I think federation and decentralization work well for email and text-messaging platforms like XMPP and Matrix because those platforms inherently benefit from being decentralized. They work almost seamlessly with federation.
Forums, on the other hand, don’t really need a federated system. Just look at Lemmy and how many communities defederate from one another because of ideological disagreements. When there’s that much defederation, the entire concept starts to feel pointless. Suddenly, you can’t use your account across “Lemmy” because several instances have decided they don’t like each other anymore.
If this much fragmentation is going to happen naturally, how is federation supposed to be the sustainable future of forums?
I think this is a fair criticism of federated forums. You don’t see this same level of fragmentation with email or text messaging.
Centralized but well-moderated forums are what really matter. Federation doesn’t protect good or useful speech, quality moderation does. And by its nature, Lemmy lacks that.
EDIT: There may have been a misunderstanding on my part on what defederation exactly means in the context of Lemmy
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Glances around
I mean, it’s working just fine. 🤷♀️
I can’t see the Linux memes from .ml
I personally love the way the .Zip admins handled it, both for Lemmy.zip and Piefed.zip. Defederate a very short number of instances (https://lemmy.zip/instances https://piefed.zip/instances?filters=blocked ), hide new joiners unfriendly instances by default for new users onboarding, but still allow people to unhide it.
We’ve also now enabled a similar welcome message and instance block system to what we’re running on Lemmy.zip. This means some of the spicier instances are blocked by default, which users can remove themselves in the user settings.
https://lemmy.zip/post/50200106
That gives enough freedom to power users while still being welcoming for new joiners.
Also, is there any centralized forum that is more active than the Threadiverse (Lemmy/Piefed/Pylova/Mbin)?
Also, is there any centralized forum that is more active than the Threadiverse (Lemmy/Piefed/Pylova/Mbin)?
It looks like there are on the order of maybe 20-30k total monthly active users of the threadiverse, though I had to cobble this together from a few sources, so if you have any solid numbers I’d love to see them.
As much drama as there is/was, the Something Awful Forums are a Web 1.0 old school centralized forum which has been around for over a quarter of a century and is still going. At their peak they had hundreds of thousands of users.
I don’t think the argument that in order to host a large forum, you need to be decentralized holds any water. I know you’re not directly making that argument but I’ve seen others make it in their replies.
In the current world where most of the forum discussion happen on Reddit, there is little space left for another active centralized forum.
The decentralized approach has at least the pro to offer something different (you can leave for another instance instead of depending on a single corporation for access).
Creating another centralize Reddit brings exactly the same issues current Reddit has (enshittification), and you don’t even have the userbase to make up for it. Digg 2.0 launch was messed up, but even if they managed better it would be very difficult for them to get enough traction to really compete.
Bluesky is better that Twitter in a lot of aspect, but it stills fails to replace it, and the network effect keep bringing people back to Twitter to see “what is happening”.
Vicinus replied in the other comment for numbers.
In the current world where most of the forum discussion happen on Reddit, there is little space left for another active centralized forum.
I strongly disagree, and there are tons of other centralized forums that are doing just fine. They’re not as big as Reddit but some have an order of magnitude (at least) more users than Lemmy does.
The decentralized approach has at least the pro to offer something different (you can leave for another instance instead of depending on a single corporation for access).
There are lots of ways to offer something different, and new upstarts have been able to gain traction by offering something different countless times in the past.
Especially if we’re talking about a forum for the masses with a high number of users, the vast majority of those users simply don’t care about centralization vs federation.
I was talking mostly about generalist forums. Indeed topic-specific forums are still active, but that’s not something OP’s forum, Reddit or the Threadiverse tries to do.
They’re not as big as Reddit but some have an order of magnitude (at least) more users than Lemmy does.
I just checked https://forums.somethingawful.com/index.php , it shows 2,369 users logged in. A single instance like Lemmy.world has 4880 daily active users.
Yep, they’re likely about the same size, when comparing apples to apples (DAU ≠ current users logged in).
Looks like the Threadiverse is ~45k. So, relatively stable and up year-over-year. Peak would have been 2023-07-17 at 76585 MAU (Lemmy + Mbin/Kbin; during the Reddit 3rd party exodus?).
topicle.com also active
It seems to have 1k subs on https://topicle.com/t/topicle/
Is there any benefit compared to something like https://discuit.org/ ?
Have (really) good app, have intuitive features, and everything is so polished as though it’s been operating for years and founder still really active to develop compared to discuit
Let’s see. I’m afraid it would go the same way than Discuit and Tildes: there’s motivation at first as the userbase grows, then after a while the motivation drops and the project gets stagnant.
