For those that may only vote and otherwise lurk, there’s a decent amount.

The inability to create multi-communities/reddits (or feeds as Piefed calls them), the absence of post-folding/deduplication for when someone posts the same article to multiple communities (sometimes similar, sometimes distinct), the absence of keyword filtering to automatically filter out stuff from local/all feeds one’s uninterested in, and these are just a few from the top of my head for those that mostly lurk.

Was thinking the same and you can.

Minimal fucking around needed too, just pkg install imagemagick then navigate filesystem to images ya want to adjust and magick however desired to reduce the file size.

There’s also this:
https://frontpage.fyi/

Not sure which of the two has been around longer, but looks like frontpage is also pretty slow going.

Your ignorance means it was shiny and new to you, and that’s okay!

More like reply to posts without regard for its host community. In other words, context collapse where the community is the main context.

The tricky part is, the group-supporting fediverse software and the microblogging software need to improve how they interact for this to be as good as it could be.

Right now Mastodon barely supports group users/actors/accounts, however they’re called, translating stuff from Lemmy’s format in a rather clunky way. Meanwhile Lemmy also has to roughly translate Mastodon’s format to its own, working pretty well all things considering, but leaving clear artifacts (subject line/first line repeating, community mention remaining shown, etc.).

A part of the problem is that there are multiple similar general topic instances/sites to choose from. If there were more dissimilar, specific topic instances/sites it might help reduce the choice paralysis a little.

It might even better help highlight the perks of federation, as it would be easier to be like, “See, even though you’re on cuteanimals.posts, you can still check out and comment on stuff besides cute animals if you want.”

And correct me if i am wrong, but banning a user just stops them from posting, but i thought it did not delete their post history without additional mod action - which i cant see in the modlog

There’s an option when banning a user to also remove their content, albeit unless it’s an admin action I don’t think it would affect their whole post history beyond the specific community.

I’m kind of getting the sense as I look into this that it may be related to how Voyager is rendering the thread, as I’m not able to observe what’s being described from the web interface. That’s another catch in all this, the other apps and interfaces have their own quirks in how they handle rendering things, which itself is typically related to how they work off the base software (Lemmy in this case).

Edit: why am i forced to upload a photo for a new post?

Which way are you posting? Mobile/web interface? Shouldn’t need to add an image to post…

That aside, regarding your main question:

I think it’s very confusing when a single post appears with different comments on different instances, and have no idea how this works.

A basic reason for the difference in which comments are appearing across different instances/sites is because of delays in networking (federation) between the sites due to a variety of reasons. One of the common ones with the fediverse tends to be the software itself, and sometimes differences in versions’ federation handling. In this case it’s probably because Lemmy World is still running an older version of Lemmy with clunkier federation at Lemmy World’s scale, which causes delays in activities on there updating elsewhere (particularly those hosted in Australia).

Edit:
See also Kichae’s comment for a more detailed explanation, covers how things operate under more ideal conditions.

Sort of, it’s because a lot of microblogging software doesn’t have the same post format with title/post body. The current workaround for microblog to Lemmy and similar is to format it like this:

first line title

second or more lines post body

@communityname@site.name

#hashtags if desired

Appreciate this post OP, as I’ve wondered similar at times when not wanting to fuss with another machine for self-hosting (as often it’s not the case that I could run the server software on my main system).

Well, also maybe Reddit, unless they’re also removing/burying other social sites. Besides that, any messaging services one may use to chat with friends or others.

Echoing this, with some slight adjustments:

Promote the specific sites/communities to people, and on sites that permit it, share links back to specific posts/comments that you found interesting/amusing/etc. from said sites/communities.

Reddit got popular off the back of changes to Digg and people mentioning/sharing stuff from Reddit there. I’d imagine TikTok also grew in popularity from people sharing stuff from it on other major platforms like Instagram/YouTube/Snapchat/Twitter, much as now RedNote’s growing in popularity from people mentioning it on TikTok and other platforms.

