So considering there’s a substantial push to get away from places like Reddit and Twitter, as an outsider I’m wondering how the fediverse is going to actually provide solutions to some already bad problems within higher resource platforms:
ADMIN/MOD ABUSE: Redditors are no strangers to mods/admins nuking comments, astroturfing, signal boosting/silencing, and so on. Doesn’t that problem just become worse in a federated system? As an example, a subreddit mod may ban users for whatever reason, but a lemmy instance admin could drag all their communities into their own drama if they choose to defederate, no? Losing access to entire instances instead of just one community/subreddit based on a power-tripping admin seems a big flaw. Am I missing something?
REPOSTING/X-POSTING: Reddit was already just the same tweets posted to like forty different subreddits, recycled weekly. On lemmy, there are now a handful of instances that contain virtually the same communities too. The lemmy.world/c/memes and lemm.ee/c/memes communities will post virtually the same content. And that’s just one. Aren’t feeds going to be overrun by duplicate posts in /All?
PRIVACY: I have no clue about this… are there extra security or privacy issues with something like lemmy?
SERVER ISSUES: This kinda goes without saying, but a small instance will already struggle to host even their own local users as traffic increases. Communicating across more and more instances is going to be extremely taxing. Access issues/desyncs seem like they’ll be inevitable. Doesn’t a federated system have more trouble scaling up than a centralized one because of this? How could small independently run servers keep up with exponential processing costs? Won’t this just squeeze out smaller instances? Add this to issues when instances choose to defederate, and you have two competing incentives: spreading out users to keep server stress low, and centralizing users to keep local engagement high. Isn’t this kind of a big hurdle?
Sorry for the wall of text- excited about lemmy in general but really have no idea about whether these are issues.
Admin abuse: yea, but unlike reddit you can just move to another instance.
Reposting: you don’t have to subscribe to all communities. And you can block communities if you don’t want to see them in your local or all tab.
Privacy: depends on which instance you choose. Do your research.
Server: I am not sure about this, but I think the server strain is placed on the subs who generate the most content / have the most users. More users means more potential for donations, which means the devs can buy better servers.
Case in point on the admin thing: When the blackout thing started, two instances were the most recommended: Lemmy.ml and Beehaw.org.
Then Beehaw.org defederated from Lemmy.world and sh.itjust.works using some extremely flimsy reasoning (“they have open applications, they’re gonna fill with bad peeps uwu”)
Instantaneously EVERYONE stopped recommending Beehaw as a home instance. It left everyone’s consciousness entirely and you see little amount of communities hosted on it on community recommendation threads as well.
.ml also has potential problems, but people have abstracted themselves from it since, you know, so far the admins didn’t allow themselves to get in the way of the usability of their site. Specially not at a critical moment of the Fediverse’s growth.
I understand why people keep piling on Beehaw, but it feels to me like the people who make comments like this really don’t understand why they did it. I’m not speaking about the current lack of mod tools, but creating a space like Beehaw invites trolling.
I’m not a member of that server, but completely agree with what they’re out to do.
A single “entire” instance being ruined is a much smaller problem than a whole platform.
As for the duplicate community problem, I would love to see either a multi-reddit-like feature or the ability to merge/co-mingle “duplicate” communities across instances.
The solution to tyrannical mods or admins is simple: “take your ball and go home” by starting your own instance, or your own community on a separate instance. That said, instances and communities grow by growing trust between users and mods/admins by a track record of acting in a rational and trustworthy way.
Privacy is definitely a problem for Lemmy. You should assume everything you post or comment is public and in the open, and impossible to fully delete, because it is. Post accordingly. You could theoretically be identified by the sum total of all personally identifying information you freely post over a long enough time or by your writing style if a government considered you a real threat.
That said, many instances do not even require an email address. I don’t know whether instances store data like IP addresses, but you could check the lemmy source code to find out.
Edit: But also, who’s to say their server source code is unaltered? Federation lives and dies by trust and mutual cooperation, and that cannot be guaranteed.
