It became the only reliable source of information I had. People posted links with a minimal amount of commentary, picking and choosing the best content from other social media networks. They’re not doing it to “build a brand” because that’s not a thing in the Fediverse. It’s too disjointed to be a place to build a newsletter subscription base.
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People complain about Lemmy having limited content and engagement. Not in this article so much. I’m sure there were fewer posts in the past too. But what I found is that there are real people on here and you don’t have to wade through bots and shills which makes this community feel much more whole to me.
While that’s true, I don’t believe it to be a fundamental property of the medium or federation in general. I think what we are experiencing is the result of lack of mainstream attention and traffic.
The people here are much less demographically diverse than the public at large, and have intentionally sought out this space and others like it, so they have more of a sense of ownership and community about it. The more attention it gets, the more the demographics will change to reflect the broader public, and the more it will become like a public space, complete with all the ills that come with that, like advertisers vying for attention, shills posing as enthusiasts, and influencers saying what will get them the most followers, rather than what they think.
I believe it would take extensive moderation and amazing tools to keep places like this the same as they gain users. I haven’t ever seen a community survive that kind of growth and retain its original spirit, but I also haven’t seen one with no profit motive. If we can get the moderation tools where they need to be, there could be hope!
True, Lemmy feels this way almost exclusively because it’s small and hasn’t been noticed by mainstream media enough. The second that changes this place will become what reddit was pre-ipo.
My hope is that it will always be a little too disjointed to hold that kind of attention for long.
There is no effective way to ban a person. As long as that remains true, moderation tools don’t really matter.
Israel alone is putting $760 million into propaganda. Lemmy may not be big, but it’s worth 0.2% of that budget.
And that’s just Israel.
I think that’s trying to solve the wrong problem.
If I had awesome moderating tools, identifying and deleting comments that violate the policy would be effortless. I would not need to ban a person, which as you aptly point out, can reappear forever. But, I can ban all of his violating comments, which are, after all, the true target and violation, not the commenter.
I think the community is a good size right now. Popular enough that we guarantee getting any content of relevance I care about, but not popular enough to have all the problems you mentioned. I hope the community stays this size and off the radar indefinitely.
I actually like the slower pace. There’s no constant stream of content but I find that helps me to moderate my usage. It also helps me take a more active role because I don’t just see what I’m subscribed to. I’ll hop over to the top posts over the last 6 hours and find something that’s really hot elsewhere, or I’ll hop on to scaled and find something obscure. It’s slower and cranky but it embodies a lot of the old elements of scrolling that I miss.
As soon as there is “unlimited” content, the vast majority of said content is shit
See I had forgotten the one golden rule of capitalism. To thrive in capitalism one must be amoral. Now you can be wildly sickeningly successful with morals but you cannot reach that absolute zenith of shareholder value. Either you accept a lower share price and don’t commit atrocities or you become evil. There is no third option.
Spot on.
It’s also one of the most nitpicky whiny places you can visit. A new open source software/update just got released and it does something cool! “Well it’s not {x} compliant so it’s trash.” Or “If a solo developer or a team decides to use ‘AI’ then their entire project is AI slop.”
There are so many moments where I’m like “just shut the fuck up and enjoy the software/news/updates these strangers are providing for free.”
And the eight and final rule of fediverse, if this is your first time discussing linux distros, you have to fight.
One of my policies to make this place less insufferable, is to block people who behave in ways that I object to.
For example if somebody shows up in a Windows thread, and just types in “Linux!” I’m blocking that person. Add something germane or novel or fuck right the fuck off, that’s my attitude.
Felt.
Amen!
Even better.
Most instances have human moderation, gating for bots, and yes, and you actually have to take 5-10 minutes to figure out how it all works, so the stupid people are automatically excluded by sheer complexity.
I fucking love Mastodon.
Stupid people can just use AI, so nothing is truly barred, not like it requires more than a 3rd grade reading level either. Your post being upvoted this much shows how easy it is for the average NPC to make an account.
The Australian Subreddits got overrun by extremist right wing people who tend to be 20x louder than anyone else, and exaggerate everything.
One even reported me for being racist (successfully) despite the fact that the entire time I was fighting back against the racism
Even worse, you now need to log in to even see it at all in a mobile browser. So f that
I was perma banned for calling someone “A fucking piece of human garbage” as they openly and brazenly advocated for the death of trans people.
I got banned, the person calling for Trans people to be killed did not.
That’s unfortunately pretty standard.
Whereas, on Facebook, nobody gets banned. I’ve literally reported people inciting violence towards others. However, it seems permitted by community standards these days
Stuff like this is why I banned Reddit first.
Those same fuckers are on a roll now, winning one MP seat.
Yeah. And they were apparently “never going to win in SA either”. Everyone was happy with that result. SA is happy they lost, and ON supporters were somehow happy with being absolute failures too 😂
This was a great read to start my day, thank you!
People talk a lot about the protocols that power Bluesky vs. ActivityPub, because we’re nerds and we believe deep in our hearts that the superior protocol will win. This is adorable. It flies in the face of literally all of human history, where the more convenient thing always wins regardless of technical merit. VHS beat Betamax. USB-C took twenty years.
