I just said “Lemmy” and they went forward from there.
Helping people pick an instance is not as straight-forward task as many people claim. e.g. if you love programming, then perhaps programm.dev is right for you, except right now they are having enormous federation difficulties - e.g. https://programming.dev/post/20692281. They are far from the only ones doing so though - https://feddit.org/post/3524876 - and yet they do have more difficulties than most.
Any instance that is not Lemmy.World itself is going to suffer right now, until the deployment of 0.19.6 - https://github.com/LemmyNet/lemmy/pull/4623. And yet people piling on top of the already too-large pile of Lemmy.World will only make the future problems worse. This whole “federation” concept is still experimental, compared to a single-server model like Reddit had.
Blaze often tells people to go by default to lemm.ee. Which is one of the rare instances that defederates from none of hexbear.net, lemmy.ml, or even lemmygrad.ml. So if someone comes across this advice and follows it… BTW, Lemmy.cafe likewise defederates from almost nothing, except it DOES defederate from those big 3 (caveat: it seems run by only a single administrator, so is therefore far less stable than e.g. lemm.ee, and could disappear at any time - though there are so many other things about that instance that are so welcoming and friendly, and btw it is one of the very select few that are already running 0.19.6-beta! so a single admin yes, but one who seems VERY on the ball!).
But ultimately you are correct: they control the sourcecode, so it is YOU who are using THEIR platform - and they WILL do it THEIR way, regardless.
Until and unless more people switch to Mbin, PieFed, or eventually Sublinks. Admiral Patrick who developed Tesseract for dubvee.org and who has blocked lemmy.ml users has pledged to switch to Sublinks whenever it will come out. In the meantime you can view a demo, but I haven’t heard of any developments for it for like half a year. So I switched to PieFed, and am posting several bug reports to help make it better. I advise people to check all of these options out just to see what’s out there, though definitely more is yet to come due to the hard work from these very helpful developers!
And credit where it’s due: Dessalines is helping in his own way, to reduce people’s dependency upon Reddit, and offering that codebase completely free of charge - that’s not nothing. Though administering a server instance is an entirely different skillset… and if we want to see the Fediverse grow rather than shrink with time, I think that better fences are going to be necessary (or mere labels would be even better, except they seem to militantly refuse to do such - but could you imagine if “politically extremist” content had a label just like all the NSFW posts do? then we could all get along side-by-side in the same space).
Nobody enjoys being punched in the face, or to see their (or why not ANY?) nation mocked - especially normies who may have DEEP knowledge of their subject matter, yet happen to not use Arch Linux btw, or may not be actual full-on communists (yet?).
Right, and for people who want that low defederation, lemm.ee is not just a good but a great option. Though for normies, it may be turning people away.
But as you said, what other options are there? Lemmy.cafe seems so perfect in so many ways. Like their welcome messages are actually helpful, e.g. pointing people to [email protected], as opposed to e.g. “What is Lemmy.ml” that is just a broken link to nowhere, or Lemmy.World’s Getting started guide that doesn’t mention things such as cross-posting. But then again, normies especially wouldn’t like it when/if the instance suddenly has to shut down for whatever reason… I get you there.
So who else defederates from the entirety of the big 3? (Btw lemmy.cafe defederates from almost nothing but these, and threads ofc, so still has e.g. NSFW and anime instances linked. And quokk.au likewise has only a single admin.) Or better yet allows custom user blocking? PieFed does, Tesseract on dubvee.org, and perhaps some apps (not sure which ones - and the trick is that some appear to at first glance, but it’s merely the same Lemmy back-end blocking that doesn’t block users, only communities). And I’m not clear about Mbin - I think not.
Moreover, nearly every instance other than Lemmy.world is having federation issues with lemmy.world right now. But we can’t just keep sending people to lemmy.world bc it’s the only one that always works for >80% of the content on the Fediverse? That would somewhat work, but be a purely short-term solution. Yet nothing else would work… e.g. I made a post from StarTrek.website to tenforward on lemmy.world and couldn’t see the comments (or votes) that people made to it for at least 2-3 days. Eventually I responded from a third instance involved - discuss.online - but federation issues such as this tend to have a cooling effect in terms of shutting down conversations. This stuff is going to turn normies away as well, on top of the toxicity issues.
So there are problems with every instance. At least you get your choice of which issues you want to deal with:-). The toxicity issue though is particularly what has driven away 100% of the people that I’ve mentioned Lemmy to irl, so it seems to be the major one. Perhaps if not for it they might have joined Lemmy and then left it later, but as it is they refuse to even consider it bc they can’t get past that. So THAT is the one that I think we need to focus on to get more people. At which point yeah, perhaps add Lemmy.cafe to the recommendation list? Alongside PieFed that allows custom user blocking of whatever instance you want - and I mean the good kind, blocking not just communities but all comments as well.
Perhaps the reason that people are mentioning the defederation issues is due to Mastodon’s heavy fragmention and inability to really search for content outside of someone’s initial chosen instance? (Though that feature seems to be coming “soon™”.) If so that would make a LOT of sense?! However, the difficulties faced by Lemmy are of a different sort. Not being able to search for content from any other instance is nowhere near the same as e.g. the Western world defederating from an instance that constantly mocks and disrespects everything that it does - and kinda vice versa btw bc there is much that the Western world does not respect about how the Eastern world (specifically Russia and China) does things as well, e.g. the extremely heavy-handed banning from all communities, and how the East is “not” doing genocide, fully and literally directly, even while the USA “is” (I mean it low-key is, but how does that justify the Ukrainian invasion or the Uyghur situation?!) - the whole “one rule for thee, an entirely different set of rules for me” thing is a real turn-off for people to remain in the Fediverse. So while I don’t doubt that people are asking for instances that aren’t defederated from anything, I do question whether that’s truly what they want, especially “they” meaning the majority of normies. It’s complicated bc some truly do want something like lemm.ee, while on the other hand I see some people leaving Lemm.ee wanting to go somewhere that defederates from at the very least Hexbear. It’s one thing to foster and encourage STRONG diversity of opinions, but it’s another to open the door to people who consistently argue in bad faith (and rarely if ever do not do such). The former makes dull conversations better, while the latter ends conversations entirely.
