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Comment by karlshea | Hacker News Reader

Lemmy has the same issue as Mastodon: what instance do I join?

When looking at the "migrate from Reddit" page the two obvious ones are lemmy.world and beehaw.org. But now they don't federate with each other, so it's down to more special-interest and smaller instances where it's not really clear what some of the rules might be, just to be able to see posts from both of these bigger instances.

The comparison is always made to picking a place for your email where Gmail/Yahoo/Hotmail were all "the same", but that's not really true for federated social networks. There's quite a bit more mod actions that could significantly influence your reach or experience with the wider fediverse.

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>what instance do I join?

The answer is "both of them". Pick a client that makes it the easiest to connect to separate instances on separate accounts, then choose the same-ish username.

Federation is, fundamentally, an anti-feature that exists solely to create liabilities for the end user as, by design, it empowers people who should not be empowered to destroy your social graph arbitrarily (the "not sharing my ban list is bannable" problem plagues the Fediverse).

This is not something the people writing the documentation understand (or worse, the above is a feature for them), but the correct way to use the service is to engage atomically under multiple different identities rather than be caught in the fallout of petty admin slapfights, just like signing up for a bunch of different phpBB forums was before the rise of Digg/Reddit.

> The answer is "both of them". Pick a client that makes it the easiest to connect to separate instances on separate accounts, then choose the same-ish username.

That actually reveals even more complexity: having to understand what federation is, researching and experimenting with clients, how to find different communities across the fediverse. Each added complexity cuts how many people would be willing to make the switch

I feel like there's a need for a client application that makes signing up and connecting to both appear to be unified network to the end user

Absolutely, the only way for these to take off is if you have a single place you direct people that makes the whole process braindead simple.

Sign up has to be simple. Finding content has to be simple. Keeping updated has to be simple. The branding also has to be really welcoming as well.

I can't verify this is true, but I've seen stuff pop up on Lemmy that Reddit accounts are getting banned for promoting Lemmy/Kbin/etc. Being resistant to unseen administrators destroying your social graph is literally a selling point of federation.

>Being resistant to unseen administrators destroying your social graph is literally a selling point of federation.

And that "selling point" is grossly inaccurate. (Unless you make a separate account everywhere, which obviously defeats the entire point of federation.)

ActivityPub implementations all suffer from the same "you're pre-emptively banned from subreddit X because you commented in subreddit Y" problem that Reddit currently has, but with cascading effect across half the network. Good for admin egos and power trips, bad for long-term usability and stability from the end user's perspective. As things of this nature have always been.

For now my own solution has been to spin up my own Mastodon, PeerTube and Lemmy instance, and because I'm such a small one person instance I don't bother anyone and therefor nobody defederated me yet.

> Federation is, fundamentally, an anti-feature that exists solely to create liabilities for the end user as, by design, it empowers people who should not be empowered to destroy your social graph arbitrarily.

My Twitter-using friends have complained that their feeds have become a ghost town and has lost most of its utility as a social network in the past year. Part of the reason why people were so upset at Reddit is because of justified fears that it's going down the exact same path. I have seen countless people myopically and unjustly banned from most major social media sites. How are these things anything other than a destruction of a social graph?

The thing is, this kind of vitriol isn't uncommon, and I've been trying to rack my brain trying to figure out what would cause such a reaction. Is it a misguided feeling of patronizing empathy for end-users? A distaste for the tech-enthusiast types that champion them? Or is it distasteful from a business POV since it is antithetical to walled gardens?

> the "not sharing my ban list is bannable" problem plagues the Fediverse

i had to google around a bit to figure out what you meant by that. do you mean "server A blocks server B, you run server C and want to federate with B but if you do then A will block you too"? if so, that's not "empowering people to destroy your social graph", indeed, from A's point of view it's the only way they can contain a potential infection by posts from B. but as an end user you could easily have accounts on both A and B, and a client that merged them, you just can't use your server C to join A and B into the same graph when A does not want to be connected to B.

