this post was submitted on 15 Jun 2023
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Day 2 here, and I can see the growth already. Personally I really like the notion of how its gonna shape up in the future but at the same time I really feel for the average user as of now its too complex to understand the working and how the cross servers thing is working. I mean yes still early days, UI will improve further leading to a better UX but the core mechanism yet is little tough to get along. For instance, still unclear if I made the right choice by signing up on lemmydotworld why not lemmydotml , beehaw etc.... and where does this stop? like in the coming times i it would be like a thousands of servers lemmy.this lemmy.that lemmy.etc or anything.anything. That's soo confusing for someone who just wanna join a server. Would be interesting to see how "signup anywhere, its the same thing" evolves.

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[–] [email protected] 37 points 1 year ago (11 children)

I moved from aussie.zone to lemmy.world already to get around federation issues.
Now beehaw.org has stopped federating with lemmy.world πŸ€·β€β™‚οΈ

I don't want to have half a dozen accounts so that I can access all the niches of this system, and yet it's beggining to look like the dream of federation is stillborn.

[–] [email protected] 27 points 1 year ago (3 children)

Yea. I feel like Beehaw cutting a lot of the larger general communities out from two of the biggest instances is highlighting early a major hurdle that’s gonna make the whole fediverse thing difficult to get a lot of people on board with. I don’t want to have to keep making new accounts to access stuff, but like… half of the communities I had subscribed to are just gone now because the admins over there decided they don’t want to play with anyone else, I guess.

[–] [email protected] 20 points 1 year ago (3 children)

To be fair, that's how things used to be on the internet. You'd sign up for various forums or message boards with different accounts. Then it all became consolidated under one roof, and message boards started dying. What's happening with reddit now shows the danger of that.

[–] [email protected] 6 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Yeah there will never be a perfect middleway. Either you have a lot of small kingdoms where sometimes some of them go rogue or you got one big one where the Leaders literally rule the whole place.
I think feddiverse will be the better option in the long run after some things get tweaked a bit more.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 1 year ago

Bluesky has a global identity system where instance accounts are just links to a DID (basically your private key). If you get banned from an instance you have to change your name but you keep all your posts and likes.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 1 year ago (2 children)

It'd be nice if there were some way to link accounts across different instances

[–] [email protected] 6 points 1 year ago (2 children)

It's a decent argument to host your own instance just for your self and not having to shuffle subscriptions around

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[–] [email protected] 3 points 1 year ago

There was OpenID for this, but it sadly also died.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 1 year ago (1 children)

I'm personally OK with the old-school way of one account per community/server. All I really want is forums with (1) a nice clean UI, (2) nice mobile app, and (3) open APIs. Most popular forum software meets only one, or even none of these. Lemmy has all three of these. Federation is maybe nice icing on the cake, but I could take it or leave it personally. Maybe that's denying the whole point of Lemmy, but I don't care.

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[–] [email protected] 14 points 1 year ago

Beehaw has a code of conduct that everyone can read.

They already said that it is hard to effectively mod because the tooling isn't there yet.

I really wish people would hamper their expectations a bit. With more people coming, there will be more people willing to contribute for tooling etc. These projects are in it's infancy so growing pains will happen.

Facebook for example pays around 500mil per year for moderating and Reddit has free labor for it. But even then, Reddit is dependent on 3rd party tooling for their moderators to effectively moderate. That is a company that exists for 18 years or so?

At one point I expect there to be tooling available to make it easier to target ban people from an specific instance or even defederate specific accounts from an instance.

But if you are a mod team of 4 people without effective tooling then I hope that people understand the predicament they are in and also support the server in their efforts and try to understand their reasoning.

At least you don't have to switch to another platform, you can just make an account on the instance and participate.

I have been toggling between instances and accounts per instance for a good week already and I encounter zero problems with it.

If you just make an account and "activate" the keep yourself logged in checkmark than you can easily switch between instances.

In this stage we are self governing to an extent. The behaviour of people can affect a full instance so everyone has the obligation to think before they post.

Just don't be a dick/troll/spammer/bigot is more then enough to keep federating for your instance enabled.

[–] [email protected] 5 points 1 year ago

Yea that sucks.

[–] [email protected] 14 points 1 year ago (5 children)

Now beehaw.org has stopped federating with lemmy.world

Fucking wonderful.

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[–] [email protected] 10 points 1 year ago

you kinda have to pick your poison. some groups will naturally segregate themselves, while others will try to remain open for everything. you have to find an instance that matches the way you engage with stuff. Or you can use multiple instances if need be.

I'm pretty happy here on kbin.social and I doubt I'd leave if some other instance ends up blocking us.

[–] [email protected] 10 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Hopefully large instances keep federating with the small, self-hosted ones. I’m not sure how to check but I think really small instances still have the most reach.

[–] [email protected] 14 points 1 year ago

I self hosted precisely so I can federate with who I want to. It's nice to be able to see posts from multiple instances of (for example) self-hosted on different servers within my own instance, and comment on them directly within my own instance.

