it tried to be "Everything CMS" by establishing a protocol or standard for building modules while Wordpress succeeded superbly as it did a specific implementation for weblog CMS without caring about any generic standards.
I think FTP actually isn't a good example here. Or rather, it doesn't know but offloads it to clients to figure out for themselves as it is a fairly broadly defined protocol where a lot of...
A classic example is the FTP protocol for transferring files, it doesn't care whether the host or server is windows, linux or a mac.
I think FTP actually isn't a good example here. Or rather, it doesn't know but offloads it to clients to figure out for themselves as it is a fairly broadly defined protocol where a lot of interaction is left up to the server implementation.
For example, there is a standardized command for getting a directly listing. But in what format you will get that listing isn't defined. These days you basically can mostly expect the linux/unix response or windows response but older FTP clients have fairly complex logic to figure out what sort of server response they are dealing with.
I found this out the hard way a few years ago. I was trying to interface through FTP with a server running openVMS through a nodejs script. The FTP libraries I found all managed to connect but for actually getting content I basically had to write my own parsers there.
Honestly ActivityPub should never have been used to create a link aggregator like reddit. Unlike with twitter, there's no reason to have communication between servers. Communities (subreddits) are...
Honestly ActivityPub should never have been used to create a link aggregator like reddit. Unlike with twitter, there's no reason to have communication between servers. Communities (subreddits) are wholly stored in one server, the only thing needed to federate is letting people post comments and links from server X to server Y, but you can just do that by sending them a signed message with a private key using a client, the key can be stored on the main server, that's fine, it also lets your identity be portable. Pulling a feed can be done easily by pulling the top k posts from every server and ranking them clientside, it's not really super expensive to download less than 1k of data from 10 or so servers every time you want to see a feed.
That's one way to approach it. My issue is more that I expect a federated thing to be p2p based where all information is stored across instances and if one instance goes down the information isn't...
That's one way to approach it. My issue is more that I expect a federated thing to be p2p based where all information is stored across instances and if one instance goes down the information isn't lost. I know this is technically difficult to implement and even harder to moderate. But what we are currently seeing pop up also doesn't seem sustainable in the long run if instances get popular.
I think that's what the at protocol aims to do. I think the main issue is that just like running a full Bitcoin node, the cost of having all the data like that is pretty inefficient and each...
I think that's what the at protocol aims to do. I think the main issue is that just like running a full Bitcoin node, the cost of having all the data like that is pretty inefficient and each server is going to need a lot of storage.
Like with most designs, I imagine the hardest part would be developer buy-in. Even if a better standard exists, convincing everyone to actually use the same standard is ridiculously hard. The...
Like with most designs, I imagine the hardest part would be developer buy-in. Even if a better standard exists, convincing everyone to actually use the same standard is ridiculously hard. The worst outcome is you end up in Serial Port Hell.
That post is a bit disingenuous. The Fediverse instances on that list (and the instances frequently defederated on #fediblock) are, more or less, racist, fascist, transphobic, or CP-ridden...
That post is a bit disingenuous. The Fediverse instances on that list (and the instances frequently defederated on #fediblock) are, more or less, racist, fascist, transphobic, or CP-ridden instances most reasonable people wouldn’t want anything to do with. There is nothing lost by declining to federate with them.
The thing is with an open protocol like activitypub, anyone can spin up a site that’s compatible with federation. That doesn’t mean that you should federate with every such site, especially those prone to abuse.
I'll perhaps provide an example: there are several instances out there that appear to actively search for instances they aren't defederated from, in order to throw slurs at whoever they can find....
I'll perhaps provide an example: there are several instances out there that appear to actively search for instances they aren't defederated from, in order to throw slurs at whoever they can find. (seemingly via a bot in one case?)
You must use a blocklist to run a Mastodon instance.
You know, I wonder why it is federation-by-default. Shouldn't things be defederated by default, then federation enabled if you as an admin decide "yup, the folks on that other instance are chill,...
You know, I wonder why it is federation-by-default. Shouldn't things be defederated by default, then federation enabled if you as an admin decide "yup, the folks on that other instance are chill, and it's well moderated"? You should be able to view but not post to a community that hasn't yet accepted you.
I don't think that would work well because so many people run their own instances. The number of (active) bad actors is actually rather small comparatively (people defederate because obviously ==>...
I don't think that would work well because so many people run their own instances. The number of (active) bad actors is actually rather small comparatively (people defederate because obviously ==> troll instance dies), instance admins just need to block them.
And they don't even need to actively do that if they rely on one of the community blocklists that that those oh so horrible "drunk off their own power" instance admins wade through racism/Nazism/etc to maintain.
You're essentially completely bifurcating the network by defederating anyone who doesn't defederate your blocklist. Considering unsavory elements exist on a continuum, I'm not sure that's great....
The Fediverse instances on that list (and the instances frequently defederated on #fediblock) are, more or less, racist, fascist, transphobic, or CP-ridden instances most reasonable people wouldn’t want anything to do with. There is nothing lost by declining to federate with them.
You're essentially completely bifurcating the network by defederating anyone who doesn't defederate your blocklist. Considering unsavory elements exist on a continuum, I'm not sure that's great. There is no hard boundary that everyone can agree with, so some instance A that is close to the line on this side might not want to defederate another instance B that's close on the other side.
What do? Well, apparently the solution they chose was to defederate A, because A refused to defederate B. For the sake of argument, let's assume that A are themselves not problematic per se, but they're friends with the assholes on B.
Ok, so what's the problem? The friends of A on this side of the fracture are. Now that A is on the blocklist, they're in the position A was in before: defederate your friends, who this time around aren't even assholes, or get defederated yourself.
Federated networks need to learn that social relationships aren't transitive. If they were, all the Nazis would be friends with all the Jews. Accordingly, defederation should never be expected transitively. Don't force your blocklist on your peers. If a platform can't support that, it's got problems.
This isn’t really the problem on the fediverse that a lot of people outside think it is. I joined the current iteration of fedi back in April 2017, and I can count the number of instances that are...
defederating anyone who doesn't defederate your blocklist
This isn’t really the problem on the fediverse that a lot of people outside think it is. I joined the current iteration of fedi back in April 2017, and I can count the number of instances that are this strict on defederation on one hand. And even then, defederation is also a spectrum.
An instance can completely defederate from another, which most instances truly do reserve for literal Nazis, pedos, or instances based on harassing others, but for those instances in the “grey area”, limiting/silencing is an option. That essentially means that by default, you won’t see content from that instance on your federated feed, but you can still follow folks on that instance and see and interact with them in your home feed no problem. If a friend on a silenced instance decides to follow you, you’ll get a follow request instead and be able to verify that they are indeed a friend.
Finally, you also get to choose which instance you join. So as long as you join one with a moderation and federation policy you agree with, none of this is really a problem to begin with.
lol what does Tildes have to do with anything? I found that an odd inclusion in the title, and even the comments were confused. I do actually think there's a good point with the user...
lol what does Tildes have to do with anything? I found that an odd inclusion in the title, and even the comments were confused.
I do actually think there's a good point with the user responsibility for blocking federating instances, but would think like, say, Reddit, blocking users should be the proper action. I feel like I missed a context in Beehaw's bigger picture, where these might be problematic instances not just a minority of vocal bad posters? The Beehaw response is going too far, IMO, if it's not a majority of behavior from another instance. While I disagree with it, I can understand just nipping the issue in the bud.
Yeah OP thought Tildes was federated. It isn't, we're not at risk for this problem. He did provide a nice rundown of Mastodon's problems and predict Lemmy fracturing. I like to collect these...
Yeah OP thought Tildes was federated. It isn't, we're not at risk for this problem. He did provide a nice rundown of Mastodon's problems and predict Lemmy fracturing. I like to collect these little lessons learned from failed social sites and networks. You never know when you'll spot something useful in them.
I think I saw a glimmer of that emerging when I clicked away. I feel like that's definitely a weak point of federation, and it's why I was sort of hoping to get away from it when I joined Tildes....
I think I saw a glimmer of that emerging when I clicked away.
I feel like that's definitely a weak point of federation, and it's why I was sort of hoping to get away from it when I joined Tildes. I think demonstrably bad instances ought to be cut off, but it becomes a barrier to communication when people can just sever connections like that.
Yeah, that's odd, but I can sort of see it? Maybe they see us as another node in the fractured Reddit diaspora. In effect, Tildes blocks everyone by not doing federation at all. And we like it...
Yeah, that's odd, but I can sort of see it? Maybe they see us as another node in the fractured Reddit diaspora. In effect, Tildes blocks everyone by not doing federation at all. And we like it that way.
Even when the server software supports federation, it seems like a better default would be opt-in? Why should the admins federate with another server without making sure it has compatible policies? For example, if one server is invite-only and the other isn't, effectively it's not invite-only anymore, because users can easily join the other server.
One way to restrict growth via external subscriptions might be if local users need to spend an invite to follow someone new on different server (and allow them to follow back), and people on other servers need to get an invite to follow anyone on the local server (and be followed). That would be kind of weird though.
That post... doesn't seem quite right, at all? Am I understanding it right that it's arguing for instances to be essentially unmoderated? There's also quite a lot of stuff in there that if it's...
That post... doesn't seem quite right, at all? Am I understanding it right that it's arguing for instances to be essentially unmoderated? There's also quite a lot of stuff in there that if it's referring to what I think it's referring to, is presented in a very disingenuous manner.
It almost reads like it was written by someone new to the Fediverse who doesn't understand that your instance admins fundamentally shape your experience. But they said they'd been on it for seven years? Strange.
I found it interesting that a lot of people on /r/RedditAlternatives were against sites like Squabbles and Tildes just because they weren't federated. I guess this is a good example showcasing...
I found it interesting that a lot of people on /r/RedditAlternatives were against sites like Squabbles and Tildes just because they weren't federated. I guess this is a good example showcasing that federation isn't the end-all be-all of the future of social media.
I would argue against this point. Reddit brought communities next to each other, but apart from cross posting, theres not really any interaction between communities. The other thing Reddit brought...
Reddit brought multitudes of communities together,
I would argue against this point. Reddit brought communities next to each other, but apart from cross posting, theres not really any interaction between communities.
The other thing Reddit brought to the table was an easier way to discover content through /r/all and /r/popular, as well as the auto-populating subreddit search fields on some apps.
I don't think we need to have federation like Lemmy is doing, it's fine even if communities are as split apart as tildes and reddit are. What is mainly needed is a way for people to find these communities (a search engine, if you will, HAH).
Many communities on reddit try very hard to be very indenpendent. E.g. banning "brigading" (Or, people from other, often larger communities, who come and disrupt the way your community wants to be run), coming up with strict rules and other ways of doing which is different from the rest of the site and so on. These things are all much easier to do when you have more or less complete control of the platform.
A common protocol for sharing content accross comunities isn't the worst idea, that'd help creating centralized content aggregators, but I don't think you should be able to access any other community from any other community.
WWW/HTTP is already a good protocol. Let's just that or develop something on top of it.
I could be wrong, but I think their point was the only features that Reddit as a platform had to encourage communities to comingle was crossposting and having a single account for every subreddit....
I could be wrong, but I think their point was the only features that Reddit as a platform had to encourage communities to comingle was crossposting and having a single account for every subreddit. There was some great collaboration between subreddits, but that was rarely due to any features inherent to Reddit.
True that. Many, many groups of subreddits formed. Some of us went to extreme lengths to try and bring them all together with multireddits, and to share moderators, and do things to encourage...
True that.
Many, many groups of subreddits formed. Some of us went to extreme lengths to try and bring them all together with multireddits, and to share moderators, and do things to encourage cross-subreddit participation. It was a gargantuan amount of work, and cat pictures with 20k upvotes were reddit's way of saying 'fuck you' to anyone who actually put in this kind of work. That's part of the reason for the negative attitude towards 'fluff' content on this site. All the mod teams I know did this stuff for a little while and then gave up on it completely because it was all work, zero visibility. I'm including myself in that set.
Let's say I make a musical 'bestof' with 30 other mods, collecting 300+ albums from 800+ subreddits and dozens of 1k+ comment threads with user recommendations, taking hundreds of hours each for those 30 mods to proof-listen the set. It only takes every waking moment for a month, no big deal. It might even look something like this.
Now let's have this compete with cat pictures for the front page. Guess how that goes. Do you think you'd do that again next year, and the year after, and the year after? Fuck. No. Reddit's code is so bad those bestof submissions never even found 1% of the subscribers that asked for them and participated in making them.
Reddit did absolutely nothing at all to help bring groups together. They just gave people the convenience of one user account being able to access all of the communities on their website, which made it damn easy for subs to attract new people. That was their only value add.
In my opinion your examples highlight my pont exactly. The only way for communities to actually crossover, is by means invented by the community to "force" that interaction. There is nothing that...
In my opinion your examples highlight my pont exactly. The only way for communities to actually crossover, is by means invented by the community to "force" that interaction. There is nothing that Reddit does inherently that helps communities integrate or cross over.
What I mean by interaction between communities could be:
Posts submitted to multiple communities (NOT just crossposted, singular posts that exist in multiple subreddits)
Communities being sub communities of parent ones. Many subreddit communities even now exist accross multiple subreddits, with NO support from Reddit. (e.g. /r/Coffee and /r/Cafe, the former being the strictly moderated one, and the latter the relaxed one, or /r/Finland/ and /r/Suomi). It is NOT clear at all that these two subs form one community.
Hockey game threads, you could have a post where comments made from each subreddit are tagged differently (kinda like flair). This way you could have a joined game thread for a hockey game for fans of either team, but then still each team can have their own community.
There's plenty more features that would be fun to experiment with that would bring communities together, but still keep them separate where necessary.
Hmm, I see what you’re saying here, but isn’t this more of a necessity of its federated design rather than a feature? Sure, it’s a good way to prevent unhinged communities from ruining discussions...
it's a way to shut down brigading while still supporting interaction across communities
Hmm, I see what you’re saying here, but isn’t this more of a necessity of its federated design rather than a feature? Sure, it’s a good way to prevent unhinged communities from ruining discussions on your instance, but that just further complicates folks’ adoption of these platforms.
There are likely TONS of new users on those unfederated instances who jumped ship from Reddit with relative optimism—but not confidence—that something like Lemmy could be the solution. They probably just signed up on one of the “recommended” instances (because “they all talk to each other just pick any of them! it’s sooooo easy I promise!”) and now that group of folks may be more turned off to the whole idea over someone who may have initially been too confused to sign up in the first place.
