Following the other thread (550 upvotes and 366 comments at the moment: https://lemmy.world/post/16211417), one of the complaints that people had what that some communities only exist on lemmy.ml and don’t have alternatives on other instances.

Let’s discuss this and see if we can organize together.

I suggest to have one topic per comment so that is is easier to discuss.

  • sabreW4K3@lazysoci.alEnglish
    69·
    18 days ago

    That said, I would like to say that despite the issues with the ML administration, I feel the centralization of communities on WORLD is a far greater and thus more urgent issue for me.

    • BlazeOPEnglish
      22·
      18 days ago

      I feel the centralization of communities on WORLD is a far greater and thus more urgent issue for me.

      Is it? Is there any level of power tripping similar to lemmy.ml?

      Also

      I suggest to have one topic per comment so that is is easier to discuss.

      • sabreW4K3@lazysoci.alEnglish
        47·
        18 days ago

        It’s not about power tripping, it’s about philosophy. When I left mainstream social media and decided upon the Fediverse, decentralization was very much at the top of the list. I was happy to be part of a world where one corporation wasn’t in control of our lives. I’m just uncomfortable with the way that people are so eager to foster that in world. We shouldn’t have to see them misbehave before we apply what we learned from previous mistakes.

        • BlazeOPEnglish
          19·
          18 days ago

          I’m just uncomfortable with the way that people are so eager to foster that in world. We shouldn’t have to see them misbehave before we apply what we learned from previous mistakes.

          You’re preaching to the choir, but “for now” it’s acceptable to me.

          We are always able to move communities to other instances should they misbehave, and that’s good enough to me.

          Could be improved, of course, but not critical.

      • maegul@lemmy.mlEnglish
        14·
        17 days ago

        I’m a little late on this thread/issue, but I agree with @sabreW4K3@lazysoci.al .

        I’m also inclined to push back on the anti-lemmy.ml stance being pushed here. And to be clear, While I’m on lemmy.ml, I joined before “the migration” when it made sense to join the “main” instance as it then was and I have no particular affiliation with them or their politics.

        Inline with what sabre is saying, I think there’s a certain degree of political entitlement and “defederation-fever” creeping into this general sentiment. I think the communists/tankies should be allowed to do their thing without it being an issue, just like any other niche interest/viewpoint that can build a space here.

        I suspect there’s some dangerously presumptive politics at play here … where moderation action is presumed to be “power tripping” mainly because the moderator’s politics is presumed to be completely wrong. How about, “yea, that’s their thing, it’s unlikely something productive will come out of speaking flatly critically about china on lemmy.ml … their moderation can go overboard sometimes, but their defensive about all of that … if you want to do that, you’ll need to go to a more western instance/community”

        Building different spaces with different rules, vibes and beliefs, while simultaneously committing to inter-connectivity as much as possible … is basically the idea of the fediverse. It allows us to talk to each other without being stuck in one group’s (or corporation’s) policies and world-view … and more idealistically, allows us to see different world-views more clearly as we contrast the different spaces we can be connected to. If everything were on lemmy.world, it’d be hard to see the world-view (ha) that the mods/admins and even majority there impose on the rest.

        That’s the idealism, and I think it’s very real.

        But the pointy end of the stick is disagreements which lead to downvotes and moderation. That’s what enables the creation of a particular space, and needs to just kinda be accepted a bit more.

        That’s the part not stated enough IMO … at some point, if you’re going to be committed to the inter-connectivity part, you need to be respectful of the fact that another space exists and can be antagonistic to some of your views. That’s fine. On reddit, we’d just steer clear of a particular sub-reddit and maybe disparage them elsewhere. De-federation or targeting an instance as plain bad or wrong is a useful tool that the fediverse provides but which, IME, can easily become over zealously embraced in a sort of dog-pile behaviour. A more useful behaviour, IMO, is to try to work out ways that the fediverse can persist with such antagonism and disagreements.

        Not being surprised that communists are hard on criticism of communist countries seems like a start to me (where, TBF, such criticism is pretty wide spread in the west to the point that I don’t blame them for being cranky about it). Being open to the idea that you can get along with same communists on just about any other issue is a good next step. It’d be the same with criticising tech workers on programming.dev or trans/gender/queer issues on blahaj.zone or criticising western imperialism and capitalism on lemmy.world. Though I suspect the lemmy.ml admins could do a better job at sign-posting their politics/policies here.

