I’ve seen around 3 occasions of that this week, altho I have never seen anything like it before.
if I remember correctly they were:
- smack talking a mod (FlyingSquid) for saying not to report the same comment twice, when they were different comments, and the report was spam
- someone comparing .world with .ml in politics (as in there was a comment saying "this post will be overrun with .ml people, and then a comment going “but you are from .world”) (Maybe Im part of the problem? I have been called out for being a fascist because I questioned the “puching nazis” theme)
- one more which I can’t remember.
Anyways, what is all that about? Are people really starting to hate on 50% of the lemmy population because of their instance?
Thanks for asking this btw. Just found it with a quick search wondering the same thing after reading yet another comment section (this one about Trump, Musk and JD Vance) that turned into 50% whinging about .world mods/admin and horrible reddit users turning their lemmy into a shithole. The answers you got here were really helpful for me to understand a bit more about the context/history of these spaces.
No problem, I was just curious, and I guess you had the same question :)
.world is the biggest instance and therefore a prime choice for trolls to create accounts. Most of the trash posts I’ve seen lately are from brand new users on lemmy.world
I am equally suspicious of brand new lemmy.world users as I am of veterans of lemmy.ml. Older accounts on .world are usually pretty normal.
I like to think of myself as normal lol
I’m here because kbin.social died and this was my next oldest account
I moved to fedia.io because it is basically kbin.social, but working.
I moved to kbin.earth (which later migrated to mbin).
Glad to hear kbin/mbin is still alive. Any good communities/“magazines” there I should check out?
I tried fedia.io, but it’s mobile website design is pure ass. It’s nice on my tablet, where there’s more room for the design to breathe a bit…but smooshed together on the cell phone layout, nothing makes sense. I want to like it, but I’m only on my tablet like 20% of the time. Cell phone is my main use.
There is an app: https://github.com/jwr1/interstellar/releases/tag/v0.6.0
Good to hear you found something that works for you. Personally, I’ve had no problems browsing on phone, though every right sidebar being in the top-left hamburger menu took a while to get used to
I probably would have gone there, but I didn’t want to make another new account, so I just ended up falling back to one I already had.
Haven’t heard of the news. Do you mind telling me what happened to kbin?
The developer and admin, Ernest, went through a rough patch in his life. Development and server upkeep fell off during this time, and it wasn’t picked back up again. I don’t think anyone’s heard from him in a long while now, but I don’t really know.
My twin, I was on kbin.social as well
lemmy.world is popular, which has its pros and cons. At least you didn’t pick hexbear lol
My first account in this place was on .ml because it was only them and beehaw at the time, and I ended up deleting it once controversy popped up lol
How dare you call me normal good sir.
In my experience (hexbear and .ml instances excluded) the majority of trolls I encounter seems to be from either infosec.pub or blahaj.zone
I usually see them from ee or sh.it.¯\_(ツ)_/¯
Those blasted canadians.
Its an incredibly pro US biased instance despite not being hosted in the US and having a .world domain.
Greatest hits are politics@lemmy.world forbidding non-US topics and of course news@lemmy.world and its bias check bot according to which every non US media is left wing biased.
To be fair, considering the right wing hellscape our (US) Overton window overlooks the bias bot might actually have a point.
Oh no. Just no. We’ve found more than enough cases of bias to call it unreliable at best and a cover for washing conservative sources at the worst.
What is this the third time I’ve agreed with you on something? See, common ground.
The bot posts in world news which allows non us news.
It not trying to criticize the right wing bias of political discourse it’s trying to normalize it and apply it to non US issues and media.
I was simply telling a joke, but point well taken.
The bot is bad and jonsjava is a real piece of shit just by themself.
Both should be blocked… It is DNC komissars run them subs
Imo the best mods/admins are the ones I don’t have to interact with and oh boy did I interact with the admins of .world
Nice way to phrase it 😄
A lot of this boils down to consequences of lemmy.world being the largest instance: typical Reddit users beeline for it, trolls go there, larger comms so more frequent issues with moderation, people who fail to distinguish between “we shouldn’t concentrate our activity into the largest instance” and “largest instance bad! EDIT WOW THANKS FOR LE GOLD TO LE KNEE KIND STRANGER!”, so goes on.
