Why YSK: Beehaw defederated from Lemmy.World and Sh.itjust.works effectively shadowbanning anyone from those instances. You will not be able to interact with their users or posts.
Edit: A lot of people are asking why Beehaw did this. I want to keep this post informational and not color it with my personal opinion. I am adding a link to the Beehaw announcement if you are interested in reading it, you can form your own views. https://beehaw.org/post/567170
It’s important to note that the admins of beehaw are not happy about this solution, either. And they hope to refederate once they have better tools and enough mods / admins to deal with it.
They point wasn’t to shadowban, that was a side effect. The point was to protect their member–who specifically wanted a certain type of safe friendly instance–from hostile weirdos sending dick pics and stuff like that. Nobody’s happy with the situation, but it’s the best they could do under the circumstances with the resources they have.
I also don’t think it’s wrong for instances to have their own strong rules and preferences. This is one of the GOOD things about the Fediverse. The software features and how people use lemmy will catch up eventually.
As for the confusion / chaos around multiple/redundant/competing communities and so on…that will get better over time as people figure things out. Honestly it’s not that different than reddit with all of its splinter subs like “true-” whatever.
As for the confusion / chaos around multiple/redundant/competing communities and so on…that will get better over time as people figure things out. Honestly it’s not that different than reddit with all of its splinter subs like “true-” whatever.
That’s true for just the duplication problem, but the defederation / shadow banning issue is not one that reddit has and is pretty confusing and poor user experience for new users coming in.
This isn’t reddit 2.0. It’s a different platform with different mechanics that hasn’t had over a decade to mature.
Change is hard. People need to learn to adapt.
Right, but even non-reddit users would be confused by it. When everyone advertises lemmy as seamlessly integrating with all the different instances, it doesn’t matter what instance your account is on, this definitely is not that.
The idea behind federation is, that individuals host their own instance and connect (federate) with others individual’s instances.
But that’s not easy for less tech savvy people.
It’s a young platform experiencing unprecedented growth. There’s going to be growing pains where misunderstandings and misinformation are bound to happen. We need to correct the misinformation and set proper expectations.
The ability for a server admin to choose what servers they federate with is a core concept of the fediverse and needs to be properly communicated.
Except you’re not making a case for why they should rather than go to some other alternative once it pops up soon.
One of us is confused, I’m not sure which. I’m not “making a case” for anything. I stated a fact, “Lemmy != Reddit”. It’s a completely different platform, with different underlying technology, that can perform a similar task. Anyone who’s representing it as a 1:1 reddit clone that you can just hop to with no effort to learn how it works, is misleading others.
I’m not trying to win any arguments nor convince anyone to stay. If another alternative pops up, try it, if you like it use it. If you like lemmy use it. Hell, use them both or use neither. That’s the benefit of having choices.
Expectation management… people need to stop pitching this on Reddit as the new Reddit then.
But… It is essentially identical in design to Reddit apart from the decentralised concept.
Which is a massive change that tbh I’m still not sold on.
Federation seems to cause more problems than it solves and it’s created so many fractured communities that it’s impossible to get involved in niche ones anymore.
It’s definitely more messy. I suppose the reason i left Reddit was that the corporate structure ended up compromising their ability to live up to the responsibility of running a community space. As running the community became increasingly subordinate to revenue the decisions of the corporate body became increasingly out of whack with the best interests of the community. The federated concept feels like a possible solution to that problem.
Well, new Reddit might easily mean better but also diffderent Reddit. Also, I am not sure whether people actually call it a new Reddit. Most of the time I heard the destription was a Reddit alternative which by definition doesn’t imply that it’s identical or even better in all ways.
But… It is essentially identical in design to Reddit apart from the decentralised concept.
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I foresee a lot of issues with defederation and the proposed mod tools in the future, as well. They can refederate but it’s not a good look for the platform when the federation can be fractured so easily. We have not seen the last of this issue.