Idk about tildes, but discuit since beginning the founder himself always moving too slow, this is why i abandoned it early
Tildes has recently announced they will not add any more features nor actively seek new members and will simply die if that’s where it’s headed.
Chad is an odd dude.
They really have potential when reddit exodus began and i really don’t mind tildes dont have image upload featured, but tildes refusal to open sign up made me realize tildes basically serves as deimos’s playground
Such a shame they guy that making rif app wasting his time developed app for that turd
Also, is there any centralized forum that is more active than the Threadiverse (Lemmy/Piefed/Pylova/Mbin)?
I can only think of Lobste.rs and Tildes.
Hacker news, something awful, tons of special interest forums for things like cooking, cars, travel, etc. I’m sure there are many more that I’m not aware of.
I have a look at Tildes from time to time, it’s definitely less active than here. Same for discuit.org which has been stable at 200 weekly active users for quite a while.
Frankly Tildes was my favorite until I got banned. Which seems to be a trend for many Tildes users. You got to learn to love the fascist bomb or kick it.
I’ll give it a look
Also, is there any centralized forum that is more active than the Threadiverse (Lemmy/Piefed/Pylova/Mbin)?
Fecesbook, Shitter, and LickedIn came to my mind first.
Then there are Reddit and Tumblr and a couple more.
But all of these are worse experiences than the Fediverse. And I believe that’s because the Fediverse is federated.
Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn don’t follow the Reddit / Threadiverse structure based on communities
Fecesbook does. Over there, communities are called “groups”, but it’s the same thing. I’m surprised if LickedIn doesn’t do the same.
That’s unrelated. Correlation doesn’t prove causation. It’s fair to say you haven’t seen a high-quality centralized forum, but that doesn’t mean one can’t exist.
Either way, I’m pointing to a real issue with Lemmy that you seem to have overlooked: what happens when instances defederate over ideological or other differences?
what happens when instances defederate over ideological or other differences?
Their users get a better user experience.
What are you talking about? What ‘better user experience’? If defederation means communities disappear from each other, why not just use regular forums? They’re already fragmented. Either way, you can’t use your account across defederated Lemmy instances, so you end up with the same thing as regular forums, just with extra steps.
No communities I want to see have ever disappeared. Just choose your instance wisely and all is okay.
The main reason I picked .zip was the lack of defederation. There’s definitely content here I don’t want to see and do hide, but I’m suprised how many people here (Lemmings? Piefeddies?) are happy to delegate that task to an instance admin.
It’s my role to determine what content I see, no one else’s.
Decentralization works perfectly for forums. That’s literally how the forums of the '90s worked: “Tom’s Hardware” was never the only forum for Windows issues, “Codeguru” was never the only stop fo weird Visual Basic 5 error messages, etc.
Federation is orthogonal, and can cover a number of subjects - it’s less about “what’s out there” and more about “how do we get in touch”. We have for example a sorta federated sign-in with things like OpenID. Lemmy, Mbin etc…, are built on the idea of federating the content. CDNs are literally federated caches.
What are you talking about?
What fragmentation? I have had zero problems like that. Yeah, there is content that I am not directly seeing, but that is some seriously bad-quality content and if I want to fry my brain, I can always go to the home instances of the idiots and see their crud there.
The most important reason why federation is needed is that it’s the only known way to keep a forum non-commercial for good. You try adding advertisements to a Fediverse server, you get an exodus of users to other servers that show precisely the same content. If you try adding a mandatory ID check for a Fediverse server, users will migrate to servers who don’t have that.
Any non-federated social media will get facebookified/twitterified once it becomes seriously popular. You simply cannot sustainably run a forum without federation.
You are a moron, sorry. Structure is not what makes or breaks a forum. The type of participants does. Lemmy it self kind of sucks because of the type of people that attend it. A good quality forum would avoid popularity anyways.
You are a moron
If you’re gonna make opinionated posts like this, you might want to get a little better at accepting criticism or disagreement
I have offered counter arguments, insults shouldn’t matter. My reply was not a baseless insult, and I actually replied and counter argued. The person I replied to just put a baseless claim and you expect us to just accept it?
Rules of this community:
Be respectful to others
You might want to do some reading next time before you spout off. Next time is a perma.
I imagine what the other commenter meant was that your post would have been 10x better just by removing the “You are a moron” sentence from the beginning.
Yes, in a perfect world, arguments should be all that matter. But on the other end of the little text replies here is (presumably) a real human being, and sometimes your argument doesn’t get across as well if you sandwich it with insults.