Back when reddit* was just starting to fall to shit, I had already been dipping my toes in the mastodon water, and while I really liked the instance I was on it did not have enough people on it to properly surface good collections of off node traffic.
Knowing that Mastodon had the problem, I didn’t dick around with smaller nodes. To be honest it’s still a fight if you’re on a node with only a handful of people, you have to do something to mitigate the lack of community traffic in the face of lacking discoverability.
People are doing that here though - e.g. the user Blaze made accounts on basically every instance, and subscribed to every community. This gets around the limitation where at least one user of an instance must subscribe to a community before it will even so much as show up for others to also subscribe. Really the developers should have made better automation so that this was not necessary, but… anyway it works, for now:-).
That’s nice! ☺️
I feel like ActivityPub implemented federation in a really weird way, and that’s what causes problems like @linearchaos@lemmy.world is reporting, or the issue that Blaze is addressing through multi-accounting. Perhaps we shouldn’t be sharing content across instances but only credentials.
For example. If you’re registered to instance A, and B federates with A, then B would let you post from your A account as if you were registered to B. Then let the retrieval of the content of different instances up to the front-end, instead of mirroring it.
No, the whole point for the federation is to share the content. For one, it allows redundancy so that if a rogue mod or admin decided to delete a bunch of stuff, then every other instance still retains copies of what came from it.
But that said, having to keep everything up to the second, in batches of a single action, is extremely limiting. If I downvote someone with an accidental button press, then undownvote them, then upvote - that could have been just one net interaction to send, but instead it is three.
Redundancy is better handled through specialised mirrors, similar in spirit to reveddit. That would be even more transparent than the current system - as the mirrors could translate actions like content removal into content highlighting, so it would stick out like a sore thumb*. This would also throw the burden associated with redundancy (transmission, storage, removal of clearly illegal content) into a few machines, instead of the whole network.
I’m aware that it’s a weaker form of federation than the current one but, as long as the front-end handles simultaneous multi-account and merges the feeds of the instances that you’re registered to, it’s already addressing the main needs:
- users can see content from multiple places without registering individually to each
- users don’t need to see what they don’t want to
- content is still spread out, so no instance controls the whole
- admins still have control over who accesses their own instance (through defederation + banning).
*currently you can only find a piece of removed content if you know that it exists.
At a wild guess, it could literally be the communism?
No really, I’m serious: what you are describing sounds to me like there is a sense of “ownership”, as in an instance owns a community, whereupon everything else is lesser than the owner with respect to that particular content - e.g. the others “mirror” the content that is “owned” by the instance that the community is on. A master/slave relationship, in computer science terminology.
In contrast, ActivityPub sounds to me (caveat: I’ve never read the source) like everyone is equal, hence why every action is shared equally by all. A distributed burden. Except without the major traditional benefits of it being distributed - i.e. Aussie.Zone cannot simply connect to some other server instance with less physical distance between it and Lemmy.World, no it must go straight to the source, even when that results in a 7-day delay (and even that cutoff is only because things older than that simply get deleted).
On the other hand, there’s nothing stopping someone from not respecting the deletion requests, and instead highlighting that content, in the current Lemmy framework. It would definitely be a deviation from the standard codebase though. And therefore every time there’s an update or patch, there would have to be a merge event to keep that feature functional.
I wonder if the reason your idea is not done is bc it relies too much on “trusting” the client for security reasons? Although… tbf I’m not certain how much that would differ from how things are now.
I’m not sure if the analogy with communism holds well, as communism implies post-scarcity. Perhaps socialism - if you see the current AP protocol as the Soviet economy from 1918 to 22, my proposal is basically a Lenin style New Economic Policy: a step back (less federation) to take two steps forward later (federation growth).
As for the mirrors, secondary (as in backup) would be a good analogy; their main reason to exist would be to make admins+mods accountable. (“Why did you remove [content]? It’s within the rules, even if you disagree with it!”). And ideally it should be possible for a single mirror to work for multiple instances, specially smaller ones. In the meantime, the actual (non-mirror) instances would be on equal grounds.
In contrast, ActivityPub […]
As far as I know, as someone who didn’t read the source either, that’s accurate. aussie.zone is basically mirroring the content of federated instances, to service its users, then when some aussie.zone user posts something there the other instances mirror it.
