Aa!

North America. Is there a pattern of difference?

Zero issues, everything works exactly as I expect

Not to say no issues exist, but I have encountered none, and that is data

This is what I’ve been saying. I think it should go even further and give admins a default block list of users.

A lot of folks talk about how Lemmy became useable after they spent hours (or sometimes a month) blocking the right communities and users, but most social media users don’t want to work that hard, they just want to start doomscrolling.

Try using one of the PWA’s, like Voyager. Just go to vger.app in your browser. It’s still a browser-based front end, but it has more features than the default interface

I want an instance already established, very populated, and proven to last long term, so I don’t have to create another account

Yes, if you want to see Hackernews posts, get them from Hackernews yourself. Reposting to Lemmy just adds more posts with zero engagement that new users will see and be put off of the site for

Several months ago we had three different instances with their own Hackernews communities and their own repost bots posting the exact same things, with zero discussion.

Lemmy needs more actual discussion, and fewer bots adding noise to the feed.

A lot of people talk about the decentralization being a barrier of entry, but I don’t think it is.

Generally speaking, your average social media user won’t care about that one way or the other. You tell them an instance to look at, they will check it out.

Where I think it goes wrong is the general Lemmy attitude of curating your own feed. Your average Lemmy user will say the best part is that you just block the communities and instances that you don’t want to see.

Your average social media user on the other hand, doesn’t want to spend an hour or a month blocking people and communities to make the site useable. Most folks will come in, see a feed full of tech bros, repost bots with zero discussion, 30 different fetish porn communities, Star Trek memes, and bottom of the barrel shitposts, and they’ll just leave.

The only way I see Lemmy overcoming this is for instance admins to heavily curate the default experience so the feed is friendlier to new users. This would likely require some more tools in place to allow for this, possibly even a default block list that users can customize after they are already drawn in

Also the sorting could be better.

It’s a lot like my feelings on cryptocurrency. The dencentralized idea was interesting but it led to mostly discovering several reasons why it wasn’t as good as they thought. Some of the problems were solvable with future iterations, but overall it led to private exchanges that could just take all your money if they wanted, high transaction costs, etc.

With social media, federation addresses one thing: If an instance goes away, the content has already been federated elsewhere. For starters, this has never been a concern for me. I don’t treat any social media network as a long term data archive. If there’s something I need to refer back to, I will save the conversation myself or I am prepared for it to be deleted when I look away. Even on Lemmy, I don’t assume anything I post will stay, because moderator actions are federated, which will delete content from other instances anyway (when that federation is working correctly, at least)

On the other hand, we’ve already seen some of the negative sides of this:

First, users spam offensive/illegal content, which gets federated to all the other instances, leading to admins scrambling to a) stem the flow of this content and b) remove what is there. Ultimately they had to solve this with temporary defederation and user-created tools to help purge some of the content.

Second, federation is a (relatively) complex process, and there are multiple situations that can cause federation to an instance to fail. I’m pretty sure I’ve seen cases where if one instance’s keys are lost and certificates need to be regenerated, any instance that has seen that instance will be unable to federate with it anymore.

Now like I said before, these aren’t unsolvable problems, it’s just a case of the software and concept being relatively new, and needs to mature more.

Now when I switched to Lemmy, the complaints I saw about Reddit had absolutely nothing to do with federation and data availability. All I ever saw people complaining about was:

• Algorithms pushing content to benefit advertisers rather than the best end user experience
• Forcing UIs designed to satisfy advertisers rather than UIs end users want
• Admins/moderators making moderation decisions that users disagree with

These are significant issues, and are worth leaving a service over. However, federation doesn’t address them at all. Lemmy certainly addresses the first two, but that has nothing to do with federation, that’s just it being open source and community-developed software.

So that’s what I meant. The one thing federation addresses is questionable, and the added complexity has brought about new problems that need to be solved still. I’m not against it, but it was never what drew me to this platform. It’s just a “Huh, that’s neat” kind of feature.