The only issues I've had is the comments can take a bit to federate across, but that's to be expected.

[–] [email protected] 8 points 1 year ago

It goes both ways though, if beehaw isolates itself enough the rest of the fediverse will make its own communities that effectively replace the ones we lost from them defederating.

As of now they're blocking 387 communities according to this

[–] [email protected] 7 points 1 year ago (2 children)

If I'm not mistaken both Beehaw and Lemmy.world are pretty big mainstream instances.

Why has Beehaw decided to stop federating with lemmy.world?

[–] [email protected] 17 points 1 year ago (1 children)

The stated reason is that there's too many bad actors coming from here, so it's too hard to moderate:

https://beehaw.org/post/567170

Hopefully (as they state in their post), federation will resume once things settle into a new norm.

Or I forsee beehaw losing relevance as it continues to pursue an isolationist policy.

[–] [email protected] 7 points 1 year ago (5 children)

Thank you!

A scary thing about the Fediverse right now is that some instances have many of the bigger communities. And the owners of the instance can literally shut it down at any moment (or stop federating with you).

And right now there isn't an incentive to keep instances alive.

[–] [email protected] 6 points 1 year ago

I like how matrix handles the rooms, you can have aliases on other servers for the same room. This would be also nice for communities. So once there is a server split you at least keep the old content on the other servers simmilar to when one matrix server goes away everyone can still be in the room which is an alias for it.

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[–] [email protected] 5 points 1 year ago

Ok so apparently it's a pinned post in their community.

Tldr Lemmy.world has open registration, which means more trolls/extremists and they are tired of dealing with them.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 1 year ago (1 children)

What federation issues were you having with aussie.zone? I used that one for a while before creating my own instance.

[–] [email protected] 5 points 1 year ago

The issue was the owners choice of not federating with anything nsfw.

By moving to lemmy.world I could still post as much as I wanted to [email protected] AND upvote boobs.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 1 year ago

about the defederation, this comment about it is great: https://kbin.social/m/[email protected]/t/22433/Beehaw-defederated-us#entry-comment-90015

"I think it's easy to take this personally but I think it's more about the moderation tools in Lemmy not being adequate at the moment so this is the best bandaid solution for now. We need to quickly put effort into developing better moderation tools like limiting other servers without fully defederating, limiting specific communities, forcing nsfw on communities/instances, proxying reports to origin servers so admins have better feedback on their instance user's bad behavior, and many other things if we want to prevent defederating like this from being the only option.

I think infighting about this decision and differing moderation styles instead of focusing together on moderation challenges and tooling deficiencies risks tearing the community / federation apart and is counterproductive to the goal of being better than reddit."

there will be growing pains.

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[–] [email protected] 13 points 1 year ago (2 children)

I somewhat went through that. Signed up on one instance cause it seemed a cool science based one to check out but then realized that if I wanted to make a community for anything else, I couldn't do it there

[–] [email protected] 7 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Ah interesting point, never thought of it but you're right, in this regard with lemmy it is kind of important where you have your account. Good point! I had the feeling that with lemmy it really doesn't matter where you have your account but this is a very valid point.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 1 year ago

If you don't plan on running communities it's a non issue but otherwise, yeah

[–] Tragic 2 points 1 year ago

Welcome to the fedoraverse

[–] [email protected] 8 points 1 year ago (3 children)

on kbin there was a long period of no federation and so I think we kinda ended up with this "kbin is kbin and then there's this other stuff" mindset. I think it helped ease a lot of us into this fediverse stuff lol. the analogy I use is email :) why pick yahoovs gmail vs protonmail? same idea.

[–] [email protected] 9 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Email, the true OG federated protocol.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 1 year ago

Pretty sure that was Usenet

[–] [email protected] 3 points 1 year ago (2 children)

That analogy doesn't hold when yahoo can block gmail and proton can block all yahoo content, etc.

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[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Now we are federating, properly.

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[–] [email protected] 7 points 1 year ago

I agree it's somewhat complex for the average user, but I 'm questioning whether they really need to understand. I subscribed to kbin, started using it like reddit. Federation is now enabled, too, but if I hadn't seen a post about it, I wouldn't even have noticed. The cool thing is you don't need to care where the content is if you don't want to, you still can enjoy the platform ang get a lot out of it.

[–] [email protected] 7 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Why did you post this to selfhosted? lol

[–] [email protected] 10 points 1 year ago

that i just realized, lol

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Or lib.lgbt!

More seriously it’s basically all the same. Just depends what @ you want after your username.

[–] [email protected] 7 points 1 year ago (1 children)

I would say that it depends on that and on if you want to use the local feed or what you want to see there.

But pretty much that's it.

[–] [email protected] 5 points 1 year ago

And it's hard to know better in advance, but quite important is that you also choose your (instance) moderators β€” the people who decide in the end what you're allowed to see and say.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 year ago

The sign up process is a bit non-standard, but I have mostly browsed via app (Mlem) and it makes the cross-community sub and commenting fairly seamless.

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