On the other hand, there’s nothing stopping someone from not respecting the deletion requests, and instead highlighting that content, in the current Lemmy framework. It would definitely be a deviation from the standard codebase though. And therefore every time there’s an update or patch, there would have to be a merge event to keep that feature functional.
In theory, there isn’t. In practice:
- AFAIK this is not something that Lemmy or Mastodon were coded for. It’s unsupported so the person doing it would need to maintain their own fork of the relevant software.
- This becomes specially problematic once users from the non-deleting instance interact with content that, for other instances, has been deleted.
I wonder if the reason your idea is not done is bc it relies too much on “trusting” the client for security reasons? Although… tbf I’m not certain how much that would differ from how things are now.
If I had to take a guess, the reason why W3C, Lemmer-Webber and Prodromou created the AP the current way is because, while you’re raising a baby, you never know the growing pains that it’ll have as a teen.
Ease discovery of federated communities has been funded: https://join-lemmy.org/news/2024-09-11_-_New_NLnet_funding_for_Lemmy
Also, thank you for the comment above
Ease discovery of federated communities has been funded: https://join-lemmy.org/news/2024-09-11_-_New_NLnet_funding_for_Lemmy
That’s some great news! It’s great to see that the issues are being ironed out.
EDIT WOW THANKS FOR LE GOLD TO LE KNEE KIND STRANGER!
Giving me fucking flashbacks
lemmyworld in many ways is still just reddit. don’t get me wrong, I’ve talked to plenty of cool people on there before. but it is the biggest instance that ballooned after the API controversy and a lot of them seem to have just brought Reddit to the fediverse with them. I have no issues with any mods there, I’ve not really seen them at all. they did defed a community from my instance though so that’s pretty lame of them.
I beg to differ: even Reddit these days is little like Reddit, as it was just prior to the protests. Reddit f-ing died, and Lemmy.World is nothing like that shithole, especially what’s left nowadays with bots copying bots speaking to bots, allowing humans to simply scroll forever.
To any extent that it is like the Reddit of old though, yeah it’s just bc it’s so big. It was guaranteed that some instance would become that, bc people are people - at least here, not like AI-Reddit. 🤡
t’s just bc it’s so big
It’s not the World is big…
It’s just everyone else is so small.
Like in the grand scheme of the fediverse we’re all tiny. But of the “reddit clone” instances it might be bigger than everyone else put together even.
I went over to your instance and checked, and yeah, it’s a reddit clone interface too
The structure makes all of us “like reddit” because reddit has always had a shit ton of different small subs with vastly different vibes. A decade ago there was some sub on Reddit that had the exact same vibe your instance has today. That’s just how big reddit was.
Federation just means no one group of admins can seize control, even if World went to shit tomorrow, everyone would just bounce. I have zero “loyalty” to my instance, if it starts to suck I’m out.
That’s the point of this whole thing.
I just counted some of this in another comment here on this thread “they” being Lemmy.world:
they are definitely the largest by a wide margin! According to https://lemmy.fediverse.observer/list, they have >5-fold active users than anyone else. I presume that’s monthly. The next largest instance, is lemmynsfw.com, followed by Lemm.ee, sh.itjust.works, lemmy.ml, etc. but each of those with 2-3k users compared to lemmy.world’s 17.2k. So the latter is bigger than many others (if not quite all of them) combined.
Also, due to how “packets” of data are sent, many smaller instances (like Aussie.zone) have like 7-day delays getting all the data from Lemmy.world, sent at a rate of no more than one action per second (a future Lemmy software update should help with this substantially). I’m not kidding about any of this btw - see e.g. discussion at https://feddit.org/post/3524876.
Edit: I just realized I didn’t respond to your "reddit clone” part. Honestly, unless you start talking like Mbin or Piefed or something, that’s just Lemmy. I cannot really think of a single counterexample, not really - we all are on “link aggregators”, and most of us further are on “general purpose” ones. For that one I can at least think of several counterexamples: as you mentioned, some instances such as programming.dev, StarTrek.website, mander.xyz, aussie.zone, lemmy.ca - all those have a “theme”, but those too still allow general purpose usage, and still are forum-like. Then again, they can each have multiple communities, like mander.xyz is science but there are many individual communities underneath that heading. Which is a bit different from Reddit, having only just “subs”?
