I hope so, but we need a winning instance first. When you search for Lemmy right now you're sent to a page that begins with "Join a Server... Run a Server". That kind of first experience will never replace Reddit.
Lemmy.world seemed to be winning the SEO battles in my Google search. Is that a good one?
Edit: Sorry for changing my entire post; I had incomplete information about Lemmy at the time.
If you have a community on Reddit which you want to migrate you just need to find a stable instance with admin policies you consider reasonable. If it's a big community with really active moderators you might even want to start your own instance. If Lemmy needs anything it's probably a managed hosting provider like masto.host that could make it easy for large communities to run their own servers.
Sure, I could start my own instance, but that's a high bar.
I thought about creating something like r/all, but you can get something similar on any instance if you filter by posts + All: https://lemmy.sdf.org/?dataType=Post&listingType=All&page=1&... . This will be restricted to whoever that instance federates with of course.
Too many choices when you want to lazily scroll a reddit equivalent defeats the purpose.
This kind of fragmentation is pretty bad in terms of UX.
The fediverse is not like that: with a single account you can subscribe to all discussions, participate anywhere. Fragmentation is only when you don't participate: once in, all discussions appear on your instance, everything is reachable.
> You can make a thread on /r/linux on the lemmy.example.com instance and will not appear at /r/linux on lemmy.example.net
That's not how this works. You control what appears, not the instance.
Likewise, can you have a reasonable expectation that others would do the same — so it doesn’t matter which server you post your questions on?
Yes, by design. You do have to search for all that exist, but you can follow them all from your own instance, provided your instance and the remote instance allow federation.
> Likewise, can you have a reasonable expectation that others would do the same — so it doesn’t matter which server you post your questions on?
I don't know yet the usages on the Threadiverse, but it is expected that people at least know the multiple communities that exist. The discussion about merging happens constantly, with pros and cons, and no easy decision for anyone
If you want to understand what the fediverse is about, here's a nice link: https://joinfediverse.wiki/What_is_the_Fediverse%3F
Also, and separately, huh? You can share links on lemmy without logging in. Look, here's one:
So, you can visit without being prompted to select a server. You can sign up without having to look through servers. And you can share links without logging in.
So what am I missing?
I get the sense that there are a lot of competing visions for what Lemmy should be, and I am not interested enough to put myself in the middle of that.
There's probably an opportunity to start a modified instance that avoids all this identity stuff and hides the federation aspect as much as possible to make it look like a seamless unified community. That's something I, and I presume many others who were turned off by their first experience with it, might well join.
So the thing you say you wanted, it was literally right there on your screen and you were looking at it.
You can't "visit lemmy". Which instance did you visit and signed up, lemmy.ml?
You an also exercise bad faith and construe those as overly literal references to a singular "lemmy," and position yourself as offering a correction wherein you explain what the fediverse is, a correction which depends on that bad faith interpretation, which appears to be your game here.
Good. Let the eternal September remain on Reddit. The rest of us can go back to the roots of what keeps online communities from becoming cesspools like Reddit and Twitter.
The lessons I've taken away are that it's dangerous to get too invested in any one network, and when network effects get too big they do more harm than good.
That would defeat the purpose. Lemmy is a fediverse application. The whole point is decentralization. A winning instance would concentrate power in the hands of one admin. We don’t want that!
We already had a decentralized Reddit—-it is called The Internet.
No, that's just a marketing lie.
The biggest instances have politically-charged "codes of conduct" that other instances are forced to adopt or be defederated. IIRC, some instances even require those rules to be applied transitively, that is, they will defederate from your instance unless you enforce their rules on all instances that you federate with, and so on.
The whole point of Lemmy and Mastodon is political control, while convincing people that it isn't so. I'm honestly astonished to see how many smart folks are falling for their lies; mostly, I suspect, because the Fediverse's political leanings pander to their own biases.
What exactly are the lies? No one group is in control, each fiefdom is free to do what they wish, including not consorting with those they feel are of ill repute or temperament.
As far as being "politically charged", that's just the way the world (well, ok the US at least) is now. Blame the culture warriors who can only think in terms of how something fits or does not fit into their world view, and seek generally only to pander to their base.
That's not true in practice. The purpose of a social network is to communicate with others. Network effects ensure that the biggest instances grow ever bigger, and thus not federating with them effectively means not participating in the network. If those instances then impose their rules on other instances under threat of defederation, and further demand that other instances do the same, again under threat of defederation, the "free" network turns into a monoculture that is effectively controlled by whoever runs the most influential instances.
Claiming that you are still free to do as you wish under these circumstances is like claiming that you are free to do as you wish on the Internet, as long as you don't connect to any other computers.
Imagine if email, a truly federated system, worked that way. It would be utterly useless. "Sorry, you can't send mail to user@example.com, because example.com does not require other domains that send mail to it to abide by our code of conduct."
Maybe news to you, but that's exactly how e-mail works. DKIM, DMARC and all the other anti-SPAM measures amount to exactly that. If your server is not proven to abide by the "code of conduct" of not spamming people, your emails get nowhere.
And speaking of fediverse and "network effects", you might not realize but besides the westernized section of the fediverse, Asia has a large community which is mostly defederated on mainstream instances because of what people consider questionable content. They are probably larger in actual numbers.
So federation does work as intended. What you really want, I suspect, is to shove your questionable political opinions down the throats of folk that don't really want to be subjected to them. And somehow being told no, is everybody else's problem and not your own.
