I'm intrigued by this. However -- and this is probably a cultural thing with me being an old-timey unix guy who likes to build things from scratch -- I have a point of confusion.
If you choose Run A Server, it suggests two main options: Ansible or Docker. It specifically warns against "from scratch".
When I'm developing software, I want people to be building it from scratch. If someone likes something I made enough that they want to take it and build a docker or ansible thing out of it ... okay, that's flattering, albeit a little confusing, and it's not my default.
And I probably wouldn't agree to support those third-party ansible/docker things which someone else felt the need to create.
What happened to rolling a versioned tarball that you can chuck in opt or wherever and point nginx at it? Eg, if I knew I could pull in versions of lemmy server through my package manager, I'd be totally trying it out as my side-project this weekend.
> Disclaimer: this installation method is not recommended by the Lemmy developers. If you have any problems, you need to solve them yourself or ask the respective authors. If you notice any Lemmy bugs on an instance installed like this, please mention it in the bug report.
Supposedly so it's easy to reproduce issues locally. I remember participating in the PHP community long time ago, and constantly having to replicate peoples arbitrary Apache/NGINX configurations just in order to reproduce issues, so it's not surprising that people are using Ansible/Docker for setting up development environments.
I just wished people stopped pushing for that bloated mess in production too, but step by step...
Theoretically, you could run a web server and database both written in rust and have your entire dependency stack contained within cargo. Literally deployment with a single `cargo build` and just a couple weeks of build time
Thanks for the pointer. I guess I was more thinking about the culture involved in explicitly denouncing a from-source build. Sorry if that wasn't clear.
I suppose the Ansible and Docker versions are both built from the source, in a reproducible manner. What would you gain by going through the build steps manually by yourself?
From my point of view, having to build things is a hassle: one needs the dependencies, it will work differently on different OSes/distros, the maintainer needs to keep the build instructions up-to-date and verify manually that they won't break (for all OSes/distros). Ansible or Docker just gives you a reproducible thing, easier to verify in one step whether the build instructions in it still work.
> What would you gain by going through the build steps manually by yourself?
To know your enemy, you must become your enemy - Sun Tzu, "The Art of War".
Developers as well as operators should read Sun Tzu and take what they read to heed. To know what you're running it makes sense to know what you're installing. While this still leaves open the chance of the actual code being riddled with nasty bits it at least removes the chance of the Ansible playbook or dockerfile adding something "extra".
If you look in their docker-compose.yml file, they’re also running an instance of pictrs. So I assume that image uploads would be borked on a manual install. There’s another fork that uses iframely in a similar way
when you maintain an open source project you’re inundated with a constant stream of questions from beginners (no matter how much documentation you have), and using docker eliminates some of those questions
The front-end is still buggy and needs a designer's touch. And the real-time aspects wear thin at scale with all the notifications in a mismatch of languages showing up in the main feed. Lemmy is practically unusable without a personal feed filter, it seems that of the new reddit alternatives only retalk_[1] want to get this right.
If you do decide to run an instance of lemmy be sure to nuke the absurd word filter - the code is designed to make it as difficult as possible to change out. Thankfully some nice souls [2] are maintaining that anti-feature removal.
The problem with Retalk is this: It’s closed sourced.
If we want to talk about Reddit alternatives, I would rather we look at ones which are open source, including Reddit itself until 2017 [1], the Mastodon Twitter-like web app [2], Discourse [3], Lemmy [4] (use a fork [5] if you can’t stand the slur filter), and the old school PHP discussions boards like PhpBB [6] and MyBB [7].
If it was possible to write an effective slur filter, I would not find it completely objectionable. Not because that would be useful to stop people saying completely shit-headed things if they really wanted to (I strongly suspect you could get the entirety of Mein Kampf past that filter), but as a "people who use these words are not welcome" signal, which definitely has some value.
As it is, it's bashing the problem with regular expressions, and doing so badly. I mean, some of those words actually have completely different, non-offensive meanings in certain communities & contexts. (One of a few I spotted: Last time I used "retard" was in the context of ignition timing...)
Writing an effective slur filter is undesirable. No one can stop people saying completely shit headed things. For one, people just work around it. And more importantly for every shit headed thing you restrict you also cut out someone else, even if it's just because of their perception of constraints. The mind has a funny way of editing thought before it even arrives. We can't afford this anymore in our online spaces.
Allow me to add one more, built by me, which is closer to lemmy in functionality being also built on top of ActivityPub: https://github.com/mariusor/go-littr
Reading the whole bug, it's literally a political stance with no teeth or real purpose. It's bizarrely all for show, serves no real purpose, is functionally deficient, and the DEVs know this.
Further, a 10 line script could easily patch each new version, replacing the hardcoded code with a loadable text file.
Done.
Updates would take zero time to deploy.
It's all about taking a position.
Taking a position is fine. But, imagine a self driving car which wouldn't let you drive home to Cuntsington, MA (an example)?
Super strange. One of those artifacts that makes you question the whole project. One of the powers of diving in super deep is you can start to notice internal consistency or dissonance quicker. With this as an example.
It's actually a great feature. It sorts out the edgelords very quickly, while taking 10 minutes to disable for any administrator with a modicum of technical prowess. If removing a regex string from the code is too much work for you, you shouldn't be trusted holding account credentials, email addresses, and private messages of an entire community in the first place.
While the core Lemmy team has been intransigent about this feature, it is pretty clear why they have taken the position they have. They understand something a lot of people here seem to miss. That creating an alternative to Reddit / Twitter / Facebook / etc. is much more a social project than it is a technological project. It doesn't matter how slick your software is. Hell, Reddit's user interface is still dogshit. So is Twitter's. People don't use these platforms for their technological aspects. They use them because of the community.
