Lemmy: A Federated Reddit Alternative
lemmy.ml
lemmy.ml
LemmyBB, a federated bulletin board - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33438493 - Nov 2022* (186 comments)
Open Source federated link aggregator in rust - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31712332 - June 2022 (37 comments)
Lemmy – A link aggregator for the fediverse - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28453165 - Sept 2021 (213 comments)
(*Reposts are fine after a year or so but a major thread 13 days ago makes the current submission a dupe. This is in the FAQ: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsfaq.html)
> Rules
> No bigotry - including racism, sexism, ableism, homophobia, transphobia, or xenophobia. Code of Conduct. > Be respectful. Everyone should feel welcome here. > No porn. > No Ads / Spamming.
And a look at the moderation abilities:
> Can lock, remove, and restore posts and comments. Can ban and unban users from communities and the site.
A quick search leads us to this issue thread[1], which starts with a very reasonable request:
> It's generally not a good idea to hard code something like the slur filter because the needs of every instance is different. Instances in another language would need their versions, and cases where the slur filter over blocks need to be addressed by the admins.
> A good idea would be to store the slur filter in the database and initialize it with a default when spinning up an instance, but make it editable by admins without changing source files.
…which encounters, shall we say some resistance:
> If you dont like it, fork it. Stop bothering us about it, we will never fully remove the slur filter.
That's just one of the quite hostile responses of this <checks notes> group against hateful conduct.
It seems that not only has "community of leftist[s]" given up on free speech (as is the vogue), they've given up on real federation too. We have other comments here asking for a centralised authority - we have it, it's the developers!
how is that a hostile response exactly? Its a fundamental premise of foss isn't it?
You seem to place quite a bit of value in free speech, yet are bothered when the creators of this project use theirs to set boundaries, going so far as to call it "hostile." It's unfortunate that you find it hostile - I consider the hateful conduct that they're banning much more hostile and support their methods of collaboration to that end.
> It's unfortunate that you find it hostile - I consider the hateful conduct that they're banning much more hostile and support their methods of collaboration to that end.
It is hostile, but how is their hostility in that case justified by their stance against certain forms of prejudice? I don't see the justification. Moreover, the list of prejudices (if they are, they're just vague assertions at this point) they gave is not necessarily hostile. For example, a racist might publish a paper saying that the IQ of one race is less than another's. That is racist but not hostile. If they were to write "thus we should eliminate them" or "I hate them because of this" or, to a member of that race were to show any sort of aggression for simply being of that race, that would be hostile. It is eminently possible (and I'd say, easy) to be against hostility of any sort discussed here, and against racism while also noting that they're not synonyms and that they don't always overlap.
Nuance exists, even when discussing prejudice.
It's their project, they can do what they please with it. This is the premise of FOSS, which makes no claims as to how maintainers must communicate with collaborators or how projects must be maintained.
> go against the ideas of free speech and of federation, especially in the open source space
Those are your values, not the values of the maintainers. Maybe their relationship to open source is different than yours. Maybe their idea of free speech is different than yours. This is no more than you forcing your values on them.
Who was questioning that? No one, thanks for noticing.
> This is the premise of FOSS, which makes no claims as to how maintainers must communicate with collaborators or how projects must be maintained.
It is not, however, any protection against criticism about what they choose to do with that project. If you open source a program that actively harms any or all of the groups the Lemmy project is (ostensibly) trying to protect in its claim, would that protect you from criticism? Not in the slightest.
> > go against the ideas of free speech and of federation, especially in the open source space
> Those are your values, not the values of the maintainers.
Again, thanks for noticing.
> Maybe their relationship to open source is different than yours.
And?
> Maybe their idea of free speech is different than yours.
Clearly, it's why I'm criticising them.
> This is no more than you forcing your values on them.
Pray tell how I have applied force?
You're welcome! I'm pointing that out because apparently you haven't noticed that, hence your criticism.
> It is not, however, any protection against criticism about what they choose to do with that project. If you open source a program that actively harms any or all of the groups the Lemmy project is (ostensibly) trying to protect in its claim, would that protect you from criticism? Not in the slightest.
Yeah, I'm not debating that.
> Again, thanks for noticing.
Again, you're welcome!
If you conflate criticism with being against freedom then I can see why you'd come to this erroneous conclusion, and many of the others you've made.
> Yeah, I'm not debating that.
It's not protection against criticism but to criticise is against the freedom of the project. Right.
Asking nicely is when you submit a PR as well IMHO.
No, asking nicely is not limited to issues that come with a PR.
> As we're discussing a Reddit alternative it seems apt to use the phrase "username checks out".
and trying to get something for free and then playing victim when you don't is somewhat akin to being a brigand, ain't it? I'm not entirely sure what such username games buy us given we seemingly both embrace negative connotations in our handles.