Additionally, I’m reminded by this comment I read earlier where @scot described his experience where ProtonMail was effectively unfederated. (For a loosely related comparison.)
Eventually the inbox delivery issues for me were growing more severe and I feared it was impacting my ability to run my business […]
I realized my business wasn't something I wanted to play with in this way and I transitioned everything back to GSuite, or Google Workspace, or whatever it's called now
The only real course of action in that case… is to leave ProtonMail if you want your e-mail to work across “instances” right? I know that it’s a bit different here as the folks borking delivery from ProtonMail are mostly profit-driven, but I feel like this type of infighting can only result in a few bigger, more powerful instances. So then, why bother with federation? (This is just where my mind is going, not saying this will or won’t happen by any means.)
I’m conflicted because federated social platforms are so cool conceptually… I just don’t see them growing as much as some folks may anticipate. Hope I’m wrong, though.
I think a lot of people need to go through this desire to try federation out and see what the current implementation is like. Right now, decentralization or federated are the big buzz words...
I think a lot of people need to go through this desire to try federation out and see what the current implementation is like. Right now, decentralization or federated are the big buzz words because people don't like being stuck with the whims of a single group controlling things.
Which works right up to the point where the instance you're registered with gets too big and the mods too power trippy and then you need to find a new instance. I don't think federation can solve...
decentralization or federated are the big buzz words because people don't like being stuck with the whims of a single group controlling things.
Which works right up to the point where the instance you're registered with gets too big and the mods too power trippy and then you need to find a new instance. I don't think federation can solve this problem.
It can't, and that's why Tildes isn't wasting any time with federation. Usenet was federated, it failed to solve this problem. Anyone who didn't know that before starting their internet forum...
It can't, and that's why Tildes isn't wasting any time with federation. Usenet was federated, it failed to solve this problem. Anyone who didn't know that before starting their internet forum project didn't do their homework and deserves to fail. That statement applies to about 99.9% of all social software projects, far as I can tell. I've rarely seen a topic where developers so often avoid educating themselves before starting the code. I'm honestly curious as to why this keeps happening.
Lemmy's problem here is identical to Usenet problems in the 70s. Usenet servers killfiled (defederated from) each other all the time, and the process/consensus to create usenet groups was a nightmare that lead to plenty of infighting across the network.
Congrats guys, you reinvented tech from 1970 that is still just as broken. /golfclap
Gotta solve that moderation problem first. If you can create a well moderated node and then perfect the systems that allow the users of that node to moderate themselves well - with the users helping in development so there's good testing, think about what happens when twenty nodes appear. They now all have this new moderation system that keeps eternal september on ice within their own node.
Now let's federate all of those nodes. Are they going to have all of the same problems? Of course they are - but the volume on those problems is a lot lower now, because the nodes themselves are all just a bit better at holding themselves together culturally. It's a lot harder for a node to go bad now. Will there be as much fragmentation on the federated network with this moderation immune system in place? Doubtful. It's progress.
You literally have the solution that federation provides in your comment, you just phrased it as a problem. It's not a problem, it's the whole point. It's a Vote with Your Feet system, digital...
I don't think federation can solve this problem.
you need to find a new instance.
You literally have the solution that federation provides in your comment, you just phrased it as a problem.
It's not a problem, it's the whole point.
It's a Vote with Your Feet system, digital nomadship.
It might not be for you, but that doesn't make it bad.
Because you can leave an instance without leaving the service. It's like leaving Reddit without losing access to any content. It's the best of both worlds.
Because you can leave an instance without leaving the service. It's like leaving Reddit without losing access to any content.
That's a black and white thinking, I think decentralization is not the end of all solution but it works for some instances in ActivityPub. I think Nostr model works better than ActivityPub federation.
That's a black and white thinking, I think decentralization is not the end of all solution but it works for some instances in ActivityPub. I think Nostr model works better than ActivityPub federation.
You can read the primer here. But to highlight the difference with ActivityPub: The problem with Mastodon and similar programs: User identities are attached to domain names controlled by...
You can read the primer here. But to highlight the difference with ActivityPub:
The problem with Mastodon and similar programs:
User identities are attached to domain names controlled by third-parties;
Server owners can ban you, just like Twitter; Server owners can also block other servers;
Migration between servers is an afterthought and can only be accomplished if servers cooperate. It doesn't work in an adversarial environment (all followers are lost);
There are no clear incentives to run servers, therefore, they tend to be run by enthusiasts and people who want to have their name attached to a cool domain. Then, users are subject to the despotism of a single person, which is often worse than that of a big company like Twitter, and they can't migrate out;
Since servers tend to be run amateurishly, they are often abandoned after a while — which is effectively the same as banning everybody;
It doesn't make sense to have a ton of servers if updates from every server will have to be painfully pushed (and saved!) to a ton of other servers. This point is exacerbated by the fact that servers tend to exist in huge numbers, therefore more data has to be passed to more places more often;
For the specific example of video sharing, ActivityPub enthusiasts realized it would be completely impossible to transmit video from server to server the way text notes are, so they decided to keep the video hosted only from the single instance where it was posted to, which is similar to the Nostr approach.
Very short summary of how Nostr works, if you don't plan to read anything else:
Everybody runs a client. It can be a native client, a web client, etc. To publish something, you write a post, sign it with your key and send it to multiple relays (servers hosted by someone else, or yourself). To get updates from other people, you ask multiple relays if they know anything about these other people. Anyone can run a relay. A relay is very simple and dumb. It does nothing besides accepting posts from some people and forwarding to others. Relays don't have to be trusted. Signatures are verified on the client side.
How does Nostr work?
There are two components: clients and relays. Each user runs a client. Anyone can run a relay.
Every user is identified by a public key. Every post is signed. Every client validates these signatures.
Clients fetch data from relays of their choice and publish data to other relays of their choice. A relay doesn't talk to another relay, only directly to users.
For example, to "follow" someone a user just instructs their client to query the relays it knows for posts from that public key.
On startup, a client queries data from all relays it knows for all users it follows (for example, all updates from the last day), then displays that data to the user chronologically.
A "post" can contain any kind of structured data, but the most used ones are going to find their way into the standard so all clients and relays can handle them seamlessly.
You can find the list of programs in awesome-nostr, for starters, you can try Damus on iOS and Amethyst on Android.
Yeah Nostr sounds like it can handle scale way better than the ActivityPub model. I alway thought ActivityPub worked better as a way of merging all of your personal content across multiple...
Yeah Nostr sounds like it can handle scale way better than the ActivityPub model. I alway thought ActivityPub worked better as a way of merging all of your personal content across multiple platforms into a single feed, something you publish for other people to check out, like a personal blog. Attempts to shoehorn it into the perpetually updating content-stream sort of system, like Twitter always seem strained and awkward.
How does Nostr handle persisting feeds across multiple devices? I assume the client has its own server that manages syncing?
Or the instance becomes big which encourages everyone to go there which makes it even bigger. That eventually starts to hurt the smaller instances if a majority of your content is now blocked. You...
Or the instance becomes big which encourages everyone to go there which makes it even bigger. That eventually starts to hurt the smaller instances if a majority of your content is now blocked. You could also end up with a bunch of federation fiefdoms if the blocking and selective federation becomes more prevalent.
I suppose we'll just have to let them go through their federation phase and experience what it's like. Then clamor for the simplicity of centralization. Only for a new round of federation later on.
I think of federation as a slightly less extreme case of cryptocurrency: it's a very interesting technical challenge, and it does come with some theoretical improvements. However, it's plagued by...
I think of federation as a slightly less extreme case of cryptocurrency: it's a very interesting technical challenge, and it does come with some theoretical improvements. However, it's plagued by practical issues (performance with mismatched server sizes), and generally fails to do anything an appropriately managed centralized solution couldn't do.
Federation by default makes it impossible to have any checks on new accounts: if I want an account, I can just make a federated instance and an account there. Thus, any instance which wants anything more than that will necessarily remove federation by default, as done here.
Opt-in federation implies coordination, i.e., a mutually respecting relationship between the communities. Typically, it would also involve agreeing to a similar set of rules on both sides, a way to resolve disagreements, etc. And when this type of relationship is in place, conventional tools offer as much as federation with a much simpler implementation. This simplicity means that more time can be spent on implementing how the communities wish to be merged, and less time handling sync issues
Decentralization came into vogue a few years ago and everyone had their own idea for a cool experiment looking at what you could do with it, and they were cool! But they probably should have...
Decentralization came into vogue a few years ago and everyone had their own idea for a cool experiment looking at what you could do with it, and they were cool! But they probably should have stayed as experiments. It's a case of a tool being ill-suited to a problem space. But a lot of people really like decentralization as a concept so you end up in "If the only tool you have is a hammer, you tend to see every problem as a nail" territory.
To draw the cryptocurrency analogy even deeper: during the peak of blockchain mania, everybody was trying to cram blockchain into everything. NFTs and smart contracts in general are one (now well understood to be a silly idea) example, but there was a bizarre period where quite literally any new or old project of any kind was considered for cramming blockchain in somewhere, regardless of whether it netted any real life benefits, and regardless of whether it came with massive practical issues, like slowdowns, costs, energy use, etc.
The Fediverse always felt kinda similar. What are we getting out of it? Ehhh, decentralization is cool, arguments about privacy that never really made sense, that's about it. What are we losing? The ability to moderate communities effectively, the ability for a community to exist as a coherent whole rather than a fractal of disjoint fiefdoms in parallel universes all trying to exist in the same place, etc etc etc.
That is by far the biggest problem I have with federation as a framework, the whole fracturing of communities. Mastodon itself is absurdly fractured, and you're always running into walls there,...
That is by far the biggest problem I have with federation as a framework, the whole fracturing of communities. Mastodon itself is absurdly fractured, and you're always running into walls there, sometimes there's a person you'd like to interact with but oops! it just so happens their instance defederated from yours because of disagreements, so now you can't even read their posts!
Like, what if I'm interested in a community from Beehaw but also interested in another from lemmy.world? I'm going to have two accounts now? How long until I need five accounts or more? I hoped Lemmy wasn't going to start fracturing this soon, but I guess I was being naive. The most surefire way of avoiding this issue would be to host your own private instance, kind of like an email host of sorts, something the average user isn't going to do. It's this kind of stuff that makes me have serious doubts about the whole federation concept.
This is something that sort of bugs me about the current reddit alternatives (Tildes excluded since it's explicitly not meant as that). None of them have a large enough user base for them to...
these two instances’ open registration policy, which is extremely problematic for us given how federation works and how trivial it makes trolling, harassment, and other undesirable behavior;
This is something that sort of bugs me about the current reddit alternatives (Tildes excluded since it's explicitly not meant as that). None of them have a large enough user base for them to become truly interesting to browse for everyone yet they refuse to have a large user base in fear of having to deal with bad actors.
I think that this kind of exclusive club mentality is what's going to lead many to just go on reddit instead, which is much easier to access. The fediverse in particular has no purpose if you defederate from most of the user base.
I think the userbase size issue kinda runs even deeper than that: Federations are the wild west of reddit brigading. Basically, any one instance doesn't have enough moderation capacity to properly...
None of them have a large enough user base for them to become truly interesting to browse for everyone yet they refuse to have a large user base in fear of having to deal with bad actors.
I think the userbase size issue kinda runs even deeper than that: Federations are the wild west of reddit brigading. Basically, any one instance doesn't have enough moderation capacity to properly moderate if a bunch of other instances come knocking. They can defederate, at massive cost to themselves and others, or they can try and moderate a large group invading a small community, but they're probably only sufficient moderators for a small community. Not impossible, but I imagine the mod tools required are substantial.
It doesn’t really help that the code is a little messy, it seems like none of these Reddit replacements have really got a very clean code base. Tildes is pretty clean and easy to read from my...
It doesn’t really help that the code is a little messy, it seems like none of these Reddit replacements have really got a very clean code base. Tildes is pretty clean and easy to read from my perusing, but it’s also pretty old school. But for tildes at least it should be pretty quick to actually develop new features.
Tildes does go a long way to explain the philosophy behind its site design and implementation which is far more thoughtful than most projects. Though jQuery still feels very old-fashioned,...
Tildes does go a long way to explain the philosophy behind its site design and implementation which is far more thoughtful than most projects. Though jQuery still feels very old-fashioned, speaking as someone that has primarily worked with Angular.
Yeah the two biggest problems I have with the tildes code base is 1) Vagrant + Ansible and 2) jQuery. Vagrant on new Apple hardware essentially requires paid Parallels or VMWare to run, which is...
Yeah the two biggest problems I have with the tildes code base is 1) Vagrant + Ansible and 2) jQuery.
Vagrant on new Apple hardware essentially requires paid Parallels or VMWare to run, which is sad. And jQuery is definitely not going to be around very much longer, would perhaps be better to just run completely native JS. Or go with HTMX.
Tildes uses Intercooler, which is the predecessor of HTMX from the same developer, and it required jQuery. I'd definitely like to switch over to HTMX at some point, does it no longer have the...
Tildes uses Intercooler, which is the predecessor of HTMX from the same developer, and it required jQuery. I'd definitely like to switch over to HTMX at some point, does it no longer have the jQuery dependency?
I don't have an M1/M2 to be able to test, but is there just no longer a straightforward/free way to run a Debian VM on them? I see that there's a "Developer preview for macOS / Arm64 (M1/M2) hosts" on the VirtualBox downloads page, does it not work?
(mention for @sixthgear if you have any info about this too)
I can do a little research. The Virtualbox VM seems to just crash with minimal explanation in that developer preview. I've had success on M1 with tools that use Apple's HyperKit framework (Docker...
I don't have an M1/M2 to be able to test, but is there just no longer a straightforward/free way to run a Debian VM on them? I see that there's a "Developer preview for macOS / Arm64 (M1/M2) hosts" on the VirtualBox downloads page, does it not work?
I can do a little research. The Virtualbox VM seems to just crash with minimal explanation in that developer preview. I've had success on M1 with tools that use Apple's HyperKit framework (Docker and Multipass).
If I can figure out someway to coerce vagrant to work nicely on my M1, I'll make a pull request. Sound good?
You should checkout my comment here and the tildes post I made. Perhaps we should make an issue on GitLab and have some of the technical stuff there? IMO it looks like it'd be most straightforward...