I also question what it’s going to look like when these moderation tools are implemented. Lemmy has more avenues for moderation/admin abuse than Reddit, and less recourse for users. There are a lot of concerns here that just seem to be swept under the rug under the pretence that “you can always go to another instance”.
Ultimately it’s not an issue with the function of the fediverse, but with the moderation philosophy of the people running these instances. Particularly when it comes to the viability of voting. That’s a huge opportunity for suppression that I don’t trust certain admins not to abuse.
How does Lemmy have more avenues for admin abuse than Reddit? On either platform, the admins can technically do whatever they want. (Including editing users posts, spez). Lemmy makes it easier to just go somewhere else. At the end of the day that is all you can do.
The` point was to protect their member–who specifically wanted a certain type of safe friendly instance–from hostile weirdos sending dick pics and stuff like that``
They are making community policy around a single person?
I am not following.
With that being said, they can do as they please and other can do what they want. That’s the beautity of the protocol.
However, people shoudnt be surpised when others take the ball and play else where.
Looking forward to seeing how this works out.
That was just a typo. Beehaw has advertised itself as being a largely positive, safe online space. People who sign up for it would generally be considered to want that same ethos.
It’s not ideal at the moment but until the moderation tools improve it’s the best way forward if they want to stick to their ethos. I enjoy Beehaw and the admin do seem like they want to refererate when it’s possible to.
I’m on both Beehaw and Lemmy.world so I between the two I can interact with everything I would want to see.
I think they just dropped the s off members.
I’m pretty sure it’s supposed to be “members” and missing the s is a typo.
It’s getting pretty tiring to see people feeling entitled to have access to any and all communities of the Fediverse, if the people paying for the running cost of the Beehaw instance wants to defederate (for whatever reason, “good” or “bad”), that’s their prerogative.
If you really want access to their content, apply to join, otherwise sign up to any of the dozens of lemmy instances federated to the rest of the fediverse.
One of the great things about the Fediverse in general is choice, user and instance admin can choose how they want to interact, and are not beholden to a company or group which can take any arbitrary decisions they want.
TLDR : Instance admin are entitled to how they want to run it, you’re not.
Ah, in less than 48 hours we’ve come full circle.
What beautiful dawns await us.
I’m entitled to leave to another instance. One of the main things to look at when choosing an instance is who they are federated/defederated with. I would never join BeeHaw Lemmy.world, or Sh.itjust.works because of their feud. I’d rather join a third party instance and have access to all the content on all three.
It’s not a feud, lol. Admins from all of them say they talked it out and they plan to re-federate in the future. Beehaw wants to be a heavily moderated instance, and lemmy.world and sh.itjust.works were growing faster than Beehaw’s moderation ability.
If you really want access to their content, apply to join, otherwise sign up to any of the dozens of lemmy instances federated to the rest of the fediverse.
I think it was pretty clear, yeah
Until the instance you choose to set up on ends up in a feud with any, or all of those instances.
The whole fediverse experiment is going to end up with a number of small, highly segregated communities, and even more political polarization. I guess if you want to live in an echo chamber, a federated environment is the best way to go about it.
I don’t think so, Lemmy is just going through growing pains. Those instances are already talking about refederating.
I signed up through sh.itjust.works - was this a bad idea? Only opened my account 2 days ago so learning the ropes.
Nothing is stopping you to register on multiple and see how each one feels, then stick to the one you like most. Instances with application process tend to have a bit more curated user bases and that’s reflected in conversations where they participate. You could try lemmy.world, Beehaw.org, lemmy.ml, or any other instance.
Don’t worry about it, sh.itjust.works is a popular instance and Beehaw just want to do their own thing. Unless there’s a specific community hosted on Beehaw that you really want to be a part of you probably won’t notice, as most popular subjects have communities on other servers.
Shitjustworks was defederated from Beehaw, if you absolutely want to be able to post on Beehaw, you’ll have to create an account there, otherwise you should have access to every other instances federated to shitjustworks
I’m criticizing people criticizing people for criticizing people who criticize people who criticize…
You’re just as tiring as the people you’re criticizing.