Furthermore, I haven't added anything to the project's issue tracker, and I didn't criticise them for turning down a request but the way they reacted to a request. Please try not to create straw man arguments because they're more convenient to rebut than what has actually been written, that's unbecoming.
It would be super relevant if they got paid a million per issue by the community because then there would be an expectation of receiving something in exchange. Project maintainers don't owe you anything, the whole point of FOSS is that this doesn't matter because you can just fork it and make your own opinionated changes to circumvent differences of opinion instead of achieving nothing but negativity by hand-wringing over tone.
> and I didn't criticise them for turning down a request but the way they reacted to a request.
We can tone police the OP of that thread as well if you like. The way the OP effectively says:
> this [what currently happens] is just bad
> this [what I want] is much more sensible
has the same capacity to appear aggressive in nature.
What's the issue tracker for and why is open beyond the core team?
> We can tone police the OP of that thread as well if you like. The way the OP effectively says:
> > this [what currently happens] is just bad
> > this [what I want] is much more sensible
> has the same capacity to appear aggressive in nature.
I don't see the aggression. If you ask me for something and I respond with:
- no, fuck off
- I'm sorry but I don't think that meets the current aims of this project so we won't be doing it
They're equally aggressive? Maybe you could give a better example because what I have right now is too absurd.
Are forks permitted to join Lemmy's federated network, and are those that use different filters to those that the core team would want able to?
More importantly (for our discussion), why would I have to share someone's values in order to think they're worth listening to?
Again - this means that you probably don't want to use this project, then.
> More importantly (for our discussion), why would I have to share someone's values in order to think they're worth listening to?
Because you've dismissed their entire project based on their comments in a single PR from years ago.
> Again - this means that you probably don't want to use this project, then.
You haven't answered the question why, you're begging the question. You can scroll up and see what I asked and perhaps finally answer it.
> > More importantly (for our discussion), why would I have to share someone's values in order to think they're worth listening to?
> Because you've dismissed their entire project based on their comments in a single PR from years ago.
This is a non-sequitur. Firstly, I haven't "dismissed" their entire project, I've criticised their stated position and the way they handled a polite issue request (not a PR). Secondly, why is that single thread not indicative of the attitude of the developers? Do you have other issue threads available on the same or a similar topic where they were less hostile?
Lastly, it doesn't answer the question at all. Why would I have to share someone's values in order to think they're worth listening to? When you see a question I'd be grateful if you could try answering it instead of trying to answer the straw man version of me you've created in your head.
> It seems that not only has "community of leftist[s]" given up on free speech (as is the vogue), they've given up on real federation too.
This... seems like dismissal. They claim to be a federated project, you claim that their lack of alignment with your idea of "free speech" makes this not a federated project and is an abandonment of real free speech (again, your idea of it).
> Secondly, why is that single thread not indicative of the attitude of the developers? Do you have other issue threads available on the same or a similar topic where they were less hostile?
Think about the last time you were curt with someone - do you believe that it is indicative of your general attitude, or indicative of your attitude because of some extenuating circumstances? Can you please collect some other issue threads on the same or a similar topic that you believe establishes a pattern of behavior?
> Lastly, it doesn't answer the question at all. Why would I have to share someone's values in order to think they're worth listening to?
Because you "have a problem with overtly hostile responses to reasonable and polite requests," which you believe the maintainers are guilty of. Hence, it's likely you wouldn't want to listen to them because you have a problem with how they communicate, i.e. the way that they would communicate with you. I can keep answering this question over and over again in different ways, but I'm not sure how to make this simpler to understand.
The lack of understanding is all yours, as you've managed to conflate the developers with the users of Lemmy - is it really just them on this alternative to Reddit?
I also wonder why the hostility within a network goes up as the hate speech goes down, it seems counterproductive.
> Think about the last time you were curt with someone - do you believe that it is indicative of your general attitude, or indicative of your attitude because of some extenuating circumstances?
If you were their lawyer or their dad I would understand this need to come up with an excuse, but you're not.
> Can you please collect some other issue threads on the same or a similar topic that you believe establishes a pattern of behavior?
I could try but I already have evidence of hostility that backs up my claim, why would I start working to satisfy a different claim that you'd like to make on my behalf, presumably for your benefit here, when I asked you to back up your claim but you've provided nothing? That makes no sense.
There's something like 10 days to respond to a comment on HN so you can still do it.
> you claim that their lack of alignment with your idea of "free speech"
You mean, the standard idea given by those who support free speech? Yes, that idea.
> makes this not a federated project
Reddit also has servers that talk to each other but won't allow others to join its network that it doesn't control, it's not considered federated either.
The nature of federated networks is such that the vast majority of nodes by count will always be more or less default configured, and serving a tiny, single digit or low double digit population. In spite of their miniscule size, they almost always punch above their weight in terms of content produced, which makes sense, given that at least one of those dozen or so people was at least driven enough to build their own platform.