Also, people on mander.xyz could block everyone from let’s say lemmy.ml and/or lemmy.world, if they wanted to. Reddit definitely did not allow that - if you wanted to make a block list, then you had to do it the old fashioned way, one by one!:-)
I don’t hate LW, I even regularly post to a few LW communities. The sysadmins do a good job. There are a few debatable moderation decisions, but those are usually documented on !yepowertrippinbastards@lemmy.dbzer0.com
The main issues I have with it is
- centralization of communities coupled with the current federation implementation creating 7-days delay for instance like aussie.zone (see !fedimemes@feddit.uk for a meme and discussion on that topic)
- their communities being the default means they can take controversial decisions and impact a topic for everyone until an alternative community emerges. See all the debates with the Media Bias Fact Checker bot, which in the end got removed from !world@lemmy.world (!globalnews@lemmy.zip for an alternative) but apparently it still on !politics@lemmy.world
- another consequence of centralization is impact of their being unavailable. People here might remember August 2023 when LW was under consistent DDoS attack, it was barely usable. This prevented a third of Lemmy total users to use Lemmy. Should they face a similar issue in the future, most of the Lemmy communities would be unusable.
Another point I haven’t seen mentioned is that they are still federated with Threads: https://fedipact.veganism.social/
They are the last large instance which still is.
I have nothing against the wolders but the admins of that instance raise more than a few eyebrows. Particularly when they rolled back specific anti hate speech policies in favor of vague common sense ones to stay ahead of the anti-woke crowd.
Kind of feels like they have been trying to take over Lemmy. Which… Could be a lot worse but still rubs me the wrong way.
So far my only beef with the .world admins was their VPN policy. I don’t have any better suggestions, but I still feel it was the wrong choice.
I just learned about the vpn thing a few days ago and its annoying.
we have a VPN policy?
Sadly spammers are to blame here.
Some of the dumbest and most aggressive comments I’ve seen on Lemmy came from lemmy.world. Most comments on it seem OK, but it does have a reddit-like flavour with a good number of unpleasant users.
hits you in the head with a steel chair like in pro-wrestling
C’mon. Lemmy.World users aren’t aggressive!!! That’s a misconception!
throws salt in your eyes
In fairness, you in particular have lost your mind! (And I for one am glad to not be the only one!:-)
I am really somewhat surprised to hear that honestly. After Lemmygrad.ml and hexbear.net, the worst extremes I see by far come from lemmy.ml. Sort of a “when I see trolling this bad, then >90% of the time it is lemmy.ml”.
After that, yeah, lemmy.world has the largest absolute number of trolls on the Fediverse - you kinda expect some from any large instance, and they are definitely the largest by a wide margin! According to https://lemmy.fediverse.observer/list, they have >5-fold active users than anyone else. I presume that’s monthly. The next largest instance, is lemmynsfw.com, followed by Lemm.ee, sh.itjust.works, lemmy.ml, etc. but each of those with 2-3k users compared to lemmy.world’s 17.2k. So the latter is bigger than many others (if not quite all of them) combined.
Trolls from lemmy.world I block individually, but lemmy.ml got so frustrating for me that I blocked the entire instance. I do not regret that in the slightest. It was that or quit Lemmy altogether. Lemmy.world though seems… “manageable”, i.e. not every person from it is worthwhile to talk to, but enough are that it’s worth blocking only the trolls while keeping the rest, imho.
What’s wrong with punching nazis?
Was expecting this comment, I used to be a pacifist, after asking why people would* punch nazis in asklemmy, I read a few books they reccomended and I changed my mind.
tldr: nothing.
edit: * if it is morally correct
That’s a pretty big fucking asterisk. That makes all the difference in the world.
yeah lol, I kinda mean both at the same time so ill leave it like that.
Not a god damned thing!
I’d say the biggest criticism is that it’s the largest instance, and is also a “general purpose” instance, which sort of takes away from the main goal of the fediverse. When 90% of content comes from one instance, it opposes the goal of decentralization.
I chose lemdro.id because it’s nice and fast, the admins are very good, and its main topic is around technology/software which I like
I don’t think the existence of large instances is in itself strictly antithetical to decentralization. The network effect makes them inevitable.