Nonsense. Anti-spam systems block spam, not content an unaccountable cabal deems politically undesirable. That comparison is laughable.
> So federation does work as intended.
If the intention is to split the world into silos, each of them populated by a different group of moral absolutists, all of which consider all other groups so abhorrent that severing all communication with them is the only acceptable course of action, then yes.
Perhaps that is indeed the intention. Perhaps the prevailing attitude of our time is that this is the only way. However, I'm old enough to remember an Internet that didn't work like that.
I wonder what are you calling "politically-charged code of conduct here". Do you have an example?
Are you talking about that one single instance that became famous for having a strict code of conduct?
The question in response seemed like open curiosity.
(When I talk about Mastodon's CoC, I am talking about the CoC of the main federated network; you get defederated from it if you don't share the same set of rules)
You disagree with it so it's politically charged. You're not even offering a definition of politically charged, just the scare words.
Beyond that, you're not even looking at the relevant document, but making a statement based purely on what you "imagine" it contains.
I'm not agreeing or disagreeing with their code of conduct, but I feel that you're exhibiting the very behaviour you were attempting to call out and portray as "always bollocks" originally.
It's not what you feel is "common sense" (or rather, you imagine that it isn't) so therefore it deserves to be marred as "politically charged."
No hate speech (for example, no "derogatory posts" based on gender) -> politically charged. ///// No posts or comments supporting or promoting QAnon related content or similarly disproven conspiracy theories -> politically charged.
If you want to look at it the other way, if there was a mastodon instance that said "no pro-immigration propaganda" or "no discussions about abortions" then it would be politically charged as well.
Of course if you ask Mastodon's people they will tell you "you can't just promote a conspiracy theory like qanon, that's common sense". The other way, "abortion is murder, you can't discuss how to murder babies, that's common sense". But no, it's not "common sense", it's politics. YOu don't want people to discuss the politics you don't like in your instance. Fair is fair.
That's my point, I hope I made it more clear.
Which Lemmy rules were you looking at? I can't find anything from the project itself except for a code of conduct for contributors.
The mastadon link you shared is applicable to a certain instance but doesn't seem to apply to the wider fediverse. I also don't see them claiming anything as common sense.
Also, question: Would you say free speech absolutism is politically charged?
I was talking about the main lemmy instance, https://lemmy.world/ - if you look at the sidebar it says: "Be polite and follow the rules (https://mastodon.world/about)". That's what I linked to, above.
>The mastadon link you shared is applicable to a certain instance but doesn't seem to apply to the wider fediverse.
The main mastodon instance, mastodon.social, will defederate from you if your server has users that break those rules. I admit I haven't found any similar rules in mastodon.world, but I have to imagine it works the same (see below)
https://mastodon.social/about is the main mastodon instance of the fediverse -> click on "Moderated servers" to see the list of blocked servers and the reasons, like "disinformation" or "hate speech", which are politically charged. mastodon.world has chosen not to disclose their list of moderated servers, but given the list of rules, I predict a similar (or even the same) list. Mastodon servers of the main fediverse share a moderated servers blacklist through some mechanism that I don't know much about.
But.. this discussion was not originally about the server blacklist but about whether the set of rules had a political slant or not.
>I also don't see them claiming anything as common sense.
I imagine that someone who doesn't want to admit that those rules are politically charged will claim they are common sense - at least that's the way the argument has been presented to me in the past.
>Would you say free speech absolutism is politically charged?
Allowing everybody to express their political opinions without censorship is the opposite of a politically charged moderation.
> Allowing everybody to express their political opinions without censorship is the opposite of a politically charged moderation.
And that's just common sense!
The business model matters. The answer to the question: how does the platform earn to maintain its work?
If there is an answer and it is explicit (no matter what it is and how much someone likes or dislikes the business model), it is much better than if there is no answer or it is implicit.
Because everything implicit and muddy can be the basis of anything, for example, of hidden but paid propaganda. The injection of ideas is not so annoying at the initial stage, a good nurse gives painless injections. But then the substance will certainly begin to act. A harmless substance may cause a desire for spontaneous purchase and is therefore generally safe. But harmful substances are different ...
Intrusive ads are the lesser of evils. If we think about it well, of course.
The fediverse allows you to be connected to whomever you want, and if they're part of an instance whose rules don't agree with you, then those persons also don't agree with you; why should they be subjected to what you want to say ?
Join the fediverse by building your own instance, the more instances the stronger the network. But don't expect everyone to be willing to talk with you, that's not how societies work.
The smartest people will always fall for the most blatant lies and false ideologies. That's because it's a tantalizing challenge for their intellect, to try their hardest to twist logic and words to fit with the lies. Then they derive evil pleasure for making less sophisticated people believe their lies, or even fall so far down the hole that they start believing the lies themselves. Normal people usually just call bullshit and move on with their lives when some false ideology pops up.
I don't believe that healthy political discourse is even possible on social media in the first place. Especially not if the political posters are anonymous.
The advantage with Fediverse and Lemmy in particular, is the fact that creating multiple accounts on left-wing/right-wing/neutral instances is pretty easy. You can add all your Lemmy accounts to a (web) app like vger.app and voila you can now join every political discussion on Lemmy in an almost seemless experience.
Political control is thus harder in the fediverse than on centralized platforms like reddit or Twitter. But even if the platform managed to discourage political segregation, the people will still look for every possible to segregate themselves.
"federated" means "servers talk to each other".
So, like email. There's only one Reddit, but lots of places where you can get a mail account.