I appreciate the decentralized architecture and the privacy that comes with it, but it’s organization isn’t great.
I’m not sure if I understand why certain instances can choose not to federate with other instances. It just seems to limit the content that is accessible to me. I don’t want to have to switch between 4-5 Lemmy accounts that I switch just to curate what I to see. Its impractical.
I’m not happy with the changes on reddit and will most likely ditch entirely soon. Lately I’ve only been using it for tutorials. But at least I wasn’t closed off from viewing anything and everything I wanted without sifting through instances. I hope great things come for Lemmy, competitors are great, but in its current state it just seems doomed.
certain instances can choose not to federate with other instances
I’ve not seen this yet, how does this manifest?
An instance owner is still running a server. Reddit isn’t federated with anyone. Posts on Reddit don’t interact with Twitter, or on Youtube. So odds are you already bounce between several accounts. Yet on the fediverse, posts from Mastodon about a video on Peertube, can be discussed on Lemmy. If that’s not flexible enough, then that’s okay. If you think of it that way, then the big federated instances are an analog to sub-groups on one platform. Some instances specifically don’t want to federate, because for one reason or another they want a more narrow community. No harm done to us or them. Your time is your own, spend it doing what you want.
I’m not super impressed yet and I’m kind of confused with this whole thing so far. Whatever, screw reddit, I was done with that place anyway so I’ll give lemmy a shot.
I was already getting to a point where I spent too much unrewarding time on reddit and wanted out. this is the perfect time. there is an alternative that is close to the same, but different enough that I feel fresh.
I’m not sure if I understand why certain instances can choose not to federate with other instances. It just seems to limit the content that is accessible to me.
Because certain types of content and users might have negative value in a given environment.
I’ll use a mild example to illustrate that. Let’s say that you got two instances:
- alicelemmy - it’s just a place to shitpost, chill, chat, and throw jokes. Serious discussion is frowned upon.
- boblemmy - serious discussions only; joke posts are banned, you’re supposed to quote your sources, all that procedure.
If both instances are federalised you’ll see alicelemmy’s posters doing shitty jokes in boblemmy, and boblemmy’s posters trying to argue the jokes in alicelemmy. Both communities became less useful for their respective users, because now alicelemmy isn’t just a place to shitpost and chill, and boblemmy’s content has become less serious.
This happens a lot in Reddit, as a consequence of the Fluff Principle and the lack of barrier between subs. However in the Fediverse you can somewhat avoid it, by not federalising instances together.
In the meantime, if you enjoy both shitposting and serious discussions, nothing prevents you from accessing both instances separately.
why are communities not enough to separate alicelemmy from boblemmy?
after all, a user could want to participate in both
inb4 sorry, wall of text. [Also, note: this is my personal take.]
I think that communities are not enough because of a few things.
One of them is that most people expect to be able to behave the same way, abide to the same rules, and contribute the exact same way, to have the same level as expertise, as long as they’re in the same site. Sometimes this is not of the best interests of the group.
You see this a lot in Reddit, and I believe to be one of the main factors behind large subreddits going downhill, no matter the best efforts of their mod teams. r/linguistics is a good example of that - the sub was supposed to be for people at least familiar with Linguistics, sharing information, but most posts and comments there nowadays are from laymen assuming shit out of nowhere, because that’s how your average redditor behaves.
You could follow the local rules, sure; but most people will not. Unless there’s a higher degree of separation between both group.
Across instances however it’s clearer that you’re in a different site, with different rules, that you may need to behave in a different way. And that a contribution that may be welcome in one instance might be harmful for another.
Another is that different instances host different demographics. My example is too mild to show it, but imagine the following two instances instead:
- charlielemmy - intended as a safe space for trans people. Mostly so they can chill together, shitpost together, nothing too serious.
- danlemmy - intended for people who have a really dark sense of humour, and who’d gladly poke fun at everyone, including trans people. Definitively unsafe.
If you’re the admin of one of the instances you definitively do not want people from the other instance. In charlielemmy this would make the environment unsafe for its target userbase; for danlemmy it means that you’re going to get people pissed at the dark jokes, and potentially starting arguments.
after all, a user could want to participate in both
Federation makes it easier to handle: register in both alicelemmy and boblemmy.
Defederation is one of the best things about the Fediverse. It allows people and communities with strongly exclusive views to coexist while preventing harassment, brigading, or having to completely ban one or both of them. There are, or will be, instances which on principle will never defederate, so feel free to join one of those and see everything.
Based on the feedback I’ve been receiving, a user can just run their own instance on not be bound by the various internecine instance blocks. I will be looking into doing so myself.
A more positive mental attitude might improve your experience of all things across the board. If this is the energy you bring, it’s no wonder you’re not happy.
he’s trying and he wasn’t completely disgracing the place. Just saying its difficult coming from reddit to here. I myself am having the same troubles. I’m bringing a “positive attitude” and trying to learn but this place is much much more confusing than reddit and im not sure i even understand half of whats going on rn. this place is just confusing to the average person. you should have a better attitude towards people adopting this over reddit if you want more people to come here.
Are you going to provide the positive perspective of the same points (not all the other things great with Lemmy, but directly what OPs points were)? Two complaints (if that’s what you want to call it) are not any more constructive.
Lemmy is absolutely a learning curve…but once you learn it; you’ll basically grok how all fediverse-centric services behave.
Because the fediverse is built decentralized; you can have multiple instances…and it works more like an email account and less like a social network account. You need to know the destination (that’s the user or community name) and the instance name (that’s the domain name).
As Lemmy is still in development; they maybe haven’t gotten around to making all of this information easily manageable yet; but it will improve over time; and I do think you should post your feedback to the devs instead of just grumbling about it. I believe !lemmy_help exists for this reason.
What happens if I make an account on a niche instance, and it’s operator decides to close it? Is my account toast? If yes, doesn’t that incentivize me to centralize more by only making accounts on the biggest and most stable instances so I don’t lose my “email” history? Not criticizing, just trying to understand.
Not criticizing, just trying to understand.
It doesn’t feel like you aren’t trying to criticize Lemmy. This defense of your question seems very disingenuous.
What happens if I make an account on a niche instance, and it’s operator decides to close it?
Why would you knowingly make your account on an instance you believe to be unstable? Why would you trust a niche instance to be your “Main” if you couldn’t trust it’s administration?
As for Lemmy in general; the application is not yet matured enough in it’s codebase; there is currently no methods that I know of for you to transfer your account out of a Lemmy instance anyways…it hasn’t been developed yet. This feature is most definitely planned; but hasn’t been implemented as far as I can tell.
All I can tell you is choose wisely. Or don’t. I don’t care. The standard on Mastodon has always been you should run at least One Main and One Alt account anyways…so if something about your choice of a main instance unsettles you; create an alt quietly on a ‘bigger and more stable general instance’ or another ‘small-but-stable niche instance’ to fall back on depending on your preferences and needs.
As for myself; I’m here because I trust the person I know from the privacytools.io keybase chatroom(s); the developer who literally modded that room and did everything he could to make that original website worth something.
I appreciate your answer to my question, but not your aggressive tone. Before yesterday I had never even heard of a federated service, I’m just trying to understand how things work to make the best decision on a “home base”.
I wasn’t trying to be disingenuous, but just head off attacks from the insecure who might mistake my intentions. Thanks again for the in-depth answer.
