“Decline in overall quality” is a subjective metric, though. Does defederation reduce participation? Certainly.
But ya know, there’s a reason people defederate certain instances – usually because those instances have attracted people who are disruptive to discussion on other instances.
It’s really been no problem at all for me to keep a foot in lemmy.world, kbin.social, lemmy.ml, and beehaw.org. And a few other instances that appeal to more niche audiences.
And if I really feel like discussion on an instance is offering something and I’m missing out, I can always get an account there.
Not that I’m arguing against better moderation tools, of course. By all means, lemmy devs should prioritize those as soon as scaling/stability issues are dealt with.
Yep, when I get sick of the rhetoric here I just jump over to hexbear where they make fun of the people I tend to disagree with frequently here. . I think the best moderation tools would be to attempt to decentralize it so the petty tyrants the role seems to attract can’t abuse their authority to censor opinions they don’t agree with regardless of whether or not the content actually conflicts with the rules.
I’m an example of a filthy casual reddit user who is really struggling to find value in lemmy. Finding an instance where local is of value is difficult, world may as well be “everything”, and “everything” is a nightmarish hodgepodge of memes for teenagers, furry porn, really niche technical discussions, and star Trek memes. I never stay in the app longer than a few minutes and I feel like I spend more time blocking weird porn communities than I do reading interesting articles.
The other major issue is having to sort through the exact same article 60 times because people cross post not only to local communities but then also the same communities are duplicated on every instance. I’m probably going to abandon this soon unless I can find some kind of curated community list to subscribe to or something.
I browse all and block communties I have no interest in.
Bye bye Star Trek memes and may the force live long and prosper.
The biggest thing killing Lemmy for me is needing a seperate account on every single instance if I want to participate in anything on an instance.
I thought this wasn’t how it was supposed to work.
I saw this post on another instance and tried to reply this exact message but got an error saying I couldn’t.
Using Liftoff if it matters.
There is some friction of finding posts from federated content on your own instance, but you will note that I am posting from (and see this on) programming.dev rather than lemmy.world (where this community is hosted).
You need to be logged into your instance, search for the post on your instance, browse it via search, and then you can interact with it there. You don’t need to create an account on the other instance to interact with it.
And yes, that list of steps mentioned above is a lot of friction.
Links are also slightly awkward needing the full path in order to navigate to it on the instance you are signed into… and the editor appears to do it wrong when you let it. The link !programming@programming.dev should let you navigate there, join, comment and vote on a community hosted on another instance.
They might be talking about instances that have been defederated from each other?
I’m going from:
I saw this post on another instance and tried to reply this exact message but got an error saying I couldn’t.
And suspect they were doing something like browsing Lemmy.ml / all while not logged in and saw it but couldn’t interact with it until they came back to lemmy.world where it was easy to find and interact with.
Hello! Dev of Summit for Lemmy here. Summit actually supports switching accounts while keeping the same post open. Of course due to defederation it is not always possible to open a post on another account but it tries it’s best.
That’s odd, you shouldn’t need another account. I’ve even made posts from this account to another instance
Also it can be really hard finding small communities from a different instance, a lot don’t show up or aren’t fully synced so some of the posts don’t show.
Hopefully this is going to be fixed but I think it’s limiting the growth of more niche communities.
Instances shouldn’t be first class citizens, they should be more invisible to the users. The fediverse should be more like a cloud. Communities should be the primary focus, and only allow Instances to control how many users/communities they are the primary/secondary source for.
Disagree. Indeed, I couldn’t disagree more strongly.
Instances are not just abstract server nodes in some overly wasteful recreation of some other website. This is the world wide social web as it should have been.
You may as well argue that websites should be indistinguishable from each other.
This isn’t Reddit. Full stop. And it’s not a drop-in Reddit replacement, either. It’s not “Reddit, but different”. It’s a whole new paradigm in forums and content aggregation. It’s very different from centralized social media, and we need to stop dancing around or trying to hide that fact.
It will never get to reach its potential if we decide it needs to be nothing more than a simulacra of what came before it.
Websites are indistinguishable from each other except for their content.
Federated instances can be like web service providers, only limiting malicious content from users. The magazines/communities are like web sites on a particular host, such as WordPress. They control the content within their scope.
What you are suggesting is that instances should be like AOL, curating the experience. Which is fine if some of them want to do that, but it shouldn’t be the standard.