        These are spaces with particular sensitivities. Antagonising them indifferently is kinda rude at some point. Demanding that they not have their sensitivities is kinda against the fediverse at some point. Interestingly, the admin of lemmy.ml, dessalines, basically said the same thing recently.

        Now, to be fair, I haven’t looked into the moderation stuff that seems to have precipitated this conversation and I’m certainly open to the idea that the lemmy.ml mods overstepped (mods tend to do that IME). But my general view is that, as communists living in the west, they’ve probably come against a good amount superficial criticism and frankly prejudice that us general westerners wouldn’t really notice, and so have pretty sharply guarded boundaries around that sort of dialogue. So they’ve built their own space (well platform actually), that is generally geared toward FOSS and privacy about which many of us have shared interests … but they also have some pretty clear policies around communism that are clearly very personal to the admins that are better respected than exiled or antagonised.

        Also, none of this is to say everything should be on lemmy.ml. Quite the opposite. Diversify! That’s part of my point. But away from lemmy.world too, and with the understanding that part of diversification is enabling niche spaces that can cause friction and said friction isn’t, in itself, a problem. Instead, IMO, we tend to get a bit feverish whenever these sorts of things spark up. Anyway … rant over!

        • sabreW4K3@lazysoci.alEnglish
          8·
          17 days ago

          This is a tremendous post and I’m saddened by the fact that it’s buried in this thread where many won’t see it. I agree with it wholeheartedly.

          I find the term tankies to be egregious. It feels like it targets minorities and is incredibly dismissive. I’m not authoritarian in the slightest and so I will have certain friction in my thought processes with authoritarians, but my views are incredibly left leaning,. I’ve spent my life learning from my experience and reaching and the only thing I can say for sure is that the right wing elite that rule over us, don’t give a fuck about us.

          We all saw how communists were villainised around the second world war and that the confirmation bias as a result, lead to what we have now, which is again the right wing elite that rule over us, don’t give a fuck about us.

          While I definitely want the administration of Lemmy.ML to be better in the way they conduct themselves, I feel that we need their presence for the greatest Fediverse we can create. It’s because of that, I feel someone from that team should’ve come forward and spoken on what happened in an official capacity. If an any time administration take action, send a message and be vocal and open about it. If you don’t have the time to do that, I question whether you have the time to making administrative actions.

          That said, there’s a bunch of communities being created and I’m grateful for that. I want to see all communities move away from the bigger instances and I’ll say it again, moving communities away from LW is far more urgent and important. We need different flavours and different ideas and implementations. The best isn’t always the biggest.

          • maegul@lemmy.mlEnglish
            7·
            17 days ago

            Cheers for the response! Interesting to see that we generally align pretty accurately over this. I wasn’t clear we would and half expected you to come in and say “fuck that, I just don’t like lemmy world”.

            I did think of making a separate post of my rant, but figured it’d just get downvoted and there wouldn’t be any point. After this, I’d be happy to put it up.

            Also, I’ve just posted in the meta community about this, generally poking around the issue and what happened and how better administration might be possible.

            • sabreW4K3@lazysoci.alEnglish
              7·
              17 days ago

              Ha, no. All the dealings I’ve had with the LW admins have been overwhelmingly positive. The members, not always so positive but that’s more about the thoughtfulness of the people I’ve come across on smaller instances. It would appear the people that don’t just join the biggest instance are more measured in their approach to things and are generally just less entitled acting. It makes them a joy to interact with and the conversations are more thought provoking, which is always a joy.

            • imaqtpie@sh.itjust.worksEnglish
              4·
              17 days ago

              You absolutely nailed it with that comment, 5/7, perfect score.

              Honestly it probably would get downvoted if you made it as a separate post, but that’s just because kvetching about lemmy.ml is the flavor of the week and most people are sheep.

    • ᴇᴍᴘᴇʀᴏʀ 帝@feddit.ukEnglish
      8·
      18 days ago

      I feel the centralization of communities on WORLD is a far greater and thus more urgent issue for me.

      It’s definitely a big issue too and why it is a good idea to suggest people start alternatives somewhere other than l.w, as is being done in this discussion.

  • BlazeOPEnglish
    31·
    18 days ago

    Linux: !linux@lemmy.ml

    !linux@lemmy.world seems quite active, I guess if any people move to it it will become even more active.

    !linux@programming.dev could probably be a nice one too if people want to avoid hypercentralization on LW

    If you know any other, comment below and we can see which one we decide to select as “the one” to avoid fragmentation.