Keeping these small networks in the network is generally very high value, and so generally you want to maximize federation by default. Sending some messages, either inbound or outbound into the ether, without explanation, silently weakens the network and lowers interactivity of the entire federated graph.
Maybe messages with slurs are so bad that the cost is worth the benefit, but its far from a free choice, and it's one that an API team should view as a solemn, painful compromise - hurting the network and the interface in order to keep it safe.
That doesn't seem to be the attitude or level of respect the Lemmy devs give their own decisions however, which is why I'd consider them bad stewards of their own project.
> Freedom of speech is a principle that supports the freedom of an individual or a community to articulate their opinions and ideas without fear of retaliation, censorship, or legal sanction. The right to freedom of expression has been recognised as a human right in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights and international human rights law by the United Nations.
So, when talking about freedom of speech most nations abide and follow the prescriptions of the international framework supplied by the Universal Declaration of Human Rights and further ratified as members of the United Nations. I think it's safe to speak about the universal concept and the national/political concept as being the identical.
> Under Article 230-1 of the Criminal Code of Japan:
> “(1) A person who defames another by alleging facts in public shall, regardless of whether such facts are true or false, be punished by imprisonment with or without work for not more than three (3) years or a fine of not more than 500,000 yen.”
“regardless of whether such facts are true or false” isn't the way to protect freedom of speech in my mind, nor anyone I've ever heard supporting freedom of speech. Hence, no, it's not safe to conflate the concept and the implementation in law, and not just for this reason but because in the vast majority of cases the implementation in law does not protect freedom of speech to even the amount the US constitution does (which is still not far enough, in my opinion).
If you're counter arguing my statement with "in the vast majority of cases" I would welcome some supporting evidence on your part. Which Western states have a very different definition of freedom of speech from the one in the declaration of human rights?
Also the declaration specifies exceptions for libel and national security among others, a clarification that can be found (again) on Wikipedia:
> The version of Article 19 in the ICCPR later amends this by stating that the exercise of these rights carries "special duties and responsibilities" and may "therefore be subject to certain restrictions" when necessary "[f]or respect of the rights or reputation of others" or "[f]or the protection of national security or of public order (order public), or of public health or morals".
You can argue that you personally hold a different opinion about what "freedom of speech" is, but I would say that for the vast majority of people using the definition in the dictionary is the correct way.
I'm sure there are other countries that actually take the notion of free speech seriously but I'm too ignorant about the laws of every country to know that. Most countries I can think of have glaring issues with protecting people's right to free speech.
As to "the rest of the civilized world", as pointed out several times now, very little of the "civilized" world has strong speech protections. Germany? Laws against Holocaust denial and defamatory fake news[1], which sounds Orwellian. France isn't pro-free speech either[2]. The UK has the backwards Communication Act and libel laws that are criticised the world over[3], leading to hundreds of convictions a year[4], including for posting your favourite rap lyrics[5]. Canada's free speech protections are anything but[6]. Australia has "less protection of free speech than most Western countries" according to a former High Court judge and there are raids on journalists[7], which we know happens in the US all too regularly[8] as well despite its much lauded first amendment. Italy charges writers for expressing opinions[9]. Perhaps I could complete the G8 with the state of free speech in Russia? Or you'd like to move on to places like Norway that only managed to get rid of its lese majeste laws in 2015? Or Thailand that still has them. Germany only got rid of its lese majeste laws in 2018 after a dictator tried to use them against a satririst, which brings us full circle and we haven't even touched the worst parts of the world.
[1] https://apnews.com/article/europe-germany-business-3d266e6de...
[2] https://www.amnesty.org/en/latest/press-release/2020/11/fran...
[3] https://www.npr.org/sections/parallels/2015/03/21/394273902/...
[4] https://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/arrests-for-offensive-...
[5] https://www.bbc.com/news/uk-england-merseyside-43816921#main...
[6] https://nationalpost.com/news/canada/despite-what-you-may-th...
[7] https://theconversation.com/australia-doesnt-protect-free-sp...
[8] https://freedom.press/news/2020-report-journalists-arrested-...
I'll gladly accept that my definition of free speech differs from the "civilized world" that has no clue what free speech is and has basically no interest in protecting it.
Nobody supports unlimited free speech. Everyone accepts there needs to be certain limits. Suppose there is a billionaire with a very dark personality, and you are a low-paid waiter in a restaurant. He's unhappy with the service you provided, and is in a particularly angry mood today, so he instructs his minions to falsely label you as a child molester, and spends millions spreading that false accusation across the globe, simply as a way of hurting you–does any one really think "free speech" should include the right to that kind of speech? But if you don't, you support defamation laws as a limit on free speech at least in some extreme cases, even if you think many of those laws (as they currently exist) go way too far.