A former Reddit admin by the name of Deimos decided to create a Reddit alternative as well, named Tildes. The software itself is nothing special. Just another bare-bones link aggregator like Reddit or Hacker News. What made it unique was the "manifesto" and philosophy behind it, which basically boiled down to "place value on effort-posts instead of low-effort slop" and "If your website is full of assholes, you are an asshole."
The failure to recognize this is the reason why a lot of the early Reddit alternatives like Voat instantly turned to dogshit. They were born from a knee-jerk reaction to Reddit getting rid of communities like FatPeopleHate and C**Town, so the only people who migrated were people who were such enormous assholes that they couldn't even fit in on Reddit (a website which is already notoriously full of assholes).
Instead of actually trying to build and nurture a community, or even think of their goal in the terms of a social project, they just tried pushing the technology button. Don't even get me started on the folks who tried to fix Reddit's problems by doing Reddit but blockchain.
In this case it's really about the burden of community moderation. It's a fairly impotent restriction, and yet it serves the social function of discouraging a certain sort from making Lemmy their home. Most Reddit alternatives become really scummy because they attract the people (not "the kind of people", the literal individuals) who get banned from Reddit for pushing anti-Semitism, racism, and misogyny past what Reddit allows. There are a lot of people who thus think "the whole point" of a Reddit-like that isn't Reddit is to be able to post the really awful stuff. The filter obviously doesn't work well to reliably block it -- but it does seem to work to drive off the folks who are looking for a cesspool.
But we aren't talking about a single centralised community. This is a part of the fediverse (decentralised) and where anyone can create a server to host their own community.
If the lemmy team wants to have their slur filter for their "official" instance, they are free to. However, part of being decentralised is to give people the power to run their communities as they see fit and so they shouldn't be beholden to the infallible lemmy devs to maintain a slur list that the community can't manage themselves. Maybe they want to add or remove slurs or remove this filtering entirely, it isn't the place of the lemmy devs to decide that for them.
Yeah exactly. I would expect a tool like Lemmy to acknowledge that slur lists are a thing, make them easy to modify by admins, and make them exposed and easy to reference by users. Join Server / Policies / Word block list. Put it up front and center.
The problem is it cuts the other way too and spooks those who believe in open speech. I'm now uninterested in Lemmy because of this "feature". Anyone who would try to limit the speech of others cannot have my best interests in mind.
The very existence of moderation is a limitation on certain speech. To acknowledge the necessity of any moderation is acknowledge the validity of free speech limitations in certain contexts. Anything beyond that is arguing specifics and thresholds, not categorical morality.
I’m curious if you feel the same way about other features such as the ability to ban users or remove comments, which is in effect is a much greater limit on people’s speech. I can say significantly less as a banned user than as a user who is discouraged from saying the n word (since you can still post those comments. they just end up with the word censored)
Do I think this is good feature? Absolutely not. It’s an anti-pattern. But my read is that it was a stop gap for a site which had a live instance running with minimal resources during early development. The maintainer has said they are removing it. Surely if the slur filter was a moral consideration rather than a practical one, they would have no interest in removing it.
Counterpoint: If you are a member of an oppressed group and the leaders of your community punish people for calling you slurs, it makes it pretty obvious that they do, in fact, have your interests on their mind.
The point of federation is autonomy. Communities can decide on their own how they would like to conduct themselves, instead of having Steve Huffman or Mark Zuckerburg write the rules for them. Several alternative social media websites, including instances of Lemmy, have actually sprung up explicitly because of censorship they experienced on the hegemonic corporate platforms.
Hexbear for instance was born from the ashes of r/ChapoTrapHouse, one of the most active (per capita) communities on Reddit. The Reddit staff pulled the plug in the midst of a generational political crisis and mass civil unrest and didn't even have the nerve to cite a single, specific infraction. And now, the community is free to discuss subversive political topics without having to worry about advertiser boycotts applying pressure to have their community shut down.
This idea that free speech starts and ends with the ability to use slurs is among the most idiotic brainworms which persists among libertarians. Nobody in power gives a fuck if you spend your time spitting on people who have even less power than you do. They only care if you can articulate a political program which threatens their ability to rule.
That is a nice to see after reading several past issues and a closed unmerged PR where innumerable users and (presumably) instance hosts made good faith arguments as to why a hard coded Regex was not only untenable , but antithetical to the ideals of the fediverse — which fell on deaf ears of the developers.
The maintainers can be pretty ruthless about closing issues. I think it’s either about their workflow or about maintaining focus for the main branch’s feature set. Last I knew the core team was two people and maintaining a repo with an increasingly large number of contributors can be super time consuming.
It's the Scunthorpe problem all over again. It's like Youtube flagging that chess channel for hate speech[0] (perhaps because words like "black", "white" and "attack" were used a lot). It will annoy people who're accidentally caught by the filter, and people who want to get past it will figure out a way anyway (by look-alike character substitution or whatever). I think it's the wrong approach to that problem.
Indeed it is. There are comments here and there in the GitHub issues where the devs defend the filter as being targeted at making it harder for "the [American] right wing" to use the platform.
> I don't get the instant -2 downvotes for just providing context.
Well I don't remember the exact phrasing but I think your original comment did have a part asking people not to discuss this further. I can see how this would not be well received.
All software is political. The act of releasing your work for free into the public domain is political. Disagree with his ideology, but anyone who thinks they are above ideology is just unaware of the assumptions they’re operating under.
Ideology is when you disagree with the status quo, and the more you disagree with the status quo, the more ideological you are. And when you disagree with the status quo a whole lot, that's dogma.
> all the notifications in a mismatch of languages showing up in the main feed
I'm not quite expert here, but, IIRC, this language problem is partially inherent to ActivityPub. The sender can attach translations, and the receiver can pick one from the set, but no one knows what's gonna happen if the expectations from both sides don't match.