You should checkout my comment here and the tildes post I made.
Perhaps we should make an issue on GitLab and have some of the technical stuff there?
IMO it looks like it'd be most straightforward to move to Docker or Podman.
tbh given the hardware I have at home (2018 air, windows desktop I built years ago), I'll probably just spin up an aws instance to tinker with tildes. It's not expensive to run as long as you...
tbh given the hardware I have at home (2018 air, windows desktop I built years ago), I'll probably just spin up an aws instance to tinker with tildes. It's not expensive to run as long as you remember to turn things off when you're not using them.
I posted a bit more about it here a few days ago I've since looked in to it a bit more, and it definitely seems like the virtualbox is a no-go, VMWare or Paralells may work but those are paid...
I've since looked in to it a bit more, and it definitely seems like the virtualbox is a no-go, VMWare or Paralells may work but those are paid non-open source versions.
I have given it about an hour or so of work to try to get it running using Docker, but ran out of time during my lunch break.
EDIT: Also interesting, I did not know Intercooler was the precursor to HTMX. I have yet to use HTMX in an actual project, but I've wanted to for a while. It looks very neat. HTMX is dependency free.
Yeah, I wanted to start contributing but hit VirtualBox hurdles on my M1 Pro. I'm partial to vue.js paired with my own python backends (Django or FastAPI usually), but I think it's overkill for...
Yeah, I wanted to start contributing but hit VirtualBox hurdles on my M1 Pro.
I'm partial to vue.js paired with my own python backends (Django or FastAPI usually), but I think it's overkill for the type of site Tildes wants to be. I agree that HTMX would be a nice fit for Tildes, or perhaps some nice, tight Typescript with as few other dependencies as possible.
I miss the simplicity of the old school. Unpack a zipfile of site code, set up that directory on a web server so you can access it, install a database, run the setup.php that does the basics. Now...
I miss the simplicity of the old school. Unpack a zipfile of site code, set up that directory on a web server so you can access it, install a database, run the setup.php that does the basics. Now you have a website. It was pretty damn hard to fuck that up. Containerization has its uses, but there are also times where it just seems like total overkill.
I actually have accounts for both Beehaw and Lemmy World. I guess I can live with one de-feredating from the other. But seeing as LemmyWorld has more users and federates with more communities, I...
I actually have accounts for both Beehaw and Lemmy World. I guess I can live with one de-feredating from the other.
But seeing as LemmyWorld has more users and federates with more communities, I will probably stay in LW more often.
I use the jebora app on Android. It needs work, but I can login to both accounts. It's not ideal, but at least I can still view and interact with both communities.
I use the jebora app on Android. It needs work, but I can login to both accounts. It's not ideal, but at least I can still view and interact with both communities.
Because any two instances can defederate from each other at any time. That works now, but not in the long term. The system by design tendentially creeps toward every user having an account on...
Because any two instances can defederate from each other at any time. That works now, but not in the long term. The system by design tendentially creeps toward every user having an account on every instance.
I have a Mastodon.Social account that federates with both, but I don't use it that often. Plus I don't like to create too many accounts, I think a LW and BH account are enough for my needs.
I have a Mastodon.Social account that federates with both, but I don't use it that often. Plus I don't like to create too many accounts, I think a LW and BH account are enough for my needs.
Lemmy is already quite confusing and needing to have two different accounts just so I'm not blocked off from certain posts and comments is a shame. I think if Reddit comes back and the protests...
Lemmy is already quite confusing and needing to have two different accounts just so I'm not blocked off from certain posts and comments is a shame.
I think if Reddit comes back and the protests have ended (for good reasons) I'll just stop using Lemmy. I'll stay on Tildes though, I like it here.
Is it possible to have an instance of Federation that allows it to be placed in an aggregator that you can read and post from, but not be able to read and post from every other federated website?...
Is it possible to have an instance of Federation that allows it to be placed in an aggregator that you can read and post from, but not be able to read and post from every other federated website? Or did I just reinvent Pidgin?
I thought people were moving to kbin, not lemmy, after it was seen how problematic the devs behind lemmy are? Though I may as well ask here. Would it be possible to run your own instance, just for...
I thought people were moving to kbin, not lemmy, after it was seen how problematic the devs behind lemmy are?
Though I may as well ask here. Would it be possible to run your own instance, just for yourself, and grab stuff from/post to other communities you like in the fediverse?
If by "grab stuff" you mean "copy links from other link aggregators," we do that all the time, but manually. I can imagine making it a little easier to do. Take an RSS feed from Hacker News (or...
If by "grab stuff" you mean "copy links from other link aggregators," we do that all the time, but manually.
I can imagine making it a little easier to do. Take an RSS feed from Hacker News (or anything else with an RSS feed) and use that to populate a list of potential topics, so we can convert them into Tildes topics with a single button press.
But it's easy enough already and I think having a bit of friction is fine. We don't want all the links, just the ones you think are the best, and you can find them anywhere you like.
There are also bookmarking websites that are a bit less social, where you bookmark anything you like, and so do other users, and you can see their bookmarks, but it's less about shared discussion of the best ones. That might be kind of nice; you could save bookmarks without saying they're worthy of showing up on the front page or affecting the mix.
Run an instance of Tildes? No, what you described is federation. Tildes runs as its own site, so to do what you did without conventional federation you would have to somehow share database access,...
Run an instance of Tildes?
No, what you described is federation. Tildes runs as its own site, so to do what you did without conventional federation you would have to somehow share database access, instead of a standardized communication protocol (ActivityPub, which is behind Lemmy, Mastodon, and others).
Not Tildes. I was talking running your own instance of lemmy/kbin just for yourself but then subscribing to other communities across the fediverse to read and post to.
Not Tildes. I was talking running your own instance of lemmy/kbin just for yourself but then subscribing to other communities across the fediverse to read and post to.
I'm not a fediverse guy, but I think it would be subject to a few things: is federation opt-in? Or do instances block random instances with low user counts they don't know to avoid harassment?...
I'm not a fediverse guy, but I think it would be subject to a few things:
is federation opt-in? Or do instances block random instances with low user counts they don't know to avoid harassment?
What's performance like when all of your interactions are 'off-server'
I believe it's dynamic. So if a user subscribes to a community on another instance it becomes federated. So if you run your own instance you technically would only federate with those you...
I believe it's dynamic. So if a user subscribes to a community on another instance it becomes federated. So if you run your own instance you technically would only federate with those you subscribe to.
I do believe you could manage that, I've seen people discuss it, and as long as you're meeting whatever conditions there are for federation it should work fairly fine.
I do believe you could manage that, I've seen people discuss it, and as long as you're meeting whatever conditions there are for federation it should work fairly fine.
Is there an easy-to-install, low maintenance, lightweight service (preferably with docker) that I could install on my VPS to participate in lemmy/kbin communities? Something like what...
Is there an easy-to-install, low maintenance, lightweight service (preferably with docker) that I could install on my VPS to participate in lemmy/kbin communities? Something like what GoToSocial+Semaphore do for Mastodon.
I don't want to clone projects and build docker configs, I just want to drop a docker-compose.yml and be able to participate in the fediverse kinda like an "RSS with reply".
Actually I already have several docker services that I run behind nginx proxies, but Lemmy directly integrates nginx and letsencrypt, and I was somehow unable to start it correctly 🤷♂️ A contact...
Actually I already have several docker services that I run behind nginx proxies, but Lemmy directly integrates nginx and letsencrypt, and I was somehow unable to start it correctly 🤷♂️
A contact recommended me Friendica, and I saw some mentions of Hubzilla
I've only looked briefly into beehaw/lemmy but i think it's current implementation generates too much noise while simultaneously splitting the fediverse with its approach to federation. And i mean...
I've only looked briefly into beehaw/lemmy but i think it's current implementation generates too much noise while simultaneously splitting the fediverse with its approach to federation. And i mean this while still federated with each other.
So no wonder they do this.
not gonna lie, im kinda bummed about that. I jumped ship to beehaw a few days ago, and was really liking it as a decade long reddit addict. Tho i also dont agree with disabled downvotes on beehaw....
not gonna lie, im kinda bummed about that. I jumped ship to beehaw a few days ago, and was really liking it as a decade long reddit addict. Tho i also dont agree with disabled downvotes on beehaw. I'll be registering to lemmy world now
This is your regularly scheduled reminder that Lemmy is written and maintained by tankies (authoritarian apologists).. This is a dangerous bed to get into. Authoritarian motives are not prosocial;...
I'm seeing a lot of posts along the lines of "tankies bad, lemmy devs are tankies, therefore lemmy bad" which strikes me as an incredibly fallacious argument. Maybe there's some critical context...
I'm seeing a lot of posts along the lines of "tankies bad, lemmy devs are tankies, therefore lemmy bad" which strikes me as an incredibly fallacious argument. Maybe there's some critical context I'm missing somewhere, but the more I see that same argument, again and again without context, the more I suspect that the context doesn't exist.
I'm not a huge fan of using an anonymous mastodon user as my only source, especially one who for some reason says "I have receipts, DM me if you want to see them for yourself" instead of you know, citing their sources. So I've done some looking around to see if there's anything with a bit more detail.
The very same Lemmy instance this post is about, beehaw, has a well thought-out post regarding the politics of the two Lemmy developers, "On Politics and Forking", which seems pretty relevant here.
One of the two Lemmy developers wrote a "Statement on Politics of Lemmy.ml", where they straight up say they're communists. But they also present a very reasonable narrative that they keep their politics out of Lemmy decisions and call out the Lemmy Code of Conduct, which certainly appears to be a safe, apolitical document to me.
My personal take here is that if the Lemmy devs can, in fact, keep their politics and Lemmy development separate then why not use the project? I'm wouldn't donate to the Lemmy devs, especially not if it would fund the hosting of Lemmy instances that are a safe haven for extremist communist rhetoric, but it seems to me that simply using the code doesn't promote political extremism.
Finally, this is a bit of an aside, but this situation also reminds me of a post by an Invidious contributor, TheFrenchGhosty: "I'm Not Invidious". For context, Invidious is an open source alternative frontend for YouTube, which unsurprisingly Google is not very happy about. TheFrenchGhosty's argument is that as an open-source project with numerous contributors, no one person "owns" Invidious. Obviously TheFrenchGhosty has a vested interest in not being considered an owner of Invidious due to the cease-and-desist Google sent them. But regardless of TheFrenchGhosty's bias, I think it's a pretty valid approach to think of FOSS code as being ownerless.
I linked to the context. Why not use Lemmy? Because as much as people want to believe, technology is not neutral. People can pretend to compartmentalize but we can't. We're all jumped-up monkeys....
I linked to the context.
Why not use Lemmy? Because as much as people want to believe, technology is not neutral. People can pretend to compartmentalize but we can't. We're all jumped-up monkeys.
If someone tells you who they are, believe them. The Lemmy devs are Leninist communists. This infects how they interact with others.
If you don't have a problem with Leninist communism, good for you. But then I have a problem with it and all who believe in it.
Okay, I'm genuinely confused here: is there anything in particular about their politics you think has entered the code? If your problem with them is that they're totalitarians, and you believe the...
Okay, I'm genuinely confused here: is there anything in particular about their politics you think has entered the code? If your problem with them is that they're totalitarians, and you believe the code is intractably ruined by their totalitarianism, you probably wouldn't expect them to create a social network that provides admins with so little control over anything that their only recourse is to shut themselves off from much of the rest of the network, and yet that's what they did. If anything, their code is too libertarian to be usable.
If you want to convince people that the code is somehow ... itself communist... whatever that means, you need to do better than vaguely asserting it is "infected".
You don't really say what part of their beliefs you think infected what part of the project in that comment, or how you think that happened. If Lemmy somehow enforced democratic centralism for...
You don't really say what part of their beliefs you think infected what part of the project in that comment, or how you think that happened. If Lemmy somehow enforced democratic centralism for decision-making, or something, anything at all related to their Marxist-Leninist beliefs, I could accept that and that could be a basis for a debate about whether that influence is good or bad or neutral. But, again, I don't think you're saying anything about the code at all except cryptically asserting it's "infected".
The only real ideological content I see to Lemmy as a project is that it clearly is inspired by and embodies decentralization ideology, which is radically anti-authoritarian, which is the last thing you would really expect from this project if you believe it to be "infected" by authoritarianism or whatever you're arguing.
Have you visited lemmygrad.ml? I found a lot of it disturbing. Having a separate instance for it? People don't have near boundaries. We're not machines. This isn't my full time job. I don't get...
Have you visited lemmygrad.ml? I found a lot of it disturbing. Having a separate instance for it? People don't have near boundaries. We're not machines.
This isn't my full time job. I don't get paid to point out that there's at least moral risk in using something for free provided by someone else with questionable motives. Take my suggestion with as much salt as you see fit. I'm finding myself feeling too defensive in this conversation now to continue.
Yes, I have. Lemmygrad was deliberately made a separate instance as a containment zone so that other instances could defederate from that content if they wanted to, without having to defederate...
Yes, I have. Lemmygrad was deliberately made a separate instance as a containment zone so that other instances could defederate from that content if they wanted to, without having to defederate lemmy.ml. This is a good example of them separating their politics from the project.
This is a simple rule for rejecting things but I think it’s too simple. The history of an open source project is often useful for understanding it. But I don’t believe an open source project is...
This is a simple rule for rejecting things but I think it’s too simple.
The history of an open source project is often useful for understanding it. But I don’t believe an open source project is forever tainted by association with the authors of previous commits after a fork. You can review the code and change anything you don’t like.
For some projects that may be too many changes to be practical, if it’s not close enough to what you wanted. Or there may be too much to review. But I think we can make that decision on a case-by-case basis.
An argument to not use some code would be more compelling if it described something wrong with the code.
Simple? Yes. However, forking is typically a socially violent activity. You are creating schism. There is mass, gravity, and momentum on originating projects. Forking, therefore is complex. There...
Simple? Yes.
However, forking is typically a socially violent activity. You are creating schism. There is mass, gravity, and momentum on originating projects.
Forking, therefore is complex. There are unforeseen complications.
There's a lot to be said for "simple".
Your take invokes discomfort for me. I taken it in as the same sort of libertarian meritocratic speech that was common in Hacker News until perhaps a decade ago. I hope that's not what tildes will represent.