So, if we accept free speech has to be subject to some limits – the question is, where to draw those limits? How to balance freedom of speech with other freedoms (such as freedom from defamation, freedom from fraud, freedom from privacy invasion, freedom from perjury, etc)? Is there some objective answer to how that balance ought to be drawn? You seem to think that the US does a better job of that than most other countries (or maybe even every other country)–maybe you are right, but surely that's an argument that needs to be made, rather than simply something which is self-evident (as you seem to think it is).
Some do propose this, most don't.
> the question is, where to draw those limits? How to balance freedom of speech with other freedoms (such as freedom from defamation, freedom from fraud, freedom from privacy invasion, freedom from perjury, etc)?
- freedom from defamation, provide a justice system where truth is the ultimate defence (as common law states have - it could be improved though)
- freedom from fraud, already covered by contract law and caveat emptor
- freedom from privacy invasion, that is part of free speech (you choose who you share information with, hence, privacy is implied and necessary)
- freedom from perjury, there are laws against perjury in common law
As I pointed out, Japan's defamation law is painted in such a way as to make it so broad that it affects all speech. Hence, bringing up such an exception is not a refutation of the point but an indictment of the exception itself. As to the "national security" exception, the US's FISA courts are a good example - or should that be bad example? - of why such an exception is easily abused. Have you not heard of Edward Snowden and Wikileaks?
> You can argue that you personally hold a different opinion about what "freedom of speech" is, but I would say that for the vast majority of people using the definition in the dictionary is the correct way.
1. Wikipedia is an encyclopaedia
2. If we were talking about the meaning of common words in common use I might agree on relying on a dictionary but we are not
3. Wikipedia is also not a source of truth in a discussion on free speech. If you wish to argue your point then try to steel man it instead of looking for ways to avoid dealing with those made by your opponents, please.
4. The Oxford English dictionary defines "free speech" thus:
> free speech > noun [mass noun] > the right to express any opinions without censorship or restraint: it violated the first-amendment guarantee of free speech.
That doesn't support your point.
And since you brought it up, my own definition:
Speech can be said to be free when one has the ability to share a view:
- with whom one chooses
- at a time of one's choosing
- without interference or punishment (physical or otherwise) by government or society
and that view is neither maliciously false nor a credible and imminent threat.
https://beehaw.org/c/technology
https://lemmy.ml/c/technology
> On Lemmy you're able to subscribe to communities on any other server, and can have discussions with users registered elsewhere.
“Hmm, almost all of r/technology is against nuclear, that informs my personal view point a little… “hmm, every one of these technology reddit-likes is against nuclear, I guess everyone agrees and I should too”.
I am aware that this is not a bug to Reddit, it is the reason they are looking at an IPO, is a very in-demand feature to be able to shape narratives.
I look forward to seeing how a federated Reddit deals with narrative pushing.
What federation lets you is view and interact with communities that are hosted on another instance, for example:
https://beehaw.org/c/technology@lemmy.ml
https://lemmy.ml/c/technology@beehaw.orgI will try to answer any questions you have.
Russia today is an ethnofascist dictatorship, but most tankies don't care because America Bad.
The bigger it is, the more difficult it is to move off your tenant platform.
And as time passes, you are more likely to want something which your tenant platform does not offer.
Maybe it is a different style of displaying images. Maybe it is a different way of defending against bots and spam. Maybe it is easier reporting of spam by users.
Whatever it is, a platform with a user:operator ratio of over a million will probably not have the resources to accommodate you.
And here's the repos https://github.com/LemmyNet
It looks like ActivityPub
Hard-coding slur filters sounds like the work of Sisyphus though.
one shared namespace is problematic for reasons. You can figure email though, right?
DNS is a solved problem and we're never going to see anything better come along because DNS has survived the test of time (see the Lindy Effect - DNS is old, crusty, and like the Art of War or Shakespeare, it's worth learning).
(In passing, using top level domains as user id may be a good idea in some cases. In tech communities the friction may be bearable.)
I assume you aren't familiar with the Lindy effect though and I apologize for making an arcane reference: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lindy_effect
OK then:
> "that's a feature, not a bug! one shared namespace is problematic for reasons."
Is just saying "I'm right you're wrong and I refuse to explain why".
> "You can figure email though, right?"
Are you saying that being able to understand email means one should find the benefit to separate namespaces in social media? Or that email is everyone's definition of perfect and so everything should be like it? Or something else, considering it took me a bit of guessing to even think of those first two explanations?
> DNS is a solved problem
First, are you suggesting DNS is 100% perfect at what it does and nobody could ever have any complaint about it? Second, it's not clear to me how it being a solved problem for what it currently does means it's necessarily the right approach for any new uses? I need to get a tire on my car replaced tomorrow, and I really hope they don't tell me "you don't need a new tire, you need DNS - haven't you heard, it's a solved problem".