@morrowind@lemmy.ml

It’s a bit of both in my opinion. You only market/suggest Lemmy (as forum/link aggregator software) to those with the tech knowledge to build with it, but to everyone else you mention a community site to join and don’t bother mentioning what it’s built with, as they won’t care anyway.

If we remain in our current comfort space, Lemmy will likely continue to stagnate as a niche platform.

I follow what you’re getting at here, but I think this line of thinking, of Lemmy as a platform, also contributes to the issues in drawing more people to this network of communities/sites.

As Kichae said in your other thread:

[…]
“Lemmy” doesn’t exist like Reddit does. It’s not a place people can go to talk about shit. It’s a website engine. It exists like WordPress does. One of its features just happens to be “can pull content from other websites”.

If we want this space to grow, we need to focus on building community websites that stand on their own. Then we can market it as “hey, you love it here on MyInterest.social, but did you know you can also talk to people from SomethingElse.social? Pretty cool, huh??!?” Nobody seems to want to do that, though. That means we’re totally at the mercy of places like Twitter and Reddit, waiting for them to fuck up badly again and hoping more people just kind of land here, in some cheap and uncanny knockoff of where they really wanted to be.

On one hand I agree that the interface, and in turn the user experience, is worth focusing on to help get people to participate around here. On the other, I think you also need what Kichae describes at the end of their comment. Communities that can stand on their own with their own distinct identities and interests that also happen to let you talk with and see stuff from other distinct communities.

At some point I’d like to move to a little more focused sort of community like that built with Lemmy (or Piefed, or Mbin), but haven’t had luck finding any that fit so far since many are broader in scope instead.

I don’t love the default Lemmy web UI, but I agree with the sentiment of preferring a lighter, faster UI…Which makes me surprised to read that you love it.

I don’t know why, but it occasionally slows way down for me when signed in and browsing. It’s nearly driven me to switching interfaces to see if they’re any better with performance.

True, but as noted, it isn’t a necessity to run a full-network relay, which those resource demands and costs relate to.

At the same time, one of the larger Mastodon instances, Mstdn.social in terms of financial costs alone amounted to about 1000 euros per month as of October 2024.

The architecture of ATProto also enables a greater degree of flexibility in separating out costs by comparison, which in some respects may be an interesting model worth consideration for new or developing ActivityPub software, and in some respects is already in the works with projects like Bonfire and ActivityPods. On the ATProto side there’s already at least one person looking to adapt ActivityPub to ATProto’s PDSs in a manner similar to ActivityPods, just using ATProto data formatting instead.

We use different terms, but that’s what I’m referring to here:

ActivityPub is more suited to scaling across multiple instances/sites than up, and I’d argue that’s its strength.

I understand the hesitation, which is why I’ve been trying to monitor its developments closely. Hence why I linked the example of someone testing out a small network ATProto relay, and why I also dug up this post about self-hosting different parts of the ATProto infrastructure the other day.

From what I’ve observed, there’s no pushback against people doing so, and the only things stopping people are the usual: time, costs, knowledge, motivation, etc. For the first step to really happen at all there have to be people with the resources and motivation to do so, which is always the tricky part. In a small way part of my OP is intending to encourage anyone with both to give it a shot, as I lack some of the necessary resources to try it myself.

It’s not so much that ActivityPub can’t scale up, so much as that for one, as I’ve understood it that’s not really been desirable anyway (undermines the point of decentralization/distribution), and for two, it starts getting bogged down as you already recognize. It also runs into similar, if not worse, cost problems to operate as ATProto’s full network approaches are now.

ActivityPub is more suited to scaling across multiple instances/sites than up, and I’d argue that’s its strength. It unintentionally has an implosion threshold to counter centralization in terms of cost and performance.

On the other hand, ATProto’s advantage is that it enables scaling up while also enabling better data portability. I’m aware of work on this with ActivityPub as well, but it’s still very early stages. My thinking is that there may be some ways to work with both to push towards their similar shared aims in terms of an open social web, with more flexibility in moving between spaces and adjusting experiences to better find what one wants from these different spaces.