Yes, forking isn't always easy. But if someone else does it, I think I'm still going to judge their project by the actual community that's doing the new work and not by any predecessors. I'm...
Yes, forking isn't always easy. But if someone else does it, I think I'm still going to judge their project by the actual community that's doing the new work and not by any predecessors. I'm uncomfortable with guilt by association when they're not associating anymore.
This is dropped like it's a fact, but I'm pretty sure it's not. It's not the first time I've come across this belief, and I don't know where exactly it comes from, but I find it concerning....
Because as much as people want to believe, technology is not neutral. People can pretend to compartmentalize but we can't.
This is dropped like it's a fact, but I'm pretty sure it's not. It's not the first time I've come across this belief, and I don't know where exactly it comes from, but I find it concerning.
Obviously there's something to be said for "yes, if you support lemmy, these people with these beliefs will become more successful, and you might not want that"
That is a far cry from "these people with these beliefs made X or Y tech, and therefore the tech itself is not neutral".
Maybe you mean more of the first than the second, but in my past experiences with this line of logic that hasn't been the case, and I really have to say I strongly disagree.
Good request for clarification. I mean both. The latter is because forking a social change with social impact. The rationale that "we'll just fork" means accepting the cost of effectively striking...
Good request for clarification.
I mean both.
The latter is because forking a social change with social impact. The rationale that "we'll just fork" means accepting the cost of effectively striking out on your own; you don't get the original project's dev community to come with you without creating some sort of schism in the community.
Never heard the phrase Tankie before, this is all very….interesting. IMO all this federated stuff is way over my head and I’m in the realms of someone who would look up stuff/read wikis/mod pc...
Never heard the phrase Tankie before, this is all very….interesting.
IMO all this federated stuff is way over my head and I’m in the realms of someone who would look up stuff/read wikis/mod pc games etc.
I just don’t see it catching on outside of our own little internet-bubble. At least here it’s effectively a Reddit like forum with categories.
Yet the content is federated to and from them. They have some moderation controls local to them. How that works in Lemmy-land 🤷🏻♂️? Choosing to federate with them is a form of complicity.
Yet the content is federated to and from them. They have some moderation controls local to them. How that works in Lemmy-land 🤷🏻♂️?
Choosing to federate with them is a form of complicity.
This seems like a better argument. Federating with a toxic node seems like a legit complaint in principle, though I haven't looked into it so I don't know anything.
This seems like a better argument. Federating with a toxic node seems like a legit complaint in principle, though I haven't looked into it so I don't know anything.
lemmy.ml is moderated apolitically, the devs deliberately segregated all their commie stuff into a separate instance which is defederated by a lot of instances, and they did this specifically to...
lemmy.ml is moderated apolitically, the devs deliberately segregated all their commie stuff into a separate instance which is defederated by a lot of instances, and they did this specifically to allow other instances to defederate.
I'm still baffled by moderation that occurred in a kbin.social thread I participated in that was federated to lemmy. It's... weird. I wrote the top voted comment.. Now I cannot see other comments...
I'm still baffled by moderation that occurred in a kbin.social thread I participated in that was federated to lemmy. It's... weird. I wrote the top voted comment.. Now I cannot see other comments when logged in to kbin. Is this federated moderation? A bug in kbin? I don't know. But it makes me less trusting of both.
Let's not pretend: the main instance of a federated system tends to get the most traffic. This has been demonstrated with mastodon.social. It is again with Lemmy.ml.
I get that my perspective here isn't shared widely. That's unfortunate. Maybe tildes isn't for me after all.
This isn't a kbin.social thread. This is a lemmy.ml thread that you are viewing on kbin.social because it was federated to kbin.social. I'm sorry, I don't know how to say this more nicely, but my...
This isn't a kbin.social thread. This is a lemmy.ml thread that you are viewing on kbin.social because it was federated to kbin.social. I'm sorry, I don't know how to say this more nicely, but my guess is you probably got banned from lemmy.ml because you went off-topic insulting the owners of the server in their own meta forum in order to try to advertise for people to abandon their platform and go to another one. This is not a particularly surprising outcome to me, and crucially it doesn't impact your ability to view other lemmy instances.
The URL is https://kbin.social/m/lemmy@lemmy.ml/t/6861/How-is-Lemmy-going-to-make-money, and you can see "lemmy@lemmy.ml" is the community name. That's how you access federated communities on...
I can't open the page anymore because I get a 503 error, but I seem to remember agreeing with you that the page itself doesn't make it clear at all that it wasn't a kbin.social thread. Lemmy instances make it pretty clear when a thread is federated from another instance, and I don't think kbin does a good job of this.
Well, their view points don't need to be yours. The software is interesting and the benefit is you can use a different instance that isn't theirs. It's open source so it could be forked. Kbin is...
Well, their view points don't need to be yours. The software is interesting and the benefit is you can use a different instance that isn't theirs. It's open source so it could be forked. Kbin is wholly separate from Lemmy but it's also in the fedeverse (think email ish like yahoo and Gmail). You can converse between the two (although a bit buggy from what I've read) but they are run by different groups. So you could still partake in the fedeverse by using kbin and subscribing to Lemmy communities that aren't run by the developers. It's all very interesting.
Probably for the best. There's little point in vetting new users if you're going to federate with open instances. Also, I didn’t realize who exactly was running Beehaw. That's an interesting...
Probably for the best. There's little point in vetting new users if you're going to federate with open instances.
Also, I didn’t realize who exactly was running Beehaw. That's an interesting combination of (ex?)Tildes posters — I don't think I had those two teaming up on my bingo sheet. Best of luck to them, in any case!
I knew Gaywallet was on there, but the rest of the mods don't ring a bell. Why do you think it's an unlikely combination?
Also, I didn’t realize who exactly was running Beehaw. That's an interesting combination of (ex?)Tildes posters — I don't think I had those two teaming up on my bingo sheet.
I knew Gaywallet was on there, but the rest of the mods don't ring a bell. Why do you think it's an unlikely combination?
alyaza was banned here many years ago... and I won't out the other person, but they were also banned here (and on /r/tildes). I love gaywallet, genuinely consider them a friend, and wish them all...
alyaza was banned here many years ago... and I won't out the other person, but they were also banned here (and on /r/tildes). I love gaywallet, genuinely consider them a friend, and wish them all the best... but the aforementioned other two, I have very serious doubts about their ability to run a supposedly "safe, friendly", "healthy" community, based on their past actions/behavior here which got them banned. But who knows, maybe they have changed their ways. I know I certainly have since the early days of Tildes. So ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
Maybe I choose a particularly bad day to check out the unofficial Discord, but seeing what was said and abided there seriously colored the way I view any of the people involved. Wish them the...
Maybe I choose a particularly bad day to check out the unofficial Discord, but seeing what was said and abided there seriously colored the way I view any of the people involved. Wish them the best, but I would share the same doubts, and the same hopes they've matured.
No, it wasn't a particularly bad day, that is just how the discord was as far as I can tell. I joined and left it multiple times over the years to check in on things but it had an issue of...
No, it wasn't a particularly bad day, that is just how the discord was as far as I can tell. I joined and left it multiple times over the years to check in on things but it had an issue of vague-booking and talking down about other users, where it was just too much to stay. It is a shame though because it did have some good moments, like when we had a Valheim server going. But I think the casual conversations should stay away from chatrooms and be contained on the site, on ~talk.
The Unofficial Discord is and was largely for people that don't like Tildes to complain about moderation, talk shit about other users, brigade, "identify" (or create the perception of having)...
The Unofficial Discord is and was largely for people that don't like Tildes to complain about moderation, talk shit about other users, brigade, "identify" (or create the perception of having) enemies and enemy groups, sharing an overall sense of paranoia, witch hunting, and a "us vs them" mentality.
I have a vague hunch that seeing a list of users of the discord would explain a few things I've experienced on tildes before. I have a much less vague hunch that it won't make me any happier, so I...
I have a vague hunch that seeing a list of users of the discord would explain a few things I've experienced on tildes before.
I have a much less vague hunch that it won't make me any happier, so I won't go looking.
To be fair, I was a regular on the Discord for several years too (and was even made a mod there shortly before I left)... as were a few other prominent members of the Tildes community who are...
To be fair, I was a regular on the Discord for several years too (and was even made a mod there shortly before I left)... as were a few other prominent members of the Tildes community who are awesome, super nice people. But I (and many others) eventually left due to the issues Merry and lou mentioned. And having banned users still lingering there years after they were banned from Tildes itself, and shit talking the site (and Deimos in particular), was another reason I left too though. I didn't need or want that negativity or added stress in my life.
Time changes people, and sometimes we learn what to do and not to do from experience, rather than just ideals. A lot of what I’ve figured out in my life has come from me screwing something up, not...
Time changes people, and sometimes we learn what to do and not to do from experience, rather than just ideals. A lot of what I’ve figured out in my life has come from me screwing something up, not necessarily realizing it or knowing why — or knowing exactly why but being unable to do otherwise —and then reflecting on it afterwards.
I’m aware of some of the details of their pasts here, and I hope reflecting on that has helped them make Beehaw a better place.
Yeah, I am trying my best to give them the benefit of the doubt. But given my history with both, and knowing a lot of the behind the scenes stuff that happened which most other users aren't aware...
Yeah, I am trying my best to give them the benefit of the doubt. But given my history with both, and knowing a lot of the behind the scenes stuff that happened which most other users aren't aware of, it's difficult. Regardless of how I feel about them, I hope beehaw works out and lives up to the principles they espouse in their docs though. We need more places like that on the internet.
I still keep in touch with with Alyaza. She remains unlikely to suffer fools gladly, but she does care about keeping discussions up to a certain standard of quality. That's probably an appropriate...
I still keep in touch with with Alyaza. She remains unlikely to suffer fools gladly, but she does care about keeping discussions up to a certain standard of quality. That's probably an appropriate inclination to have for moderating a more fractious, Reddity space.
At risk of contradicting my comment here it looks like they're defederating to maintain sort of the vibe of their community and drop federation with communities that run open signups. Some...
At risk of contradicting my comment here it looks like they're defederating to maintain sort of the vibe of their community and drop federation with communities that run open signups. Some discussion even shows that they're unhappy with the call, but see it as necessary, at least in the short term.
Not to out anybody but I do recall a couple of the admins there from their history here. This is consistent with sort of how they felt about the Tildes community a while back, I sort of get what they're going for on Beehaw and how this decision will support their goal, at least in the short term before they re-evaluate the decision, whenever they make that call. In fact, a lot of Beehaw seems to borrow conceptually from Tildes, they just wanted to do it with their own tweaks, which I think is great, but risky in the fediverse.
Here's a post from an admin where they mention being on Tildes previously: https://beehaw.org/post/509322 They have changed their username, so I'll respect that, but you'll probably recognize the...
That sounds familiar. The pre-alpha Tildes crew spent more than a year chilling out on a Slack channel doing the exact same thing. All of that stuff now happens in ~tildes as god intended -...
That’s what drew my attention to Tildes and why I spent considerable time there during testing phases. During that time, some of us that were using that site, decided to try something else.
We grouped together on Discord and did a lot of talking…some have said that we talked far too long before taking action. Finally, we settled on Lemmy as a software platform in order to launch Beehaw.
That sounds familiar. The pre-alpha Tildes crew spent more than a year chilling out on a Slack channel doing the exact same thing. All of that stuff now happens in ~tildes as god intended - development has to be in the open.
It's clear to me that BeeHaw is going to be the best instance on Lemmy. Fracturing sucks, but I know which side of that fracture I'm on and why. Good luck guys.
Ohhhhhhh. Yeah, I can only remember one person interested in that niche on tildes. Jog my memory, someone... The notabug person, is that the same or am I getting mixed up?
Ohhhhhhh. Yeah, I can only remember one person interested in that niche on tildes. Jog my memory, someone... The notabug person, is that the same or am I getting mixed up?
Ahhh ok. I remember both to be peculiar personalities. Eccentric is a fitting word, I believe. Then I must've gotten them confused into one person in my memory. Also, I thought for a second there...
Ahhh ok. I remember both to be peculiar personalities. Eccentric is a fitting word, I believe.
Then I must've gotten them confused into one person in my memory.
Also, I thought for a second there @louwas being very clever, but apparently goldfish is someone else. :D
Haha, when I first read lou's comment, contextless in my notifications, I initially thought they were responding to an older comment I made on go1dfish and notabug. So yeah, I get where your...
Haha, when I first read lou's comment, contextless in my notifications, I initially thought they were responding to an older comment I made on go1dfish and notabug. So yeah, I get where your confusion is coming from. :P
Exactly the comment that prompted me to think of him when I read the above post by the beehaw admin. Probably because I figured goldfish, having had previous experience trying to spin up a social...
Exactly the comment that prompted me to think of him when I read the above post by the beehaw admin. Probably because I figured goldfish, having had previous experience trying to spin up a social site, to try it again. So that's why Chris and goldfish became one.
Well, talking about the memory of a goldfish, With all that being at least 1-2 years ago I think I can forgive myself.
Massive /r/museumofreddit vibes right now for some reason. And that just brought on nostalgia for "early" reddit. Well, early for me. '13, '14 or so. Come to think of it, I think I found reddit then because I played a browser game that I stumbled upon, that was mostly marketed via reddit, so the crowd was basically all redditors. More nostalgia.
Now off to bed, before I tell you my life's story. Cheers!
There was a dude on here named go1dfish, but he's been banned since presumably before you joined. We thought you were making a very clever and sneaky remark about them.
There was a dude on here named go1dfish, but he's been banned since presumably before you joined. We thought you were making a very clever and sneaky remark about them.
I recognized two, but am also trying to not directly out who I'm referring to out of respect of their activities on another site. I realize mentioning it sort of undermines it.
I recognized two, but am also trying to not directly out who I'm referring to out of respect of their activities on another site.
This feels like pain from growing too fast, right? The sudden shock of the Reddit decimation revealing weaknesses in the platform? Hopefully Tildes is weathering the storm better, considering the invitation barrier.
It’s always interesting when an online system suddenly has to scale up, and the people behind it try to slow that down. Perhaps that’s a good thing to see? Considering we’re in a world of tech startups where blitz-scaling is the ultimate goal.
I think going for a slow and organic growth is the right approach and it's admirable that the admins on here don't give into the fear of missing out on users jumping ship on Reddit. I'm really optimistic for Tildes!