I'm genuinely not trying to be sarcastic I just don't understand any argument you're trying to make.
People expect and understand username exclusivity.
I rarely think of a distributed ledger as the useful answer for something, but I wonder if there are other ways a social network like lemmy or toot toot could agree on something like this.
It’s perfectly fine if the network consists of a bunch of loosely connected islands without the ability to propagate information across the entire network because there is a limited number of people you can interact with meaningfully. Federation favors smaller communities where the interactions are more personal while still facilitation interaction between different communities.
Even a centralized site like reddit is ultimately broken down into subreddits because nobody wants to see all of reddit all at once.
Employment, for example.
Luckily good orgs use directories to manage membership (LDAP, etc).
What I'm thinking about here is something like my particular city (Los Angeles) delegating social media accounts to people involved in government, like city council members or spokespeople in certain departments (LAFD? you get the picture).
The way this works is you have to put an HTML tag on a page on a site you own, then link to that page in your Mastodon account. This verifies you as the owner of the site and your identity.
A workable alternative would be using a pubkey fingerprint with an mutable display name, but who wants to help their family sort that out?
The main difference between "brutalinks" (which is the official name of the software project) and lemmy is that in my opinion, grouping multiple "subreddits" on the same instance is a bad choice when designing federated discussion platforms. As some commenters have already observed, it raises the issue of which community targeting a niche interest is the best among the ones split on different instances. On brutalinks we made the explicit choice of treating the instance itself as a "subreddit" which targets a small/medium community that gather around this one shared interest.
More details can be found reading through the online docs: https://man.sr.ht/~mariusor/go-activitypub/brutalinks/
Bottom of page.
I'm intrigued by lots of users using a federated system and curious how it works out and I look forward to read activitypub distributed posts tree rendered.
This of course is not necessarily a reason to avoid the underlying technology, but it may be something to consider.
> Edit: This comment was written at a time when Lemmy the software was practically identical with the lemmy.ml instance. At that time we barely had any moderation tools, so it was an easy way to keep some groups of users off the instance. Now its different, there are good mod tools, and many different instances. So we removed the slur filter in Lemmy 0.14.0 (instance admins can optionally configure one, which lemmy.ml does).
The comment was edited Nov 2021 to include this new context.
Be more Lemmy.
Like, is it really a great thing for mending societal bridges that folks can choose between a server for leftists or a server for hard-right folks and that split ensures that one never interacts with the other? Is it really no longer possible to have conversations happen between folks that disagree, to the point that we want to ensure that there's no chance for such conversations ever to happen, even by accident?
...and that's why we can't have discourse. No one can agree on what constitutes "reasonable debate".
That validated my intuition and proved my point.
Thanks!
I hope that, like me, you enjoy the rest of your day.
But that's a large part of the problem, reducing everything to a simplistic "left-vs-right" dichotomy – everything is either "left" or "right", and everyone who is good/sane/rational/decent/etc belongs to one of them and everyone who belongs to the other is irrational/insane/wicked/etc
If someone is pro-war (to any degree), anti-worker/union or pro-capitalism I have a hard time taking them serious as a leftist; that's more of a liberal bag.
I think it is an attempt to name a real phenomenon – a particular strand of left-of-centre thought, with a great deal of contemporary influence, which (among other distinctive traits) foregrounds issues of race and gender/sexuality, in opposition to the classic Marxist emphasis on economic class as the "underlying cause" of all those other issues. If you don't want to call it "wokeness" – fine then, what should we call it?
My personal suggestion would be to go back to what it was called when I was a kid; "knee-jerk". "knee jerk" doesn't have a specific axis connotation (unlike "woke" which refers explicitly to progressive issues). It was primarily aimed at (knee jerk) liberals but could easily be aimed at reactionaries without any change of meaning.
My apologies.
Surely it is valuable to find descriptive terminology for different ideological currents – across the totality of the political spectrum? The traditional Marxist answer is "yes" – followed up with an analysis of the endlessly diverse ways in which those various currents support class interests, which is what Reed presents for "woke".
[0] https://newrepublic.com/article/160305/beyond-great-awokenin...
Personally I run my own Mastodon instance for myself and federate with everything, left or right, I don't care. I block stuff for myself that is illegal in my country, but I like reading about opinions I don't necessarily agree with.
It's the opposite. When people are aware of the bias of their sources the filter-bubble effect cease to exist.
The whole problem with the filter bubble is that people are unaware of the existing biases.
It's surprising how people don't understand this...
Sounds great. But remind me from where all this brigading, canceling, preventing speech, and censorship is coming from.
They aren't necessarily deep friends, these bubble people. Move such a bubble to friendly territory where there is only peace, and many will fall apart.