Ah, in less than 48 hours we’ve come full circle.
What beautiful dawns await us.
Ah, in less than 48 hours we’ve come full circle.
What beautiful dawns await us.
Ah, in less than 48 hours we’ve come full circle.
What beautiful dawns await us.
Wow so much misinformed hostility against Beehaw here. The mod tools for Lemmy are currently limited and they just want to protect their community from trolls and spam. There’s no conspiracy here to break federation.
Also - fwiw - they are likely to refederate in the future. I subscribe to beehaw communities, cuz we can still see them, just can’t talk to them.
For instances that are mostly for discussion, its pretty pointless to stay subscribed.
Unless you’re ok lurking and just reading. I used to rarely contribute to ask reddit, but I would read a ton of those threads
You can still communicate with other people from your own instance.
I guess we will just have to take their word on that refederation thing
As a member of Beehaw I haven’t seen any reason not to trust them so far. They’ve been transparent about why it was done and they’ve spoken with other instance admins.
Think we have to be conscious that this is all still at an early stage and generally it’s wise to give people the benefit of the doubt at first. I get the cynicism but this isn’t a privatised space- people across lemmy have been constructive and open so far, so maybe give them a chance?
Both teams of admins have been openly posting about the discissions they’ve had with each other too. There isnt any hostility or underlying motives behind the situation at all. They are genuinely open and honest about things and definitely looking to refederate once it makes sense again to do so.
It might seem like there is some drama here but there really isn’t any at all.
They’ve already been talking to the admins of those instances, they did it because there weren’t better options like in Mastodon, remember that Lemmy is still Alpha software
Yeah I don’t see any issue with having conversations with each other even if the beehaw folks never see it
is there a list of beehaw community? how do I know which community is from beehaw?
this is a bit confusing but I will prevail
The community name will be !something@beehaw
I disagree with this. A more nuanced take is that you should consider any beehaw communities read only unless refederation happens. The defederation was not out of ill will, it was about self preservation in a growing ecosystem and the reasons were clearly communicated and a path to refederation was left open. Read only posts are still valuable, and even though there is a more complex mechanism at play than true “read only” understanding that you can view is better than just blocking them in reverse. We are all friends here, and I think in the long run refederation will happen as this platform matures.
I’m basically a read only user anyway so hah!
I’m starting to realize that maybe I should learn to lurk. If I lurked in reddit I would have had a better experience.
Lurking with occasional comments in areas that interest you is best, I find. Oh and ignoring anyone who comes off as a troll or clown
Ignoring anything so controversial that people are at each other’s throats also helps. Although a healthy bit of disagreement is always fine.
Yep I’m all for some healthy back and forth, but once people start frothing at the mouth, I’m out
Yeah I would agree with this. It’s good to know for anyone new coming in but should be taken in good faith unless and until a reason crops up to change that. Not seen anything like that so far.
It would be nice if Lemmy let you know if you were browsing a thread from a defederated instance. Like a flair in the title or something, So you can read but you know your comment will only be seen by users on your instance.
Can we actually see the posts from people at Beehaw?
I was subbed to some communities from before defederation. I also have a accounts at a few instances for discovery.
@SteelBeard@lemmy.world , you should add a link to the announcement which explains why Beehaw defederated since this looks to be the top question many are asking.
tldr; too hard to mod. That’s pretty dumb, but the cool thing with the fedi is you can just not care and swap instances.
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Mod work in general is going to be a tough issue for everyone to solve. Different places will have different norms they want to enforce, and a limited volunteer staff to push that agenda. But there’s nothing that can’t be automated. Automate the creation of AI mods, automate the selection of user mods, automate the banning of objectionable comments and users using a combination of both humans and AI to both handle the workload and adhere to community regulations. If these tools can be developed as part of lemmy, automated moderation can become an available option for all instances, which hopefully will mean that moderation here will be better quality and lower cost than moderation on that other social media site, I’m forgetting the name.