Also while I'm a big advocate for FOSS and the principles behind it I don't think the federated approach of Lemmy will work out. Scattering your userbase on different instances and then even allowing the mods to cut off big chunks of the userbase seems problematic. And the answer can't be to just register multiple accounts like people suggest in the comments there.
I will be very surprised if it works out, and I will definitely have to re-evaluate my own opinions on decentralized platforms if that's the case.
But currently I agree with you, I don't think federated lemmy will work out. Personally I don't think any single thing will replace Reddit. Many of it's problems stem from the fact that it is controlled by one group of people whos interests don't align with that of it's communities.
A federated approach like Lemmy where ID management is handled by each instance just creates chaos, these sort of de-federations will happen every time the users of two instances get into enough drama.
I actually believe federated approach can work but it would need:
I always figured this is the one part that should always be centralized or equivalent.
The consequences are tricky because it affects the design of everything else.
What do you get from centralizing usernames? It’s a way of guaranteeing that when you see a username on both sites, it’s the same person. This is linking accounts when often, people don’t want their accounts linked for privacy. (Though you could create another account to avoid that, and using the same username is a pretty good hint that it’s the same person, if it’s sufficiently unique.)
If the accounts are linked in this way, it’s easy for someone to create a profile of a user’s activity on all the sites. Might as well make it convenient like a Reddit profile.
If user profiles are centralized like this then the main server ends up with pretty much all the data and the other servers are replicas of the main server. Alternatively, users can have different home servers and their activity gets partially replicated, which is how the fediverse does it.
If the data is truly decentralized like git repos then it becomes easy to impersonate users. You can create a repo with commits that have any email address you like. This can be prevented by requiring signed commits, but people often don’t use them.
All this sudden interest in federated servers smacks really hard of the prior fad with sticking "crypto/Blockchain" terminology to anything and everything where it didn't belong.
Wonder how long it's gonna take to see "federated" come up as a buzzword for video game lootboxes, "federated" virtual storefronts, etc.
Also, "federal" government. :-)
Jargon often does get borrowed and watered down if it's used a lot, but I think it's pretty reasonable jargon for now. Are you concerned about the terminology being used badly, or with the design pattern being overused?
I think what I'm seeing is similar circumstances surrounding the two, and it's enough to stoke worry in me, but at the same time I know full well that it takes three to be a pattern, and the circumstances are just different enough some comparisons begin to break down.
Interest arose in bitcoin after the 2008 economic recession, where emotional investment was at breaking point with one's bank account. Years after, people start using this new, relatively untested technology in ways not really envisioned, as a reactionary response, and thus the "digital currency" age (as short lived as it was) came to pass.
Interest in federated servers arose after Elon Musk bought Twitter, and rattled people's emotional attachment/investment to social media. As a response, Mastodon comes into existence using this new, (old?) relatively untested technology (for the use-cases involved) as a reactionary response to moneyed interests and enshittification.
It's clearly not enough to make a pattern, and it might be just good ole' paranoia, but there are some similarities to note. People get emotionally invested in a thing, wealthy decide to take away the thing, people build a "decentralized" version of the original thing that by nature can't be as good as the original, and less savory elements swoop in to take advantage of that fact while people who got swept up in the decentralized version can't let go due to their emotional attachment to the original thing.
The part that fails comparisons is the last bit. Lemmy hasn't ripped off people, or if it already has, no way its ripped off people to the extent that all the digital coin services did in their heyday.
I think there’s a pattern, but it’s a vague one. There are fads. People are going to try stuff, and often it fails and then they might try something else. This isn’t enough of a pattern to predict what’s going to succeed or fail. Hopefully newer attempts at making social networks will fail better. Not all lessons are learned and some failures repeat, but some things get fixed.
So how bad are the failures and are people protecting themselves enough?
For cryptocurrency, a decent approach if you tried it at all was not betting more money than you can afford to lose. Many people were cautious, but some lost a lot more. The indirect effects are harder to predict. (I doubt anyone expected that cryptocurrencies would end up using so much electricity. Even the enthusiasts probably didn’t expect Bitcoin mining to get that big.)
The direct harm of wasting time on a website seems minimal but it’s easy to imagine all sorts of wild indirect effects, just based on what’s already happened on social networks at large scale. Some people risk more than others. Sometimes it’s because when you’re more vulnerable, sharing things about yourself is more risky.
The only instances I know of using federation are ActivityPub and some enterprise hybrid cloud systems, where it is apt.
Federated identity with OpenID is a pretty popular one, though most people won't ever see that term but see their favorite site allowing them to login with their Facebook/Google/Steam/Github credentials instead.
Federated authentication is also a possibility: I log into one instance with another's credentials, it authenticates against my origin server, and we're in. All you meed for that is to allow authn against the server with no risk posed by its content.
Of course there would likely be a mechanism to prevent authentication from "unapproved" servers as this just extends rhe issue to signups, but it can also be corrected with limiting signups or an application/invite-based system.
If it's just authentication then passkeys probably do it better.
Access delegation protocols like OAuth will pass additional information along like an email address and avatar. Beyond that, there's the question of what "having an account on some other website" really means as far as vetting someone. For example, having a legit Gmail address tells you a little bit of information about them. The account probably wasn't one of thousands created by a spammer, because Google makes that somewhat hard to do.
So there's the question of what other information could be passed on, and whether to trust it, and also how much to trust the user. Typically you still need to vet users yourself. It's similar to how getting a Tildes invite doesn't guarantee that the user won't misbehave later. It's a speedbump and rate-limiter that makes local moderation feasible.
And I think that's part of the issue with fediverse-style federation; any user can let a vampire in by following them. Users effectively get unlimited invites to give out. It works okay for small servers but eventually breaks down at scale.
We could have a whole different topic about the design of distributed social media protocols. I think it's technically interesting but hard. BlueSky is in this space too and they have some interesting ideas. It all seems rather experimental and other people have probably thought about it more than I have.
I believe we will see decentralized but also roaming user identities. Maybe not in the next few months, but within the next couple years.
Roaming user accounts that can access various communities/websites, is something we may very well see in the future. It would assist in moderation and streamline the user experience.
I requested to join a few days ago to this site and got the email to sign up today. In my opinion, waiting a day or two to get in will help foster a community of people who feel more invested than the average platform. Then again, given the popularity of short form content like TikTok and such this might be too slow for certain people.
(And not that it matters, but yes, this is my first comment on tildes.)
I also think that making people wait a day or two means we're not gonna get as flooded with new users who just want to complain for 24 hours and then go back, leaving this site with ten thousand dead accounts, which is what usually happens with drama like this. Like, the majority of people probably request an invite because they're pissed and want to complain about reddit, then they have to wait for the invite, and during that time they cool off and go back. It largely skips the portion of the cycle (which happens every time to every reddit clone) where they flood other sites with posts about reddit and nothing else. Hopefully, the people that actually use their invite, make an account, and stick around in the short term, are interested in staying and actually being a member of the community.
Welcome.
I got an invite via reddit that took about two days.
Honestly having it small shouldn't matter. If anything it'll reduce the chance of bad actions going unnoticed. Digg "Patriots" or TD style gaming of the system would be faster to spot.
Why does Tildes "need" to grow?
The Digg exodus was instrumental in making Reddit what it is today, sure, but we see exactly what the long term consequences of constantly accepting (and even promoting) vast amounts of new users.
If Tildes dies out, it's because people just weren't interested in the discussions anymore, because the community is the only real "feature" on this site. There are no images, no upvotes (that affect an algorithm), and no incentive to try and be the first to post something. For me, this is a place to actually talk to other people about the things I like and current events, not a Twitter/Reddit/Instagram competitor.
In my opinion, the only thing Tildes "needs" is to be loyal to its cause of promoting non-profit, personalized discussion. I suspect more sites like it will be popping up in the near future, and that these communities will be a core part of the next generation of websites.
But I could be wrong. Who knows. I struggle to wrap my head around how corporations like Reddit operate without the team behind it hating themselves and their job, so maybe I lack the viewpoint.
Grow is the wrong word, but there does need to be a healthy trickle of fresh voices to keep the site reasonably active.
Before this latest influx, a lot of posts were going without discussion....I'd wager because most of us here already had a pretty good idea what the discussions would entail....we knew each other too well to discuss some things yet again. Fresh voices help bring old voices back.
Exactly this - it’s the Eternal September issue that seems inevitable with social platforms that grow too quickly. The tricky part is finding the line for what rate of growth is needed (or should be allowed) to meet the demand of new users who want to join without overwhelming the existing culture of the site. If you want to get philosophical - if the culture completely changes, is it even the same site in anything other than name? If Tildes opened up and was overrun by political extremists or low effort memes it would matter more to me that it had radically changed than that it had grown.
Too much new seems to fundamentally overwhelm the dynamic of platforms that allow it - Reddit in ‘09 was a different culture than Reddit in ‘23, and for users who were specifically looking for the experience offered by Reddit ‘09, the growth of the site may be the very thing that ruined it for them. You definitely want new users to come in and engage and feel welcome, but not to the detriment of the existing users who helped build your site in to a desirable place to be. I think Tildes is doing the right thing for now by controlling the stampede, especially while discussions about how growth affects the features of the site are still ongoing. Even with the invite system, as a new user I’ve seen a handful of veterans comment on some noticeable changes the past week.
I’ll be watching from the sidelines to see where the dust settles with all these new platforms and the fediverse as a whole, though. Maybe they’ll defy the odds and come up with a solution.
There was more than one exodus from digg to reddit, it started in 2007 with the decss2.0 debacle when digg first deleted the news story and users started spamming the key everywhere. Quite a few users left at that time already. The bigger one you are thinking about was in 2010 iirc when digg overhauled the UI and user experience.
I'm surprised this isn't brought up more..."Oh Nine Eff Nine" was a pretty bit deal at the time. DRM was a huge hot button issue in nerd circles around the mid aughts. Who can forget Sony's infamous rootkit scandal? It almost feels quaint now.
I've been waiting for some part of the Fediverse to actually experience a measurable increase in users for a while now, because it was obvious this was exactly what was going to happen. Decentralized services are just sorta fundamentally capable of handling masses of users, both technologically and culturally. And I say this as someone who has been using the Fediverse for a while.
It's just not a good model for a social network. IRC could handle occasional netsplits, because IRC was an ephemeral chat protocol, but a social network has so much state that it's devastating every time it happens.
Now note that two out of the three moderation tools administrators of ActivityPub servers (Lemmy, Mastodon et al included) have available to them are to just cause a netsplit intentionally. One of them causes a full-scale netsplit, and one of them causes a partial netsplit only for particular users, leaving the system in an inconsistent state.
Beehaw's statement linked above says that they're doing this because they don't really have the tools available to do anything else, since people can flood them with alts faster than they can ban them. But it's not that Lemmy doesn't provide them with those tools -- these limitations are built into the tech, and not only the tech, but the very concept of decentralization itself.
The value of centralization is that you have a uniform registration process and ban-list. Decentralization's entire point is to get rid of that, Lemmy can't just program around it. It's a cool technology, but I don't think social networks (at least not public ones) are a good use-case for it, and the irony is that if your social network is private, there's rarely any need for it to be decentralized in the first place!
Well said. I was on the fediverse for a bit a few years ago and came to the same conclusions as you.
The instruments for managing communities are blunt and when used they add friction and confusion. Meanwhile, federation, by its very nature, means that instances and users are stuck playing a pretty much unwinnable game of whack-a-mole all the time that will only get worse the more the network grows.
I think the federated model works well for a Twitter or Instagram-like format. The content itself isn't really ephemeral in the sense of disappearing after a while, but it is functionally so because nobody cares about your tweets from last year unless they want to doxx you or something. Twitter, in particular, wasn't designed as a personal archive for substantive posts, it was designed to function more like an AIM Away Message. It's very much about "What are you doing right now." Lots of people started using it more like a personal blog, which was a mistake. The most it ever should have expanded into was bulletin updates, like sending out a telegram where you pay by the word, to let your followers know when you had done something new they should check out. The key thing the user cares about is the "social graph" of who follows who with these platforms.
Something like Reddit just doesn't work with this model. It's not about what you're doing right now, it's about the posts and conversations, not the interconnections between actors and entities within the system. If you wanted a federated version of Lemmy you'd need to federate along the dimension that actually cares about interlocking with other elements of it. That's on the subreddit level. Each instance should act as its own "subreddit" and whichever one you're on can browse across different ones or have a personal feed of everything you're federated into. Posts shouldn't just all funnel into one master list.
That's actually pretty confusing to me, as you don't need multiple accounts. I have a single Lemmy account on lemmy.sdf.org which presently has completely open federation. Meaning that I can access, post, and comment on content from BeeHaw, lemmy.world, sh.itjust.works, anywhere. And the fact that the comments on Lemmy are so overrun with the sentiment of "I now need a BeeHaw and a lemmy.world account" is wild, as it shows that all of those vocal commenters have a big gap in their understanding of how federation works.
And, conversely, the people on lemmy.world need one elsewhere to interact with Beehaw. And now everyone on two of the biggest instances needs two accounts. And as more instances defederate, everyone in the whole system needs 10 accounts, each with access to some incomplete fraction of the community.
And if everyone is doing that anyway, so everyone is seeing the content they're trying to get rid of by defederating, then what is the point of defederation to begin with? Now the only thing it accomplishes is forcing people to switch between a handful of different accounts every time they want to read the new threads in a given community, manually keeping track of which accounts have access to which instances. It's a mess.
Admin.
There is just one.
I would say it's a good thing to see. I don't know why the most popular narrative seems to indicate that a successful reddit protest or successful reddit transition involves reddit imploding overnight as everyone moves to lemmy/kbin etc., rather than seeing it as a multi-step event over a much longer period of time. I'm not even saying the current alternatives will last a long time either, but so many people here seemingly never experienced the internet before web 2.0 and think that success = millions and millions of users all at once on an ever-growing platform with echo chamber algorithms that are designed to bring in profits rather than enrich your experience.