"Thing from one bubble goes viral in another" doesn't require two bubbles to exist on the same platform, as in Twitter. If the two bubbles are segregated to different platforms, people will still post screenshots/etc of one on the other, and some of those will go viral. "Libs of TikTok" is a good example of this – TikTok and Twitter aren't federated, but that doesn't stop left-leaning TikToks becoming viral in right-leaning Twitter; and you can find plenty of stuff on TikTok critiquing "Libs of TikTok" (and Twitter more generally) in turn. Similarly, there are whole subreddits devoted to stoking outrage at screenshots of Twitter and Facebook posts.
No doubt a shared platform accelerates this mutual feedback process a bit, simply by reducing the friction of cross-bubble quotation; but it still is going to happen a lot even without one.
>Is it really no longer possible to have conversations happen between folks that disagree,
At this point? No -because neither side can agree on common references; the left get their news from one set of news outlets and the far right get their news from qanon or whatever facebook fringe groups.
It's impossible to have a conversation if you cannot even agree on basic language or common references.
With their being fewer and fewer genuinely left-of-center outlets it becomes necessary for people to be able to build enclaves that won't be shitposted into oblivion (see also: reddit with the_donald and other brigading subs)
If in the physical space you'd ban somebody from ever joining your meeting or neighborhood again, you need to have some type of probable cause. Something really bad must have happened.
Meanwhile in the digital space: banned for life because your comment was too long. Don't believe me? Watch:
Federation offers at least some hope of cross-pollination.
I don't think that the goals of these software products are to reduce political polarization. What does the telephone do to reduce political polarization?
Extremity is highly engaging and richly rewarded, hence maximizing polarization has become an incentive on its own. "normal" users have been exposed to this discourse for several years now, and may have internalized it.
Thanks, folks!
Another conclusion: Federation alone isn't enough of a selling point. Federation must also be a key unlocker of other features. Perhaps more branded/tailored sites for different audience segments but which can feed into each other in meaningful ways might be one way to pitch it. But dropping federation entirely is throwing out the baby with the bathwater.
People who don't care about federation, conceptually, will never care about federation, even if it yields tangible benefits they care about otherwise. They will prioritize user experience, interface, branding appeal, reliability and speed of operations like finding people in-app, and all of that other stuff that FOSS social media, and many other types of FOSS projects, de-prioritize. That is why FOSS alternatives are still alternatives despite being free, and largely technically superior.
The disconnect is rooted in differing perspectives. Developers, naturally, use more sophisticated means of evaluating software than end users, much the way nutritionists evaluate food. We consider interfaces and user experiences to be means of interacting with software, and consider the software on a whole, yielding only so much weight to usability. Since software plays such a huge part of our lives, spending a little time wrangling it doesn't seem onerous.
To nearly all end users, the interface/experience is the software. Even people who do care about federation conceptually may not even be willing to deal with admin > 0 for their social media accounts. It's not ideal, but it's reality. Currently, federation hardly matters more to people than HTTP/2 does. Trying to use it as a selling point for general audience software is a failing strategy. So who cares? Social media is a hell of a lot more useful with a critical mass of users... other users are what make it "social," rather than merely "media."
If developers are nutritionists, designers are chefs. Calculating proper nutrition to keep us alive and functioning is arguably more important to making food delicious and enriching our sensual lives. But if you take a large group of people and offer them their choice of food either constructed by nutritionists or constructed by chefs, the chefs will win every time. Many of the nutritionists will be mystified by people's lack of ability to prioritize critical body functioning over beautiful sensual experiences.
(When I was in culinary school, a fellow student was a career-changing nutritionist saying she was becoming a chef because she was tired of "being the bad guy taking away all the things people loved.)
The key is actively enfranchising people who specialize in knowing what users want. Spending an afternoon in Gimp making a punny logo is not branding. Customizable color themes are not UX. Deeply considering, and probably researching users needs and expectations and then trying to meet them is the only way forward for FOSS social media. People are willing to give up some flavor benefits for food that's significantly more nutritious, but we need chefs to help us make it as tasty an appealing as possible, and then spin the hell out of the benefits. It's the only way forward.
As usual when chasing "mass adoption" I think that the target demographic would simply be chased off and the project with wither on the vine.
I belong to the later camp, and I suspect the grandfather post you're replying to does too.
Looks like a no for me. But I appreciate the effort.
I don't remember _any_ political discuss on the various warez forums I was on (nxsecure anyone?). Flame wars were a thing, no doubt, but it wasn't this already formed opinion where you've picked a side and now anyone on the other side is a bad guy. It is completely bizarre.
I think politics is just a bigger part of peoples' lives now and we're seeing that play out in real life as well as in internet communities.
People were just out to have a good time, have a laugh or get together over something they loved.
