A community to talk about the Fediverse and all it's related services using ActivityPub (Mastodon, Lemmy, Mbin, etc).
If you wanted to get help with moderating your own community then head over to !moderators@lemmy.world!
Learn more at these websites: Join The Fediverse Wiki, Fediverse.info, Wikipedia Page, The Federation Info (Stats), FediDB (Stats), Sub Rehab (Reddit Migration)
People talk a lot about the protocols that power Bluesky vs. ActivityPub, because we're nerds and we believe deep in our hearts that the superior protocol will win. This is adorable. It flies in the face of literally all of human history, where the more convenient thing always wins regardless of technical merit. VHS beat Betamax. USB-C took twenty years.
Hopefully, unlike betamax and laserdisc, the fediverse will trudge on despite the megacorporate protocols
See I had forgotten the one golden rule of capitalism. To thrive in capitalism one must be amoral. Now you can be wildly sickeningly successful with morals but you cannot reach that absolute zenith of shareholder value. Either you accept a lower share price and don’t commit atrocities or you become evil. There is no third option.
Spot on.
Even better.
Most instances have human moderation, gating for bots, and yes, and you actually have to take 5-10 minutes to figure out how it all works, so the stupid people are automatically excluded by sheer complexity.
I fucking love Mastodon.
Plenty of stupid people in the fediverse so I dont think we will win any prices for that, guys. And plenty of people who think they are smarter than average, and zero people who think they are dumber than average. The usual stuff.
I really would like to somehow convince more people to adopt the idea that, like, Facebook and friends are run by bad people and you can choose not to use their products. Just stop. Find another way. Be uncomfortable for a little while.
But people aren't up to the challenge.
People are fucking addicted to instagram and I'm the annoying "get rid of that shit" preacher to everyone I can. My gf has reduced her usage, but still checks it from time to time.
I always ask "Do you really need to use it?" - and almost always, their answer is "not really, but it's the only place I can find X". Some of my gf's friends use it to find new places to go. Some of my boardgaming friends still use it, mostly to "know what events are coming up" or what new games are being released.
Instagram is essentially this age's yellow pages of a telephone list, small businesses are super dependent on it and they're forced to post fucking stories everyday or get erased by the algorithm
It's one of those self fueling problems. Businesses post on Instagram because people go there, and people go there in part because that's where they found out about businesses doing stuff.
Better options are possible, but the big money is backing this hell. Less money to be made from RSS feeds , web rings, and email newsletters.
I don't use any social media other than this. I find out about bands I like playing from their email lists or bandsintown. I'm on a couple "things happening in the city" email newsletters. It doesn't demand my attention.
I also wish they would, but ive realized a lot of people have no self control or discipline. I guess I do because of some challanges during my life. But for most people, its difficult to even stop eating unhealthy food, and thats not even difficult. :)
People complain about Lemmy having limited content and engagement. Not in this article so much. I’m sure there were fewer posts in the past too. But what I found is that there are real people on here and you don’t have to wade through bots and shills which makes this community feel much more whole to me.
While that's true, I don't believe it to be a fundamental property of the medium or federation in general. I think what we are experiencing is the result of lack of mainstream attention and traffic.
The people here are much less demographically diverse than the public at large, and have intentionally sought out this space and others like it, so they have more of a sense of ownership and community about it. The more attention it gets, the more the demographics will change to reflect the broader public, and the more it will become like a public space, complete with all the ills that come with that, like advertisers vying for attention, shills posing as enthusiasts, and influencers saying what will get them the most followers, rather than what they think.
I believe it would take extensive moderation and amazing tools to keep places like this the same as they gain users. I haven't ever seen a community survive that kind of growth and retain its original spirit, but I also haven't seen one with no profit motive. If we can get the moderation tools where they need to be, there could be hope!
While Lemmy lacks those, PieFed already has both advanced automated mod tools plus other features that dramatically increases the democratization of moderation itself.
e.g. if someone wants to see less Trump and Musk content, keyword filters allow someone to personally set that up, without having to rely upon a moderator to make that decision for the entire community.
Another example along those lines is the automated collapsing or even hiding of content that falls below a certain score threshold - personally I have that turned off, but if someone wants that then again, they don't have to rely solely upon the efforts of a moderation team, and can rely instead upon the community engagement. Again: if they want.