Lemmy isn’t a perfect solution. The problem with Fediverse technologies is that they’re not actually decentralized, they’re polycentric. As you pointed out, an instance admin can make a lot of trouble for the users of their instance.
However, it is a step in the right direction. The cost of switching from a particular instance to another is fairly low. Your point about reposting supports this argument. If other communities offer the same content, there’s no need to tolerate bad administration.
I don’t really see reposting as a serious problem. It’s a minor annoyance.
Privacy, I don’t think the privacy concerns are more serious with lemmy than with something like reddit. Just don’t any personal information to your account if you can avoid it.
Server issues, I don’t know what the solution is to that.
We saw admin power abuse just yesterday on lemmynsfw.com . A new admin came in and banned any non-vanilla R34, but more egregiously (if the leaks are to be believed) wants to ban any regular porn if it doesn’t come from a “trusted source” and wants people to ID themselves with their government IDs if they are deemed “too young looking” by the moderation.
wants to ban any regular porn if it doesn’t come from a “trusted source” and wants people to ID themselves with their government IDs if they are deemed “too young looking” by the moderation.
So that admin wants to actually make sure that there is only legal and ethical content on their platform? How is that “abuse”? How else are they supposed to protect themselves against legal accusations that they are hosting illegal porn? The admins here aren’t working for multimillion dollar corporations, it’s probably just a matter of time until corpo social media starts targeting popular instances by exactly this kind of legal action…
ADMIN/MOD ABUSE: Redditors are no strangers to mods/admins nuking comments, astroturfing, signal boosting/silencing, and so on. Doesn’t that problem just become worse in a federated system? As an example, a subreddit mod may ban users for whatever reason, but a lemmy instance admin could drag all their communities into their own drama if they choose to defederate, no? Losing access to entire instances instead of just one community/subreddit based on a power-tripping admin seems a big flaw. Am I missing something?
Yes and no. There are certainly concerns with “little dictators” hosting instances or individuals with an agenda manipulating content on their instance. The difference to a site like reddit or twitter is that this power and influence stops at the instance border, nobody controls lemmy, so people can always migrate to another instance if something like this happens.
And with reddit, admins don’t just control individual subreddits. There are of course admins that control all of reddit.
REPOSTING/X-POSTING: Reddit was already just the same tweets posted to like forty different subreddits, recycled weekly. On lemmy, there are now a handful of instances that contain virtually the same communities too. The lemmy.world/c/memes and lemm.ee/c/memes communities will post virtually the same content. And that’s just one. Aren’t feeds going to be overrun by duplicate posts in /All?
This is just an normal characteristic of decentralized services in general and I think it will resolve itself over time. There are of course also many different websites that host similar content and there are similar subreddits that host similar content. Over time, one will establish itself and become the main community.
I have no clue about this… are there extra security or privacy issues with something like lemmy?
Information tends to be more transparent and open on the fediverse. Stuff you post on lemmy is not private. Your personal information you provide when signing-up is of course readable by the person who hosts the instance or people who have admin access. However, at the moment at least, lemmy instances are not run for profit and don’t use/sell your data for profit.
There are privacy concerns, there are always privacy concerns. It’s important to teach users how to protect themselvs by consciously controlling what information they reveal about themselves. This is much more important and effective than trying to control what others might do with your information.
This kinda goes without saying, but a small instance will already struggle to host even their own local users as traffic increases.
Here I have to speculate because I just don’t know enough about the technical side of it. At the moment, most issues seem to be cause by software bugs, not by too much traffic or hardware performance.
Handling high amounts of traffic and activity is always tricky. I believe scalability will probably be an issue that will arise, maybe sooner than later, but I don’t think it’s an unsolvable issue.
I haven’t been able to get into the “flow” of Lemmy to really enjoy it since joining within the last week but…
Reposting/X-Posting is the thing I’m most worried about. It is the thing that annoyed me most on reddit. Seeing the same post 2 or 3 times on the frontpage at the same time is obnoxious.
Ironically, that was one of the feature I actually really liked. Seeing the same post two or three times didn’t really matter to me since if it was posted in different communities, there was a wider variety of responses and perspectives (or I could just scroll past it).