No need to open a comment with an offense btw.
But in the type of participants, federation allows that a la carte. Within what each instance’s willing to handle, you can find anything from commies to journalists to weebs to reviewers to MAGA folk to porn artists to IT technicians to pirates to whatever else. The list can go quite far from what I’ve observed in the ~4 years I’ve been around.
bro whatI was following you up to this point, and somewhat agreeing, to a certain extent. You lost me with the name calling.
Because Lemmy is so popular (emoji with rolling eyes and shit).
If you wanted. You could just join an instance or create your own where nothing is defederated, am I wrong?
Is he saying federation is bad because it’s working exactly as intended?
Even that’s not an option to get what he wants, as some instances automatically block yours if you don’t block their enemies. I don’t know if there’s much of that on lemmy, but there’s tons of it on Mastodon.
That’s my whole argument, if Lemmy is going to be naturally fragmented and require a new account for every defederated instance, why not just use regular forums at that point?
If you are in a regular forum you also don’t get access to any of the lemmy communities, so what’s your point?
You don’t need an account for every defederated instance. The network is still one and whole. Defederation only hides the two instances’ activities from each other’s users, but you can use piefed.zip that doesn’t defederate from basically anything.
You will see all content defederated from lemmy.world and you will also see all content from lemmy.world.
If you use piefed.zip, you will get precisely the result you are describing you want. You will have all the Forumverse content behind one login, seamlessly.
Okay, but it’s not clear enough by what is meant by defederation. Apologies for being rude to you, that reaction was based on a misunderstanding on my part.
This one is easy, because regular forums are even more fragmented. Are you really one of those “all or nothing” people?
Just look at Lemmy and how many communities defederate from one another because of ideological disagreements
Lol…
Decentralizing isn’t good if you want everyone in the same spot, that is correct…
But why does everyone need crammed together?
Some people just don’t vibe, if no one wants to federate with an instance, they don’t have to.
I’ll never understand why people who grew up with big social media are so hung up up on this idea that one platform has to host everyone.
Like, a shit ton of fractured forums was the norm for decades, long before Facebook, twitter, or insta. Everyone going to the same place is a new thing, and if people are here it’s because they didn’t think it worked out.
You don’t, you think it’s great for insanely wealthy tech ros to control every conversation.
Cool.
Go there, none of us care
Because people expect a seamless experience? I don’t want to browse a fragmented platform either, which is kind of the point: if I have to pick an instance, hunt for communities, and hope they federate with the places I care about, what exactly is Lemmy improving over regular forums?
If fragmentation is the feature, regular forums already did that without pretending they’re one platform. You see my point?
People should not expect a seamless experience across totallly different communities of people. Reddit is not a seamless experience. Rules and norms are different across subs.
The internet works better with fragmentation. It always has. Trying to treat everything as homogenous is stifling.
And besides, there are instances where they try to federate to as many instances as possible. Sure it takes time to find it but that’s why there people out there recommending general instances to people looking to join the threadiverse. I join some of them and use the accounts there so that I can recommend them to people.
Doesn’t matter for this while anyway. OP has been temp banned.
Buddy…
Because people expect a seamless experience?
You want a seamless experience…
And I already told you what to do for that:
Go there, none of us care
If that’s what anyone here wanted, they wouldn’t be here…
Why does one place not being how you want it, mean that it should change to be like everywhere else? And especially when you seemingly don’t want to go to any of the many options that are already like that?
Do you legitimately not understand the responses this is getting?
If you don’t like it, go back to reddit. But you’re not going to convince anyone on the fediverse that the fediverse should be more like reddit. The few people that would agree with you, have already made these same posts, gotten the same responses, and went back to reddit.
How are you surprised the people who stay here like it?
Fair enough if that’s what you would like. But for the rest of us, yes we’re looking for a seamless anti-echo chamber experience, the mirror opposite of Reddit.
Looks like that’s not really true seeing how you are calling people, who are not in your echo chamber of “defederation breaks the experience”, morons.
But for the rest of us,
No one here agrees with you,
Centralizing platforms aren’t necessarily seamless either. Having the same general contents propagating around, but different sites to seeing them, allows for creating the ideal experience to a given user, and each user expecting different things for an ideal experience.
Like in my case, I’m in Mbin, which would look like the least feature-complete of the fediverse softwares at first glance. But besides actually having what it takes to make a functional forum, it can bring together microblog and thread posts, and the lack of visual noise in the UI while the UI also being overall text-oriented help me focus. Plus it’s very responsive to scripts when a feature isn’t natively available. And I can connect to other sites thanks to RSS-tracking and protocol-bridging bots.