There's not a single one of these platforms that anyone looks at as good, whether it's Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, Reddit etc. they're all a bunch of shit, yes they either make a ton of money (don't confuse this with profit exactly) or they have the potential to make a ton of money, but why is that the only measure of success? Why should any of us care whether someone builds a platform that takes all of reddit's users? Why should anyone want that? If you expand the idea of success to something that you view positively in terms of how it benefits you rather than just what money it brings in to people that aren't you, then none of those other ones are successful, so why are we asking for something else to take its place in the same exact way? A good portion of the cynical people on reddit saying nothing will change etc. aren't like some huge reddit fanboys that love the site, a great many of them will probably say they dont care and it's just something to kill the time or that it sucks but there's nothing better etc. and even the non-cynical people are mostly just the ones that fall in the latter who will say reddit sucks but there's nothing better.
I know I'm different than I was 15-20 years ago but it was actually fun to explore and find new things and there was so much less NOISE on the internet that it wasn't as hard to find them. It seems so much harder to find unique things because as the internet grew, the interest business had in the internet also grew, and the money poured into getting the attention of all the new people using the internet grew with it, and that is noise. Because so much of what we see involves money behind it, and the more money there is, the more visible it is, the harder it is to find things that aren't backed by big money interests. I know there wasn't as many Youtube-type creators that had in-depth researched subject matter and expert opinion type topics that you could learn just about anything back then, so I'm not saying it was all sunshine and roses compared to now, but I just don't know if there is some sub-layer to all of this noise where you can cut through most of that shit but if there is I'd love to return to it.
Tildes to some extent so far gives some of this back I feel like, because of it being invite only and not-for-profit there is less noise here than there was on reddit or on some other platforms. Of course it's impossible to avoid the fact that much of what the users of Tildes see outside of Tildes is very heavily influenced by what money is behind it, that does bleed into here on some level or another, but I'll take whatever I can get at the moment.
Federation appears to be all good in theory but the programming implementation just gets too complicated and overwhelmingly complex before you know it.
You must be so specific about all the tiny details like the definition of a "sync", what information will be synced and how, who will initialize the sync and how will it be accepted, how will the instances know about each other, will there be a tracker or broadcasting server?
On top of that, when you try to put all these things into an abstract standard in a bid to federate another entire system (mastodon) with this one, a whole new pandora's box gets opened! I think they should have made the lemmy network robust first before trying to bring in mastodon.
I mean there's already standard that's used for federation. Mastodon and Lemmy could theoretically federate since they both use ActivityPub.
IMHO standards are more useful for interfacing between two systems which are very different and agnostic of one another, not building those systems themselves. A classic example is the FTP protocol for transferring files, it doesn't care whether the host or server is windows, linux or a mac. It doesn't need to know that which is good in that situation.
But if your objective is to build an entire system from scratch (a federated network for eg.), adhering to standards results in more hindrance than help. The more you obey generic standards, you'll loose the freedom or flexibility in implementing specific functionality in code. It's like how Drupal failed because it tried to be "Everything CMS" by establishing a protocol or standard for building modules while Wordpress succeeded superbly as it did a specific implementation for weblog CMS without caring about any generic standards.
I think FTP actually isn't a good example here. Or rather, it doesn't know but offloads it to clients to figure out for themselves as it is a fairly broadly defined protocol where a lot of interaction is left up to the server implementation.
For example, there is a standardized command for getting a directly listing. But in what format you will get that listing isn't defined. These days you basically can mostly expect the linux/unix response or windows response but older FTP clients have fairly complex logic to figure out what sort of server response they are dealing with.
I found this out the hard way a few years ago. I was trying to interface through FTP with a server running openVMS through a nodejs script. The FTP libraries I found all managed to connect but for actually getting content I basically had to write my own parsers there.
Honestly ActivityPub should never have been used to create a link aggregator like reddit. Unlike with twitter, there's no reason to have communication between servers. Communities (subreddits) are wholly stored in one server, the only thing needed to federate is letting people post comments and links from server X to server Y, but you can just do that by sending them a signed message with a private key using a client, the key can be stored on the main server, that's fine, it also lets your identity be portable. Pulling a feed can be done easily by pulling the top k posts from every server and ranking them clientside, it's not really super expensive to download less than 1k of data from 10 or so servers every time you want to see a feed.
That's one way to approach it. My issue is more that I expect a federated thing to be p2p based where all information is stored across instances and if one instance goes down the information isn't lost. I know this is technically difficult to implement and even harder to moderate. But what we are currently seeing pop up also doesn't seem sustainable in the long run if instances get popular.
I think that's what the at protocol aims to do. I think the main issue is that just like running a full Bitcoin node, the cost of having all the data like that is pretty inefficient and each server is going to need a lot of storage.
Like with most designs, I imagine the hardest part would be developer buy-in. Even if a better standard exists, convincing everyone to actually use the same standard is ridiculously hard. The worst outcome is you end up in Serial Port Hell.
https://forums.radioreference.com/threads/help-im-in-bct8-hell.90068/
That prophecy came true awful fast.
Invite-only is a nice warm blanket today.
That post is a bit disingenuous. The Fediverse instances on that list (and the instances frequently defederated on #fediblock) are, more or less, racist, fascist, transphobic, or CP-ridden instances most reasonable people wouldn’t want anything to do with. There is nothing lost by declining to federate with them.
The thing is with an open protocol like activitypub, anyone can spin up a site that’s compatible with federation. That doesn’t mean that you should federate with every such site, especially those prone to abuse.
I'll perhaps provide an example: there are several instances out there that appear to actively search for instances they aren't defederated from, in order to throw slurs at whoever they can find. (seemingly via a bot in one case?)
You must use a blocklist to run a Mastodon instance.
You know, I wonder why it is federation-by-default. Shouldn't things be defederated by default, then federation enabled if you as an admin decide "yup, the folks on that other instance are chill, and it's well moderated"? You should be able to view but not post to a community that hasn't yet accepted you.
I don't think that would work well because so many people run their own instances. The number of (active) bad actors is actually rather small comparatively (people defederate because obviously ==> troll instance dies), instance admins just need to block them.
And they don't even need to actively do that if they rely on one of the community blocklists that that those oh so horrible "drunk off their own power" instance admins wade through racism/Nazism/etc to maintain.
You're essentially completely bifurcating the network by defederating anyone who doesn't defederate your blocklist. Considering unsavory elements exist on a continuum, I'm not sure that's great. There is no hard boundary that everyone can agree with, so some instance A that is close to the line on this side might not want to defederate another instance B that's close on the other side.
What do? Well, apparently the solution they chose was to defederate A, because A refused to defederate B. For the sake of argument, let's assume that A are themselves not problematic per se, but they're friends with the assholes on B.
Ok, so what's the problem? The friends of A on this side of the fracture are. Now that A is on the blocklist, they're in the position A was in before: defederate your friends, who this time around aren't even assholes, or get defederated yourself.
Federated networks need to learn that social relationships aren't transitive. If they were, all the Nazis would be friends with all the Jews. Accordingly, defederation should never be expected transitively. Don't force your blocklist on your peers. If a platform can't support that, it's got problems.
This isn’t really the problem on the fediverse that a lot of people outside think it is. I joined the current iteration of fedi back in April 2017, and I can count the number of instances that are this strict on defederation on one hand. And even then, defederation is also a spectrum.
An instance can completely defederate from another, which most instances truly do reserve for literal Nazis, pedos, or instances based on harassing others, but for those instances in the “grey area”, limiting/silencing is an option. That essentially means that by default, you won’t see content from that instance on your federated feed, but you can still follow folks on that instance and see and interact with them in your home feed no problem. If a friend on a silenced instance decides to follow you, you’ll get a follow request instead and be able to verify that they are indeed a friend.
Finally, you also get to choose which instance you join. So as long as you join one with a moderation and federation policy you agree with, none of this is really a problem to begin with.
lol what does Tildes have to do with anything? I found that an odd inclusion in the title, and even the comments were confused.
I do actually think there's a good point with the user responsibility for blocking federating instances, but would think like, say, Reddit, blocking users should be the proper action. I feel like I missed a context in Beehaw's bigger picture, where these might be problematic instances not just a minority of vocal bad posters? The Beehaw response is going too far, IMO, if it's not a majority of behavior from another instance. While I disagree with it, I can understand just nipping the issue in the bud.
EDIT: Corrected a mangled sentence.
Yeah OP thought Tildes was federated. It isn't, we're not at risk for this problem. He did provide a nice rundown of Mastodon's problems and predict Lemmy fracturing. I like to collect these little lessons learned from failed social sites and networks. You never know when you'll spot something useful in them.
I think I saw a glimmer of that emerging when I clicked away.
I feel like that's definitely a weak point of federation, and it's why I was sort of hoping to get away from it when I joined Tildes. I think demonstrably bad instances ought to be cut off, but it becomes a barrier to communication when people can just sever connections like that.
Yeah, that's odd, but I can sort of see it? Maybe they see us as another node in the fractured Reddit diaspora. In effect, Tildes blocks everyone by not doing federation at all. And we like it that way.
Even when the server software supports federation, it seems like a better default would be opt-in? Why should the admins federate with another server without making sure it has compatible policies? For example, if one server is invite-only and the other isn't, effectively it's not invite-only anymore, because users can easily join the other server.
One way to restrict growth via external subscriptions might be if local users need to spend an invite to follow someone new on different server (and allow them to follow back), and people on other servers need to get an invite to follow anyone on the local server (and be followed). That would be kind of weird though.
That post... doesn't seem quite right, at all? Am I understanding it right that it's arguing for instances to be essentially unmoderated? There's also quite a lot of stuff in there that if it's referring to what I think it's referring to, is presented in a very disingenuous manner.
It almost reads like it was written by someone new to the Fediverse who doesn't understand that your instance admins fundamentally shape your experience. But they said they'd been on it for seven years? Strange.
I found it interesting that a lot of people on /r/RedditAlternatives were against sites like Squabbles and Tildes just because they weren't federated. I guess this is a good example showcasing that federation isn't the end-all be-all of the future of social media.
I would argue against this point. Reddit brought communities next to each other, but apart from cross posting, theres not really any interaction between communities.
The other thing Reddit brought to the table was an easier way to discover content through /r/all and /r/popular, as well as the auto-populating subreddit search fields on some apps.
I don't think we need to have federation like Lemmy is doing, it's fine even if communities are as split apart as tildes and reddit are. What is mainly needed is a way for people to find these communities (a search engine, if you will, HAH).
Many communities on reddit try very hard to be very indenpendent. E.g. banning "brigading" (Or, people from other, often larger communities, who come and disrupt the way your community wants to be run), coming up with strict rules and other ways of doing which is different from the rest of the site and so on. These things are all much easier to do when you have more or less complete control of the platform.
A common protocol for sharing content accross comunities isn't the worst idea, that'd help creating centralized content aggregators, but I don't think you should be able to access any other community from any other community.
WWW/HTTP is already a good protocol. Let's just that or develop something on top of it.
I could be wrong, but I think their point was the only features that Reddit as a platform had to encourage communities to comingle was crossposting and having a single account for every subreddit. There was some great collaboration between subreddits, but that was rarely due to any features inherent to Reddit.
True that.
Many, many groups of subreddits formed. Some of us went to extreme lengths to try and bring them all together with multireddits, and to share moderators, and do things to encourage cross-subreddit participation. It was a gargantuan amount of work, and cat pictures with 20k upvotes were reddit's way of saying 'fuck you' to anyone who actually put in this kind of work. That's part of the reason for the negative attitude towards 'fluff' content on this site. All the mod teams I know did this stuff for a little while and then gave up on it completely because it was all work, zero visibility. I'm including myself in that set.
Let's say I make a musical 'bestof' with 30 other mods, collecting 300+ albums from 800+ subreddits and dozens of 1k+ comment threads with user recommendations, taking hundreds of hours each for those 30 mods to proof-listen the set. It only takes every waking moment for a month, no big deal. It might even look something like this.
Now let's have this compete with cat pictures for the front page. Guess how that goes. Do you think you'd do that again next year, and the year after, and the year after? Fuck. No. Reddit's code is so bad those bestof submissions never even found 1% of the subscribers that asked for them and participated in making them.
Reddit did absolutely nothing at all to help bring groups together. They just gave people the convenience of one user account being able to access all of the communities on their website, which made it damn easy for subs to attract new people. That was their only value add.
In my opinion your examples highlight my pont exactly. The only way for communities to actually crossover, is by means invented by the community to "force" that interaction. There is nothing that Reddit does inherently that helps communities integrate or cross over.
What I mean by interaction between communities could be:
There's plenty more features that would be fun to experiment with that would bring communities together, but still keep them separate where necessary.
Hmm, I see what you’re saying here, but isn’t this more of a necessity of its federated design rather than a feature? Sure, it’s a good way to prevent unhinged communities from ruining discussions on your instance, but that just further complicates folks’ adoption of these platforms.
There are likely TONS of new users on those unfederated instances who jumped ship from Reddit with relative optimism—but not confidence—that something like Lemmy could be the solution. They probably just signed up on one of the “recommended” instances (because “they all talk to each other just pick any of them! it’s sooooo easy I promise!”) and now that group of folks may be more turned off to the whole idea over someone who may have initially been too confused to sign up in the first place.
Additionally, I’m reminded by this comment I read earlier where @scot described his experience where ProtonMail was effectively unfederated. (For a loosely related comparison.)
The only real course of action in that case… is to leave ProtonMail if you want your e-mail to work across “instances” right? I know that it’s a bit different here as the folks borking delivery from ProtonMail are mostly profit-driven, but I feel like this type of infighting can only result in a few bigger, more powerful instances. So then, why bother with federation? (This is just where my mind is going, not saying this will or won’t happen by any means.)
I’m conflicted because federated social platforms are so cool conceptually… I just don’t see them growing as much as some folks may anticipate. Hope I’m wrong, though.
I think a lot of people need to go through this desire to try federation out and see what the current implementation is like. Right now, decentralization or federated are the big buzz words because people don't like being stuck with the whims of a single group controlling things.
Which works right up to the point where the instance you're registered with gets too big and the mods too power trippy and then you need to find a new instance. I don't think federation can solve this problem.
It can't, and that's why Tildes isn't wasting any time with federation. Usenet was federated, it failed to solve this problem. Anyone who didn't know that before starting their internet forum project didn't do their homework and deserves to fail. That statement applies to about 99.9% of all social software projects, far as I can tell. I've rarely seen a topic where developers so often avoid educating themselves before starting the code. I'm honestly curious as to why this keeps happening.
Lemmy's problem here is identical to Usenet problems in the 70s. Usenet servers killfiled (defederated from) each other all the time, and the process/consensus to create usenet groups was a nightmare that lead to plenty of infighting across the network.