You might have higher chances of convincing lemm.ee, lemmy.zip, lemmy.dbzer0.com, discuss.tchcs.de to defederate hexbear, than getting a small instance that does popular enough to enter the top 20
Or you can convince lemmy.cafe to get another admin, and get a bit more “professional” (a la lemmy.zip)
I covered the federation issues in my other comment.
PieFed allows users to decide their own personal defederations without needing to depend upon an instance admin for that.
Hopefully as the UI gets more developed, people will gravitate more to PieFed, or Sublinks.
If the worst were to happen (another Ernst/Kbin.social situation) then any instance with only a single admin is indeed vulnerable, as is any instance that remains federated with it due to the inevitable spam attacks that will come from it.
Though the issues with federation with lemmy.ml are also important too. See e.g. that recent discussion at https://lemm.ee/post/45248880, where the admins expressed a desire for OP to physically commit suicide, all based on an easily preventable misunderstanding about a situation that happened in a game. Just to underscore how ridiculous what we are talking about is, here is a mini run-down of the facts: one non-existent irl character kissed another non-existent irl character, who had been dating in the game for awhile btw, having reached a “hearts” level of 8 of 10 points so quite an established relationship showing mutual interest, whereupon the 2nd character had just given a bouquet of flowers to the 1st one, who then kissed the 2nd one in a surprised and pleased movement, which the ML admins described as “sexual assault” (mistakenly thinking that that did not happen until reaching 10 of 10 points), banned the OP, oh and in the process also told the OP kill themselves. This sounds like insane ranting on my part I know, but it all actually happened!?!?!?! And it’s not even something that we need to hear second-hand stories of, it’s all right there in the modlogs preserved for anyone who wants to see directly.
It is because of events such as that - which KEEP HAPPENING - that I have stopped recommending Lemmy to anyone. Though I would love to start recommending PieFed as its UI improves a bit - and I will be helping that process along by submitting loads of bug reports to their team!:-) In the meantime, perhaps the downsides of instances such as lemmy.cafe being run by a single administrator do not seem so bad? After all, lemmy.ml has an entire team of administrators - but that did not stop SagXD from losing their account there, suddenly and without warning. Nor macniel or any of the others that we keep hearing about happening. That is why we are saying that having a single admin is bad right - b/c it is vulnerable to go down without warning? Afaik, I’ve never heard that lemmy.ml has offered a warning first before smashing the entire instance-wide ban hammer, even against a mod of a community there. Nor, again even for a mod there, do they even so much as tell them that it happened. Or explain what the cryptic modlog messages mean, which look at first glance as if they pertain only to individual communities, leaving people confused and having to figure out on their own what happened?
So anyway which is worse: a community with a single admin, or one with a whole team that is unhinged and somehow even more likely to boot someone, and with a demonstrated pattern of doing exactly that whenever it suits them?
And then ofc hexbear is a whole other thing too - who wants to be actively bullied, like why would that be fun for most of us, especially normies? If someone REALLY wants to be exposed to thus, then okay I won’t stop them, but it really does seem to me like it would be helpful to at least offer a WARNING to new users that it is likely to happen. Which afaik lemm.ee does not do. Maybe as you recommend lemm.ee you can attach such a warning?
Possibly something like: “if you want an instance that is connected all servers across the fediverse, such does not exist but the closest seems to be lemm.ee, although be warned that it federates with known multiple instances known to encourage trolling behaviors; otherwise lemmy.cafe seems quite welcoming although it is small and with only a single admin so is less stable than others.”
As you say, nothing is perfect. All we can do is try to help manage and perhaps mitigate this absolute shit-storm. Thanks for all your efforts there:-).
See e.g. that recent discussion at https://lemm.ee/post/45248880, where the admins expressed a desire for OP to physically commit suicide, all based on an easily preventable misunderstanding about a situation that happened in a game.
The tricky aspect with lemmy.ml is that they host the most active open source communities. So recommending everyone to block them would probably make Lemmy as a whole appear hostile, as you need to choose between accessing open source communities and blocking a hostile instance.
To be fair, at this point in time, you might probably want to create a dedicated community to discuss this issue with the rest of the people (maybe [email protected]) and agree on a potential action plan.
I feel like we’ve had this conversation two or three times in the last few weeks, it’s not really solving the core issue.
Not… entirely, but yes an entire section dedicated to “hardcore tankies” helps!:-) I suppose that helps more for people brought in via Reddit, but not word-of-mouth recommendations, so if I am speaking of the latter then the burden is on me, and upon everyone else doing likewise, to “warn” their irl friends that they recommend to take a look at Lemmy. Which is why I am saying that it would be good to add automated labels. I think we are still waiting for a Lemmy upgrade though, that would allow for those? Or perhaps people are waiting specifically for 0.19.6 when Lemmy.World will upgrade, leading the way.
Lemmy.World naively might seem the most likely to attach a warning label to Lemmy.ml communities, seeing as e.g. they have defederated entirely from Hexbear.net, whereas so many other instances do not even do that much.
Though for myself, the longer this goes on the less faith I have that it will ever be fixed whilst remaining dependent upon the Lemmy.ml + lemmygrad.ml admins & devs to help accomplish the goals of bringing in more mainstream normies from the Western civilization that they so abhor and constantly ridicule. Why should they? They themselves do not want that. It is a harsh truth but we are on their platform, and that’s that. We will receive what they deign to offer. Which is why I am trying now to help PieFed thrive, despite how far behind it is, and it would be great to see Sublinks arrive as well.