And from it, jumping to other forums such Twitter, Retropie and GOG’s becomes seamless too.
For me, that is an example of seamlessness.
People who join the forum threadiverse and actually stay are likely ok with how federation affects the experience. The ones who don’t like it eventually leave and go back to centralized ones. Pushing to centralize something that has decentralization as its primary purpose is pointless. “The rest of us” isn’t accurate based on the interactions you’re getting in this post. It’s you who is the outlier.
It’s important you also understand this: You will never, ever see all the content. What you are deciding is who and what determines which comment you see.
Do you want Reddit deciding that for you based on their algorithm, moderation, and other policies like API access?
Or do you want to choose based on which threadiverse community aligns with your ideals (including the option to setup your own with full federation to everyone)?
You realize Reddit bans people too, right? The only difference between Reddit banning people and Lemmy.world banning people, is that Lemmy is transparent about it and gives you choices about it. On Reddit when someone gets banned they’re gone, there is no more so-called “completeness”, it’s just an illusion. But Lemmy has no such issue because you can choose who your admins are, you can join an instance that didn’t ban them.
Imagine if Reddit bans your friend, not as easy to ignore as Reddit banning a stranger, they’re gone and you have to leave Reddit entirely. On Lemmy if lemmy.world bans your friend, you can both just change which Lemmy instance you use to something more agreeable like https://lemmy.zip/
But I realize you’re probably only here to advertise your own forum. You’ve had 7 posts in the past month? And only 3 comments total? Just join the Fediverse! Lemmy, PieFed, and Mbin are open source, use one of them for your server and you’ll instantly have an active userbase of over 40k. If you use Mbin (or PieFed to a lesser extent) then it also brings access to microblog posts which means many more users linked in. And then you can allow everyone and not ban anyone.
I see a few “deleted” badges on your forums, I’m now upset that I can’t access ALL of the content!
I wouldn’t worry too much about OP. They’ve also been banned in the meantime.
People overall want to have a single website or app where they can access everything interesting to them.
Like, I remember being a teenager 15 years ago and regularly clicking through three, four, five different forums. I don’t have time for that anymore. The Lemmy concept allows us to have the best of both worlds: no single point of failure, but also no need to remember to click through many different websites.
Similarly, I don’t have the time from my teenager years anymore. But still wanting to keep tabs with other places, if they have RSS feeds, I can at least get them to appear in my feed here, and then jump over to comment/react. Best of both worlds indeed. 🤝
Uhm, have you seen the amount of Spam, Phishing, Hacking, no replies we get on E-Mail?!? How is that working properly? It even cancels my attachments etc. And admins have to put in a massive amount of effort, constantly to make it work. Instant messenging isn’t great either. Neither is Facebook, X, TikTok and all the other central for-profit social media platforms?!! None of it works on an acceptable level.
Nah.
For starters, who will pay for the hosting and bandwidth of a monolithic Reddit knockoff? How do we prevent it from becoming another shitplug of capitalism? (We don’t, it goes exactly the way every other profit-seeking platform has gone)
And, MOST importantly: content moderation is impossible at scale; every Instance operator takes as many users as they can afford, in time and effort as well as money. The operators of monolithic sites end up doing things like hiring people in Africa and making them look at CSAM posts all day, so we don’t have to.
No, giant scale is bad. It was always bad. I have been here since 1992, you are really peddling terrible and ignorant ideas here.
When accounting for all defederations between all instances with at least 50 MAU (as of when I last checked in August, at least), the only instances that are defederated with over 5% of other Threadiverse users (inbound or outbound) are lemmygrad.ml, hexbear.net, fedinsfw.app, forum.guncadindex.social, and lemmy.1095.me, none of which are oriented towards the average user moving over from Reddit anyhow.
Less defederation on average is better, but defederation is not a huge problem as it stands, particularly if you pick an instance known to use it minimally such as lemmy/piefed.zip.
The freedom and control I am able to have over what I see vastly outweighs the inconvenience of not having access to all the content always
In fact, I was there for the early days of reddit, I was there before that when most of the internet was a series of disconnected forums. I preferred it, just like I prefer Lemmy. it’s easier to find niche communities where you may make real friends.
You don’t have to agree with me, but ya, no, I hard disagree with you.
Well, personally I’m coming from the angel where I want to see everything first and then judge for my self second.