One might, instead, re-fetch the messages from the sender using HTTP + content negotiation, which will definitely cause different types of headache.
Weird that a Reddit clone wouldn’t be open source. So much for the free speech crowd. thedonald and the .win-iverse did the same thing, but I think it was originally based on postmill.
I agree, for something like this to take off, you need someone to invest heavily up front in creating a user experience which is worth using - which means content.
The tech is the easy part, you need to have a place that is worth going before the tech will be utilized.
And if someone posted a link to a page about the reddit software (which isn't open-source anymore, but was for a long time), you'd also say "this isn't reddit", because the descriptive page doesn't show a front page, but you need to actually go to somewhere the software is installed to see it? That's two clicks!
Run a server / join a server is just your first setup step. After that you join Communities and while these can exist on any other server that yours is federating with (Lemmy has an allowlist for this), you interact with them from your own account on your own chosen server. The federation stuff is now mostly hidden to you, and the default filtered timeline shows stuff from you subscribed communities.
By and large what “isn’t allowed” on major tech platforms is racist, xenophobic, and homophobic content. You can still find a lot of non-PC, fringe content on YouTube, Facebook, Twitter and Reddit.
I get that censorship in major tech platforms is problematic, but the sense of martyrdom in comments like yours feels a little overwrought.
Are you even paying attention? This isn't true. You can be censored from social media for all sorts these days. This last year we had a UK media organisation banned from YouTube for questioning the UK COVID response. People in the US are no longer allowed to question the legitimacy of their elections on most social media platforms. Even US media outlets like the NYPost were censored for running stories Twitter didn't like during the US election.
Yeah, sure you can be banned for questioning if an untransitioned man wearing a wig is really a women, but this isn't what most people are concerned about. The censorship has now gone far further and in many cases to simply disagree with mainstream narrative on some politically charged subject will be enough to have you removed. One of my favour YouTubers "Mouthy Buddha" was banned for making some videos about Epstein and paedophilia -- the guy produced "conspiracy" content but it's really high quality stuff with no hate at all.
I mean even the US president was banned for "violence" despite asking rioters to go home, being acquitted and the FBI finding that there was no coordinated insurrection plan.
I'm not coming at this from any political position. A lot of content social media platforms censor I don't like, but that doesn't mean I think it should be censored. Things like racism have been deliberately defined in a very loose way that practically anything can now be considered racist and used as an excuse to censor. A popular comedian in the UK got banned during the world cup for saying, "all I'm saying is, the white guys scored". He was mocking how the UK media had been running stories for weeks about how the "diversity" of the England team is what made them great, but that wasn't allowed because "racism".
I meant more in the sense of classical left/right divide -- I felt the parent commenter was suggesting it's just right-wing troll types that are being censored, which isn't the case.
I'm definitely in favour of free-speech, I'm just not particularly left or right wing in my political views or voting habits.
> People in the US are no longer allowed to question the legitimacy of their elections on most social media platforms.
> Yeah, sure you can be banned for questioning if an untransitioned man wearing a wig is really a women, but this isn't what most people are concerned about.
> the guy produced "conspiracy" content but it's really high quality stuff with no hate at all.
> I'm not coming at this from any political position.
>People in the US are no longer allowed to question the legitimacy of their elections on most social media platforms.
You mean, they aren't allowed to spread absolute blatant lies and falsehoods, that have already caused at least one deadly riot, in an attempt to overthrow a fair and legitimate election that just happened to not be convenient for their personal agenda? Good.
Your comment is exactly what I'm talking about though. Let's break down your first paragraph, while keeping in mind the context as stated by the parent comment is content that is "not allowed" on major tech platforms:
> This last year we had a UK media organisation banned from YouTube for questioning the UK COVID response.
I'm not from the UK and haven't kept up with news about the UK, so I can't really comment on this one. But out of curiosity I looked it up. If we're talking about the same instance, one of Rupert Murdoch's radio shows was banned for content that YouTube flagged as contradicting the World Health Organization's guidance on COVID. That content was then soon reinstated. That is notably different than saying you are not allowed to "question" the UK government's response to COVID. YouTube misidentifying content on their platform is well documented and happens all the time outside of the context of politics. So again, YouTube's actions here were flawed, but far from the political censorship that you imply.
> People in the US are no longer allowed to question the legitimacy of their elections on most social media platforms.
This is blatantly false, and so easily disprovable. People on Twitter and Facebook constantly repeat falsehoods about election fraud. I just now Googled "youtube biden president illegitimate" and got several results back attacking the legitimacy of Biden's presidency. The funny thing is I only clicked one video because I want to avoid YouTube's recommendation engine thinking this is content I want to see. YT surfaces fringe ideas so readily. How do you think that stuff spread in the first place?
> Even US media outlets like the NYPost were censored for running stories Twitter didn't like during the US election.
Twitter bungled their response on this, and they backed down after they were rightly criticized. One tabloid getting banned from one social media platform is again, not at all close to certain topics not being allowed on major tech platforms. Content attacking Hunter Biden (the topic of the article that got the NYPost banned) happened before, during, and after the the ban. The NyPost is also back on Twitter.
The rest of your claims follow a similar pattern.
I again repeat my assertion that censorship in major tech platforms is flawed and problematic, but the narrative that certain view points are being choked out by tech platforms is simply not true. Fringe ideas have flourished in the age of social media, and would have not entered mainstream discourse if it weren't for the tech industry.
> People in the US are no longer allowed to question the legitimacy of their elections on most social media platforms.
Sounds almost reasonable, except:
Putting a question mark after misinformation and conspiracy theories doesn't magically transform them into reasonable questions.
And pluralizing the word "elections", doesn't fool us into thinking this is about more than the 2020 presidential, and Donald Trump's lie that it was stolen.