People seemingly don’t seem to be as good at that these days.
It's like the people who bitch about their HOA all the time but never go to a meeting or even know who the board members are.
Maybe I’m just dumb, but I don’t fully understand this comment.
What is unignorable? Politics? I can ignore it just fine when I consider it not an appropriate subject. And a losing strategy? For what?
Why does every arena have to be about picking a fight, rather than finding common ground? Why try to increase the divide in our society?
I just don’t get this mentality.
It's easier to ignore something that largely ignores you. It becomes impossible to ignore something when half the people in it consider your existence an affront to their sensibilities, and those people are inexplicably being listened to.
> Why does every arena have to be about picking a fight, rather than finding common ground?
There exists no common ground when people think other people shouldn't exist. If all those people stop having any influence on the world, perhaps the rest can successfully seek common ground and have reasonable policy discussions.
As a counter example consider someone who could no longer exist online even if he, sadly, had not passed: Erik Naggum
Erik certainly expressed political views in many of his comments, but at the same time it's very hard to box his thinking into any mainstream political narrative. I think today he would be both unwelcome on Twitter and HN or any more conservative sites. Erik represents a lot of what I remember and miss about earlier forums: strongly held personal beliefs that don't fit into any one particular bucket.
Individuals having diverse views within their own system of beliefs is what allowed us to have meaningful political discussions in the past because 3 people could talk about 3 different topics and the group could reasonably be split 2 vs 1 on all topics with completely different splits each time.
Also there was a ton of political stuff in the bush era as well. My theory is that you just dont remember it because there was still a solid foundation of political decorum and respect on both sides at that time.
Disclaimer: I am not american.
None of those emphasised words means what you think they mean.
The fact that some people have been radicalized to believe stuff like this is more likely the root of the problems we’re having today.
In that regard your comment is what I would objectively consider a bad comment on HN (and against the site guidelines too), but it was still useful in the broader sense of the discussion.
Your parent is asking for a place where there is little to no political discussion, not a place to have meaningful political discussion.
With the good old phpBB forums, they'd often dedicate one subforum for political/flamebait content, and it was allowed only in there. As a user, you simply didn't read that subforum if you didn't care for it.
Specifically, on those forums, you had to actively seek those venues to have these discussions. Today it seems you have to work to avoid these discussions.
pretending this is news reminds me of Paul Ryan being shocked that Rage Against the Machine didn't like him. I also will point out that your very own profile page here features a link to a political manifesto
Things were different before, and it seems things are becoming different again.
If you wanted a political discussion, you took it where it was welcome. "young people today" and "get off my lawn" and all that but manners and decorum went out the windows with the original eternal september and we may never see them again.
It wasn't like this but then the Internet wasn't still that much widespread as today. Social media boom really opened it to the masses but also bring political polarization which really bloomed in last ~10 years.
Twenty years ago I wouldn't imagine that in the nearest future we'll have communities on the Internet ruled and divided by political views. That we'll need to self-censor what and in what form we want to say to others under the risk of the instant ban. I didn't expect either that we'll need to agree to "codes of conduct" - netiquette and forums rules were enough for most of the time.
Back then I hoped we'll have virtual assistants connected to vast databases, that we'll met in the virtual worlds with photo-realistic avatars, that technology would blend indistinguishably with our environment, and that would connect us into one global village. And instead we got bubbled social networks with yelling influencers and ads, tracking on every corner of the web. Bleh.
Not since Arab Spring or rather shortly thereafter. I'm not sure if there was a ramp-up of "active measures" style agitation, "cointelpro" style group antagonism or what the exact mechanism was. But any way you slice it, it has become increasingly impossible for competing groups within the same sphere to communicate much less for their to be a dialog between the left and right.
No one can dialog with anybody else because the people upstairs want it that way!
It's important to remember who owns corporate platforms and whose interests they ultimately represent. These are not neutral and unbiased channels that allow for the free flow of information. The content on these sites is carefully curated. Views and opinions that are unpalatable to the owners of these platforms are often suppressed, and sometimes outright banned.
Some examples include Facebook banning antifascist pages[1] and Twitter banning left-wing accounts during the midterm elections in US[2]. When the content that the user produce does not fit with the interests of the platform then it often gets removed and communities end up being destroyed.
Another problem is that user data constitutes a significant source of revenue for corporate social media platforms. The information collected about the users, and it can reveal a lot more about the individual than most people realize. It's possible for the owners of the platforms to identify users based on the address of the device they're using, see their location, who they interact with, and so on. This creates a comprehensive profile of the person along with the network of individuals whom they interact with. This information is often shared with the affiliates of the platform as well as government entities.
It's clear that commercial platforms do not respect user privacy, nor are the users in control of their content. Users are just a product that the owners of the platform sell to their actual customers who mine personal data.