The power in the fediverse is everyone has a standard toolset to interact with the entire fediverse. Most people won’t, and that’s okay. The important thing is that, should larger communities become too oppresive as they gentrify, replacing them is a cheap decision, as you and everyone like-minded with you can squad up and leave at any time and lose nothing as the standard tooling of the platform facilitates that migration. You have mobility in the fediverse, and that permits choice to those who seek it.
This will stop being true once the larger instances start augmenting their experiences with proprietary nonsense. Features that only work there, that you can invest into and become dependant on, that you’d have to give up if you leave.
The day that happens will be the day that chunk of the Fediverse dies. Or, well, it won’t die, it will probably flourish and do very well. But it won’t be the Fediverse anymore. It will just be another knee-high-fence-gated community, that happens to run on Fediverse tech.
I’m on db0 and we have lots of subs aren’t on .world. So it possible but you are right in general.
Thank you for your work on Photon!
Also, just thinking about it, but OP, you are posting this on a LW community, while people really disliking LW probably blocked the instance. You could maybe crosspost to !asklemmy@lemmy.ml to get additional answers
Come on, don’t encourage people to use Lemmy.ml
I’m not, just pointing out that people actually upset with LW aren’t probably on the present community
deleted by creator
Thanks!
The instance structure conveniently groups people together and labels them. Stereotyping, bias and tribalism are the natural result.
I want you all to know that I’m happy you’re here, cis het white male frat boy from old wealth with an ivy league education or a neorospicy gay trans Jewish anarcho-communist and everything else out there.
While I won’t judge you on your instance, I will judge you on your ability to be a good neighbor. I’m always glad to see humility, kindness, empathy, comradery, etc. on display.
“We must therefore claim, in the name of tolerance, the right not to tolerate intolerance”
Karl Popper
I usually beef with sh.it.just.works users because by far I’ve met the most wrong takes there, especially in WPT, and it’s quite funny considering the instance name conveys a sort of desperation in not being able to get Lemmy to work, which just makes it seem like it’s an instance for the less intellectualy gifted of us, but it’s all in good fun really. Some communities there are also quite nice.
I’m pretty aligned with hexbears/MLs but their Russia simping is too much, whether it’s critical support or trying to get a reaction out of folks to post the pig it just feels like a nazi bar type situation.
Ironically db0 and slrpnk feel far more legit to me as an anarchist though neither are explicitly anarchist or based around being leftist in any other way.
Blahaj.zone banned me for transphobia on my first post I think. Or one of the communities did. No idea what I said there but I totally get them not messing around with bans.
World is just the largest instance, so naturally has the most trolls, spam, dodgy mods with weird rules and so on and so forth.
That’s the beauty of the fediverse though, if they ever became a real problem for me I’d just block em all. I kind of love this instance culture. Makes the place feel more human than the cold masto bullshit.
Lemmy.dbzer0.com is literally anarchist though. It’s run by anarchists and has an anarchist coc. It’s just not only for anarchists.
Woops. I fowgot >.<
My wrong take of sh.it.just.works’s name is that it’s for people who neither care nor know how the fediverse works or what it even is - people who just want to consume and occasionally randomly interact.
Hey, I primarily consume and very randomly interact!
Thanks for taking your time to interact here. I appreciate it. Enjoy your scrolling…
hello fellow millenial-feels anarchist, what’s WPT?
personally i only beef with hexbear. justworks seems about the same as world
Hey there! WPT is WhitePeopleTwitter. Yeah you’re right it’s not too different from world really. I think my experience is just more happenstance haha
Justworks has some dedicated anti-leftism communities. Essentially folks dedicated to having a problem with Lemmy existing as long as it is made and maintained by communists.
Which communities?
MeanwhileOnGrad is a ‘just making lists’ community. The quality and credibility is closer to ToiletPaperUSA for the most part since they had users misrepresenting interactions for a while. Dunno if that’s still the case but it has been back with a vengeance the last month or so.
Shitting on tankies is pro leftism though. Tankies are not leftists, they are fascists with a bad paint job. Enumerating how their ideals diverge from modern leftist philosophy is both common sense and good praxis.
It might be if there was much effort to establish any tankie ideal beyond a user being registered on .ml. It’s a lot of ‘so you hate waffles’ level of reaction and discourse unfortunately.
Having a problem with ML communist (communities) is not the same as having a problem with Lemmy