It has been thoroughly litigated and found to be legitimate by both public and private entities. Anyone continuing to "question" it most likely has an agenda of undermining that legitimacy.
The definition of what is racist, xenophobic, and homophobic is different from person to person, mod to mod. There are plenty of rational opinions within controversial topics that are just not allowed. This is compounded with the problem of social media that don't allow anonymity, as laws in some western countries actually criminalize rudeness.
Limiting speech means there are plenty of rational opinions we would otherwise miss, options, solutions. It reminds me of that NASA satellite caught throwing away useful data at the system level. If you start editing deeper and deeper eventually you start to throw out important solutions.
We need to keep the solution space as big as possible.
The problem isn't only with being outright blocked, the problem is also that some topics trigger immediate outrage and can't be discussed openly.
For example, try talking about a need for safe spaces for X, and you will immediately get abuse from random strangers complaining that you aren't thinking about Y.
Or try saying anything about treatment Z side effects. You'll be downvoted and insulted for not sufficiently trusting the science.
Some discussions just work better in a less open, moderated forum, where people will try to engage with you, rather than having an angry internet mob materialize out of thin air whenever their trigger topic is mentioned.
> By and large what “isn’t allowed” on major tech platforms is racist, xenophobic, and homophobic content.
That's such a naive and ignorant viewpoint. Everything which one doesn't agree with suddenly doesn't become racist, xenophobic, and homophobic content.
Post from an hour ago:
> Somali feminist: Facebook is being used to silence me
Thanks for saying this with examples. People sure seem to be afraid of their own thoughts if they feel the need to limit speech of others. Must be a hard way to live. And certainly makes life hard for your examples.
These are all from big corporate entities either making (admittedly terrible) mistakes, or using the precedent of those mistakes to hide. These are problems systemically fixed by having human moderators not dependent on ad revenue.
> One only get to understand what censorship feels like when it comes for them.
This looks like you were starting to write "First they came for the" and then realized the next word was "socialists".
They already are coming for anti establishment socialists- Jimmy Dore, Glenn Greenwald etc for example. Anti establishment Tulsi Gabbard got her ad campaign censored too. Right now it just happens to be the case that majority of the censorship is happening on the right but that’s not to mean that anti establishment voices on the left aren’t getting censored.
And now we've moved on to "misinformation" which has no real definition other than being mitigated by so-called fact checkers who mostly work for American for-profit newspapers.
First slow, then all of a sudden. Seems like the move to decentralized platforms may come quickly. I wonder what the precipitating event will be. Any speculation?
Same things I'd normally say because I know anonymous posts on the internet are a terrible medium for rational discussion on controversial subjects. I've sworn off arguing anything with anyone on the internet.
More censorship = less content on social media, which is a good thing for humanity.
Me doxing myself in an anonymous forum doesn't make discussion any better if everyone else is anonymous. It just opens me up to real life attacks.
Plus, honestly non-anonymous discussion of controversial subjects might actually be worse. You still get maximally aggressive interpretation, but you actually know each other so you can lose real friends.
Discussing anything on the internet that makes anyone feel emotional is just a bad thing no matter how you do it. That's why I'm completely fine with censoring anyone with violent views I disagree with. Get them off the internet first, then maybe someday everyone else will get off too.
Also I'm aware I'm being a hypocrite right now just by responding here. I'm supposed to be working. Like I said, the internet is just bad and my hypocrisy is proof of it.
There are important conversations within the LGBT that would be really interesting, but asking questions that could be construed years later as homophobic, no matter now innocent can publicly destroy people.
I'd love to have a discussion breaking down certain ideologies, including the merits as well as demerits of certain controversial groups. But this could actually cross into criminal in the UK with the interpretation of some laws. And certainly come back to haunt me years later publicly.
Contrary to popular opinion that such conversations are censored to death on popular media, there are still discussions like that happening on reddit, for example in subreddits like /r/changemyview or /r/unpopularopinion. It's just that people asking such questions usually either don't even try phrasing them politely and detached from personalities, or are based on incorrect or incomplete data.
Thanks for your thoughtful reply. Can you imagine the raw curiosity and interest we could unleash? Seems like incredible potential.
On the flip side, we have the ability for systems to mine through words and sentence structure and identify commonalities. Perhaps there's like an "on screen keyboard" for conveying meaning without giving up your specific grammar patterns. This kind of editing is so costly for the human race :(
nothing I wouldn't say when I'm not. Are you under the impression everyone is secretly homophobic or throws the n-word around when nobody can see them? If I'd be too ashamed to say something if my name is attached to it I wouldn't say it when it isn't.
you need to be far gone to manage to get yourself kicked off Facebook.
Here is some more documentation on that. It is a bit outdated, and the latest release of Lemmy brought a lot of extensions and improvements to the federation code.
I have to say that it does seem to be pretty good unlike many other federated alternatives to poplar social media platforms.
Pretty good means switching to it will not be too tough for Reddit users since most of the users (anecdata) preferred the older UI to which it is very similar and is easier to use on mobile.
What happens with moderation of unethical subs? The docs say "each instance has a set of administrator Users, who have the power to do site-wide removals and bans." So does that mean someone can start an instance for (as examples) covid deniers or white supremacists and reject any request to ban them? Or is there broader community input?
What happens if I run an instance and these subs become popular - am I going to be liable legally for their use or will a broader community be able to input into their moderation?
My understanding of how federated social networks work is that a server operator can firstly moderate the content on their own server as they see fit, and secondly blacklist other servers from syncing data with their own if they don’t approve of the content it hosts.
At quick glance the communities look very sperate. In my ideal federated dream, most servers would subscribe to most other servers and thus you could see your posts on several of them. Is that the intention here?
