So considering there’s a substantial push to get away from places like Reddit and Twitter, as an outsider I’m wondering how the fediverse is going to actually provide solutions to some already bad problems within higher resource platforms:
ADMIN/MOD ABUSE: Redditors are no strangers to mods/admins nuking comments, astroturfing, signal boosting/silencing, and so on. Doesn’t that problem just become worse in a federated system? As an example, a subreddit mod may ban users for whatever reason, but a lemmy instance admin could drag all their communities into their own drama if they choose to defederate, no? Losing access to entire instances instead of just one community/subreddit based on a power-tripping admin seems a big flaw. Am I missing something?
REPOSTING/X-POSTING: Reddit was already just the same tweets posted to like forty different subreddits, recycled weekly. On lemmy, there are now a handful of instances that contain virtually the same communities too. The lemmy.world/c/memes and lemm.ee/c/memes communities will post virtually the same content. And that’s just one. Aren’t feeds going to be overrun by duplicate posts in /All?
PRIVACY: I have no clue about this… are there extra security or privacy issues with something like lemmy?
SERVER ISSUES: This kinda goes without saying, but a small instance will already struggle to host even their own local users as traffic increases. Communicating across more and more instances is going to be extremely taxing. Access issues/desyncs seem like they’ll be inevitable. Doesn’t a federated system have more trouble scaling up than a centralized one because of this? How could small independently run servers keep up with exponential processing costs? Won’t this just squeeze out smaller instances? Add this to issues when instances choose to defederate, and you have two competing incentives: spreading out users to keep server stress low, and centralizing users to keep local engagement high. Isn’t this kind of a big hurdle?
Sorry for the wall of text- excited about lemmy in general but really have no idea about whether these are issues.
I haven’t been able to get into the “flow” of Lemmy to really enjoy it since joining within the last week but…
Reposting/X-Posting is the thing I’m most worried about. It is the thing that annoyed me most on reddit. Seeing the same post 2 or 3 times on the frontpage at the same time is obnoxious.
Ironically, that was one of the feature I actually really liked. Seeing the same post two or three times didn’t really matter to me since if it was posted in different communities, there was a wider variety of responses and perspectives (or I could just scroll past it).
Also it let me discover new communities that I wasn’t aware existed.
Are we talking about the same kind of post? I’m referring to stuff that doesn’t have multiple points of view. Like cat pictures or w/e
Even with something like a cat picture, I’m on sites like reddit and Lemmy as much for the comments and conversation as I am for the actual content, getting shared to different communities/subs at different times means different people are seeing it, so different stories and trivia and jokes are being shared in the comments even though they’re being inspired by the same picture.
And of course, the same picture of a cat being shared to r/aww will have a very different kind of conversation than the same picture shared to a different sub where the point is for people to do something like make up a fake backstory about the picture (not sure such a sub existed, but it very well might have) which would again be very different to if it were shared to r/catsStandingup (Cat.) And if it gets shared to PhotoshopBattles, that’s another totally different thing entirely.
Admin abuse: yea, but unlike reddit you can just move to another instance.
Reposting: you don’t have to subscribe to all communities. And you can block communities if you don’t want to see them in your local or all tab.
Privacy: depends on which instance you choose. Do your research.
Server: I am not sure about this, but I think the server strain is placed on the subs who generate the most content / have the most users. More users means more potential for donations, which means the devs can buy better servers.
Case in point on the admin thing: When the blackout thing started, two instances were the most recommended: Lemmy.ml and Beehaw.org.
Then Beehaw.org defederated from Lemmy.world and sh.itjust.works using some extremely flimsy reasoning (“they have open applications, they’re gonna fill with bad peeps uwu”)
Instantaneously EVERYONE stopped recommending Beehaw as a home instance. It left everyone’s consciousness entirely and you see little amount of communities hosted on it on community recommendation threads as well.
.ml also has potential problems, but people have abstracted themselves from it since, you know, so far the admins didn’t allow themselves to get in the way of the usability of their site. Specially not at a critical moment of the Fediverse’s growth.
I understand why people keep piling on Beehaw, but it feels to me like the people who make comments like this really don’t understand why they did it. I’m not speaking about the current lack of mod tools, but creating a space like Beehaw invites trolling.
I’m not a member of that server, but completely agree with what they’re out to do.
A single “entire” instance being ruined is a much smaller problem than a whole platform.
As for the duplicate community problem, I would love to see either a multi-reddit-like feature or the ability to merge/co-mingle “duplicate” communities across instances.
The solution to tyrannical mods or admins is simple: “take your ball and go home” by starting your own instance, or your own community on a separate instance. That said, instances and communities grow by growing trust between users and mods/admins by a track record of acting in a rational and trustworthy way.
Privacy is definitely a problem for Lemmy. You should assume everything you post or comment is public and in the open, and impossible to fully delete, because it is. Post accordingly. You could theoretically be identified by the sum total of all personally identifying information you freely post over a long enough time or by your writing style if a government considered you a real threat.
That said, many instances do not even require an email address. I don’t know whether instances store data like IP addresses, but you could check the lemmy source code to find out.
Edit: But also, who’s to say their server source code is unaltered? Federation lives and dies by trust and mutual cooperation, and that cannot be guaranteed.
Fair enough- losing a whole platform is the reason a lot of us are here.
Though I do think that smaller instances with flightier admins are going to experience this issue more frequently. This leaves exclusive communities in the lurch for discoverability if the admin pulls the plug. I’m no server admin expert so I have no idea if this is even a thing, but it’d be cool if communities could choose to be hosted under multiple instances at once. Even just one “secondary” instance that only retains a portion of the activity would help, both with engagement and keeping reposts low.
We saw admin power abuse just yesterday on lemmynsfw.com . A new admin came in and banned any non-vanilla R34, but more egregiously (if the leaks are to be believed) wants to ban any regular porn if it doesn’t come from a “trusted source” and wants people to ID themselves with their government IDs if they are deemed “too young looking” by the moderation.
wants to ban any regular porn if it doesn’t come from a “trusted source” and wants people to ID themselves with their government IDs if they are deemed “too young looking” by the moderation.
So that admin wants to actually make sure that there is only legal and ethical content on their platform? How is that “abuse”? How else are they supposed to protect themselves against legal accusations that they are hosting illegal porn? The admins here aren’t working for multimillion dollar corporations, it’s probably just a matter of time until corpo social media starts targeting popular instances by exactly this kind of legal action…
at least with Lemmy, if you’re dealing with a bad admin or mod, you can move to a new instance …
