Discuit is not a federated social platform, and we do not plan to support federation in the future either. This is because we do not believe that federated platforms, for a few specific reasons, have a chance of becoming mainstream social platforms one day.
My point is that you can't compare a platform like reddit to a protocol like email.
While gmail and outlook are insanely big, how much of all email traffic do they handle? Sure, they are insanely big, but I doubt they are above 50%
On the other hand, how big is reddit compared to all other link aggregators?
I think it's pretty surely far above 50%.
Or how big is YouTube as a VOD platform?
I'm not advocating for discuit, but being like "they think federation can't build a mainstream platform, but look at email" is kind of missing the point.
Also email is the only example for federation. It's an outlier, mainly because it was one of the first things on the net. Everything else is platforms, unfortunately.
I think it's just a comparison because during the Reddit Exodus people often suggested Discuit instead of Lemmy because ActivityPub is "too complicated". So I guess this is a good demonstration that federation really is our best hope at replacing the big billionaire social media platforms.
As another point of reference vs Discuit's 6,787 registered users, Lemmy has 1,904,195 registered users. Kbin has 66,175, and Mbin has 5,453 registered users.
Almost as many as there are in the colonial fleet in Battlestar Galactica. So does that mean we can expect that the colonial fleet had someone as prolific at shitposting as The_Picard_Maneuver? That's encouraging to know if so
There was, back when I was active there. Around the time I migrated to Lemmy there was some drama and I believe that user was suspended. I don't check it frequently enough anymore to know if there's a current Picard maneuver surrogate.
I've been enjoying that fact lately, it's been nice to have actual conversations with people, to actually have my thoughts challenged in healthy ways and to have my mind change and to change the minds of others without the intensity that predominates a lot of other sites. I feel I can talk to people here
I think it's because people trend a lot older on Lemmy than Reddit. I imagine a lot of the more vile opinions you see on Reddit are teenagers.
I've not seen much unhealthy discussion/ad hominen on Lemmy yet.
Also it trends towards a more intellectual crowd, even if primarily in the technical sense. Simply having to pick an instance probably keeps away a lot of the people who could otherwise flood every single community with inane questions - i.e. ask other people to do their work for them rather than do a 10 second internet search on their own.
And now for the part this platform doesn't want to hear. THOSE "problematic" posters are a GOOD thing.
You have to understand, if you took the world and seperated its humans by intelligence, the "idiot" group is going to be much bigger than the "PhD" group. Like......by a lot.
So if you ONLY cater to smart people, you ARE limiting your growth. Again.....by a lot.
So the eventual question needs to be asked. "What is Lemmy trying to be?"
Are you trying to be an alternitive to Reddit? Are you trying to replace Reddit? Are you trying to be a Reddit similiar niche community seperate from the mainstream?
Because if you want this to be a small niche unknown community geared towards older people, tech minded, then congrats. Thats what you have.
But if you want a broader reach, then you can't gatekeep the idiots. There's a reason they call them "the unwashed masses". Sometimes even quite literally.
if you took the world and seperated its humans by intelligence, the “idiot” group is going to be much bigger than the “PhD” group. Like…by a lot.
No.... you'd have a bell curve. But even that assumes you have a single good measure of intelligence.
I kind of agree with the rest of your post, but I would have worded it a bit differently, emphasizing that people who found it difficult to start using Lemmy might still be worth having around. Also, I don't think "as large as Reddit" or "small niche unknown" are our only options.
I would rather, instead of dividing between have vs. lack smartyness, focus on have vs. lack kindness, consideration, empathy, etc. Remember Reddit? (A half-joke bc although you just came from there more recently, some of us haven't been for a year or more and are legit starting to forget, almost blissfully!:-)
I don't mind talking to people all along the intelligence scale, but I do mind talking with people who engage in trolling behaviors. I will hang out with the humble uneducated plebes but I refuse to with their opposites. I am not phrasing it well but somewhere in here it gets complicated bc those scales overlap, as often the least intelligent behave as if they were somehow entitled to be treated as the most - e.g. Dr. Fauci gave the entire world a vaccine, but it was people who flunked or never took biology in the first place who are trying to block access to not only it but to simple masks. One side works to earn respect, the other does not yet not only demands equal treatment but somehow more than equal, and sometimes at the point of a literal gun. One side actually reads the Constitution of the United States, while the other side does not yet attempts to overthrow it regardless, bc they apparently know "better" how the country should be run than those who founded it.