Those are good points. Time to find a different instance. My account is not precious. Supporting a sustainable growth is.
The slowness of Lemmy.world to defederate from the fascists, and now this makes me feel I can find a better home. A home that is a better partner to the fediverse.
I will be curious to learn what works best for you.
Probably a smaller server. I need to do some more research. Lemmy.world one of the highlighted big servers when I joined during one of the waves from Reddit. I am sure there are plenty better smaller /mid-size server LD, I could join instead.
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You may find that we really like safe spaces on Lemmy.
I like safe time, but that’s much harder to come by.
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Disclaimer: pretty new to Lemmy a federation (older than this account though).
From what I gather, defederation is supposed to be a function of this whole system, but intended to cut off whole instances that refuse to moderate or are active cesspools. In saying that, I don’t understand Beehaw cutting off two of the other biggest instances. I know they have a weird mentality over there of no downvotes and saw some odd conversations condemning someone’s political views while admitting to not know the person at all (dafuq?).
It seems to me it would make more sense to block a single community rather than the whole instance.
Maybe they want a walled garden, but as new people come in and want as much content as possible to show that this is a better venue than Reddit, to me they give off the wrong message.
Am I mistaken somehow? Anyone able to enlighten me?
Newbie here. Is there an easy way to identify a beehaw community? I’ve been hitting the subscribe button left and right to build up my profile feed and I’m just winging it here. thanx!
The community name will end in “@beehaw”.
If you go to the community search bar and search for say, “gaming” you’ll get multiple results. The one that’s just “gaming” is your home instance, any with an “@instancename” behind them are from elsewhere.
okay, that makes it easy. Thanx for replying!
If you are using an app remember to turn on the option to see instance names right next to the poster’s username.
Also their icons are pretty recognizable, I think they are all yellow honeycombs.
I don’t understand: did something serious happened, or it’s them overreacting?
It’s just down to Lemmy not having good enough mod tools yet. Beehaw is a carefully curated walled garden instance that hosts some high quality communities; they are availing themselves of the only real tool they have to curb an influx of bad actors from other instances.
Here’s hoping its temporary. The admin team here at sh.itjust.works clearly operates in good faith.
They have stated as much, and are open to refederating once the mod tools can handle the influx of people joining instances with open sign-ups. Side effect of the reddit refugee crisis.
but why bother? they can still enter from any of the thousands of other instances that allow free registration. if they want to troll, they are still able to do that.
I’m not an admin, so I’m partially paraphrasing and partially speculating, but my understanding is that we’re still in the whack-a-mole phase of lemmy moderation due to the immaturity of the platform and the tooling surrounding it. sh.itjust.works and lemmy.world were the most visible issues because they grew VERY quickly and have no barriers to registration - they became big enough and some users problematic enough to warrant a full, well-articulated post from the Beehaw admins regarding the defederation.
Take a look at the massive list of blocked instances on beehaw.org/instances and you’ll see that the level of care and attention regarding this specific defederation makes this situation fairly unique. Smaller instances probably just get banned near immediately. Sucks that the end result is for us to be lumped in with racists and the like, but it looks like all involved parties expect this to be resolved eventually.
Like I said, it’s just a matter of tooling. Our admins are doing an excellent job, considering. I know this because I watch the bullshit I report get dealt with in near real time. I don’t envy the work they’re putting in.
They defederated because they were both large Lemmy instances with zero review process for joining users, and they’d rapidly starting acquiring bots and bad actors. Because of federation, these accounts could interact on Beehaw’s server like they were locals.
Beehaw on the other hand, has a human-powered review process for signup. It isn’t strict, but it keeps out bots or low-effort users. Beehaw’s community goal means that reducing the amount of bots, bad actors, and low-effort users on the platform is a priority for them. Their moderating is also human-powered, and very involved - not outright banning/blocking. They reach out to users to discuss their content’s intent, and issue warnings/requests personally as needed.