I feel like we’ve had this conversation two or three times in the last few weeks
You keep asking questions though… so I kept answering them:-P. I feel like we got some addditional clarity on your only focusing on the top 20 instances.
Little by little, progress is made. This issue is not entirely solvable though, using current methods available to us - e.g. the issue you mentioned that the desires of users to avoid being bullied are at cross-purposes with being able to access particularly the FOSS content such as [email protected]. I will say that “accessing open source communities” isn’t terribly hard - you don’t even need an account for that, though indeed lacking one would cut someone off from participating by asking questions, posting, replying, and voting. Which is why something like a “community label” holds such appeal to me, and even more approaches such as PieFed’s ability to enact user-initated user-blocking of custom user-specified instances without the need for the approval of an entire admin team and thereby the support of an entire community. It thereby democracizes blocking, making it available to anyone who wants it, which I for one think is awesome!?:-) Though the UI needs some polish, so I will focus on submitting bug reports to help with that.
You keep asking questions though… so I kept answering them:-P. I feel like we got some addditional clarity on your only focusing on the top 20 instances.
For me, writing things such as "many instances are having federation issues with LW’ lacks nuance, and people less aware of the context could just read this with “well, the whole thing does not work anyway, I’ll just quit this place”, which is probably not the message we want to convey.
That’s why I focus on the top 20, because that’s where the vast majority of the userbase is, and in those instances, only aussie.zone really experiences federation issues due to LW size (pg.dev is a different issue, it’s their own database that is corrupted)
Though for myself, the longer this goes on the less faith I have that it will ever be fixed whilst remaining dependent upon the Lemmy.ml + lemmygrad.ml admins & devs to help accomplish the goals of bringing in more mainstream normies from the Western civilization that they so abhor and constantly ridicule. Why should they? They themselves do not want that. It is a harsh truth but we are on their platform, and that’s that. We will receive what they deign to offer. Which is why I am trying now to help PieFed thrive, despite how far behind it is, and it would be great to see Sublinks arrive as well.
That’s probably the consensus among the community. But as we all know, there are only so many people interested in developing Lemmy alternatives.
About the lemm.ee vs lemmy.cafe choice for instance suggestion, would you like to open a thread on https://piefed.social/c/[email protected] ? That way we can have more people voicing their opinions on the matter.
I started gathering some thoughts to make a post - I had intended [email protected] but it could be cross-posted, or whatever - about ways to block an instance. I got stuck with Mbin but finally have what I need there. The thing is: I lack the knowledge of which Lemmy apps will allow you to implement user blocks - and I mean the full defederation kind, not just the mere “community blocking” that does not block the comment replies of users from those instances. Do you know more about that? If you could give me a paragraph or table or link to point to or some such, then perhaps this weekend I could try to write that post.
I made a post from StarTrek.website to tenforward on lemmy.world and couldn’t see the comments (or votes) that people made to it for at least 2-3 days.
May I ask you why you keep bringing that issue, when it has been solved in the meantime, and is a specific Piefed issue? Lemmy users on any of the top 20 instances are not experiencing federation issues, with the sole exception of programming.dev
First, I hope nobody is taking any of this personally. We were talking here about how to reach out to normies, and whatever best way there is to do that.
Second, you misread my comment. It is true that MANY instances are having issues with Lemmy.World. My own comment here said “from StarTrek.website” (to be most clear I mean https://startrek.website/c/[email protected] ), which itself is a different instance than PieFed.social, so I experienced these federation issues multiple times this very week, from two distinct places - i.e. I’m not continuously bringing up the same issue, I’m adding new ones to the pile, to show that it’s not just PieFed’s fault. And I don’t think I mentioned here yet that those issues also affected https://discuss.online/c/[email protected] - after a day or two the latter started to catch up but it was still a day behind lemmy.world. That’s 3 instances all struggling to receive that same content, none fully succeeding (at the time).
If anything it’s Lemmy.world’s “fault” but only in the diagnostic sense of being centrally positioned in this debacle rather than blame being a “responsible” party to have caused it or being able to fix it. Though fortunately, 0.19.6 should help provide a fix for exactly this, and the Lemmy devs are currently doing their due diligence to test it out before deployment to the entire world:-).
And I am far from the only one mentioning such - here’s one example and here’s another. Also, the issue with my personal post was just a few days ago, so even if these federation issues are intermittent they are still ongoing, and seem like they will continue until such time as Lemmy.world finishes its update process to 0.19.6.
There was one peak at 2 hours, that was was a single occurrence:
For programming.dev, they seem to indeed have issue with their database. To be honest, the way it’s going, it would almost make sense to suggest people to switch to other instances, the issues have been going on for a while.
I am well aware of aussie.zone, as I made the meme above.
But that’s still the point: are 2 instances (aussie.zone and pd.dev) of the top 20 “many” (startrek is less active)?
I have not reached out to ST.website, and anyway it seems besides the point b/c as of now they have caught up. And since all 3 of these instances were having the same issue at the same time, I would guess that it is just more of this same style of rate-limiting issues that we hear across many other instances. I did a bit digging and I see this pinned comment describing the issue occuring 5 months ago: https://startrek.website/post/10430719/9550923. The admins are aware, but until Lemmy.World updates to 0.19.6, what can they do about it really? But here at least you can see the answer directly from an admin about exactly this style of issue.