Congrats guys, you reinvented tech from 1970 that is still just as broken. /golfclap
Gotta solve that moderation problem first. If you can create a well moderated node and then perfect the systems that allow the users of that node to moderate themselves well - with the users helping in development so there's good testing, think about what happens when twenty nodes appear. They now all have this new moderation system that keeps eternal september on ice within their own node.
Now let's federate all of those nodes. Are they going to have all of the same problems? Of course they are - but the volume on those problems is a lot lower now, because the nodes themselves are all just a bit better at holding themselves together culturally. It's a lot harder for a node to go bad now. Will there be as much fragmentation on the federated network with this moderation immune system in place? Doubtful. It's progress.
You literally have the solution that federation provides in your comment, you just phrased it as a problem.
It's not a problem, it's the whole point.
It's a Vote with Your Feet system, digital nomadship.
It might not be for you, but that doesn't make it bad.
How is that a problem solved by federation, though? Voting with my feet is what I did to Reddit, no federation required.
Because you can leave an instance without leaving the service. It's like leaving Reddit without losing access to any content.
It's the best of both worlds.
That's a black and white thinking, I think decentralization is not the end of all solution but it works for some instances in ActivityPub. I think Nostr model works better than ActivityPub federation.
I know very little about Nostr. Do you know of a good primer on it? Or can you explain key ways that it differs from ActivityPub?
You can read the primer here. But to highlight the difference with ActivityPub:
The problem with Mastodon and similar programs:
Very short summary of how Nostr works, if you don't plan to read anything else:
Everybody runs a client. It can be a native client, a web client, etc. To publish something, you write a post, sign it with your key and send it to multiple relays (servers hosted by someone else, or yourself). To get updates from other people, you ask multiple relays if they know anything about these other people. Anyone can run a relay. A relay is very simple and dumb. It does nothing besides accepting posts from some people and forwarding to others. Relays don't have to be trusted. Signatures are verified on the client side.
How does Nostr work?
You can find the list of programs in awesome-nostr, for starters, you can try Damus on iOS and Amethyst on Android.
Yeah Nostr sounds like it can handle scale way better than the ActivityPub model. I alway thought ActivityPub worked better as a way of merging all of your personal content across multiple platforms into a single feed, something you publish for other people to check out, like a personal blog. Attempts to shoehorn it into the perpetually updating content-stream sort of system, like Twitter always seem strained and awkward.
How does Nostr handle persisting feeds across multiple devices? I assume the client has its own server that manages syncing?
Yeah clients connect to list of relays (like servers) so that way it syncs between devices.
Or the instance becomes big which encourages everyone to go there which makes it even bigger. That eventually starts to hurt the smaller instances if a majority of your content is now blocked. You could also end up with a bunch of federation fiefdoms if the blocking and selective federation becomes more prevalent.
I suppose we'll just have to let them go through their federation phase and experience what it's like. Then clamor for the simplicity of centralization. Only for a new round of federation later on.
I think of federation as a slightly less extreme case of cryptocurrency: it's a very interesting technical challenge, and it does come with some theoretical improvements. However, it's plagued by practical issues (performance with mismatched server sizes), and generally fails to do anything an appropriately managed centralized solution couldn't do.
Federation by default makes it impossible to have any checks on new accounts: if I want an account, I can just make a federated instance and an account there. Thus, any instance which wants anything more than that will necessarily remove federation by default, as done here.
Opt-in federation implies coordination, i.e., a mutually respecting relationship between the communities. Typically, it would also involve agreeing to a similar set of rules on both sides, a way to resolve disagreements, etc. And when this type of relationship is in place, conventional tools offer as much as federation with a much simpler implementation. This simplicity means that more time can be spent on implementing how the communities wish to be merged, and less time handling sync issues
Decentralization came into vogue a few years ago and everyone had their own idea for a cool experiment looking at what you could do with it, and they were cool! But they probably should have stayed as experiments. It's a case of a tool being ill-suited to a problem space. But a lot of people really like decentralization as a concept so you end up in "If the only tool you have is a hammer, you tend to see every problem as a nail" territory.
To draw the cryptocurrency analogy even deeper: during the peak of blockchain mania, everybody was trying to cram blockchain into everything. NFTs and smart contracts in general are one (now well understood to be a silly idea) example, but there was a bizarre period where quite literally any new or old project of any kind was considered for cramming blockchain in somewhere, regardless of whether it netted any real life benefits, and regardless of whether it came with massive practical issues, like slowdowns, costs, energy use, etc.
The Fediverse always felt kinda similar. What are we getting out of it? Ehhh, decentralization is cool, arguments about privacy that never really made sense, that's about it. What are we losing? The ability to moderate communities effectively, the ability for a community to exist as a coherent whole rather than a fractal of disjoint fiefdoms in parallel universes all trying to exist in the same place, etc etc etc.
That is by far the biggest problem I have with federation as a framework, the whole fracturing of communities. Mastodon itself is absurdly fractured, and you're always running into walls there, sometimes there's a person you'd like to interact with but oops! it just so happens their instance defederated from yours because of disagreements, so now you can't even read their posts!
Like, what if I'm interested in a community from Beehaw but also interested in another from lemmy.world? I'm going to have two accounts now? How long until I need five accounts or more? I hoped Lemmy wasn't going to start fracturing this soon, but I guess I was being naive. The most surefire way of avoiding this issue would be to host your own private instance, kind of like an email host of sorts, something the average user isn't going to do. It's this kind of stuff that makes me have serious doubts about the whole federation concept.
This is something that sort of bugs me about the current reddit alternatives (Tildes excluded since it's explicitly not meant as that). None of them have a large enough user base for them to become truly interesting to browse for everyone yet they refuse to have a large user base in fear of having to deal with bad actors.
I think that this kind of exclusive club mentality is what's going to lead many to just go on reddit instead, which is much easier to access. The fediverse in particular has no purpose if you defederate from most of the user base.
I think the userbase size issue kinda runs even deeper than that: Federations are the wild west of reddit brigading. Basically, any one instance doesn't have enough moderation capacity to properly moderate if a bunch of other instances come knocking. They can defederate, at massive cost to themselves and others, or they can try and moderate a large group invading a small community, but they're probably only sufficient moderators for a small community. Not impossible, but I imagine the mod tools required are substantial.
It doesn’t really help that the code is a little messy, it seems like none of these Reddit replacements have really got a very clean code base. Tildes is pretty clean and easy to read from my perusing, but it’s also pretty old school. But for tildes at least it should be pretty quick to actually develop new features.
Tildes does go a long way to explain the philosophy behind its site design and implementation which is far more thoughtful than most projects. Though jQuery still feels very old-fashioned, speaking as someone that has primarily worked with Angular.
Yeah the two biggest problems I have with the tildes code base is 1) Vagrant + Ansible and 2) jQuery.
Vagrant on new Apple hardware essentially requires paid Parallels or VMWare to run, which is sad. And jQuery is definitely not going to be around very much longer, would perhaps be better to just run completely native JS. Or go with HTMX.
Tildes uses Intercooler, which is the predecessor of HTMX from the same developer, and it required jQuery. I'd definitely like to switch over to HTMX at some point, does it no longer have the jQuery dependency?
I don't have an M1/M2 to be able to test, but is there just no longer a straightforward/free way to run a Debian VM on them? I see that there's a "Developer preview for macOS / Arm64 (M1/M2) hosts" on the VirtualBox downloads page, does it not work?
(mention for @sixthgear if you have any info about this too)
I can do a little research. The Virtualbox VM seems to just crash with minimal explanation in that developer preview. I've had success on M1 with tools that use Apple's HyperKit framework (Docker and Multipass).
If I can figure out someway to coerce vagrant to work nicely on my M1, I'll make a pull request. Sound good?
You should checkout my comment here and the tildes post I made.
Perhaps we should make an issue on GitLab and have some of the technical stuff there?
IMO it looks like it'd be most straightforward to move to Docker or Podman.
tbh given the hardware I have at home (2018 air, windows desktop I built years ago), I'll probably just spin up an aws instance to tinker with tildes. It's not expensive to run as long as you remember to turn things off when you're not using them.
I posted a bit more about it here a few days ago
I've since looked in to it a bit more, and it definitely seems like the virtualbox is a no-go, VMWare or Paralells may work but those are paid non-open source versions.
I have given it about an hour or so of work to try to get it running using Docker, but ran out of time during my lunch break.
EDIT: Also interesting, I did not know Intercooler was the precursor to HTMX. I have yet to use HTMX in an actual project, but I've wanted to for a while. It looks very neat. HTMX is dependency free.
Yeah, I wanted to start contributing but hit VirtualBox hurdles on my M1 Pro.
I'm partial to vue.js paired with my own python backends (Django or FastAPI usually), but I think it's overkill for the type of site Tildes wants to be. I agree that HTMX would be a nice fit for Tildes, or perhaps some nice, tight Typescript with as few other dependencies as possible.
I miss the simplicity of the old school. Unpack a zipfile of site code, set up that directory on a web server so you can access it, install a database, run the setup.php that does the basics. Now you have a website. It was pretty damn hard to fuck that up. Containerization has its uses, but there are also times where it just seems like total overkill.
I actually have accounts for both Beehaw and Lemmy World. I guess I can live with one de-feredating from the other.
But seeing as LemmyWorld has more users and federates with more communities, I will probably stay in LW more often.
I use the jebora app on Android. It needs work, but I can login to both accounts. It's not ideal, but at least I can still view and interact with both communities.
same - the app is buggy and crash prone but it handles multiple accounts across multiple instances pretty well.
Out of curiosity, why not use an account on an instance that federates with both beehaw and lemmy.world?
Because any two instances can defederate from each other at any time. That works now, but not in the long term. The system by design tendentially creeps toward every user having an account on every instance.
I have a Mastodon.Social account that federates with both, but I don't use it that often. Plus I don't like to create too many accounts, I think a LW and BH account are enough for my needs.
Lemmy is already quite confusing and needing to have two different accounts just so I'm not blocked off from certain posts and comments is a shame.
I think if Reddit comes back and the protests have ended (for good reasons) I'll just stop using Lemmy. I'll stay on Tildes though, I like it here.
Is it possible to have an instance of Federation that allows it to be placed in an aggregator that you can read and post from, but not be able to read and post from every other federated website? Or did I just reinvent Pidgin?
I thought people were moving to kbin, not lemmy, after it was seen how problematic the devs behind lemmy are?
Though I may as well ask here. Would it be possible to run your own instance, just for yourself, and grab stuff from/post to other communities you like in the fediverse?
Re: Lemmy problematic
Worth noting that Kbin and Beehaw are both fine federating with Lemmy.ml. Hard for me not see them as complicit by association.
If by "grab stuff" you mean "copy links from other link aggregators," we do that all the time, but manually.
I can imagine making it a little easier to do. Take an RSS feed from Hacker News (or anything else with an RSS feed) and use that to populate a list of potential topics, so we can convert them into Tildes topics with a single button press.
But it's easy enough already and I think having a bit of friction is fine. We don't want all the links, just the ones you think are the best, and you can find them anywhere you like.
There are also bookmarking websites that are a bit less social, where you bookmark anything you like, and so do other users, and you can see their bookmarks, but it's less about shared discussion of the best ones. That might be kind of nice; you could save bookmarks without saying they're worthy of showing up on the front page or affecting the mix.
Run an instance of Tildes?
No, what you described is federation. Tildes runs as its own site, so to do what you did without conventional federation you would have to somehow share database access, instead of a standardized communication protocol (ActivityPub, which is behind Lemmy, Mastodon, and others).
Not Tildes. I was talking running your own instance of lemmy/kbin just for yourself but then subscribing to other communities across the fediverse to read and post to.
I'm not a fediverse guy, but I think it would be subject to a few things:
I believe it's dynamic. So if a user subscribes to a community on another instance it becomes federated. So if you run your own instance you technically would only federate with those you subscribe to.
That would be better served by an aggregator client, like an RSS reader with credentials to be able to post, no?
I do believe you could manage that, I've seen people discuss it, and as long as you're meeting whatever conditions there are for federation it should work fairly fine.
Is there an easy-to-install, low maintenance, lightweight service (preferably with docker) that I could install on my VPS to participate in lemmy/kbin communities? Something like what GoToSocial+Semaphore do for Mastodon.
I don't want to clone projects and build docker configs, I just want to drop a docker-compose.yml and be able to participate in the fediverse kinda like an "RSS with reply".
Lemmy has a docker computer file too get up and running. But you still need to run a reverse proxy.
Actually I already have several docker services that I run behind nginx proxies, but Lemmy directly integrates nginx and letsencrypt, and I was somehow unable to start it correctly 🤷♂️
A contact recommended me Friendica, and I saw some mentions of Hubzilla
Ah interesting. Wonder if it's easy to turn off the built in proxy and use your own? It's imagine you could buy editing the docker compose file.
I've only looked briefly into beehaw/lemmy but i think it's current implementation generates too much noise while simultaneously splitting the fediverse with its approach to federation. And i mean this while still federated with each other.
So no wonder they do this.
not gonna lie, im kinda bummed about that. I jumped ship to beehaw a few days ago, and was really liking it as a decade long reddit addict. Tho i also dont agree with disabled downvotes on beehaw. I'll be registering to lemmy world now
This is your regularly scheduled reminder that Lemmy is written and maintained by tankies (authoritarian apologists).. This is a dangerous bed to get into. Authoritarian motives are not prosocial; they are regressive in the extreme.
Be grateful for tildes. Avoid Lemmy.
I'm seeing a lot of posts along the lines of "tankies bad, lemmy devs are tankies, therefore lemmy bad" which strikes me as an incredibly fallacious argument. Maybe there's some critical context I'm missing somewhere, but the more I see that same argument, again and again without context, the more I suspect that the context doesn't exist.
I'm not a huge fan of using an anonymous mastodon user as my only source, especially one who for some reason says "I have receipts, DM me if you want to see them for yourself" instead of you know, citing their sources. So I've done some looking around to see if there's anything with a bit more detail.
The very same Lemmy instance this post is about, beehaw, has a well thought-out post regarding the politics of the two Lemmy developers, "On Politics and Forking", which seems pretty relevant here.