Hopefully, unlike betamax and laserdisc, the fediverse will trudge on despite the megacorporate protocols
you don’t need special equipment to use the fediverse, so imo it’s unlikely it will “fail”
And it has not enough users. If the fediverse ever became popular enough to hold significant marketshare, we’d see similar issues. The upside to the fediverse is that you can defederate from misinformation peddlers.
Fediverse doesn’t (as of yet) have a monetization path because of it’s “self hosted” structure - I put it in quotes because most people use large instances, but anyone can spin up their own and federate.
The big risk with this is that if it reaches a critical mass where advertisers see potential for profit, the mechanism that would be most convenient, especially with LLMs, is bots.
Say Toyota wants to promote their new car. They contract an advertising agency, who spins up a few dozen LLM agents trained on Lemmy data and instructions to talk up the latest new car. It might make posts, or just comments, but in all cases it will eventually promote that product.
All that for the cost of a few tokens, and the only giveaway would be the “AI phrasing”, if anyone catches it.
deleted by creator
I learnt something new today, cheers
So here is a stupid question
What exactly is the fediverse? What’s included in it? I’ve hear much about fediverse and Lemmy, but is Lemmy part of it or not? Are other systems like Blue sky a part of it or not? Do I transparently see posts from all those different systems?
What exactly is the fediverse?
Servers that can federate over ActivityPub protocol. Any server that uses ActivityPub can be considered part of the fediverse.
What’s included in it?
Clones of corporate owned sites: twitter (mastodon, misskey), tumblr (wafrn), reddit (lemmy, piefed), facebook (friendica), plus others
I’ve hear much about fediverse and Lemmy, but is Lemmy part of it or not?
Yes, it is
Are other systems like Blue sky a part of it or not?
Bluesky isn’t, since they use a different protocol, but it’s possible to bridge and interact with it. Wafrn does it.
Do I transparently see posts from all those different systems?
This is the biggest “it depends” situation. For instance, by default, lemmy ignores most posts from mastodon and similars. However, mastodon users can post to lemmy communities if they use the proper
, but they cannot specify a title - their post body will also double as the title. They can also reply to comments, they’re easy to spot because they always have an@userwhen replying.Some server types integrate the different things better than others. Friendica and Wafrn seem to be the best for “variety integration”.
You asked five questions, none of them are stupid.
What exactly is the fediverse? What’s included in it.
I have heard two definitions in use. The first is narrower, it refers to the collection of servers running compatible Reddit-alike software including Lemmy, Mbin and Piefed which are pretty much 1 to 1 compatible and communicating with users on one from another is more or less seamless. The big, distributed Reddit alternative that allows you to post from lemmy.ca onto lemmy.world and me to read it from sh.itjust.works.
The second is the broader, simpler definition of “anything that runs on the ActivityPub protocol and is federated with something else.” Which includes all of the above plus the likes of Peertube, Mastodon, Pixelfed, Loops etc. They are technically cross-compatible, I’ll get to that later.
Is Lemmy part of it or not?
Yes it is, Lemmy runs on ActivityPub.
Are other systems like Bluesky part of it or not?
Some are, some aren’t. A few examples:
- BlueSky. Not part of the Fediverse, it uses a different protocol, their own thing. It is sort of designed to federate but not really in practice.
- Diaspora. Similar concept of federated social media, but not compatible with ActivityPub. The Coke to our Pepsi.
- Truth Social. It is my understanding that The Church Of Trump is basically a fork of Mastodon. They don’t federate though, they turn that feature off thank a long list of random deities and WWE wrestlers.
- Threads. Meta/Facebook’s Twitter clone. IS part of the Fediverse, it uses ActivityPub and has federation turned on, though a lot of instances defederate with them on principle. You can interact with Threads from a Lemmy instance. …If it still exists. Is Threads still a thing?
Do I transparently see posts from all those different systems?
Yes and no. You can kind of think of the Fediverse like the Universe itself in that there’s nowhere you can stand and see the entire thing. You and I are from neighboring star systems in the same galaxy, we’re both on servers running Lemmy, so we can communicate completely seamlessly. I see a comment immediately above you from someone on piefed.social, they’re on a server running Piefed, not Lemmy. That’s another Reddit-alike, they can communicate with us pretty easily. You might occasionally see someone on Mastodon chime in. You can usually spot this because they @ the users they’re replying to. It would be really cool if a Mastodon user could reply to this message to demonstrate. As you get farther afield, it kinda stops working. It’s difficult to interact with Peertube from Lemmy, for example. I have commented on a Peertube video from a Pixelfed account though.
HAHA! THEY’VE BEEN BAMBOOZLED! HOISTED! WHAT BUFFOONS!
I watched a Greenlandic toddler munch meat from the spine of a seal with its head very much intact.
I kind of want to know the context of this
This is weird ass article. It’s like the author has never used an Internet forum before and didn’t understand how the Internet works.
Don’t stop at the Fediverse. Keep going. You’ve only just begun.
Wow. I had to stop reading this one. Long on words, poor on writing and spelling and neither circling a theme so much as just edgelording on everything social, I’m not sure whether it was ever getting somewhere.
But life’s too short for 6000 words on The Things That Suck With Stuff I Don’t Use.