Yes Discuss.Online is very (hehe… may I say “blazingly”?:-P) fast - I first moved to it when ST.website was being pokey slow (~10 months ago) and I have enjoyed very much how smooth the experience is on it. Though it does federate with hexbear.net and lemmy.ml, so e.g. I get to see Cowbee responding to people discussing tankie behavior with the “just trust me bro, no I refuse to share my references instead why don’t you hit me up in my DMs, hey why don’t you share YOUR references hrm, no I’ve never asked anyone to hit me up in my DMs in my life bro whutyoutalkinabout?”. As funny as it may be to watch, it does disturb me that “normies” as we are talking about in this post will be exposed to such, and have to learn first-hand what types of behaviors to expect from which servers that the admins of most instances will not defederate from.
ST.website at least defederated from hexbear, though discuss.online has not. I briefly considered mander.xyz cause that source of content seems amazing, but it defederates from almost nothing at all - not even lemmygrad.ml (there are only 2 entries in its block list: threads.net and burggit.moe - even exploding heads isn’t listed there, wtf!?!?) Edit: though someone could eke out quite the existence there just browsing Local - that experience wouldn’t offer any “news” and especially “politics”, so that could be a strong plus for someone, but then you could switch between Global vs. Local at the press of a button, to expand or narrow one’s preferred scope of input. Then again, it seems hyperfocused on the STEM fields, with very little of e.g. liberal arts (though not none, e.g. [email protected] and [email protected], and yet those are not highly active).
Programming.dev has more than merely federation issues too. I don’t know if they’ve modified their codebase or what, but e.g. community names containing spaces - or perhaps it was underscores - are having trouble as well.
And yes I know you made the meme, I was reminding you that I’m not making this up - there are definitely federation issues going on! Perhaps not right this very second (or maybe, from somewhere, I dunno?), but over the past year this intermittent issue has persisted, to varying degrees based in part on proximity and network latency between it vs. Lemmy.World, and perhaps on hardware and in particular network connection services of each instance.
Oh, and maybe this is where we were disconnecting: if you were talking “top 20”, and I was mentioning ST.website and Discuss.Online and PieFed.social and programming.dev and aussie.zone, then (1) it still shows how it isn’t PieFed.social’s “fault”, b/c this delay with Lemmy.World content happens to MANY (most?) small instances, but (2) for a recommendation to give to people, e.g. those still on Reddit, then yeah, I don’t know of something better than lemm.ee. I was suggesting to think about adding lemmy.cafe to the recommendation list in spite of it not being in the top 20, in case some people might bend more towards wanting to avoid trolling behavior - tbf, this could be more of a recommendation for people on Mastodon than Reddit, at which point perhaps Mbin is a better fit anyway? Though at least some of those, like sopuli.xyz and lemmy.ca, do defederate from hexbear.net even if not from lemmy.ml, which is something.
Not sure they are aware, there aren’t any meta posts about this, and due to the size of the instance (196 monthly active users), they might not have noticed.
Is there anything that they can do about it? It’s not that I am against telling them but… why complain about something over which they have little to no control?
Also, at some point it had seemed to me to be caught up, but indeed perhaps I missed something, or maybe another issue started after I wrote my reply above.
I see posts missing from there, from PieFed, and much more rarely but it happens, from Discuss.Online. It’s common, it’s expected, and at this point, I think that no instance other than Lemmy.World itself has any “expectation” to be fully up2date, specifically wrt content that is on Lemmy.World itself?
However you want to phrase that - the federated model is struggling, going through a rough patch specifically while we await 0.19.6 - it seems beyond the control of even admins?
Great! I don’t really want the interlinking with Mastodon, but if you do… and like that interface, then that’s wonderful. It’s definitely quite polished. I don’t think you can user-block lemmy.ml users there like you can from PieFed - and another plug for PieFed is future integration with PixelFed and Loops, though tbh I’m not sure I care about that either, like Mastodon:-). Though being able to block users from Lemmy.ml and especially Hexbear.net (my two previous instances after Kbin went defunct did not defederate from either of them) definitely I see cleans up the conversations considerably. Not everyone wants that ofc, but it’s a VERY nice feature to have, to avoid so much of the gish gallop, reverse, didoing, the card says moops, and other “control the conversation” tactics that make me feel like I was reading content from a toddler… or a Trump supporter.
Hey, whether you want to use it personally or not, will you let me know if you see a way to block users of an instance? Someone said that Kbin used to have that, but I also saw a feature request for Mbin to add it, so it’s not entirely clear to me, without creating an account to find out, whether Mbin provides that functionality or not?
Haha, I got it! It’s not anywhere in the settings at all, lol. Like a hidden option. You have to go to the url “https://fedia.io/d/[instance domain name]”, like “https://fedia.io/d/lemmy.ml”. Then it will give you the ability to block, and that block will be reflected in your settings page.
Ah that makes sense then, why one highly technical person would recall (presumably correctly) that it used to work on Kbin, while another person submitted a request to add that feature for Mbin. It’s nice to know that it is possible, even if not quite straightforward!:-)
I would strongly hope that the Mbin codebase is being worked on by more than just one person, who is also administering your instance. That was what caused the demise of both Kbin and Kbin.social with Ernst trying to “do it all” without letting others help. I would love to see that project succeed and provide a fully viable alternative to X and Reddit besides Mastodon and Lemmy:-).
So I actually forgot that I also made a fedia.io account back when I was trying multiple instances…there were literally like 100 people on fedia.io at the time so I stuck with kbin, but then kbin kinda imploded so I switched to lemmy…
We have the same issue at fedia as lemmy.cafe - single overworked administrator.
I do see comments that say it’s possible to block instances on mbin, but I don’t see any way to do that on fedia.
I just said “Lemmy” and they went forward from there.
Helping people pick an instance is not as straight-forward task as many people claim. e.g. if you love programming, then perhaps programm.dev is right for you, except right now they are having enormous federation difficulties - e.g. https://programming.dev/post/20692281. They are far from the only ones doing so though - https://feddit.org/post/3524876 - and yet they do have more difficulties than most.