That level of moderation is fantastic for fostering community and is compassionate for ignorance and error; but it isn’t scalable when being hammered by bots and an influx of new accounts. Beehaw’s only protection from instances that shelter bots and bad actors was to defederate from them until those instances were able to address them somehow.
The Beehaw admins have reached out to the admins of the other instances; their hope is to find a solution that reduces the amount of bots and spam accounts creating on .world and .works. They don’t want defederation to be a permanent solution, it’s just the only feasible one they had.
There sign up process was nearly successful in putting me off from ever trying Lemmy. I almost gave up finding instances which would let me join without filling in a completely stupid form where I have to state what communities I will join when I haven’t even had a chance to get to know what communities are out there!!.
Same here. The signup process for Lemmy sucks. It’s confusing and instances make no logical sense for account management. Personally I have no interest in other instances, so eventually I just picked the biggest and that’s what I’m sticking with.
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The admins of beehaw are more Liberal (if you are anywhere in the LGBTQIA+ space the other side’s content is largely considered offensive enough to defederate from) and presumably the other way around.
Annoyingly I guess it all comes around to politics and which side of history you want to be on. Personally I’m all for letting other people be in charge of whatever the fuck they want to do with their life - to an extent - but context matters
Boozilla’s comment explains in better detail and I 100% recommend a read to gain a better understanding. Basically the moderation tools on Lemmy aren’t quite up to stuff yet
I don’t know anything about the issue being that Beehaw is too liberal, only that some other instances were 1. Too easy to make accounts on and 2. Allowing an influx of super right/downright nazi punks to start spamming without any serious moderation.
Yeah I definitely wouldn’t call Beehaw “too liberal”, though I don’t personally see being “for freedom” as a bad thing - you’re definitely right. It’s more about the moderation tools and being able to separate opposing points of view from relevant communities
…and in case I have not made it perfectly clear I think the fact that Nazis still exist in the information age is absolutely fucking absurd
And this is why the fediverse will never work out - if I gamble wrong and set up shop on an instance that gets in a pissing match with other ones, I either have to make an account elsewhere (and then have to do it again later the next time two instances defederate each other) or live with only seeing some of my subscribed content.
There are already conversations about Nomadic Identities and what that would look like. Until that is done, I agree with you that there are going to be some issues, such as this. The fact that this is on their radar is very promising.
set up shop on an instance
Don’t do that. You probably should have multiple accounts on different instances. If you really need a continuous, single identity, post links to all your usernames in each.
This is why the move from Reddit was so difficult for Redditors: because we put all our eggs into Reddit Inc’s basket. All our content is under Reddit’s control. This analysis can be applied to any centralized social media service. If your instance shits the bed or bans itself from everyone else, you can move somewhere else. You can start your own in the worst case. It’s annoying, but at least there is a real path to move on.
We shouldn’t be putting our eggs in any one basket. We shouldn’t have been doing it before the Fediverse, and we shouldn’t be doing it here either. Your social media access should not be dependent on the goodwill of one person or entity. Eventually, that entity will corrupt.
Also, I’m on vlemmy.net. Right now, they haven’t defederated from anyone, and I believe we’re still not banned from Beehaw or anyone else. If you really want the whole Fediverse (and you probably don’t), make an account on vlemmy or one of the top three instances on this page.
Why don’t you have a second account?
Lazy. Don’t care if my shit gets fucked. But if you do care if your shit gets fucked, then you shouldn’t rely on centralized social media.
this is why i plan to host my own federated instance - no pissing matches can be had, and i can federate with any larger ones that i like/pick up steam.
I’m genuinely curious of a real answer on this as I have the same concerns having registered on InfoSec.pub. Apparently signing up there means I am locked to that community? What happens to my account if they shutter? It’s not like I can login using Lemmy.ca as my community.