FediTips, a Mastodon account, recently shared some concerns about the Uyghur-related content in the largest Lemmy instance, which is run by Lemmy's developers:
This created a firestorm on Lemmy, on which it was noted that Lemmy removes conservative and libertarian communities with the reason "No conservative communities":
> Removed Community conservatives reason: No conservative communities
> Removed Community Libertarian, in the pursuit of a free society reason: No conservative communities allowed
Perhaps the underlying software is fine, but the largest Lemmy instance is not exactly the friendliest to anyone who wants to express themselves more freely than they are allowed to on mainstream social networks.
But you can even host your own instance with all the "conservative" communities you want. Why not do that?
I mean, you must be aware by now that those "conservatives" did ruin a couple of actually good communities in the last years (especially in the reddit clone scene) and some people just don't want to deal with those people at all. And they shouldn't have to.
Why is it that people keep saying ignorant racist trash and then cry about cancel culture and how it’s all the media’s fault. The fact you think people along you out for being disrespectful is everyone but your own fault. And quit blaming the media, if they are such a problem stop watching. Or continue to spend your days watching the elitist con men on your favorite channel and praise an opinion host like a god. You’ve likely broken every law from your magic book and still think your better than every person that can think for themselves instead of being sheep following their masters every word.
The problem arises when people dont actually say "ignorant racist trash" but have a genuine point of discussion(albeit controversial), but are painted with the same brush as real racists and bigots. Resorting to subversive vulgarity is not a good idea.
Could someone ELI5 how the federation model works in practice? From the understanding, there is one entity that owns the core technology but the operators of the servers are distributed and independent. How do they typically manage things like scale, data growth, security, monetisation etc.? Is the experience likely to vary a bit across the operators? And how do users trust which operators then want to join?
Correct. Ownership is governed through intellectual property laws, the type of license used, agreements and so on. Lemmy's code is released under a GNU Affero license, and so ownership and usage are governed under this license.
Large open source projects tend to set up legal entities (foundations, non-profits) which manage their brand, trademark, intellectual property rights and so on.
> but the operators of the servers are distributed and independent.
In the era of classic web forums, you would download a copy of vbulletion, phpbb,... operators would download a copy of the software and set up their own intance(s) on their own server(s).
The federated model operates the same way. The distinction, though, is that all these instances are interconnected. They can communicate with each other. In the federated model, you have an account on server A, but you can use that account to subscribe and see content of and participate on server B.
> How do they typically manage things like scale, data growth, security, monetisation etc.?
Each to their own. Operators work independently. The operator of instance A is entire responsible for their own setup regardless of what happens at instance B. Operators get to set the rules on their own instance as to moderation, monetization, topics, community growth, etc. etc.
Since servers are interconnected, each instance can use an allowlist to determine which other instances, and their users, are allowed to connect and participate. As an operator, you get to decide that users of B can connect with your server, but users of C aren't allowed.
> Is the experience likely to vary a bit across the operators?
Communities are groups of people. Just like in real life, a community establishes its own culture, its own identity, its own way of communicating. So, yes, the experience can vary across the board depending on who's active on your instance.
Functionally speaking, all Lemmy instances operate the same way. You have communities, comment threads, voting, posting, etc. Barring configuration differences, as a user, the experience is quite similar across servers.
> And how do users trust which operators then want to join?
The same way you'd trust your ISP, your bank, the garage that services your car, etc. You read reviews, you try to gauge sentiment, number of users, etc. etc.
Mastodon - a Twitter clone - uses the exact same federation protocols as Lemmy. Mastodon has an order of magnitude more users across its instances. A big feature in Mastodon is the ability to just move your account from one instance to another instance. A thing Lemmy doesn't seem to have at the moment:
That's quite informative. Thank you. What is still confusing though, as an end user if I can participate anywhere from any server, I'm not sure what things to consider before picking a server. It doesn't seem to really matter, does it?
If you're on an instance with a reputation for lax moderation or the other hosts don't like your politics you won't be visible to users on those other hosts. There's a naughty list of hosts that allow free speech or are a home for feminists for example.
I would define myself as pretty progressive, but Reddit's been absolutely dog** due to all the anti-capitalist, populist rhetoric. Every post seems to be filled with comments these days of "eat the rich". Like, you'll have a gif of a dude petting a dog, and then in the comments, they'll be like, "Bro, you're financially oppressing this dog and that's why it's forced to be pet by you" (Hyperbole, but I've seen some crazy stuff).
I just wish, we could have a platform that was; not necessarily politically neutral, but where it didn't consume so much of the site.
Unfortunately when I visit Lemmy, I'm fronted with a lemmygrad.ml, and a "leftist" privacy focused one, which seem to be the only populated instances at the moment. So it doesn't inspire much hope.
I pin the blame on too many users joining due to the mass popularisation of Reddit by YouTubers. At one point, almost every "popular" YouTuber seemed to have these "subReddit review" videos going on, which inevitably created a large boom in Reddits user base (it grew exponentially in the last 2-3 years). Suddenly Reddit went from being focused on fun/discussion/discovery/curiosity to mass populism and extreme echo-chamberism . The curious folks who originally were the soul of reddit were lost in the noise of "common" people barging in.
Which is why Lemmy needs more users to promote diversity and mainstream usage. Right now its filled with leftists mostly because they get banned from sites like reddit.
The thing I enjoy about Lemmy is that you can join an instance and if you don't agree with the policies and the people there you can join a different instance.
I was expecting your link to make some kind of point to substantiate your "anti-diversity" claim. This just shows they don't allow slurs on the platform.
It is not populated by leftists because they get banned elsewhere, it is populated by leftists because the developers (who are also the admins of the earliest, biggest instances) are loud and proud self avowed Marxists.
Which is fine, write code, live by your beliefs, but enforcing them in software on other people who might implement it is what I have a problem with.