Any instance that is not Lemmy.World itself is going to suffer right now, until the deployment of 0.19.6 - https://github.com/LemmyNet/lemmy/pull/4623. And yet people piling on top of the already too-large pile of Lemmy.World will only make the future problems worse. This whole “federation” concept is still experimental, compared to a single-server model like Reddit had.
Blaze often tells people to go by default to lemm.ee. Which is one of the rare instances that defederates from none of hexbear.net, lemmy.ml, or even lemmygrad.ml. So if someone comes across this advice and follows it… BTW, Lemmy.cafe likewise defederates from almost nothing, except it DOES defederate from those big 3 (caveat: it seems run by only a single administrator, so is therefore far less stable than e.g. lemm.ee, and could disappear at any time - though there are so many other things about that instance that are so welcoming and friendly, and btw it is one of the very select few that are already running 0.19.6-beta! so a single admin yes, but one who seems VERY on the ball!).
But ultimately you are correct: they control the sourcecode, so it is YOU who are using THEIR platform - and they WILL do it THEIR way, regardless.
Until and unless more people switch to Mbin, PieFed, or eventually Sublinks. Admiral Patrick who developed Tesseract for dubvee.org and who has blocked lemmy.ml users has pledged to switch to Sublinks whenever it will come out. In the meantime you can view a demo, but I haven’t heard of any developments for it for like half a year. So I switched to PieFed, and am posting several bug reports to help make it better. I advise people to check all of these options out just to see what’s out there, though definitely more is yet to come due to the hard work from these very helpful developers!
And credit where it’s due: Dessalines is helping in his own way, to reduce people’s dependency upon Reddit, and offering that codebase completely free of charge - that’s not nothing. Though administering a server instance is an entirely different skillset… and if we want to see the Fediverse grow rather than shrink with time, I think that better fences are going to be necessary (or mere labels would be even better, except they seem to militantly refuse to do such - but could you imagine if “politically extremist” content had a label just like all the NSFW posts do? then we could all get along side-by-side in the same space).
Nobody enjoys being punched in the face, or to see their (or why not ANY?) nation mocked - especially normies who may have DEEP knowledge of their subject matter, yet happen to not use Arch Linux btw, or may not be actual full-on communists (yet?).
You pointed out the biggest issue with that instance.
If you have a better alternative (so blocking hexbear and lemmygrad, with a large userbase and managed by a group of admins), feel free to suggest it.
Also, do not underestimate the importance some users give to low defederation.
Lemm.ee is still the second largest instance for a reason.
Right, and for people who want that low defederation, lemm.ee is not just a good but a great option. Though for normies, it may be turning people away.
But as you said, what other options are there? Lemmy.cafe seems so perfect in so many ways. Like their welcome messages are actually helpful, e.g. pointing people to [email protected], as opposed to e.g. “What is Lemmy.ml” that is just a broken link to nowhere, or Lemmy.World’s Getting started guide that doesn’t mention things such as cross-posting. But then again, normies especially wouldn’t like it when/if the instance suddenly has to shut down for whatever reason… I get you there.
So who else defederates from the entirety of the big 3? (Btw lemmy.cafe defederates from almost nothing but these, and threads ofc, so still has e.g. NSFW and anime instances linked. And quokk.au likewise has only a single admin.) Or better yet allows custom user blocking? PieFed does, Tesseract on dubvee.org, and perhaps some apps (not sure which ones - and the trick is that some appear to at first glance, but it’s merely the same Lemmy back-end blocking that doesn’t block users, only communities). And I’m not clear about Mbin - I think not.
Moreover, nearly every instance other than Lemmy.world is having federation issues with lemmy.world right now. But we can’t just keep sending people to lemmy.world bc it’s the only one that always works for >80% of the content on the Fediverse? That would somewhat work, but be a purely short-term solution. Yet nothing else would work… e.g. I made a post from StarTrek.website to tenforward on lemmy.world and couldn’t see the comments (or votes) that people made to it for at least 2-3 days. Eventually I responded from a third instance involved - discuss.online - but federation issues such as this tend to have a cooling effect in terms of shutting down conversations. This stuff is going to turn normies away as well, on top of the toxicity issues.
So there are problems with every instance. At least you get your choice of which issues you want to deal with:-). The toxicity issue though is particularly what has driven away 100% of the people that I’ve mentioned Lemmy to irl, so it seems to be the major one. Perhaps if not for it they might have joined Lemmy and then left it later, but as it is they refuse to even consider it bc they can’t get past that. So THAT is the one that I think we need to focus on to get more people. At which point yeah, perhaps add Lemmy.cafe to the recommendation list? Alongside PieFed that allows custom user blocking of whatever instance you want - and I mean the good kind, blocking not just communities but all comments as well.
Perhaps the reason that people are mentioning the defederation issues is due to Mastodon’s heavy fragmention and inability to really search for content outside of someone’s initial chosen instance? (Though that feature seems to be coming “soon™”.) If so that would make a LOT of sense?! However, the difficulties faced by Lemmy are of a different sort. Not being able to search for content from any other instance is nowhere near the same as e.g. the Western world defederating from an instance that constantly mocks and disrespects everything that it does - and kinda vice versa btw bc there is much that the Western world does not respect about how the Eastern world (specifically Russia and China) does things as well, e.g. the extremely heavy-handed banning from all communities, and how the East is “not” doing genocide, fully and literally directly, even while the USA “is” (I mean it low-key is, but how does that justify the Ukrainian invasion or the Uyghur situation?!) - the whole “one rule for thee, an entirely different set of rules for me” thing is a real turn-off for people to remain in the Fediverse. So while I don’t doubt that people are asking for instances that aren’t defederated from anything, I do question whether that’s truly what they want, especially “they” meaning the majority of normies. It’s complicated bc some truly do want something like lemm.ee, while on the other hand I see some people leaving Lemm.ee wanting to go somewhere that defederates from at the very least Hexbear. It’s one thing to foster and encourage STRONG diversity of opinions, but it’s another to open the door to people who consistently argue in bad faith (and rarely if ever do not do such). The former makes dull conversations better, while the latter ends conversations entirely.