Also it let me discover new communities that I wasn’t aware existed.
Yeh Lemmy is unfortunately going to have a very hard time growing to be even 10% the size of reddit. The whole decentralized thing is good in theory, but not great in reality. As you said, now entire communities can be deleted at any time, and as it gets more popular it will cost more people more money and with no way to make money to cover ever increasing server cots other than donations. Also there’s not going to be any guaranteed performance level across instances because they’re not all hosted on the same hardware in the same locations.
I want reddit to crash and burn at this stage, but unfortunately I can’t see it happening. Lemmy will crash and burn if it were to actually become a reddit competitor. I’ve already seen people asking for registrations to be turned off because most servers can’t even handle the minimal number of users they now have! That’s not how you grow a website/community lol.
Also as you mentioned, mods is a big worry. Mods are the main problem with reddit IMO, along with the admins. They push their ideologies, they shadow delete and ban people that they don’t like/agree with, and they just wield the banhammer without warning and without consequence. Are the mods here going to be the same? Many of them will literally be the same people that were mods on reddit, so that’s not a good start.
You are not logged in. However you can subscribe from another Fediverse account, for example Lemmy or Mastodon. To do this, paste the following into the search field of your instance: [email protected]
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If we could easily pack our account, subscription and history to another instance the admin abuse will be at least tolerable
I believe that this (account and content migration) is already in the roadmap.
Admin abuse: yea, but unlike reddit you can just move to another instance.
Reposting: you don’t have to subscribe to all communities. And you can block communities if you don’t want to see them in your local or all tab.
Privacy: depends on which instance you choose. Do your research.
Server: I am not sure about this, but I think the server strain is placed on the subs who generate the most content / have the most users. More users means more potential for donations, which means the devs can buy better servers.
Case in point on the admin thing: When the blackout thing started, two instances were the most recommended: Lemmy.ml and Beehaw.org.
Then Beehaw.org defederated from Lemmy.world and sh.itjust.works using some extremely flimsy reasoning (“they have open applications, they’re gonna fill with bad peeps uwu”)
Instantaneously EVERYONE stopped recommending Beehaw as a home instance. It left everyone’s consciousness entirely and you see little amount of communities hosted on it on community recommendation threads as well.
.ml also has potential problems, but people have abstracted themselves from it since, you know, so far the admins didn’t allow themselves to get in the way of the usability of their site. Specially not at a critical moment of the Fediverse’s growth.
I understand why people keep piling on Beehaw, but it feels to me like the people who make comments like this really don’t understand why they did it. I’m not speaking about the current lack of mod tools, but creating a space like Beehaw invites trolling.
I’m not a member of that server, but completely agree with what they’re out to do.
A single “entire” instance being ruined is a much smaller problem than a whole platform.
As for the duplicate community problem, I would love to see either a multi-reddit-like feature or the ability to merge/co-mingle “duplicate” communities across instances.
The solution to tyrannical mods or admins is simple: “take your ball and go home” by starting your own instance, or your own community on a separate instance. That said, instances and communities grow by growing trust between users and mods/admins by a track record of acting in a rational and trustworthy way.
Privacy is definitely a problem for Lemmy. You should assume everything you post or comment is public and in the open, and impossible to fully delete, because it is. Post accordingly. You could theoretically be identified by the sum total of all personally identifying information you freely post over a long enough time or by your writing style if a government considered you a real threat.
That said, many instances do not even require an email address. I don’t know whether instances store data like IP addresses, but you could check the lemmy source code to find out.
Edit: But also, who’s to say their server source code is unaltered? Federation lives and dies by trust and mutual cooperation, and that cannot be guaranteed.
Lemmy isn’t a perfect solution. The problem with Fediverse technologies is that they’re not actually decentralized, they’re polycentric. As you pointed out, an instance admin can make a lot of trouble for the users of their instance.
However, it is a step in the right direction. The cost of switching from a particular instance to another is fairly low. Your point about reposting supports this argument. If other communities offer the same content, there’s no need to tolerate bad administration.
I don’t really see reposting as a serious problem. It’s a minor annoyance.