Platform designers have a lot of control over features that influence (nudge is the official word I suppose) user behavior. But lets not kid ourselves, in large part the social media activity reflects also the attitude of people who participate.
Open source and federated platforms like lemmy will not magically fix the problem( * ). But they come with two killer advantages: 1) They are open, transparent and evolvable, hence diverse people can work on solutions and 2) Don't have private data monetization as their defining business model which frees up potential to explore less antisocial possibilities.
These "big picture" aspects will take some time to play out in full. But if you have the time there is nothing preventing you from setting up an instance that would strike the right balance (pun) and create history :-)
( * ) What would a "fix" look like? well thats not a easy question to get consensus on, but a workable definition is that at least people do not behave worse than in real life (as in person-to-person contact if you remember what that is :-)
Wait. You mean those "Heckin adorable Police Pupperino" threads that inevitably pop up on r/DogsWithJobs and r/Pics without fail every time the cops lynch another Black man?
It also appears that lemmygrad.ml is run on the same machine as lemmy.ml. (Same IP, and when main instance when down for technically reasons, lemmygrad did simultaneously)
Reddit banned the main catch-all leftist subs, and all of the accounts that posted there are now not allowed to congregate in a subreddit or it will be banned, and they can't create subreddits, regardless of what they actually posted
Lemmy development is coming along great, but there are some things I think don't make a lot of sense on a federated network.
1) at the very least there should be an option to run it as a single community, not multiple communities. Federation means you can have multiple communities, each on their own server, the whole user created multi community paradigm makes sense on centralized services like reddit. Added bonus, you remove site administration and have only moderation, removing bureaucratic layers is good.
2) subscriptions on federated services should ideally be handled client side. If I want to subscribe to a community feed, needing to log in doesn't make sense when a community I follow might not be on my home server. I should only need authentication to interact.
Independent as in: closed off? Servers that don't federate are extremely rare ime, except for the likes of Gab that most people just choose not to federate with.
Remote follow don’t work as good as hardcore users would like it to. Federation mechanisms would have to have kilo- to mega-posts/second bandwidth but not happening.
Also that federation choice being in hand of instance owners makes an account on each instances a must. You are going to have a person or two that your instance owners don’t like, or instance or two that don’t like yours.
Lemmy's default instance leans heavily to the contemporary american idea of leftism. This doesn't affect the actual software in any way, only that community is a bit disturbing.
I do not mean ideologically. Just in conversation. More of us learning to talk with one another better is a really good thing.
The American idea of leftism varies widely, and on all axis too.
A similar thing can be found in the right.
Both have populist factions that have a lot in common. Many identify as indie too. They lack a solid party home.
Both have moderate and conservative factions too.
Authoritarianism is also on the rise generally.
All of this can be disturbing. I find the economic policy that way right now myself. Labor seems to be organizing though. Others see that as disturbing!
What I know, having had a ton of conversations in various venues around the nation is the body politic is far more complex. Everyone is listening to some loud or compelling voices and not talking with one another near enough to garner a better sense of where people are at and how policy might make a whole lot better sense.
It does not have to be disturbing. Shouldn't in my view.
The creators say they don't want people not of their ilk joining so this idea that open debate is welcome is disingenuous. They don't allow anyone to federate with the main instance either if they don't also toe the political line.
Can you explain what "don't allow anyone to federate with the main instance" means in this case? Is it like you can host your own server, but the "index" of servers at lenny.ml won't list you unless you meet their standards?
Seems acceptable to me (anyone else can host their own index right?) just trying to understand.
Yes it’s like that. Mastodon has the same thing going on, where the main index from their official site and the biggest instances won’t peer with you (let your users and theirs interact in each other’s instances) unless you implement their rules and moderation requirements in your instance. For mastodon what that means is that instances that aren’t progressive/far left aren’t welcome and are essentially not viable because they have no user base or network effects to seed their community with.
I'm imagining - finding a topic or person or something that you want to follow, and then, your 'instance' / host pops up with "the thing you are trying to get data from is banned from this host".
Seems like an excellent opportunity to upsell someone to starting their own host / own rules system.. Star your own droplet for $10 a month maybe?
Fascinating. Well that clearly doesn't work. It's almost like having an index at all forces a ranking or framing. And so perhaps the index itself is what needs to go.
I find the answer in most cases is worries over personal judgement.
More of us quit doing that and more people will have that conversation.
I usually lead with, "ignore the talking heads on TV."
Worked wonders for me. I enjoy politics and culture again as do others I talk to.
The other basic worry is inability to manage a conversation coupled with the idea of ideology being the means to better ends rather than the reasoning tool it really is. A person who maintains one ideology, sans a working understanding of others, will feel threatened when its merit is challenged.
Fact is we have many solutions to the problems we face with no requirement they all conform to a single ideological frame.
I tried to do this on a few different sites, but in my experience, there simply aren't enough good-faith actors. The dirtbag left[0] reigns over the nice fellows in leftist circles on Reddit, Twitter, and Facebook. They don't want to engage capitalists in debate... they don't even want anyone in their own ranks playing devil's advocate. They want to call you a chud and take a screenshot of it.
For what it's worth, the same query applies left, right, whatever.
I like to lead with how is it all for you and how did you arrive where you are politically?
Common struggles, life stories, other things help start a conversation.
Then it's give and take.
The idea of any side, particular ideology being right, best fit, one size fits all is crazy! That isn't reality.
Talk about it from there.
Many would agree money in politics is bad, for example. I sure do. Another interesting chat is the for profit motive.
Compare and contrast public utilities. The one where I live is straight up government, runs at cost plus. A few miles down the road it's private. Runs at cost plus margin, plus...
All other variables are the same, and what's the impact?
Power is very reliable where I live. It's not so much down the road. Why?
There are many things to discuss like this and get a sense of where the ideologies apply well and where they don't, and after a time, people begin to realize "their team" is playing them for profit due to corruption.
