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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
…. Acquire/rent hardware, or pay for cloud services?
“How does one cook without a stove”
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.
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 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.
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.
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.
On Reddit, before it went full goose step, you’d have the problem where the top mod of r/linux would be this weird open source zealot who would delete any thread that had any practicality in it. So actual discussion of using Linux would happen in r/linuxmasterrace, which was nominally a meme sub but it’s where the actual community landed. You could use Reddit’s vast namespace to steer around an individual top mod.
You couldn’t steer around Reddit’s admin though, they have root access to the servers, they can, have and increasingly do shut things down they don’t like. It’s double plus ungood.
Lemmy, and indeed the entire Fediverse, offers every user the Bender gambit. You can make your own instance with blackjack and hookers. There is no mechanism to shut it down everywhere. Instances are hosted by multiple people on multiple hardware platforms on multiple power grids in multiple countries under multiple jurisdictions.
The top mod of !linux@example.lol is being a shithead? You could make !actual_linux@example.lol, or you could start !linux@lemmy.world, or you could start your own instance and then YOU are in control of who gets to be a mod on at least one instance. No one person has the power to shut down everything everywhere; you start talking about severing undersea cables at that point.
Lol. We need to advertise “The Bender Gambit” more aggressively in our welcome materials. It really is part of what makes this place(s) great.
I’ll be sure to do that when I make my own instance, with blackjack and hookers.
And you know what?! Forget the instance .
Lemmy, and indeed the entire Fediverse, offers every user the Bender gambit. You can make your own instance …
It really is that easy. I wasn’t sure it would be, but I started up my own instance on a Saturday because I was procrastinating on some work.
I used the Docker method, but apparently Ansible is even easier.
Isn’t this still true of Reddit though? You could just make a new subreddit if you don’t like another.
How is it different?
Because at the end of the day, they’re all on Reddit. So when reddit says “you’ll get banned for upvoting content that promotes violence [against the oligarchs],” you can’t just make another subreddit because they’ll shut that one down too.
If the admin of lemmy.world says “you’ll get banned for upvoting content that promotes violence [against the oligarchs],” then you can say okay and make luigimangione@otherlemmyinstance.com. People on Lemmy.world can still access the new site, or even leave Lemmy.world entirely if they decide they’re not down with the admin. But they can still access all of the other federated communities they were subscribed to rather than having to quit Lemmy overall.
What happens if lemmy.world admin forces the hand of the mods of wolrdnews@lemmy.world community to ban such content and then defederate from the madeupinstance.net where the new luigi community is hosted? Isn’t that the same problem as reddit? Lemmy.world users would not be able to see the luigi community at that point right?
I feel like there is a real possibility of a federation schism where a bunch of server admins get together and defederate with the rest of the servers. In that case you either need two accounts on both side of the schism or just be blind to whatever is happening over there.
We’re living it right now. It is my understanding that Truth Social is basically a fork of Mastodon.
Federation.
There’s a reason why worldnews@lemmy.world and worldnews@lemmy.ml are not federated with eachother, yet lots of users are subscribed to both.
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.
For lemmy, it’s again a federation thing. You just don’t see many multiple defederated examples due to the small user count.
It’s not the most optimal solution, but it’s still miles better than dealing with single instance or single community issues.
Yeah but what do you do when one instance becomes so big that it dwarfs the other instances, and inevitably pushes them out with its sheer amount of content?
Lemmy is built around forums, which is very distinct from microblogging when it comes to moderation and management.
You don’t get the same kind of context collapse as on Twitter. You don’t get the same kind of dependency on server wide shared culture like on many niche Mastodon servers. Although context collapse still happens to some degree on reddit and may happen here when threads gets popular, it’s possible for forums to be moderated to minimize it and enforce quality. You don’t get nearly as many people trying to enforce their rules in others’ spaces, because forum makes it clear that it’s not “your feed” (like how some try to control what they see not with filters but instead by harassing people who post stuff they don’t like), here it’s somebody’s forum and somebody else is the moderator. You can stop seeing specific content by blocking those forums instead of blocking the users. Forums which you don’t interact with doesn’t affect you!
Because of how the federation works here, volume alone is never the main problem. Forums can be hosted on small instances just fine. Users on small instances can use big forums just fine. If a particular forum is poorly moderated it can be blocked regardless of where it’s hosted. Admins for small servers can filter content from problematic servers, regardless how big they are, and can do it on a per-forum basis too in order to avoid collateral.
Spurious defederation between servers where one has a lot of users is where the problems gets complicated.
On non-federated platforms, the quantity of content contributes to the cost a user experiences when trying to switch to a different platform.
On federated platforms there is zero cost to switching, and even more, it is not zero sum. I can follow both of I think both have value.
Non-federated platforms don’t allow such a choice, and there is this hidden cost of inertia built into it that the federation bypasses.
If it starts being evil, the same thing that happened to Digg and is hopefully happening to Reddit should happen, but way faster because it’s a one or two-click process.
(Unless you need to switch your home instance, which AT protocol can accommodate but unfortunately not ActivityPub or Lemmy specifically as of yet)
lemmy is part of a horizontally scaling network of instances (servers). if a popular community on an instance goes sideways… say because of a new terrible mod or rule change, the entire population of that community can up and move to a new community in another instance without having to create new accounts anywhere.
this has already happened a few times.
I think the primary defense is the decentralized nature of the application…
Moderators/admins can block and remove content on the instace(s) they control, but this does not impact the content of any other instance.
Effective censorship of the entire ecosystem would require control of many instances and defederation from those that are not deemed appropriate.
There is not really a way for the operator of one instance to control the moderation decisions of the operator(s) of any other instance.
This one of tbe reasons I created !dullsters@dullsters.net I do not have to worry about one instances modderation policy or splitting of users. Sure I could go crazy one day, but I have a robust ruleset in place that the comminity has followed without issue.