As cool as this is, it’s not fully thought through IMHO. There’s a reason centralization tends to occur naturally. We are already seeing that with people in droves showing up on lemmy.world. for that matter who owns the instances? I’m lazy I’ll get around to digging more eventually but right now this is a curiousity.
Apparently signing up there means I am locked to that community?
There is a feature request to allow accounts to be transferred to other instances. So that’s in the works.
We are already seeing that with people in droves showing up on lemmy.world. for that matter who owns the instances?
Someone that’s not spez.
There’s no such thing as a perfect system that shitty people can’t fuck up in some way. All that can be done is to mitigate the damage on shitty person can do. So yeah, if the instance you’re on gets taken over by assholes, it’s going to be a problem. But it will be less of a problem if you’re on a centralized system that gets taken over by an asshole.
Case in point: beehaw is an instance that hosts a lot of LGBTQ communities. The influx of new users comes with an influx of new assholes. The kind of assholes that say shitty things to people in the LGBTQ+ community. On a centralized system they’d either have to accept those slurs or move to some other centralized system. But on lemmy, they have the option of temporarily disconnecting from the instances that have had an influx of assholes.
It’s a growing pains kind of thing really.Most of the new users aren’t assholes, and some of the new users will step up and become mods and the assholes will be removed. But until then, some smaller instances are going to batten down the hatches until the storm passes.
Lemmy offers options like this that a centralized system doesn’t have. Does having additional options make a system worse?
This argument is absurd. What happens, right now, if Reddit shuts down? Where can you take your account to access what’s on Reddit?
The fact is federations CAN be set up this way. Lemmy is new and the people providing the service are working to get things functional as fast as possible. Federating authentication is possible. Can you do it right this second? Nope.
Can you do it with Reddit right this second?
“I’m not gonna do this because it doesn’t work the way I think it should.” News flash, Reddit doesn’t work that way either, while you’re not doing it on Reddit…. Lemmy CAN work that way, Reddit… yah good luck.
I get it, mediocrity now is better than improvements later…
I think the logic is more that reddit is not going to close up shop anytime soon. Whereas Dave running a server from his basement genuinely might just shut down any moment. Just because both instances are possible, doesn’t mean they’re equally likely.
Right up until Twitter shut everything off unless you were logged in and throttled you if you are logged in I’d have agreed with you… YouTube is preventing you from watching YouTube if they decide they can’t advertise at you… The point is, big social media has come up with creative ways to make using their service miserable if not impossible. Even reddit is doing it right? I find your assessment of possible versus likely incomplete at best.
What in an account? It’s not the name or karma, because we have display names and no karma (I think it should be per community, but discussions on if we even want it are ongoing, maybe someone will come up with a really clever idea)
If it’s your subs, saved posts/settings, and even getting notifications for responses to your posts/comments I’m building all that into an app. The only thing you obviously couldn’t do is edit - but an account migration method in the federation spec is in the works
But I love decentralization, I think it’s the answer to everything, and it needs to go further.
All important data should live on your device and be updated, and can be applied to a different account (even on a different server)
You should be able to talk to multiple servers at the same time. This one has me stuck in refactoring… But I’m pretty sure I’ve got it down, I just need sleep.
You should be able to do not just filtering, but sorting and discovery at the device level - I’ve got custom filters working, someone asked for a keyword filter, and I thought “that sounds like a bad idea, let’s try it out”. You can also go server by server and do searches, then if you like something, you hit subscribe and it’ll tell your server to start pulling it in
I’ve also got plans to use voting to look at what communities and users you like most, and show you what they like. All without the data leaving your phone.