  • OpenStars@discuss.onlineEnglish
    19·
    17 days ago

    Sorry if this is a bit off-topic, but I wanted to say that I see you going to such great efforts to help people all across the entire Fediverse, and to say thank you - we appreciate you!:-)

      • OpenStars@discuss.onlineEnglish
        3·
        15 days ago

        They are always on r/RedditAlternatives steering people towards the Fediverse too, along with a few others. Unfortunately most people there are resistant, and the heavily leftist-leaning nature of the content here turns a lot of people away (many instances including reddthat.com do not block either hexbear.net or lemmygrad.ml by default for new users, so all those posts promoting literal violence against e.g. landlords show up immediately in their All feeds), but it is still awesome to see them trying!:-)

        Personally I think the technology will need to be improved first - e.g. adding content labels such as Mastodon already has (and everything else these days except Lemmy) - before we will see wider acceptance, especially since there are a lot of centrists who nonetheless contribute niche content that otherwise will not feel comfortable here and thus remain on Reddit, or a lot of people simply swear off social media altogether. But damn, if we do succeed it will in no small part be due to their constant efforts!:-) 🥰

        • BlazeOPEnglish
          3·
          14 days ago

          They are always on r/RedditAlternatives steering people towards the Fediverse too, along with a few others. Unfortunately most people there are resistant, and the heavily leftist-leaning nature of the content here turns a lot of people away (many instances including reddthat.com do not block either hexbear.net or lemmygrad.ml by default for new users, so all those posts promoting literal violence against e.g. landlords show up immediately in their All feeds), but it is still awesome to see them trying!:-)

          Yeah, some people there have the worst bad faith I’ve ever seen. Anyway, at least some other people can read the comments and learn about Lemmy.

          • OpenStars@discuss.onlineEnglish
            1·
            14 days ago

            There could literally be some Reddit shills there, or “useful” people who somehow are still holding on tooth & nail to the Reddit name - some people are just like that - and actually I am glad that those have not migrated over to here, even purely to do trolling:-).

            But there are a lot of centrist, middle-of-the-road people, as well as right-leaning people too, who could add their voices here and contribute to the ongoing conversation - b/c not everything is about politics (even if so many people try to turn the conversation towards that here, and I am guilty of that as well; yet gardening, woodworking, knitting, etc. - not everything needs to bring it up consistently).

            There is so much that we could do to make this place more “welcoming” for others. And I see you doing that tirelessly, so thanks!:-)

      • BlazeOPEnglish
        2·
        14 days ago

        Thanks!

        And happy cake day to you!

      • BlazeOPEnglish
        1·
        17 days ago

        It’s not that active (for such a generalist topic) and I always thought because it was on lemmy.ml.

        But as I said, personal finance communities probably gain to be on countries instances to be relevant to their audiences

    • BlazeOPEnglish
      19·
      18 days ago

      Might be worth to check with the team if they would mind moving to another instance.

      I guess they didn’t really check which instance their community was hosted on

        • BlazeOPEnglish
          14·
          18 days ago

          Or maybe it was the most popular server when the Librewolf devs decided on an instance for their community.

          • Cowbee@lemmy.mlEnglish
            3·
            18 days ago

            Could be, but given that Librewolf is FOSS and focused on Privacy, it makes sense and fits.

  • ᴇᴍᴘᴇʀᴏʀ 帝@feddit.ukEnglish
    15·
    18 days ago

    Yes, I just posted over there that:

    So if there’s an issue with lemmy.ml, boycott it - unsubscribe, give the other communities on more agreeable instances your time and they will grow and prosper. If there isn’t a relevant alternative start one.

    And this is a key step - identify where there aren’t alternatives and start them. It might also be worth compiling a list of the alternatives so people can make the switch.

    It’s also worth bearing in mind that Lemmy isn’t like Reddit in that you could just passively consume content all day. If there’s a problem, we all need to roll our sleeves up and pitch in.

    Worth also mentioning that !fedigrow@lemm.ee is a good place to discuss topics on how we can help Lemmy grow and thrive.

      • BlazeOPEnglish
        4·
        18 days ago

        Creating the community isn’t the issue, usually it’s finding moderators

        • rglullis@communick.newsEnglish
          4·
          18 days ago

          Don’t worry about it for now. I will do it until someone steps up for it. Also, don’t forget that I am actually working on tooling to make this job easier, so having any type of growing community would be an excellent way to find out the real pain point for moderators and work on the solutions.

          • BlazeOPEnglish
            3·
            18 days ago

            When I said moderator, I meant someone to bring people to the community as well 😅

            • rglullis@communick.newsEnglish
              4·
              18 days ago

              For that, I really have no answer other than “help with fediverser, stick with one community, and post as much as possible in the promoted communities”.