And they are! Make no mistake!
Gets better from there.
I am having these every chance I get. Every time I get someone out of the ideology as means to better ends trap, that's someone who will consider policy, features, benefits, costs, risks and that's all we can ask for, and all we need.
It's also someone willing to talk about money in politics, legal corruption here and what that all really means in terms of ordinary people getting reputable, meaningful representation.
All of that is a foundation for action later on when this stuff bubbles up into something we can actually act on.
If you want leftists to engage with you in good faith, you simply need to ask the right questions. Questions that demonstrate a baseline of familiarity with the history and theory being interrogated.
The Left isn't averse to debate. The Left is averse to repeating the same tired arguments about iPhones and authority and "human nature" until the heat death of the universe. Things that have been addressed in great detail for over a century.
There is actually a lively debate taking place. It just typically doesn't take the form of Zizek vs. Peterson SuperBowl style spectacles. It takes place in literature, and in meetings among organizers trying to actually accomplish their goals. People like that don't give a flying fuck what John Stossel or Ben Shapiro have to say. This mainstream "debate culture" is so far detached from the actual struggles taking place.
I mean, there is a large (by Lemmy standards) Leninist server, which is indeed pretty left. But the idea that Leninism is widely embraced by the contemporary American left is a bit hysterical.
Leninism may not be by but Maoism was explicitly adopted by parts of the radical left in the 70s, many of whom are still influential for the current generation.
I'm not the person you replied to, but today's American leftism practically mandates a belief in blank-slatism on race, gender, and IQ, to an extent that’s inimical to sincere science in those areas. And that ends up having a wide impact on science generally and policy generally.
Oh they don't like it when you repeatedly point out your favorite very sincere scientific facts collected by sincere scientists with the best calipers?
Modern American leftism, at least on social media, is really weird.
You have a lot of these so-called leftists rebelling against the philosophies of Marx and other communist philosophers on very fundamental issues (e.g. gun ownership for the proletariat, or the freedom of speech) all because of the current political climate in America. At the same time, these people will support and protect Big Tech and other capitalist interests when it is politically convenient to do so. I've heard American leftism once jokingly called Socialism with Silicon Valley Characteristics.
Ask any one of these new-age leftists what they think of Alex Jones' YouTube channel being banned, and they will hit you with a response that would disturb any of the Gen X leftists who grew up in an era where Communist was a dirty word and the protection of free speech was a top-most necessity. New-age leftists have grown up in the left-sympathetic social media era and cannot conceptualize the pendulum ever swinging the opposite direction.
In practice I think mainstream liberals are the gleefully censorious ones, not leftists. In a sibling comment I called these guys losers, but you can't argue that they're not walking the walk by setting up their own platforms. The people in these alt communities have been kicked off Reddit for rightfully pointing out how astroturfed it is by advertisers, police, and military agencies, so I'm not sure if you'd find much love for big tech among their ranks.
Setting up your own community with specific standards is totally fine imo.
>Setting up your community with specific standards is totally fine imo
In some sense I agree, but what happens when these communities begin to overflow with people, and chaos increases? It leads to opinion suppression( no I'm not talking about extreme opinions on any side of the political spectrum , I'm talking about opinions which differ from the status quo ), echo-chamber creation, and worst of all, unnecessary aggressive behaviour and mud slinging.
This criticism could just as easily apply to Reddit. The entire thing is an echochamber of American civic religion and they ban any subversive communities. Their director of content policy was plucked straight out of the Atlantic Council for f sake.
The thing that's weird is trying to group a bunch of people with differing sub-views on things into one "leftist" group and then trying to judge them all at once. Obviously they'll seem odd when you do that.
American rightism essentially leans towards Christian theocracy.
Does that lend itself more to your intellectual curiosity?
There are obviously other political spectrums, but those are all extremely insignificant minorities. Surely you don't only find satiation to your curiosities in said extreme minorities, that seems rather unfulfilling as any meaningful advancement in them is highly statistically unlikely in you or your direct childrens lifetimes.
For the same reason all the orthodox authoritarian ideologies are disturbing. Why would I want to join an online discussion forum where free thought isn't welcome?
Having "leftist" in the description makes people (at least myself) automatically jump to the conclusion that one can get cancelled/banned/deplatformed for posting any thought or argument that disagrees with the mainstream. I'm not a conservative or anti-vaxxer or anything like that, but this culture really creeps me out.
Also in the About page the author of the software says things like:
> [Reddit's] libertarian founders have allowed some of the most racist and sexist online communities to fester on reddit for years
(Implying that this community wouldn't permit certain types of discussion, defined by very broad and ambiguous terms that were weaponized such that they can be used against anyone who disagrees with the leftist ideology in any way).
And criticizes reddit for being:
> liberal, and pro-US, not left (leftism referring to the broad category of anti-capitalism)
I wouldn't be comfortable with participating in a discussion moderated by a person who says things like that.
Also, as a person who grew up in a country ruined by "anti-capitalism", I find that trend in American culture extremely disturbing. Can you think of any anti-capitalist country (now, or at any point in history) that you'd like to live in?
Luckily this is a free software and anyone is free to run their own instance.
Politics aside - I wonder if it would be possible to create an instance focused on free speech, without automatically attracting all the worst people?
> Why would I want to join an online discussion forum where free thought isn't welcome?
Every community has ideas about what's right and wrong, and there will always be people who disagree. Moderation will always be required because that's just the nature of communities.
> Politics aside - I wonder if it would be possible to create an instance focused on free speech, without automatically attracting all the worst people?
To the point I just made: no, it's not possible refrain from moderating a community and then avoid having people there who engage in behavior you don't like. If your definition of "free speech" includes a complete lack of moderation, then you'll always run into this problem.