Privacy, I don’t think the privacy concerns are more serious with lemmy than with something like reddit. Just don’t any personal information to your account if you can avoid it.
Server issues, I don’t know what the solution is to that.
at least with Lemmy, if you’re dealing with a bad admin or mod, you can move to a new instance …
We saw admin power abuse just yesterday on lemmynsfw.com . A new admin came in and banned any non-vanilla R34, but more egregiously (if the leaks are to be believed) wants to ban any regular porn if it doesn’t come from a “trusted source” and wants people to ID themselves with their government IDs if they are deemed “too young looking” by the moderation.
Do they have a choice? By hosting an instance, they open themselves up to liability if someone posts child porn. What else could they do?
So that admin wants to actually make sure that there is only legal and ethical content on their platform? How is that “abuse”? How else are they supposed to protect themselves against legal accusations that they are hosting illegal porn? The admins here aren’t working for multimillion dollar corporations, it’s probably just a matter of time until corpo social media starts targeting popular instances by exactly this kind of legal action…
Yes and no. There are certainly concerns with “little dictators” hosting instances or individuals with an agenda manipulating content on their instance. The difference to a site like reddit or twitter is that this power and influence stops at the instance border, nobody controls lemmy, so people can always migrate to another instance if something like this happens.
And with reddit, admins don’t just control individual subreddits. There are of course admins that control all of reddit.
This is just an normal characteristic of decentralized services in general and I think it will resolve itself over time. There are of course also many different websites that host similar content and there are similar subreddits that host similar content. Over time, one will establish itself and become the main community.
Information tends to be more transparent and open on the fediverse. Stuff you post on lemmy is not private. Your personal information you provide when signing-up is of course readable by the person who hosts the instance or people who have admin access. However, at the moment at least, lemmy instances are not run for profit and don’t use/sell your data for profit.
There are privacy concerns, there are always privacy concerns. It’s important to teach users how to protect themselvs by consciously controlling what information they reveal about themselves. This is much more important and effective than trying to control what others might do with your information.
Here I have to speculate because I just don’t know enough about the technical side of it. At the moment, most issues seem to be cause by software bugs, not by too much traffic or hardware performance.
Handling high amounts of traffic and activity is always tricky. I believe scalability will probably be an issue that will arise, maybe sooner than later, but I don’t think it’s an unsolvable issue.
I haven’t been able to get into the “flow” of Lemmy to really enjoy it since joining within the last week but…
Reposting/X-Posting is the thing I’m most worried about. It is the thing that annoyed me most on reddit. Seeing the same post 2 or 3 times on the frontpage at the same time is obnoxious.
Ironically, that was one of the feature I actually really liked. Seeing the same post two or three times didn’t really matter to me since if it was posted in different communities, there was a wider variety of responses and perspectives (or I could just scroll past it).
Also it let me discover new communities that I wasn’t aware existed.
I’m sure we’re going to see that as a feature of upcoming apps to at least aggregate link posts if it gets bad enough
Yeh Lemmy is unfortunately going to have a very hard time growing to be even 10% the size of reddit. The whole decentralized thing is good in theory, but not great in reality. As you said, now entire communities can be deleted at any time, and as it gets more popular it will cost more people more money and with no way to make money to cover ever increasing server cots other than donations. Also there’s not going to be any guaranteed performance level across instances because they’re not all hosted on the same hardware in the same locations.
I want reddit to crash and burn at this stage, but unfortunately I can’t see it happening. Lemmy will crash and burn if it were to actually become a reddit competitor. I’ve already seen people asking for registrations to be turned off because most servers can’t even handle the minimal number of users they now have! That’s not how you grow a website/community lol.
Also as you mentioned, mods is a big worry. Mods are the main problem with reddit IMO, along with the admins. They push their ideologies, they shadow delete and ban people that they don’t like/agree with, and they just wield the banhammer without warning and without consequence. Are the mods here going to be the same? Many of them will literally be the same people that were mods on reddit, so that’s not a good start.
If lemmy stays under 10% of reddit we all win
Not really. We need the content that comes from having a big community.