Is it weird that I don't really mind the splintering? Have massive social networks really been a net positive for society? It seems like, depending on how they're moderated, they'll end up in some local maxima of rage baiting and trolling (Twitter, Facebook four years ago) or a super sanitized dumb feed of cutesy content (TikTok, Facebook now, and soon Reddit). You always get defenders of these networks that say if you do X/Y/Z and not A/B/C, then you'll get value out of them.

My X, Y, and Z formula for Reddit over the last couple of years has been to ignore the larger communities and focus only on interesting niche content. I think that's how a lot of other people use it, for the long tail of actually interesting content. And hell, I don't think you need the massive network effects of the larger social networks to make that work.

Global-reach social networks have been good for very narrow niche interest discussion. If I have a question about Civilization 4 or roguelike game development, it's nice that I can post somewhere that's likely to be seen by a large fraction of the world's devotees of those subjects. When Reddit burns down that won't be true anymore.

I'll give you that Reddit has certainly made it easier for those communities to organize and form. I don't think it's true that it's the only place that those communities will ever form on the internet. Theirs nothing special about Reddit, Digg was a thing before Reddit, and forums before that.

Our computers are all still connected, web browser and web servers exist. With software like Lemmy, it's become super easy to stand up a place for people to connect. People that like Civilization will find each other without Reddit.

>the two obvious ones are lemmy.world and beehaw.org. But now they don't federate with each other

doesn't that make it essentially the same decision as if you were joining any other non-federated web service? on what criteria did you decide to sign up for facebook vs twitter? or reddit vs digg?

you'll still be federated with mastodon and kbin if you make a lemmy.world account.

i personally just made an account on all 3, and time will tell what i use most and what becomes like a default.

kbin.social federates with Lemmy.world and Beehaw.org. So... if you really care about getting to both servers, why not kbin.social?

Or lemmy.one?

> The comparison is always made to picking a place for your email where Gmail/Yahoo/Hotmail were all "the same", but that's not really true for federated social networks. There's quite a bit more mod actions that could significantly influence your reach or experience with the wider fediverse.

Not much different from USENET, really. Individual administrators could cut you off back then, though in practice it rarely happened outside of the pornographic / piracy groups.

Indeed, I could very well argue that federation solves the porn issue rather nicely. Just defederate from NSFW instances if you have a professional instance. No sweat, no one will blame you for banning porn on your server.

Tumbler, Twitter, and Reddit are all struggling with the porn question. It brings in a ton of eyeballs so they want it, but it kills advertisements and makes the site look unprofessional.

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Beehaw.org is just doing their own thing. They really want a very tightly organized community. Its not in their best interests to open up yet (not until Mastodon-like moderation tools come into existence in the Lemmy-verse).

I wouldn't pay much attention to the drama. Beehaw.org may have been 2nd largest before this week started, but with only 12k users, they're much much smaller than the other servers now (including Lemmy.world and kbin.social). That's fine, they don't want to grow too quickly and that's their right to slow things down to the pace the admins / moderators are comfortable with. (Much like how Lobste.rs wants a tightly bound community as well).

You can't make your own communities in Beehaw.org (only the admins can make new subreddits). So its not what 90% of people want anyway IMO.

You could join some other instance, and then subscribe to communities on both beehaw/lemmy.world as well as any other ones that spark your interest right? Kinda like email. Or, if so inclined, host your own? I think most of them take a blocklist approach instead of an allowlist approach

Yup. You can join any of the dozens of medium-sized, unassuming instances and not have to worry about defederation at all. It's only the tall poppies that get reaped (i.e.: very large instances & instances with controversial stances).

> what instance do I join?

Unless you want to interact with some specific people - it doesn't really matter that much. Sure, you'll miss some posts, but did you actually read every single one of them before? I'm honestly enjoying the quieter mastodon experience with some reactions not being fully replicated. It's nice to slow down and not experience a constant firehose. If something's really important in your community, it will get duplicated in a way you see it.

I wonder if end-user apps will eventually solve this.

Conceptually, rather than server admins choosing what's federated, users will have several/many accounts and they will choose what they want, and under the hood that will be enabled VIA whichever server/account they have accesses that community.

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