I judge for myself plenty, but I’ve also been on the internet long enough to know I don’t owe everyone my ears/eyes. I know how to find the information/communities I want to find - I’d rather seek out what I want to see than sift through that which I do not want to see.
Good enough, wise enough.
Then why are you on .world? There are plenty of instances that are widely federated.
Because I want to see everything, including lemmy.world.
Why do you then not move to an instance that offers that to you?
Because that would be a category error. I want see everything includes all places all the time.
I did not understand properly what you meant with this comment. Could you paraphrase, please?
“I want to see everything” means that I want to see even the places that in theory I have no business being in.
If centralized but well moderated forums are what matter, paraphrasing the end of the opening post, wouldn’t it be better to leave Lemmy / the fediverse though? (fediverse’s not well moderated though? Doesn’t seem so…)
deleted by creator
deleted by creator
Usenet was great back in the day. Decentralized and mostly unmoderated, full of trolls but you learned to block them. It still exists but barely.
In case the OP isn’t a troll…
Do you know why aquariums need to keep oxygenated? That’s because the type of life that is put there usually needs the oxygen dilluted in the water to be able to breath. If oxygen is lacking, what’s effectively swamp water starts forming, water where few life forms can thrive.
Multiple forums I’ve seen become a metaphorical swamp water because there was barely any renewal in userbase, all the while the original userbase grew tired.
Moderation’s also a hit or a miss, and when a forum’s slowing to a halt, even a good moderation can make things worse.
OP’s discourse also makes it seem like defederation is being used rampantly and without care across the fediverse. But from my experience at least, usually it’s a last measure act, even when communities are ideological opposites.
I’ve come to the conclusion that @parallelminds@lemmy.world assumes a defedation splits the network into two islands completely isolated from each other. They don’t seem ti understand that a defederation only affects the two instances themselves, nothing else.
Yes you are correct, but again this wasn’t clear. defederation should mean what I thought it meant, that it breaks the network. My bad I guess.
I am not a troll, I have put my money where my mouth is and hosted my own forum nightash.net, of which I crossposted the article here.
You’re treating federation like it creates fresh users, but it doesn’t. It lets existing users move between communities; it doesn’t guarantee new people will find or join them. Centralized forums can have user turnover too, through visibility and a larger audience.
And the aquarium analogy cuts both ways: if defederation closes the flow between communities, then the ‘oxygen’ isn’t reaching everyone anyway. Calling it a last resort doesn’t change that users on either side can lose access to each other, or that they can’t take their account with them. That’s still fragmentation, just with a nicer plumbing metaphor
Defederation would be more akin to a country cutting ties with another in international relationships, when this other country keeps causing trouble, or when making concessions for its problems makes the problems spill over or the bureaucratic cost to become too high. There’s still, in this analogy, another 200-ish countries to have relationships with.
In the oxygenating analogy, instead of just one waterwheel, oxygen-blowing tube, small waterfall, or the sort, it’s multiple ones. And if one source starts pumping CO2, motor oil, sucking up liquid instead of giving oxygen/oxygenated air to the aquarium, or whatever, this source can be cut without stopping the oxygenating.
And the nature of the protocol and the services that use it also allow people to come over from elsewhere. What I meant, far from “creating users”, is to open venues which people can find the platforms of the network, and for the people already in the network to have access to places otherwise barren, and that by interacting with, they can bump into relevance.
On linking externally, from my experience, it’s not uncommon for example in places like Pixiv for creators to link their socials, fediverse ones like Mastodon and Misskey included. You can also connect to other protocols such as Bluesky through bridges. Commercial projects such as Threads and Wordpress also have optional ActivityPub integration which would allow more people to join in or at least be aware of. And the services using the protocol are also niche-based but rarely alienating their userbases regarding other places in the network.
And on bigger forums having a larger audience, they usually do so by being so big they cannibalize competition (even if potentially not intentionally) while keeping their userbases in a walled garden. But when alternatives die out, and what’s left enshittify, people have nowhere to run. But when Reddit started going from bad to worse, a lot of people found here as an alternative. Similarly, Twitter’s at least kinda shitty since always, and very few altenatives stuck around, Mastodon being one of them.
And from what I can notice, the centralizing platforms, even the bigger ones, are either shrinking (e.g. Reddit), already shrunk (e.g. Facebook), or show indications that they may be shrinking (e.g. Discord allowing search engine indexing, and Meta allowing to sign up on Threads with their other services). And places that stay strong despite being centralizing usually offer more than just the forum experience or adjacents.
But once more, unless I’ve missed it, defederation is very sporadic. And when used, it is usually done so to keep the instance healthy within their culture.