Centralization makes everything way easier, so it’s a constant temptation. But we’ll get more and more decentralized as time goes on… I’ll drag the fediverse in that direction kicking and screaming myself if I have to… This is too important to just let it become just
Luckily, a lot of the devs building for Lemmy feel that way - at every layer, we’re asking what we can do to take it further
What in an account? It’s not the name or karma, because we have display names and no karma (I think it should be per community, but discussions on if we even want it are ongoing, maybe someone will come up with a really clever idea)
If it’s your subs, saved posts/settings, and even getting notifications for responses to your posts/comments I’m building all that into an app. The only thing you obviously couldn’t do is edit - but an account migration method in the federation spec is in the works
But I love decentralization, I think it’s the answer to everything, and it needs to go further.
All important data should live on your device and be updated, and can be applied to a different account (even on a different server)
You should be able to talk to multiple servers at the same time. This one has me stuck in refactoring… But I’m pretty sure I’ve got it down, I just need sleep.
You should be able to do not just filtering, but sorting and discovery at the device level - I’ve got custom filters working, someone asked for a keyword filter, and I thought “that sounds like a bad idea, let’s try it out”. You can also go server by server and do searches, then if you like something, you hit subscribe and it’ll tell your server to start pulling it in
I’ve also got plans to use voting to look at what communities and users you like most, and show you what they like. All without the data leaving your phone.
Centralization makes everything way easier, so it’s a constant temptation. But we’ll get more and more decentralized as time goes on… I’ll drag the fediverse in that direction kicking and screaming myself if I have to… This is too important to just let it become just
Luckily, a lot of the devs building for Lemmy feel that way - at every layer, we’re asking what we can do to take it further q
What in an account? It’s not the name or karma, because we have display names and no karma (I think it should be per community, but discussions on if we even want it are ongoing, maybe someone will come up with a really clever idea)
If it’s your subs, saved posts/settings, and even getting notifications for responses to your posts/comments I’m building all that into an app. The only thing you obviously couldn’t do is edit - but an account migration method in the federation spec is in the works
But I love decentralization, I think it’s the answer to everything, and it needs to go further.
All important data should live on your device and be updated, and can be applied to a different account (even on a different server)
You should be able to talk to multiple servers at the same time. This one has me stuck in refactoring… But I’m pretty sure I’ve got it down, I just need sleep.
You should be able to do not just filtering, but sorting and discovery at the device level - I’ve got custom filters working, someone asked for a keyword filter, and I thought “that sounds like a bad idea, let’s try it out”. You can also go server by server and do searches, then if you like something, you hit subscribe and it’ll tell your server to start pulling it in
I’ve also got plans to use voting to look at what communities and users you like most, and show you what they like. All without the data leaving your phone.
Centralization makes everything way easier, so it’s a constant temptation. But we’ll get more and more decentralized as time goes on… I’ll drag the fediverse in that direction kicking and screaming myself if I have to… This is too important to just let it become just
Luckily, a lot of the devs building for Lemmy feel that way - at every layer, we’re asking what we can do to take it further
I think it has positives. and the negatives can be adressed with new features like a federated identity . something that could allow you to keep accounts on multiple servers combining subscriptions deduping content and letting you control what user to use to interact.
And it’s extra shitty because Beehaw has the largest technology community in the fediverse, so if you want to access it you better make sure you’re a member of one of their ‘blessed’ federated friends.
largest tech community in the fediverse
TIL. I assumed between lemmy.world, programming.dev, infosec.pub I’d had my tech feed basically covered
This splintering of communities can be a drawback, but it can also be a blessing. Instead of having one account where I do all my social media things, I’ve been categorizing the types of social media I enjoy and creating an account for each category, on the instance that feels closest to that type of media. It’s kind of nice because I know exactly what kind of content subscriptions I’m going to see when I switch to each account. It’s also nice to be able to comment on things and know that people who look at my history will see comments on similar topics. Someone’s opinion on my comments about politics, for example, won’t be colored by my recent comments about extraterrestrials in a different community.
There is some risk of being part of a community that might disappear someday, or become something you don’t like, but that’s a risk present in all social media. As another commenter mentioned, the advantage here is that you can set up your own instance where you can control your own data. It’s actually going to be beneficial that a lot of people do this, so that the fediverse as a whole can handle everyone’s traffic without operation costs ballooning beyond control for any individual instance.