What do you mean? Having a quick test right now
It does not seem like “nearly every instance is having federating issues with LW right now”.
It’s always the same issues, there is no generalist instance that fits the bill:
You might have higher chances of convincing lemm.ee, lemmy.zip, lemmy.dbzer0.com, discuss.tchcs.de to defederate hexbear, than getting a small instance that does popular enough to enter the top 20
Or you can convince lemmy.cafe to get another admin, and get a bit more “professional” (a la lemmy.zip)
I covered the federation issues in my other comment.
PieFed allows users to decide their own personal defederations without needing to depend upon an instance admin for that.
Hopefully as the UI gets more developed, people will gravitate more to PieFed, or Sublinks.
If the worst were to happen (another Ernst/Kbin.social situation) then any instance with only a single admin is indeed vulnerable, as is any instance that remains federated with it due to the inevitable spam attacks that will come from it.
Though the issues with federation with lemmy.ml are also important too. See e.g. that recent discussion at https://lemm.ee/post/45248880, where the admins expressed a desire for OP to physically commit suicide, all based on an easily preventable misunderstanding about a situation that happened in a game. Just to underscore how ridiculous what we are talking about is, here is a mini run-down of the facts: one non-existent irl character kissed another non-existent irl character, who had been dating in the game for awhile btw, having reached a “hearts” level of 8 of 10 points so quite an established relationship showing mutual interest, whereupon the 2nd character had just given a bouquet of flowers to the 1st one, who then kissed the 2nd one in a surprised and pleased movement, which the ML admins described as “sexual assault” (mistakenly thinking that that did not happen until reaching 10 of 10 points), banned the OP, oh and in the process also told the OP kill themselves. This sounds like insane ranting on my part I know, but it all actually happened!?!?!?! And it’s not even something that we need to hear second-hand stories of, it’s all right there in the modlogs preserved for anyone who wants to see directly.
It is because of events such as that - which KEEP HAPPENING - that I have stopped recommending Lemmy to anyone. Though I would love to start recommending PieFed as its UI improves a bit - and I will be helping that process along by submitting loads of bug reports to their team!:-) In the meantime, perhaps the downsides of instances such as lemmy.cafe being run by a single administrator do not seem so bad? After all, lemmy.ml has an entire team of administrators - but that did not stop SagXD from losing their account there, suddenly and without warning. Nor macniel or any of the others that we keep hearing about happening. That is why we are saying that having a single admin is bad right - b/c it is vulnerable to go down without warning? Afaik, I’ve never heard that lemmy.ml has offered a warning first before smashing the entire instance-wide ban hammer, even against a mod of a community there. Nor, again even for a mod there, do they even so much as tell them that it happened. Or explain what the cryptic modlog messages mean, which look at first glance as if they pertain only to individual communities, leaving people confused and having to figure out on their own what happened?
So anyway which is worse: a community with a single admin, or one with a whole team that is unhinged and somehow even more likely to boot someone, and with a demonstrated pattern of doing exactly that whenever it suits them?
And then ofc hexbear is a whole other thing too - who wants to be actively bullied, like why would that be fun for most of us, especially normies? If someone REALLY wants to be exposed to thus, then okay I won’t stop them, but it really does seem to me like it would be helpful to at least offer a WARNING to new users that it is likely to happen. Which afaik lemm.ee does not do. Maybe as you recommend lemm.ee you can attach such a warning?
Possibly something like: “if you want an instance that is connected all servers across the fediverse, such does not exist but the closest seems to be lemm.ee, although be warned that it federates with known multiple instances known to encourage trolling behaviors; otherwise lemmy.cafe seems quite welcoming although it is small and with only a single admin so is less stable than others.”
As you say, nothing is perfect. All we can do is try to help manage and perhaps mitigate this absolute shit-storm. Thanks for all your efforts there:-).
You should probably bring us it to achieve
I do
https://old.reddit.com/r/RedditAlternatives/comments/1fmuk7o/post_to_address_the_usual_criticism_about_lemmy/
The tricky aspect with lemmy.ml is that they host the most active open source communities. So recommending everyone to block them would probably make Lemmy as a whole appear hostile, as you need to choose between accessing open source communities and blocking a hostile instance.
To be fair, at this point in time, you might probably want to create a dedicated community to discuss this issue with the rest of the people (maybe [email protected]) and agree on a potential action plan.
I feel like we’ve had this conversation two or three times in the last few weeks, it’s not really solving the core issue.
Here’s such a conversation with an admin at sh.itjust.works if you are interested: https://sh.itjust.works/comment/12051373, or with the mod of [email protected] https://discuss.online/post/12722075/11762479, and ofc there are many more. One conversation at a time, bringing up the logical points, condensing them, helping people know their options, etc.
Not… entirely, but yes an entire section dedicated to “hardcore tankies” helps!:-) I suppose that helps more for people brought in via Reddit, but not word-of-mouth recommendations, so if I am speaking of the latter then the burden is on me, and upon everyone else doing likewise, to “warn” their irl friends that they recommend to take a look at Lemmy. Which is why I am saying that it would be good to add automated labels. I think we are still waiting for a Lemmy upgrade though, that would allow for those? Or perhaps people are waiting specifically for 0.19.6 when Lemmy.World will upgrade, leading the way.
Lemmy.World naively might seem the most likely to attach a warning label to Lemmy.ml communities, seeing as e.g. they have defederated entirely from Hexbear.net, whereas so many other instances do not even do that much.