              • BlazeOPEnglish
                2·
                18 days ago

                No but I mean practically now, is anyone going to promote that new community to !jellyfin@lemmy.ml? Or do we expect people to hear about it by another mean?

                • rglullis@communick.newsEnglish
                  2·
                  18 days ago

                  Or do we expect people to hear about it by another mean?

                  Yes. Fediverser will help newcomers. Posting content in the “new communities” will help those already here. Everyone browses by all anyway, so the best way to promote new communities is by putting content there.

        • Katana314@lemmy.worldEnglish
          2·
          18 days ago

          I mean, if your qualification for moderator includes “Not abusing powers to defend garbage extremist politics” then we currently have two communities that each have zero moderators.

            • Katana314@lemmy.worldEnglish
              7·
              18 days ago

              No, just an implication towards the old lemmy.ml version of the community.

              What I mean is, moving from a bad situation to an equally bad but improvable situation is still a good move. It might be better to have a small, unmoderated community than one governed by “pretend” moderators.

              That said, if the above comment was pointing out a need to fulfill, as opposed to decrying the attempts at community replacement, then you could disregard my snide remark.

  • rglullis@communick.newsEnglish
    10·
    18 days ago

    Can we make some root cause analysis? Why is it a problem that certain communities are only on one instance?

    Or better, why do communities need some relationship to an instance?

    • BlazeOPEnglish
      19·
      18 days ago

      Hello Raphael,

      For the first question, I redirect you to the thread linked in the OP: https://lemmy.world/post/16211417

      For the second question, I guess this is beyond the scope of this discussion. Having communities unlinked to an instance would require a complete rework of Lemmy, this thread is just about moving away from lemmy.ml due to some abuse reported in the other thread.

      • rglullis@communick.newsEnglish
        4·
        18 days ago

        What If I told you that it does not require a complete rework of Lemmy, but instead just additional services to use instances as independent “ActivityPub group servers”?

        • BlazeOPEnglish
          9·
          18 days ago

          Are those services available today?

          • rglullis@communick.newsEnglish
            7·
            18 days ago

            @freeman@sh.itjust.works and @Majestic@lemmy.ml, what is so offensive about Blaze’s question that warrants downvotes?

            • azuth@sh.itjust.worksEnglish
              4·
              18 days ago

              Do you think I will somehow be blackmailed because you tagged me dude?

              I am downvoting all participants in this grassroots campaign against lemmy developers and diverse political opinions.

              • rglullis@communick.newsEnglish
                10·
                18 days ago

                Nothing in this discussion is against Lemmy developers, and no one is trying to silence their voices. It’s just about creating/finding alternatives for those that are not interested in interacting with that instance.

                Also, me calling you out is not “blackmailing”, just me ensuring that downvotes like yours don’t become a pile-on.

                • azuth@sh.itjust.worksEnglish
                  3·
                  18 days ago

                  … Do you think I can just keep the last comment in mind or something?

                  The discussion takes place in a post linking https://lemmy.world/post/16211417 . Surely that brings it into scope? The linked post begins

                  I feel like we need to talk about Lemmy’s massive tankie censorship problem

                  That does seem hostile to me. As does the drive to try and split communities

                  Also, me calling you out is not “blackmailing”, just me ensuring that downvotes like yours don’t become a pile-on.

                  You have to be kidding me. Why would tagging people who downvoted a post prevent a pile-on of downvotes? Is it a lemmy bug? Or is it that some people who would want to downvote your post would be intimidated by being ‘called out’? Maybe my English is bad but vote->get called-out seems to fit ‘blackmail’ just fine.

    • imaqtpie@sh.itjust.worksEnglish
      9·
      18 days ago

      I think decentralization is preferable for a wide variety of reasons, most of which boil down to stability and adaptability.

      As for why communities need to be associated with an instance, I think that’s a much more interesting question. The first thing that comes to mind is moderation and liability. Ultimately, someone needs to be held responsible if shit hits the fan and somebody hires a contract killing on Lemmy or something. Right now, those people are the instance admins. If you could have free floating communities, the moderators of the distributed community would need to take on that responsibility instead.

      Also how would that work technically? Stuff would presumably still need to be hosted and mirrored on instances, even if technically “unaffiliated”.

      • rglullis@communick.newsEnglish
        6·
        18 days ago

        What I am thinking as a possible solution would be to have some type of “community server”, akin to email list servers. The admin of the server becomes a “mere” service provider, and those that create communities are then responsible for moderation and that content being hosted there.