What he’s suggesting is that instances can be like AOL. Not that they have to be. Each instance can present whatever sort of interface to the fediverse that it wants, and people can pick and choose which one they like.
Websites are indistinguishable from each other except for their content.
Newspapers are indistinguishable from each other except for their content.
Books are indistinguishable from each other except for their content.
Movies are indistinguishable from each other except for their content.
Yep, it’s just as vapid no matter what media you plug in there.
To use a somewhat stretched analogy. Instances should be like bitcoin miners, I don’t need to know much about them individually at all. My only concern is that there isn’t a majority miner/instance.
It doesn’t have to be a reddit clone, but the federation needs to move to a more mandatory model, and one that puts the content first. The current system is far too user hostile to allow anything but the lowest common denominator of communities.
Miners are trying to make money, which is why having a faceless and generic flavour/community is irrelevant.
That’s not what motivates folk running lemmy instances
I have zero interest in administrating a generic lemmy instance, including the inevitable hosting of transphobic and bigoted users.
I admin a group focused on the gender diverse community, my community because that’s what’s important to me.
Your solution would lead to less folk volunteering to run communities
If this is true, it may also cause users on smaller instances to migrate to bigger instances, because there is more activity. Undermining the power and freedom of the decentralized structure of Lemmy and the fediverse.
What kind of moderation tools could help with this?
I don’t believe there is any type of auto moderator, though that’s possibly being supplemented by external bots.
I forget where I read it, but I believe the biggest issue is with the implementation of current mod tools and how they don’t properly propagate through the fediverse.
But again, I don’t recall the details.
Here’s a laundry list from one of the Beehaw people, and apparently the devs don’t have any of this as a priority
Wrong link.
Anyone can be a dev, it’s open source.
Sure, but it usually takes some time to get proficient in a language. I’ve been an enterprise Java engineer for a decade and things have changed pretty dramatically in that time. Picking up a language like Rust takes time, understanding the available frameworks and what they provide takes time, understanding why there isn’t published code coverage metrics takes time, understanding why commits get merged when the pipeline is broken (or the commit broke the build) takes time, etc.
It’s important, if one plans on creating a project that is maintainable by people other than yourself, to think things through and make sure the actual infrastructure exists and is stable and documented before opening it up to the world - and hold steadfast to those processes. When I read a PR that has the comment “the code works, now I just have to work on some tests”, I start to cringe knowing that testing is usually an afterthought with that developer rather than the place where the change should have started. As I look at the code in GitHub, the last commit to main didn’t even build. How was it even allowed to merge of it failed in the PR? Or do the pipelines just break randomly?
Maybe I’m just really picky because I take pride in the maintainability of my professional (and personal) projects. After seeing where we were 5-6 years ago - with commented out code and tests, tests that made no sense, lack of code or branch coverage, non-existent validation phases, etc - it’s a no brainer that I would never want to go back to that.
As a dev myself, I fully agree.
But that also illustrates why simply demanding that the existing devs should prioritize your personal needs over whatever it is they’re working on is kind of a non-starter. If it’s too hard for you to become a dev on the project but they’ve put in the effort to do so, they get to use that hard-won ability however they see fit.
Is there some sort of bug bounty or feature bounty program for Lemmy or kbin? That might be a way that a non-dev could get their own needs prioritized, perhaps.
Best take
What I think could help against instance protectionism:
A.) Better moderation tools to protect against SPAM and trash
B.) Better curation algorithm, especially for smaller instances, to smartly curate posts that are relevant to the user
C.) Better default-values for the selected feed (All instead of local), as well as for the discovery of communities (which is also currently local by default)
If B is not realized, smaller instances will have no handle against big instances flooding their user’s feeds with their posts and they will switch back to local-default again.
Overall, it can be brought down to making the All-feed more attractive. In my opinion, there should only be the subscribed-feed and an all-feed with curated posts (with different sorting algorithms to chose from in the best case). Or at least these should be the main ones.
I was going to say that B might not be so easy. But maybe some kind customization on the ratio of local vs external posts on some of the top posts lists. Just a random idea.
If its possible to create your own instance and federate with any instance of your choice - are there any apps which include the ability to register your own instance with you as the sole user? Maybe I’m misunderstanding the underlying logic
i use the home feed
I don’t like seeing something on the internet. PLEASE CHANGE THE INTERNET FOR ME. kthxbai
No. Moderation tools lead to instance protectionism, which leads to a decline in the overall discussion quality on Lemmy.