You seem to place authoritarianism and capitalism on opposite ends of some spectrum, but they're unrelated. Russia, for example, is both authoritarian and capitalist.
Capitalism != individual freedom != democracy. Those are all separate axes.
> Having "leftist" in the description makes people (at least myself) automatically jump to the conclusion that one can get cancelled/banned/deplatformed for posting any thought or argument that disagrees with the mainstream. I'm not a conservative or anti-vaxxer or anything like that, but this culture really creeps me out.
Outside of maybe 8chan, what is a community that won't ban you for saying something they find harmful? Left/right/liberal/conservative communities all have this.
It's totally fine if a self-described left-leaning community is not for you, but there's nothing weird or creepy about it.
One way in which capitalism is closer to individual freedom is the notion of voluntary transactions between two parties. That is what ultimately makes up the market dynamic of supply and demand. There are some limits to this - for example with monopolies - but in the typical case I think this reasoning holds.
Somebody can correct me if my timeline is off, but I think Lemmy was largely embraced by exiled Chapos, much like Voat became a Groyper den.
I don't think it's even worth considering such a community left-wing. They're more like an anime poisoned grooming circle that embraced red aesthetics for shock value.
However pathetic that sounds though, I'm the bigger loser for even being familiar with this nonsense.
The American left manages to combine the worst of the traditional far left - authoritarianism, enforced collectivism, a total lack of ideological flexibility combined with an as total lack of historical insight - with a willingness, nay eagerness to use non-state commercial actors to enforce their doctrine. It is as if they read Ayn Rand and decided that she got everything backwards so they made their own philosophy of Subjectivism, with a sprinkling of critical theory and a dash of Maoism.
i genuinely think this sort of good, do for ourselves, improve the world attempt- software as public good- is something that the left has a far far stronger bead on. the right, for all their history of rugged individualism, doesn't have a participatory background, doesn't have techno-inclusivity & open cyber-frontiers in their value-system.
it's unastounding to me in the extreme that the right has very little presence on most of the fediverse.
Society as a whole, consistently tends to be more left wing than people appreciate. If you survey people in private, they show both selfish and collectivist opinions. In public, in some economies, declaring the collectivist view is harder. Collectivism, is essentially "left wing". It's the sense there is some basic equity out there, nobody "deserves" more (or less) than the individual. (obviously this is modulated by reality, economic and political)
I like to believe 'we' are in a real majority. The point is the same, even if this isn't true: It's not some mythic 50/50 world, and there is no phantom "equity" out there which is a "balance" between libertarian-right, centerist and left views.
Apes, penguins, take your pick. Collectivism is out there. Its a basic model. I'd call it "herd mentality" but that tends to have negative connotations. Sure, there are apex elements in collectivism. It doesn't undermine the main thesis: There is more collectivism, essential left-wing thinking, than a lot of people credit.
In the US, because of individualism, this is often ignored. The belief "most" people in the US simply want to a) be left alone to b) sink or swim on their own and c) pay less taxes is a bit distorted. Really? They just want c).
The United States leftism leans heavily to the contemporary idea of all other developed western nations rightism... so are we to be seen as a bit disturbing by the rest of our nation peers? (hint, they mostly seem to :D )
Im saying that the current state of our (US) moderate left is effectively most other places moderate right.
Our far left is most other places moderate left. Do you not see this to be true?
Our far right is just full blown fascist/Christofacist now. We have $10,000 bounties on the heads of those assisting in seeking medical care in one of our largest states now.
Federated Reddit and federated toots and all that shit are just too obtuse and like the old regime. It's too hard to set up and run your own node, and joining an existing one is just like joining Reddit or Facebook.
The optimal way to distribute social news: bittorrent-style P2P swarms.
People copy and paste news articles with photos (maybe this is piracy?) and share them as files with known hashes. The swarm pulls down all the articles for you to read locally without ads or scripts. No HTML and script garbage. Beautiful plaintext with minimal markdown-style markup.
A core group of 5 or so people alone can probably scrape what's valuable of the old web on a daily basis, rendering the need for the web moot. The web is going away anyway with the social media giants. We should just own the method of distribution instead of having it locked away in Medium and AMP.
User identities in the system are PGP signed, but can be effectively anonymous. You follow people that you upvote frequently, and articles they upvote are given higher priority in your feed. You share your voting with others to create rich filters. If the system detects noise, you know where in the graph it comes from and can nuke it. It'll take time to build a reputation, so people won't risk it.
You can layer comments on top and distribute them the same way.
Content is ephemeral as you want and decays naturally if nobody keeps or seeds it. Some archive team might want to keep stuff, but nobody else has to go to the trouble of maintaining infrastructure to do so.
No spam. No ads. No VC-funded growth engines that require your phone or a mobile app. Just a solid protocol and beautiful reading and authoring client.
The protocol should include a plaintext legal preamble / poison pill that prevents companies from ever trying to coopt it: BEGIN. BY EMITTING THIS PROTOCOL, WE OFFER SHARES EQUIVALENT OF 1% OF OUR COMPANY ON A DAILY BASIS TO ANYONE WHO CONNECTS TO THIS CLIENT. Or something to make "embrace and extend" impossible by forcing companies into an impossible legal contract.
If you choose Run A Server, it suggests two main options: Ansible or Docker. It specifically warns against "from scratch".
When I'm developing software, I want people to be building it from scratch. If someone likes something I made enough that they want to take it and build a docker or ansible thing out of it ... okay, that's flattering, albeit a little confusing, and it's not my default.
And I probably wouldn't agree to support those third-party ansible/docker things which someone else felt the need to create.
What happened to rolling a versioned tarball that you can chuck in opt or wherever and point nginx at it? Eg, if I knew I could pull in versions of lemmy server through my package manager, I'd be totally trying it out as my side-project this weekend.