It appears to me that the current state of Lemmy is similar to other platforms when they were smaller and more insular, and that insularity is somewhat protecting it.
I browse Lemmy, and it feels a bit like other platforms did back in 2009, before they became overwhelmed and enshitified.
If I understand it correctly, Lemmy has a similar “landed gentry” moderation scheme, where the first to create a community control it. This was easily exploited on other platforms, particularly in regards to astroturfing, censorship, and controlling a narrative.
If/when Lemmy starts to experience its own “eternal September”, what protections are in place to ensure we will not be overwhelmed and exploited?
What you’re worried about is basically what federation was built to stop.
If you don’t like the moderation of a community or other aspects, you or anyone else can make a new one on the same or a different instance, if you want.
You can even make it “private” (not federate) to keep others from coming in and recreating the problem you just fled.
You can even make it “private” (not federate) to keep others from coming in and recreating the problem you just fled.
So assuming you don’t like to only talk to yourself, how do you decide who to let into a private instance?
And if you stay public, let’s say for argument’s sake, that the same thing that made you leave this first community immediately happens in the new instance, then what?
I would suggest starting the invite process with the people who were in the community before it went awry. You can also make a post about how you’re starting a new community in the old community and explain what will be different in the new community. I belive this happened recently with the “196” community becoming the “oneninetysix” community when the mods made decisions the users didn’t like.
Being mod of the new community would allow for removal of unwanted users. Additionally, if you were admin of the instance, you could block other instances that had users that tended to not match your stance on issues.
Hopefully, that helps.
To be optimistic, I’d hope the federation would be able to guard against deeper centralization like a more extreme .world or .ml, a la meta or whoever. There’s always space for grassroots instances, and I’m pretty sure there will always be someone out there running something or with enough interest to learn.
It will still probably end up like email. There will be a working group, public or private, that defines minimum spam requirements. If you don’t comply, you’ll be defederated.
Except with email, the sender and receive have no choice. With Lemmy, both can pick an instance that isn’t relying on whitelist/blacklist rules.
You’re totally right. My optimism gets around that by hoping if it isn’t Lemmy, this federation, that federation, some other new initiative or tech, community will find a way to make itself. I guess my bigger worry is accessibility and notoriety/viability, but I think that will always come in time too. There are smart, willing people out there, and gathering is human instinct.
I agree with everything you said.
I’m thinking/hoping that this new wave of Europeans going to European instances will help spread out the centralization of .world and .ml, now and it’ll hold into the future, but we’ll see.
Hearing that several people have started country specific instances also gives me hope in this. With country/geographicly specific, topic specific, and just general instances, I think/hope it will lead to a more balanced user base.
Not just Europeans. I was talking to my roommate about how I deleted my Reddit accounts and fully committed to switching over to Lemmy, and his main concern was which instances were hosted in America so he could avoid them.
I just made another comment that elaborated my stance more too.
I didn’t realize there was a trend of European users. I haven’t really thought about it, but Lemmy could use some sort of translation layer to facilitate multi-but-not-bilingual community. There’s a lot of German, French, Spanish, and Portuguese speakers I’d probably love interacting with and would never know! For now I rely on bilingual non-English natives or the little French I remember and just lurk.
You appear to have asked a vague question and people responded on what they thought you meant with your question.
You seem to be interpreting that as people trying to take your money rather than seeing that what you are looking to understand and what people are answering do not line up.
Another user has already given you other information that looks like what you were looking for, so I won’t bother reiterating.
I just want to say that I hope in the future you’ll try not to assume people interacting with you are trying to take advantage of you and there may just be a disconnect in the conversation.
Regardless, best of luck with everything :)
I’m kind of sidestepping the point, but I think the average user will always be able to depend on the community to some degree, at least hopefully. All it takes is one savvy and willing user to support a huge section of community, bless the admins. If I’m being pedantic, most admins don’t own the hardware anyway, but that’s not the point. It’s not even the software necessarily. If it isn’t Lemmy itself, the spirit of independent web won’t go away. People will be always running Tor, I2P, fedi, I’ll even include crypto. The community isn’t the platform, it’s us.
I apologize for the uncalled-for Ted Talk.
I need to know a bit more what you are specifically asking to answer appropriately, but I’ll guess in the mean time.
I’m assuming you asking about starting an instance without hardware. My understanding is that many of the top Lemmy instances are hosted on server farms (companies) rather than self-hosted on their own hardware. Hosting with a company would be essentially renting their server to run your software (Lemmy). You would have control of all the software decisions (instance admin), but would not own the hardware.
I’m not particularly knowledgeable in the area, but the above is my understanding and hopefully that answers your question. If not, let me know and I’ll try again :)
Also, I believe the !buyeuropean@feddit.uk community just posted in the last couple days a list of European companies that could be used to host Lemmy instances.
Edit: added correct community and link.
You’re not required to run your own instance on your own hardware; you’ve just got to find an existing instance with an admin team you’re comfortable with, create your community there and recruit moderators just like you would on Reddit.
…. Acquire/rent hardware, or pay for cloud services?
“How does one cook without a stove”