One of the two Lemmy developers wrote a "Statement on Politics of Lemmy.ml", where they straight up say they're communists. But they also present a very reasonable narrative that they keep their politics out of Lemmy decisions and call out the Lemmy Code of Conduct, which certainly appears to be a safe, apolitical document to me.
My personal take here is that if the Lemmy devs can, in fact, keep their politics and Lemmy development separate then why not use the project? I'm wouldn't donate to the Lemmy devs, especially not if it would fund the hosting of Lemmy instances that are a safe haven for extremist communist rhetoric, but it seems to me that simply using the code doesn't promote political extremism.
Finally, this is a bit of an aside, but this situation also reminds me of a post by an Invidious contributor, TheFrenchGhosty: "I'm Not Invidious". For context, Invidious is an open source alternative frontend for YouTube, which unsurprisingly Google is not very happy about. TheFrenchGhosty's argument is that as an open-source project with numerous contributors, no one person "owns" Invidious. Obviously TheFrenchGhosty has a vested interest in not being considered an owner of Invidious due to the cease-and-desist Google sent them. But regardless of TheFrenchGhosty's bias, I think it's a pretty valid approach to think of FOSS code as being ownerless.
I linked to the context.
Why not use Lemmy? Because as much as people want to believe, technology is not neutral. People can pretend to compartmentalize but we can't. We're all jumped-up monkeys.
If someone tells you who they are, believe them. The Lemmy devs are Leninist communists. This infects how they interact with others.
If you don't have a problem with Leninist communism, good for you. But then I have a problem with it and all who believe in it.
Okay, I'm genuinely confused here: is there anything in particular about their politics you think has entered the code? If your problem with them is that they're totalitarians, and you believe the code is intractably ruined by their totalitarianism, you probably wouldn't expect them to create a social network that provides admins with so little control over anything that their only recourse is to shut themselves off from much of the rest of the network, and yet that's what they did. If anything, their code is too libertarian to be usable.
If you want to convince people that the code is somehow ... itself communist... whatever that means, you need to do better than vaguely asserting it is "infected".
See my remarks here. I don't skew libertarian. I'm more progressive/socialist (in the American not Nazi) sense.
You don't really say what part of their beliefs you think infected what part of the project in that comment, or how you think that happened. If Lemmy somehow enforced democratic centralism for decision-making, or something, anything at all related to their Marxist-Leninist beliefs, I could accept that and that could be a basis for a debate about whether that influence is good or bad or neutral. But, again, I don't think you're saying anything about the code at all except cryptically asserting it's "infected".
The only real ideological content I see to Lemmy as a project is that it clearly is inspired by and embodies decentralization ideology, which is radically anti-authoritarian, which is the last thing you would really expect from this project if you believe it to be "infected" by authoritarianism or whatever you're arguing.
Have you visited lemmygrad.ml? I found a lot of it disturbing. Having a separate instance for it? People don't have near boundaries. We're not machines.
This isn't my full time job. I don't get paid to point out that there's at least moral risk in using something for free provided by someone else with questionable motives. Take my suggestion with as much salt as you see fit. I'm finding myself feeling too defensive in this conversation now to continue.
Yes, I have. Lemmygrad was deliberately made a separate instance as a containment zone so that other instances could defederate from that content if they wanted to, without having to defederate lemmy.ml. This is a good example of them separating their politics from the project.
This is a simple rule for rejecting things but I think it’s too simple.
The history of an open source project is often useful for understanding it. But I don’t believe an open source project is forever tainted by association with the authors of previous commits after a fork. You can review the code and change anything you don’t like.
For some projects that may be too many changes to be practical, if it’s not close enough to what you wanted. Or there may be too much to review. But I think we can make that decision on a case-by-case basis.
An argument to not use some code would be more compelling if it described something wrong with the code.
Simple? Yes.
However, forking is typically a socially violent activity. You are creating schism. There is mass, gravity, and momentum on originating projects.
Forking, therefore is complex. There are unforeseen complications.
There's a lot to be said for "simple".
Your take invokes discomfort for me. I taken it in as the same sort of libertarian meritocratic speech that was common in Hacker News until perhaps a decade ago. I hope that's not what tildes will represent.
Yes, forking isn't always easy. But if someone else does it, I think I'm still going to judge their project by the actual community that's doing the new work and not by any predecessors. I'm uncomfortable with guilt by association when they're not associating anymore.
This is dropped like it's a fact, but I'm pretty sure it's not. It's not the first time I've come across this belief, and I don't know where exactly it comes from, but I find it concerning.
Obviously there's something to be said for "yes, if you support lemmy, these people with these beliefs will become more successful, and you might not want that"
That is a far cry from "these people with these beliefs made X or Y tech, and therefore the tech itself is not neutral".
Maybe you mean more of the first than the second, but in my past experiences with this line of logic that hasn't been the case, and I really have to say I strongly disagree.
Good request for clarification.
I mean both.
The latter is because forking a social change with social impact. The rationale that "we'll just fork" means accepting the cost of effectively striking out on your own; you don't get the original project's dev community to come with you without creating some sort of schism in the community.
If you don't want them to be your admins, don't join their instance.
That's, like, the whole point.
Never heard the phrase Tankie before, this is all very….interesting.
IMO all this federated stuff is way over my head and I’m in the realms of someone who would look up stuff/read wikis/mod pc games etc.
I just don’t see it catching on outside of our own little internet-bubble. At least here it’s effectively a Reddit like forum with categories.
That are moderated by humans. Humans aren't computers; we're messy.
Yes, but lemmy isn't moderated by the developers of lemmy, one or two instances are. That's not how this works.
Yet the content is federated to and from them. They have some moderation controls local to them. How that works in Lemmy-land 🤷🏻♂️?
Choosing to federate with them is a form of complicity.
This seems like a better argument. Federating with a toxic node seems like a legit complaint in principle, though I haven't looked into it so I don't know anything.
lemmy.ml is moderated apolitically, the devs deliberately segregated all their commie stuff into a separate instance which is defederated by a lot of instances, and they did this specifically to allow other instances to defederate.
They have local control over their own instance... yes. How does that affect anyone else?
I'm still baffled by moderation that occurred in a kbin.social thread I participated in that was federated to lemmy. It's... weird. I wrote the top voted comment.. Now I cannot see other comments when logged in to kbin. Is this federated moderation? A bug in kbin? I don't know. But it makes me less trusting of both.
Let's not pretend: the main instance of a federated system tends to get the most traffic. This has been demonstrated with mastodon.social. It is again with Lemmy.ml.
I get that my perspective here isn't shared widely. That's unfortunate. Maybe tildes isn't for me after all.
This isn't a kbin.social thread. This is a lemmy.ml thread that you are viewing on kbin.social because it was federated to kbin.social. I'm sorry, I don't know how to say this more nicely, but my guess is you probably got banned from lemmy.ml because you went off-topic insulting the owners of the server in their own meta forum in order to try to advertise for people to abandon their platform and go to another one. This is not a particularly surprising outcome to me, and crucially it doesn't impact your ability to view other lemmy instances.
I'm very confused now. How can you tell it's not a kbin.social thread? That's all I see in the URL and the tags...
The URL is https://kbin.social/m/lemmy@lemmy.ml/t/6861/How-is-Lemmy-going-to-make-money, and you can see "lemmy@lemmy.ml" is the community name. That's how you access federated communities on lemmy and kbin. If it were https://kbin.social/m/lemmy, that would be a local (kbin.social) community named lemmy, but because it's https://kbin.social/m/lemmy@lemmy.ml that translates to the community named "lemmy" on the instance "lemmy.ml".
I can't open the page anymore because I get a 503 error, but I seem to remember agreeing with you that the page itself doesn't make it clear at all that it wasn't a kbin.social thread. Lemmy instances make it pretty clear when a thread is federated from another instance, and I don't think kbin does a good job of this.
Oh wow that's kinda a mess. I can see people getting wicked confused by this.
Interesting; thank you.
I haven't dived in to Lemmy/Kbin at all yet, and this is good info to have.
Well, their view points don't need to be yours. The software is interesting and the benefit is you can use a different instance that isn't theirs. It's open source so it could be forked. Kbin is wholly separate from Lemmy but it's also in the fedeverse (think email ish like yahoo and Gmail). You can converse between the two (although a bit buggy from what I've read) but they are run by different groups. So you could still partake in the fedeverse by using kbin and subscribing to Lemmy communities that aren't run by the developers. It's all very interesting.
Probably for the best. There's little point in vetting new users if you're going to federate with open instances.
Also, I didn’t realize who exactly was running Beehaw. That's an interesting combination of (ex?)Tildes posters — I don't think I had those two teaming up on my bingo sheet. Best of luck to them, in any case!
/offtopic
I knew Gaywallet was on there, but the rest of the mods don't ring a bell. Why do you think it's an unlikely combination?
alyaza was banned here many years ago... and I won't out the other person, but they were also banned here (and on /r/tildes). I love gaywallet, genuinely consider them a friend, and wish them all the best... but the aforementioned other two, I have very serious doubts about their ability to run a supposedly "safe, friendly", "healthy" community, based on their past actions/behavior here which got them banned. But who knows, maybe they have changed their ways. I know I certainly have since the early days of Tildes. So ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
Maybe I choose a particularly bad day to check out the unofficial Discord, but seeing what was said and abided there seriously colored the way I view any of the people involved. Wish them the best, but I would share the same doubts, and the same hopes they've matured.
No, it wasn't a particularly bad day, that is just how the discord was as far as I can tell. I joined and left it multiple times over the years to check in on things but it had an issue of vague-booking and talking down about other users, where it was just too much to stay. It is a shame though because it did have some good moments, like when we had a Valheim server going. But I think the casual conversations should stay away from chatrooms and be contained on the site, on ~talk.
The Unofficial Discord is and was largely for people that don't like Tildes to complain about moderation, talk shit about other users, brigade, "identify" (or create the perception of having) enemies and enemy groups, sharing an overall sense of paranoia, witch hunting, and a "us vs them" mentality.
I have a vague hunch that seeing a list of users of the discord would explain a few things I've experienced on tildes before.
I have a much less vague hunch that it won't make me any happier, so I won't go looking.
To be fair, I was a regular on the Discord for several years too (and was even made a mod there shortly before I left)... as were a few other prominent members of the Tildes community who are awesome, super nice people. But I (and many others) eventually left due to the issues Merry and lou mentioned. And having banned users still lingering there years after they were banned from Tildes itself, and shit talking the site (and Deimos in particular), was another reason I left too though. I didn't need or want that negativity or added stress in my life.
Time changes people, and sometimes we learn what to do and not to do from experience, rather than just ideals. A lot of what I’ve figured out in my life has come from me screwing something up, not necessarily realizing it or knowing why — or knowing exactly why but being unable to do otherwise —and then reflecting on it afterwards.
I’m aware of some of the details of their pasts here, and I hope reflecting on that has helped them make Beehaw a better place.
Yeah, I am trying my best to give them the benefit of the doubt. But given my history with both, and knowing a lot of the behind the scenes stuff that happened which most other users aren't aware of, it's difficult. Regardless of how I feel about them, I hope beehaw works out and lives up to the principles they espouse in their docs though. We need more places like that on the internet.
Sometimes it pays to have the memory of a goldfish! Wanna borrow some of my ADHD? I have to spare! :D
I still keep in touch with with Alyaza. She remains unlikely to suffer fools gladly, but she does care about keeping discussions up to a certain standard of quality. That's probably an appropriate inclination to have for moderating a more fractious, Reddity space.
At risk of contradicting my comment here it looks like they're defederating to maintain sort of the vibe of their community and drop federation with communities that run open signups. Some discussion even shows that they're unhappy with the call, but see it as necessary, at least in the short term.
Not to out anybody but I do recall a couple of the admins there from their history here. This is consistent with sort of how they felt about the Tildes community a while back, I sort of get what they're going for on Beehaw and how this decision will support their goal, at least in the short term before they re-evaluate the decision, whenever they make that call. In fact, a lot of Beehaw seems to borrow conceptually from Tildes, they just wanted to do it with their own tweaks, which I think is great, but risky in the fediverse.
I recognize a username but I don't know how we'd know if it's the same person without asking.
Here's a post from an admin where they mention being on Tildes previously: https://beehaw.org/post/509322
They have changed their username, so I'll respect that, but you'll probably recognize the persona.
That sounds familiar. The pre-alpha Tildes crew spent more than a year chilling out on a Slack channel doing the exact same thing. All of that stuff now happens in ~tildes as god intended - development has to be in the open.
It's clear to me that BeeHaw is going to be the best instance on Lemmy. Fracturing sucks, but I know which side of that fracture I'm on and why. Good luck guys.
Ohhhhhhh. Yeah, I can only remember one person interested in that niche on tildes. Jog my memory, someone... The notabug person, is that the same or am I getting mixed up?
go1dfish aka FreeSpeechWarrior on reddit was behind notabug, but that's not him
Ahhh ok. I remember both to be peculiar personalities. Eccentric is a fitting word, I believe.
Then I must've gotten them confused into one person in my memory.
Also, I thought for a second there @lou was being very clever, but apparently goldfish is someone else. :D
Haha, when I first read lou's comment, contextless in my notifications, I initially thought they were responding to an older comment I made on go1dfish and notabug. So yeah, I get where your confusion is coming from. :P
Exactly the comment that prompted me to think of him when I read the above post by the beehaw admin. Probably because I figured goldfish, having had previous experience trying to spin up a social site, to try it again. So that's why Chris and goldfish became one.
Well, talking about the memory of a goldfish, With all that being at least 1-2 years ago I think I can forgive myself.
Massive /r/museumofreddit vibes right now for some reason. And that just brought on nostalgia for "early" reddit. Well, early for me. '13, '14 or so. Come to think of it, I think I found reddit then because I played a browser game that I stumbled upon, that was mostly marketed via reddit, so the crowd was basically all redditors. More nostalgia.
Now off to bed, before I tell you my life's story. Cheers!
Sleep tight. Pleasant dreams. :)
I was referring to the myth that goldfishes have no memory lol. I have no idea who you guys are talking about.
There was a dude on here named go1dfish, but he's been banned since presumably before you joined. We thought you were making a very clever and sneaky remark about them.
I recognized two, but am also trying to not directly out who I'm referring to out of respect of their activities on another site.
I realize mentioning it sort of undermines it.
Hmmmm. My interest is piqued! I don't mind defederating as a concept.
I'll have to give Beehaw a try, if they'll have me :)