Hell, I’m technically-minded and I do understand it, and I still don’t consider decentralization a particularly helpful feature of social media (yet).

Federation is technically interesting, but it introduces a lot of new complications that the software is still too new to have solved. The problems it does address, it doesn’t really solve very well yet. And I’ve always been willing to leave a social media network when it doesn’t suit me anymore, so centralization has never really bothered me.

What drew me here was the growing community. I would still be here if it was just one centralized service

Okay not precisely, but we have a bot (I think it’s the one at smeargle.fans) that reposts Reddit threads and replicates all of their comments, which nobody engages with

You are starting to sound like a gatekeeper.

Well that term just doesn’t apply. I’m not saying “Real Lemmy users avoid anything to do with Reddit” or anything along those lines. You asked for feedback, and I gave you my honest criticism of it.

I understand that you found a project that sounds fun to make, and it probably will be. This is what we engineers do, we get excited to build things that seem to have clever technical answers. However in my past few months on Lemmy, I have seen these ideas, and have seen the way they tend to work out so far.

The logic may be simple, but human psychology is rarely as simple as engineers wish it could be.

Feel free to build your project. All aspiring engineers should make things that they want to make. But if you ask for feedback, don’t argue that the feedback is wrong. Not all solutions end up working out the way you hope, and that’s part of the engineering life. And based on prior experience, this one is likely to get the same treatment that the other repost bots get.

Nobody wants to participate in a disconnected discussion. We have multiple instances with bots that do precisely what you’re saying, and they just flood the feed with posts that people won’t engage with.

Nobody wants to have a discussion about a reddit post. Nobody wants to have a discussion about a hackernews or slashdot post. If Lemmy just looks like a place to mirror Reddit content, people will see that and just go to Reddit and engage directly.

We need more people posting to Lemmy. If this is just a place for bots to have discussions with themselves, nobody will stay here very long.

A couple of main points:

• You are reading tutorials to help you get it up and running. Most of the time these are designed to walk you through setting things up on a fresh node, and most often just VMs on an isolated (trusted) network. When you are providing a guide to just get someone up and running, the first thing to do is establish a known baseline configuration to start from.
• Kubernetes is a complex distributed application, and as such, the audience is generally expected to be relatively experienced. Meaning if you don’t know how to configure your firewall, people assume you aren’t going through this tutorial.

Still, I feel your pain. When trying to get into these technologies, most people who have done the work are engineers, and we stink at writing documentation. I’m sure you’re familiar with it, we automate the solutions for issues we encounter, and then those tools or automatic configurations fail to make it to the end user.

And I’m probably biased, but don’t use a video guide for this sort of thing. It’s just the wrong medium for a technical tutorial.

I think the biggest concern is getting all participating instances to agree on how to handle the issue.

We’ll start to see more fragmentation of the Fediverse as different instance owners have different views on what should be done. But many of the measures to fight this will only work if all participating instances do the same, whether actively, or by using a new version of the federation standard. Some instances may think the way is to be more transparent, while others may think the way is to obscure the votes more. Now you’ll have the “transparent” fediverse and the “obscure” fediverse with fundamental disagreements with each other on the way things work.

It’s interesting times ahead. Personally, I don’t think federation is the simple answer to all our social media woes like some folks around seem to think. There’s a lot that needs to be addressed, which will be uncovered as more companies like Meta try to get in on it.

I appreciate the illustration (and even warning) here. I predict things like this will just lead to more people having throwaway accounts. Now instead of just having throwaway accounts for posting shameful stories, you’ll also find people with their “commenting” accounts separate from their “voting” accounts.

The more I see kbin users calling people out for downvoting them, the faster I expect the votes to just become gamed instead of natural. Anything that’s used to draw attention to the way people vote will make this worse.

We’re in the early stages, but as soon as we start seeing communities that ban users based on their voting records, people will just find other ways to obscure things, which will make it even harder for instance admins to address massive misuse of the voting system.