Still another example is showing icons next to usernames - e.g. one shows new users that are <2 weeks old, another shows someone who receives ~10x more downvotes than upvotes, and so on. These are not "filters", just helpful indicators so that you know more about someone's reputation prior to responding. Most conservatives for example have warning labels next to their usernames, in these more leftist spaces.
Also - and I cannot emphasize enough how crucial this is - PieFed moderator reports actually federate. This has been a source of huge pain in Lemmy, and tbf I think a future Lemmy release is planned that will do that... but meanwhile as with so exceedingly very many other features, PieFed has had them for months.
PieFed thereby helps avoid some of the major issues that cause community fragmentation. Which ironically PieFed also helps solves that issue too, by collapsing comments (old example of this phenomena), and with the Categories of Communities suite of features, including the user-customizeable and shareable Feeds.
Also PieFed is easier to install, requires less maintenance, uses fewer resources (even sending 25-fold less data to end-users), and so on. So yeah, I don't think Lemmy is capable of scaling up, despite its reliance upon its sourcecode being in the hyper stable Rust programming language, because of all the other issues with it (database issues requiring constant restarts, and especially lack of moderation capabilities), so I am putting all of my hopes into PieFed. Sorry if this reads like an advertisement - I feel like PieFed is to Lemmy what Lemmy is to Reddit, except that analogy does not begin to come close since PieFed has added features that even Reddit never bothered to, plus some others that it continually tried to take away from people by not retaining it in new-reddit despite how it was present in old.
I think even if shills, bots and influencers gain traction in the fediverse, it's still better than reddit or Instagram because of federation. There won't be one corporation algorithmically feeding you ads. You can curate your experience more than you can on another platform.
True, Lemmy feels this way almost exclusively because it's small and hasn't been noticed by mainstream media enough. The second that changes this place will become what reddit was pre-ipo.
My hope is that it will always be a little too disjointed to hold that kind of attention for long.
I think the community is a good size right now. Popular enough that we guarantee getting any content of relevance I care about, but not popular enough to have all the problems you mentioned. I hope the community stays this size and off the radar indefinitely.
Yeah, there's definitely still some bullshit and editorialized clickbaity headlines to sift through, but it's not nearly as much and overall the content here feels much more human.
There's just not much incentive to generate engagement for the sake of it (unless you're funhole), and far fewer bots and bad-faith trolls in general. Not to say there's none though.
As soon as there is "unlimited" content, the vast majority of said content is shit
I watched a Greenlandic toddler munch meat from the spine of a seal with its head very much intact.
I kind of want to know the context of this
So here is a stupid question
What exactly is the fediverse? What's included in it? I've hear much about fediverse and Lemmy, but is Lemmy part of it or not? Are other systems like Blue sky a part of it or not? Do I transparently see posts from all those different systems?
You asked five questions, none of them are stupid.
What exactly is the fediverse? What's included in it.
I have heard two definitions in use. The first is narrower, it refers to the collection of servers running compatible Reddit-alike software including Lemmy, Mbin and Piefed which are pretty much 1 to 1 compatible and communicating with users on one from another is more or less seamless. The big, distributed Reddit alternative that allows you to post from lemmy.ca onto lemmy.world and me to read it from sh.itjust.works.
The second is the broader, simpler definition of "anything that runs on the ActivityPub protocol and is federated with something else." Which includes all of the above plus the likes of Peertube, Mastodon, Pixelfed, Loops etc. They are technically cross-compatible, I'll get to that later.
Is Lemmy part of it or not?
Yes it is, Lemmy runs on ActivityPub.
Are other systems like Bluesky part of it or not?
Some are, some aren't. A few examples:
Do I transparently see posts from all those different systems?
Yes and no. You can kind of think of the Fediverse like the Universe itself in that there's nowhere you can stand and see the entire thing. You and I are from neighboring star systems in the same galaxy, we're both on servers running Lemmy, so we can communicate completely seamlessly. I see a comment immediately above you from someone on piefed.social, they're on a server running Piefed, not Lemmy. That's another Reddit-alike, they can communicate with us pretty easily. You might occasionally see someone on Mastodon chime in. You can usually spot this because they @ the users they're replying to. It would be really cool if a Mastodon user could reply to this message to demonstrate. As you get farther afield, it kinda stops working. It's difficult to interact with Peertube from Lemmy, for example. I have commented on a Peertube video from a Pixelfed account though.
What exactly is the fediverse?