        I believe that this would be perfectly possible to implement with Lemmy, so much so that I will add some of this functionality to Fediverser as part of my NLNet grant. The question is: who else would be interested in hosting these fediverser-enabled instances?

        • BlazeOPEnglish
          7·
          18 days ago

          The admin of the server becomes a “mere” service provider, and those that create communities are then responsible for moderation and that content being hosted there.

          Would you be able to prevent admins to interfere with moderation of the communities? Seems to be the biggest issue here

          • rglullis@communick.newsEnglish
            4·
            18 days ago

            Theoretically, any admin would still have access to the server and make changes to things.

            Practically, no. Anyone providing this service would be a hosting provider. If something bad happens at the community, they would only be able to claim it’s not their responsibility if they are able to point to the actual moderator who is liable.

          • MacN'Cheezus@lemmy.todayEnglish
            1·
            17 days ago

            If communities were global instead of instance-based, instance mods/admins would likely still be able to moderate posts and comments hosted on THEIR instance (which may be important to confirm to local laws), but they wouldn’t be able to moderate the ENTIRE discussion.

            There are likely some advantages to this (such as discussion not being able to be stifled by overeager or politically extremist mods), but it would also mean there is no way to globally enforce any particular rule (unless all instance admins agree on it).

        • imaqtpie@sh.itjust.worksEnglish
          2·
          18 days ago

          I think that’s a really cool idea, but I am apprehensive about unforseen consequences. I have previously pointed out that the current structure of Lemmy creates a nice balance of power between admins, mods, and users. I think all three groups have enough agency and independence that they can follow their personal preference in the fediverse without infringing too much on the experiences of the others. In theory, as the network expands, stability will continue to increase.

          I’m not sure about messing with that paradigm in order to implement something like what you’re describing.

          The question is: who else would be interested in hosting these fediverser-enabled instances?

          So just to clarify what you mean. The fediverser-enabled instances would be current instances like lemmy.world, except with additional functionality to subscribe to unaffiliated communities?

          Or they would be a totally new kind of instance with only independent communities? Sort of like lemmy.myserv.one (they don’t host local content), except instead of subscribing to communities on other instances, you would be subscribing to standalone communities organized in some kind of lightly moderated community list.

          • rglullis@communick.newsEnglish
            4·
            18 days ago

            Fediverser works as an auxiliary service. Any admin can install it and set it up to run alongside the Lemmy backend.

            Personally, I don’t like the idea of having instances that are home to users and communities at the same time. It is the source of endless issues around identity. I think that a lot of the centralization around LW would be avoided if people could create communities outside of their own “home” instance, and I don’t think that “just create an account on multiple instances” is an acceptable workaround.

            • imaqtpie@sh.itjust.worksEnglish
              3·
              16 days ago

              Makes a lot of sense, I have to agree with you that creating multiple accounts is not acceptable. Most of the people already here don’t mind it obviously, but in terms of future growth that’s a big hurdle that we need to figure out.

              I’m definitely interested in the concept and I would certainly advocate for SJW to give it a shot in the future and see how it is.

              That’s a very interesting blog post you linked. Lots of interesting tangents which I’m not gonna go down. But I mainly agree about corporations monetizing identity in the modern age. But I don’t think it applies to the fediverse, because instances are non-profit. And quite frankly, I don’t see the harm in playing to people’s sense of community and identity in order to lure them in. It seems to me that your vision is technically efficient, but maybe lacks some of the charm that Lemmy currently has.

          • ᴇᴍᴘᴇʀᴏʀ 帝@feddit.ukEnglish
            3·
            18 days ago

            I think that’s a really cool idea, but I am apprehensive about unforseen consequences.

            Well there are a few that are easy enough to forsee and it would make me wary of doing it myself. I think the current system works OK, but I am interested to see how it works out.

  • DefederateLemmyMl@feddit.nlEnglish
    8·
    17 days ago

    I think the problem is not so much that “communities don’t exist”, but that they are far less popular and active than the lemmy.ml ones, and when presented with a choice new users will typically choose the community that is more active and has the most subs. You can’t simply solve that by creating another community on another instance. A concerted effort would be needed to get people to move and to get them to pick the alternative community over the lemmy.ml one. Raising awareness and defederation by bigger instances (like lemmy.world) would help immensely.

    For me the big ones are !linux@lemmy.ml and !programmerhumor@lemmy.ml btw, which do exist elsewhere but the alternatives are stale.