Though for myself, the longer this goes on the less faith I have that it will ever be fixed whilst remaining dependent upon the Lemmy.ml + lemmygrad.ml admins & devs to help accomplish the goals of bringing in more mainstream normies from the Western civilization that they so abhor and constantly ridicule. Why should they? They themselves do not want that. It is a harsh truth but we are on their platform, and that’s that. We will receive what they deign to offer. Which is why I am trying now to help PieFed thrive, despite how far behind it is, and it would be great to see Sublinks arrive as well.
You keep asking questions though… so I kept answering them:-P. I feel like we got some addditional clarity on your only focusing on the top 20 instances.
Little by little, progress is made. This issue is not entirely solvable though, using current methods available to us - e.g. the issue you mentioned that the desires of users to avoid being bullied are at cross-purposes with being able to access particularly the FOSS content such as [email protected]. I will say that “accessing open source communities” isn’t terribly hard - you don’t even need an account for that, though indeed lacking one would cut someone off from participating by asking questions, posting, replying, and voting. Which is why something like a “community label” holds such appeal to me, and even more approaches such as PieFed’s ability to enact user-initated user-blocking of custom user-specified instances without the need for the approval of an entire admin team and thereby the support of an entire community. It thereby democracizes blocking, making it available to anyone who wants it, which I for one think is awesome!?:-) Though the UI needs some polish, so I will focus on submitting bug reports to help with that.
For me, writing things such as "many instances are having federation issues with LW’ lacks nuance, and people less aware of the context could just read this with “well, the whole thing does not work anyway, I’ll just quit this place”, which is probably not the message we want to convey.
That’s why I focus on the top 20, because that’s where the vast majority of the userbase is, and in those instances, only aussie.zone really experiences federation issues due to LW size (pg.dev is a different issue, it’s their own database that is corrupted)
That’s probably the consensus among the community. But as we all know, there are only so many people interested in developing Lemmy alternatives.
About the lemm.ee vs lemmy.cafe choice for instance suggestion, would you like to open a thread on https://piefed.social/c/[email protected] ? That way we can have more people voicing their opinions on the matter.
I started gathering some thoughts to make a post - I had intended [email protected] but it could be cross-posted, or whatever - about ways to block an instance. I got stuck with Mbin but finally have what I need there. The thing is: I lack the knowledge of which Lemmy apps will allow you to implement user blocks - and I mean the full defederation kind, not just the mere “community blocking” that does not block the comment replies of users from those instances. Do you know more about that? If you could give me a paragraph or table or link to point to or some such, then perhaps this weekend I could try to write that post.
May I ask you why you keep bringing that issue, when it has been solved in the meantime, and is a specific Piefed issue? Lemmy users on any of the top 20 instances are not experiencing federation issues, with the sole exception of programming.dev
First, I hope nobody is taking any of this personally. We were talking here about how to reach out to normies, and whatever best way there is to do that.
Second, you misread my comment. It is true that MANY instances are having issues with Lemmy.World. My own comment here said “from StarTrek.website” (to be most clear I mean https://startrek.website/c/[email protected] ), which itself is a different instance than PieFed.social, so I experienced these federation issues multiple times this very week, from two distinct places - i.e. I’m not continuously bringing up the same issue, I’m adding new ones to the pile, to show that it’s not just PieFed’s fault. And I don’t think I mentioned here yet that those issues also affected https://discuss.online/c/[email protected] - after a day or two the latter started to catch up but it was still
a daybehind lemmy.world. That’s 3 instances all struggling to receive that same content, none fully succeeding (at the time).If anything it’s Lemmy.world’s “fault” but only in the diagnostic sense of being centrally positioned in this debacle rather than blame being a “responsible” party to have caused it or being able to fix it. Though fortunately, 0.19.6 should help provide a fix for exactly this, and the Lemmy devs are currently doing their due diligence to test it out before deployment to the entire world:-).
And I am far from the only one mentioning such - here’s one example and here’s another. Also, the issue with my personal post was just a few days ago, so even if these federation issues are intermittent they are still ongoing, and seem like they will continue until such time as Lemmy.world finishes its update process to 0.19.6.
I did indeed, but depends how much you define “many”. Has anyone reached out to the SW.website instance about this issue? What is their answer?
For discuss.online, they seem to be doing quite well federation-wise: https://grafana.lem.rocks/d/bdid38k9p0t1cf/federation-health-single-instance-overview?orgId=1&var-instance=lemmy.world&var-remote_instance=discuss.online
There was one peak at 2 hours, that was was a single occurrence:
For programming.dev, they seem to indeed have issue with their database. To be honest, the way it’s going, it would almost make sense to suggest people to switch to other instances, the issues have been going on for a while.
I am well aware of aussie.zone, as I made the meme above.
But that’s still the point: are 2 instances (aussie.zone and pd.dev) of the top 20 “many” (startrek is less active)?
I have not reached out to ST.website, and anyway it seems besides the point b/c as of now they have caught up. And since all 3 of these instances were having the same issue at the same time, I would guess that it is just more of this same style of rate-limiting issues that we hear across many other instances. I did a bit digging and I see this pinned comment describing the issue occuring 5 months ago: https://startrek.website/post/10430719/9550923. The admins are aware, but until Lemmy.World updates to 0.19.6, what can they do about it really? But here at least you can see the answer directly from an admin about exactly this style of issue.