Servers that can federate over ActivityPub protocol. Any server that uses ActivityPub can be considered part of the fediverse.
What’s included in it?
Clones of corporate owned sites: twitter (mastodon, misskey), tumblr (wafrn), reddit (lemmy, piefed), facebook (friendica), plus others
I’ve hear much about fediverse and Lemmy, but is Lemmy part of it or not?
Yes, it is
Are other systems like Blue sky a part of it or not?
Bluesky isn't, since they use a different protocol, but it's possible to bridge and interact with it. Wafrn does it.
Do I transparently see posts from all those different systems?
This is the biggest "it depends" situation. For instance, by default, lemmy ignores most posts from mastodon and similars. However, mastodon users can post to lemmy communities if they use the proper @, but they cannot specify a title - their post body will also double as the title. They can also reply to comments, they're easy to spot because they always have an @user when replying.
Some server types integrate the different things better than others. Friendica and Wafrn seem to be the best for "variety integration".
Not a stupid question at all. Loosely, I think, it's any site that trades information using the ActivityPub protocol. Because they use the same underlying protocol, they can easily trade content/posts with each other and yes, Lemmy is part of the Fediverse for that reason.
This is also why you can see posts from lemmy.ca or piefed.social or whatever.domain users while browsing lemmy.world - anyone who sets up a site with the Lemmy software can participate in the network and trade posts with all the others - these are individually called instances. These sites can decide that they don't want to trade posts with certain other sites (ie: trolls set up a farm on their own instance) and exclude them from their users being able to see them, this is called defederation.
In theory, a Mastodon instance could see content from a Lemmy instance (and Pixelfed and Loops and so on) as they all use the same underlying protocol to trade information, but in practice, it seems that sites basically stick to trading with other sites in their wheelhouse.
BlueSky also started with ActivityPub but I believe they did something to their software to make it proprietary.
The usefulness of all this is: no member site can get a monopoly on content. The largest Lemmy site is lemmy.world and I have an account on there. I switched to dbzer0 because I disagreed with some of the actions taken by lemmy.world (they defederated from some content that I wanted to see) so I came over here and now I can see that content.
Anyway, that's my understanding of it.
In theory, a Mastodon instance could see content from a Lemmy instance (and Pixelfed and Loops and so on) as they all use the same underlying protocol to trade information, but in practice, it seems that sites basically stick to trading with other sites in their wheelhouse.
Whenever you see somebody linking to the user they're replying to at the beginning of their comment, you're likely seeing somebody posting from Mastodon because their UI is user-feed-oriented instead of thread-oriented.
Interesting, that never occurred to me. I said that about the wheelhouse because I have a Mastodon account I read from time to time and I can't recall ever seeing any Lemmy content show in my feed. I never did Twitter though so I'm kind of lost, it might be I just don't know what I'm doing. I followed like 40 hashtags but I still don't get a huge amount of content.
@HAL_9_TRILLION @grue It looks like this! I looked up the comment URL on my mastodon account, which enabled me to reply from there.
The fediverse is the overarching architecture. So lemmy is part of the fediverse. It is a federated collection of servers that are somewhat independent, but still part of the system. I'm going to make a very poor analogy, but think of it like your spice cabinet. The individual spices are instances while the cabinet itself is the fediverse. Or at least that's my understanding of it. If I'm mistaken, please someone enlighten me.
yo dog. let me tell ya all about the neighborhood you live in!
This was a great read to start my day, thank you!
FYI, I'm doing it to build a brand.
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The tickets for Fediretreat are selling fast. Grab yours now!
And it has not enough users. If the fediverse ever became popular enough to hold significant marketshare, we'd see similar issues. The upside to the frdiverse is that you can defederate from misinformation peddlers.
Fediverse doesn't (as of yet) have a monetization path because of it's "self hosted" structure - I put it in quotes because most people use large instances, but anyone can spin up their own and federate.
The big risk with this is that if it reaches a critical mass where advertisers see potential for profit, the mechanism that would be most convenient, especially with LLMs, is bots.
Say Toyota wants to promote their new car. They contract an advertising agency, who spins up a few dozen LLM agents trained on Lemmy data and instructions to talk up the latest new car. It might make posts, or just comments, but in all cases it will eventually promote that product.
All that for the cost of a few tokens, and the only giveaway would be the "AI phrasing", if anyone catches it.
I learnt something new today, cheers