But a consequence of this is the creation of many small communities about the same topics, spread across many instances. I think we will need to create some method of federating many communities across many instances in a categorical way. For example, if I want to see all communities about cooking across all instances, there would need to be some decentralized method of tagging communities by topic. That way you don’t have to decide which community is most representative of what you want to see. And there could be many tags for each community, so if I want to see only videos about only cooking, where only vegan food is shown, there may be a community that ranks high in all those tags.
Instead of subscribing to the community itself, you would just subscribe to the tag, creating a virtual subscription to all the contained communities. You’d be able to see all the communities for your selected topic(s) across the whole lemmyverse. And if you see a community that you think does not belong to something that it’s been tagged with, you can unsubscribe it from the tag so it doesn’t show in that list for you. If more people do the same, that community would fall in ranking on that tag list until eventually it is taken off. But if people upvote content from that community more than communities higher in the ranking, that community would rise in the tag list.
I’m not sure if others would be interested in a system like this, but in my mind, it is the kind of thing we need to have rich curated content at low cost. Okay, I’m done now.
I don’t really like this approach because it’s not personally customizable and wouldn’t be very straightforward. I’d prefer something similar to multireddits where I can make a collection of similar communities.
With the platform at the size that it is currently, I’m inclined to agree with you. But I think in the future, lemmy may become large enough that having a public tagging system would be useful.
Ideally, the two preferences can coexist. The multireddit equivalent would just be a private tag, exclusive to your account. But you could make it public, either anonymously or posted to your account, e.g. tag@pyrojoe@lemmy.world.
Then, all the public tags can be merged at will, so if I make a new account and want to see all communities about birds, I can select the bird tag. If I want to make edits to the tag list without affecting the public tag, I would even have the ability to copy the public tag to my own private tag and prune the communities I don’t like without decreasing their public rankings.
I think this would provide flexible levels of functionality to those who want it, but there may also be hidden consequences of this method that I’m currently missing.
I mean, I was on Beehaw when this happened so had to move my account. It took ten minutes to manually copy over all my subscriptions (and I believe there are automated ways to do that now). Hardly the end of the world 🤷♀️
No. This is just a problem that hasn’t been solved yet! It will be in time haha.
Head back to Reddit the way you came then, friend.
No, discussion is welcome here. Even mine, even yours.
I disagree simply on the basis that they hope to refederate eventually, and it might be good to already be subbed. But yeah.
Okay, guess I just won’t use it then if they defed from my primary instance. Glad they did this now and not later when they became bigger and more important.
If they’re that into making a safe space then fine. Hopefully some other people will also make more free spaces and both of them can exist and everyone can be happy.
I realize that is a highly optimistic outlook to put it mildly. I must remain hopeful to avoid losing my mind, if I haven’t already -.-
shrugs It sounds like they’d happily refederate once the right mod tools are available.
Seems like a pretty reasonable request. Hopefully they get the tools they’re after and then everyone can be even more connected again!
I’m sure there will be tons of volunteers for that, after instance admins make the user experience a horrible mess.
I can’t wait to create 2 more accounts to do the same thing I did with the one I already have.
Can you help me understand exactly how this will affect me? I actually have accounts on both lemmy.world and beehaw.org (I signed up for both when I initially found Lemmy and was trying to figure the whole thing out).
If I’m on my lemmy.world account, will I no longer be able to browse beehaw communities? On the flip side, if I’m on my beehaw.org account, will I no longer be able to browse lemmy.world communities?
Am I understanding things correctly? If that’s the case, then is the only solution to flip back and forth between the two accounts depending on which server the community I’m wanting to browse is on?
At this point it’s too early to tell how well moderation can work in the long term. I’d rather they take it slow than burn out.
Same for any expectations regarding lemmy itself.
I reckon this will hurt Lemmy in the long run