Yes Discuss.Online is very (hehe… may I say “blazingly”?:-P) fast - I first moved to it when ST.website was being pokey slow (~10 months ago) and I have enjoyed very much how smooth the experience is on it. Though it does federate with hexbear.net and lemmy.ml, so e.g. I get to see Cowbee responding to people discussing tankie behavior with the “just trust me bro, no I refuse to share my references instead why don’t you hit me up in my DMs, hey why don’t you share YOUR references hrm, no I’ve never asked anyone to hit me up in my DMs in my life bro whutyoutalkinabout?”. As funny as it may be to watch, it does disturb me that “normies” as we are talking about in this post will be exposed to such, and have to learn first-hand what types of behaviors to expect from which servers that the admins of most instances will not defederate from.
ST.website at least defederated from hexbear, though discuss.online has not. I briefly considered mander.xyz cause that source of content seems amazing, but it defederates from almost nothing at all - not even lemmygrad.ml (there are only 2 entries in its block list: threads.net and burggit.moe - even exploding heads isn’t listed there, wtf!?!?) Edit: though someone could eke out quite the existence there just browsing Local - that experience wouldn’t offer any “news” and especially “politics”, so that could be a strong plus for someone, but then you could switch between Global vs. Local at the press of a button, to expand or narrow one’s preferred scope of input. Then again, it seems hyperfocused on the STEM fields, with very little of e.g. liberal arts (though not none, e.g. [email protected] and [email protected], and yet those are not highly active).
Programming.dev has more than merely federation issues too. I don’t know if they’ve modified their codebase or what, but e.g. community names containing spaces - or perhaps it was underscores - are having trouble as well.
And yes I know you made the meme, I was reminding you that I’m not making this up - there are definitely federation issues going on! Perhaps not right this very second (or maybe, from somewhere, I dunno?), but over the past year this intermittent issue has persisted, to varying degrees based in part on proximity and network latency between it vs. Lemmy.World, and perhaps on hardware and in particular network connection services of each instance.
Oh, and maybe this is where we were disconnecting: if you were talking “top 20”, and I was mentioning ST.website and Discuss.Online and PieFed.social and programming.dev and aussie.zone, then (1) it still shows how it isn’t PieFed.social’s “fault”, b/c this delay with Lemmy.World content happens to MANY (most?) small instances, but (2) for a recommendation to give to people, e.g. those still on Reddit, then yeah, I don’t know of something better than lemm.ee. I was suggesting to think about adding lemmy.cafe to the recommendation list in spite of it not being in the top 20, in case some people might bend more towards wanting to avoid trolling behavior - tbf, this could be more of a recommendation for people on Mastodon than Reddit, at which point perhaps Mbin is a better fit anyway? Though at least some of those, like sopuli.xyz and lemmy.ca, do defederate from hexbear.net even if not from lemmy.ml, which is something.
They haven’t caught up, their last post on that community is from 13 hours ago
There were quite a few since then
They are still behind from quite some time:
https://grafana.lem.rocks/d/bdid38k9p0t1cf/federation-health-single-instance-overview?orgId=1&var-instance=lemmy.world&var-remote_instance=startrek.website
Not sure they are aware, there aren’t any meta posts about this, and due to the size of the instance (196 monthly active users), they might not have noticed.
Is there anything that they can do about it? It’s not that I am against telling them but… why complain about something over which they have little to no control?
Also, at some point it had seemed to me to be caught up, but indeed perhaps I missed something, or maybe another issue started after I wrote my reply above.
I see posts missing from there, from PieFed, and much more rarely but it happens, from Discuss.Online. It’s common, it’s expected, and at this point, I think that no instance other than Lemmy.World itself has any “expectation” to be fully up2date, specifically wrt content that is on Lemmy.World itself?
However you want to phrase that - the federated model is struggling, going through a rough patch specifically while we await 0.19.6 - it seems beyond the control of even admins?
You’ve convinced me to try mbin. I had a kbin account and I really liked it, but federation with lemmy was soooo slow.
Great! I don’t really want the interlinking with Mastodon, but if you do… and like that interface, then that’s wonderful. It’s definitely quite polished. I don’t think you can user-block lemmy.ml users there like you can from PieFed - and another plug for PieFed is future integration with PixelFed and Loops, though tbh I’m not sure I care about that either, like Mastodon:-). Though being able to block users from Lemmy.ml and especially Hexbear.net (my two previous instances after Kbin went defunct did not defederate from either of them) definitely I see cleans up the conversations considerably. Not everyone wants that ofc, but it’s a VERY nice feature to have, to avoid so much of the gish gallop, reverse, didoing, the card says moops, and other “control the conversation” tactics that make me feel like I was reading content from a toddler… or a Trump supporter.
Hey, whether you want to use it personally or not, will you let me know if you see a way to block users of an instance? Someone said that Kbin used to have that, but I also saw a feature request for Mbin to add it, so it’s not entirely clear to me, without creating an account to find out, whether Mbin provides that functionality or not?
Haha, I got it! It’s not anywhere in the settings at all, lol. Like a hidden option. You have to go to the url “https://fedia.io/d/[instance domain name]”, like “https://fedia.io/d/lemmy.ml”. Then it will give you the ability to block, and that block will be reflected in your settings page.
Ah that makes sense then, why one highly technical person would recall (presumably correctly) that it used to work on Kbin, while another person submitted a request to add that feature for Mbin. It’s nice to know that it is possible, even if not quite straightforward!:-)
I would strongly hope that the Mbin codebase is being worked on by more than just one person, who is also administering your instance. That was what caused the demise of both Kbin and Kbin.social with Ernst trying to “do it all” without letting others help. I would love to see that project succeed and provide a fully viable alternative to X and Reddit besides Mastodon and Lemmy:-).
So I actually forgot that I also made a fedia.io account back when I was trying multiple instances…there were literally like 100 people on fedia.io at the time so I stuck with kbin, but then kbin kinda imploded so I switched to lemmy…
We have the same issue at fedia as lemmy.cafe - single overworked administrator.
I do see comments that say it’s possible to block instances on mbin, but I don’t see any way to do that on fedia.