Platforms like Lemmy and Mastodon are developed in the open making it possible to tell how they work internally. These platforms explicitly avoid tracking users and collecting their data. Not only are these platforms better at respecting user privacy, they also tend to provide a better user experience without annoying ads, analytics, and other garbage.
Another interesting aspect of the Fediverse is that it promotes collaboration. Traditional commercial platforms like Facebook, Twitter, and Youtube have no incentive to allow users to move data between them. They directly compete for users in a zero sum game and go out of their way to make it difficult to share content across them. This is the reason we often see screenshots from one site being posted on another.
On the other hand, a federated network that's developed in the open and largely hosted non-profit results in a positive-sum game environment. Users joining any of the platforms on the network help grow the entire network.
Having many different sites hosted by individuals was the way the internet was intended to work in the first place, it's actually quite impressive how corporations took the open network of the internet and managed to turn it into a series of walled gardens. Only when we own the platforms that we use will we be free to post our thoughts and ideas without having to worry about them being censored or manipulated by corporate interests.
No matter how great a commercial platform might be, sooner or later it's going to either disappear or change in a way that doesn't suit you because companies must constantly chase profit in order to survive. This is a bad situation to be in as a user since you have little control over the evolution of a platform.
On the other hand, open source has a very different dynamic. Projects can survive with little or no commercial incentive because they're developed by people who themselves benefit from their work. Projects can also be easily forked and taken in different directions by different groups of users if there is a disagreement regarding the direction of the platform. Even when projects become abandoned, they can be picked up again by new teams as long as there is an interested community of users around them.
It's time for people to get serious about owning our tools and start using communication platforms built by the people and for the people. Let's get back to making the internet work the way it was intended to work.
[1] https://theintercept.com/2020/08/20/facebook-bans-antifascis...
[2] https://www.wired.co.uk/article/twitter-political-account-ba...
Federated systems make collaboration much harder, not easier, in comparison to centralized platforms. This is one of the biggest complaints regarding Mastodon.
"No matter how great a commercial platform might be, sooner or later it's going to either disappear"
In the fediverse, this risk is a 100 times bigger.
If you're an artist then you can join an art instance and connect with other artists. If you're interested in functional programming then you join a functional programming instance, and so on.
You're still able to interact with the rest of the Fediverse, but you have a focused community on your server instance.
>In the fediverse, this risk is a 100 times bigger.
I can guarantee you that Mastodon will outlive every commercial social media platform in existence today.
As for Mastodon outliving other platforms, that's not what matters. What matter is instance survival, which is absolutely horrific.
>What matter is instance survival, which is absolutely horrific.
Except that's also nonsense. Popular instances run for years on end, it's also trivial to migrate from one instance to another.
You're just throwing out straw man arguments here. Meanwhile, arguing for centralization of the internet shows a fundamental lack of understanding of how the internet is supposed to work.
The first thing people need to learn about stoicism is that you can't change other people as much as you want to. Make peace with this and do things that are in your control.
I’m going to just keep using Facebook, and this will die off
This is a social problem, not a technical, financial, or legal one. Recruiting and organizing people is a fundamental skill in the modern world. The only thing stopping one from doing this is merely saying the right things to the right people.
> Want alternative to Reddit that doesn't have the clout of centrist mainstream media influencing it
> Find Lemmy, open source and free to use
> Lemmy is developed by political extremists that operate outside of centrist mainstream media
> Political extremists are on the wrong side
> Exclaim "Looks like a no for me. But I appreciate the effort."
FWIW There are a number of right wing extremist Lemmy instances (https://wolfballs.com/, https://ovarit.com/, previously https://thedonald.win).
And HN is where the Smart People go! Meaning some of the brightest folks on the internet.
If this is the best we can do, we're collectively fucked, y'all!
My most fascinating discovery is the public Modlog: https://lemmy.ml/modlog
What a spectacularly bad idea to show it in the open, but educational nonetheless. It very much resembles Reddit moderation, on steroids.
People are banned for typing 3 sentences (too long!), "repeated anti-communism", ....insert laundry list of other bullshit reasons...and get this: admins can simply wipe out an entire community at will. I'm not sure if that means it doesn't federate or simply stops working.
In any case, massive power trip vibes.
Why is that? Open moderation logs are, in my opinion, the corner stones of establishing trust between moderators and users on a discussion platform cum social network.
First, it's a potential privacy issue. It effectively is a single place where all dirt is concentrated, open for all to see. In case violators leak personal info, willingly or not, their mistake might be used against them in the future.
Second, it can be used to instantly find unpopular mods and mod decisions, and overwhelm them with more of the same, generating busy work or even harassment.
However I think that for entities which are not global network levels of population, a public moderation log is good. If there are abusers, banning them is probably not a difficult proposition among numbers counting into thousands or less.