So while I think that fascists should have a place they can talk - that's just humane - I also do not want to be in that place. Their rights end where mine begin. So if (like I/we did to Reddit) that means that they win and therefore I have to leave, so be it - I will leave social media entirely if need be, before I compromise and enjoy watching people "dunk on" others. If it is X or bust, then I choose bust.
Or the less hostile but just as damaging form of this where people treat social media as a place for emotional venting rather than real conversations with real people. Those two are related bc just bc you can get away with doing something, bc you have that power/ability, does not mean that you should do it. e.g. one or maybe three comments like "^This" or "I also choose this guy's wife" or "And my bow" etc. is fine but a hundred of them!? in a row, or even like twenty, is just too much. They speak, and therefore people cannot even listen anymore bc of the crowded noise from everyone else speaking.
Who sees the last ten posts to a community being "which android phone is the best these days" (no other details provided) and decides to add an eleventh to the group? Answer: people who are lonely and need someone to talk to, but don't care about the rules of politeness, and are so self-centered that they want another post devoted entirely to themselves. Never mind the fact that there being so many of those drives people away who would have actually answered their question. They not only whisper but SHOUT into the void, and if the only way for me to have peace is to mute them, or not go to where people do that, then so be it. Their right to post such runs up against my right to not have to listen to it.
And maybe, for some anyway, their lack of etiquette is merely bc they are young? But whoever they are, their presence foretells the absence of the people that they will drive away. So you cannot simply increase tolerance infinitely in order to grow the size of the Fediverse, bc that works in opposition to people who refuse to tolerate the intolerant and inconsiderate. We cannot have it all there - one or the other is the best that could be achieved even in purely theoretical terms, much less making it happen irl.
Sometimes, easy accessibility is a bad thing. Nobody profits off a large user base here. We should instead focus on having good users and a platform that serves those users.
Reddit is worse because of its size, resulting in problems with spam/low effort posts and comments.
This smaller size is a bit of a double-edged sword though. If I want to discuss cooking/chef knives with people, for example, there isn't a niche community specifically for that topic.
Maybe in this way it's best for people to head outside of Lemmy to other forums for more specific interests, and Lemmy can be more tech/general discussion oriented.
Thats because America alone has something like 3.5 BILLION people in it. Ohio alone has 11 million citizens. I assure you 95% of ohio is farms and cows, and we STILL have 11 million. Sometimes I wonder if they include the cows in that number.
My point is, 50k in scale to how big the internet is (and thats just America.....the internet is the world. Except for north korea).
So, 50k is not really a lot. Especially when you consider that this userbase is fragmented by design.
I feel like this is the smarter design for this type of format. I also feel like this format could be so much more than it is. And it's because this format relies on the idea that you have to please everyone. Otherwise they'll defederate.
Well when I was 7 years old there was a girl at school who didn't like me. My great aunt edna asked what the other kids thought of me. They liked me ok. I had some friends. It was just her that actively disliked me. So my great aunt edna says some advice that has stood the test of time. She told me "In life, not everyone is going to like you. The only thing you can do is be yourself, make sure they don't dislike you because you're being a problem, and then surround yourself with people who DO like you. Let the others dislike you. As long as you're not being a problem child, you can only stay true to yourself, and likeminded friends will follow."
And even though she said this in the 80s, and has been dead for decades, her words speak true in my 40s today. Essentially the modern version would be "haters gonna hate".
So if there's 50k users, and they're segregating into their own spaces, it's going to feel more like 1000 users. And now take into account time zones, and individual schedules, it'll feel more like 200 users.
I think you're going to lose a few people with that first number being off by a decimal place, but the substance of what you said is still relevant and gives insight about the Lemmy experience right now.
He tried to capitalize on the Rexodus, but iirc could not pick just one lane b/t "freedom" and intolerance of the intolerant - you can never have both. Interestingly the Fediverse is currently deciding the same thing, with some neat new tricks coming in v0.19.4 that should help.
mastodon : when you block another account they cease to exist and can no longer interact with your account at all ever
lemmy: when you block another account, the only thing that happens is you can no longer see or interact with that accounts past or future activity, though they can still see, vote, and comment under yours which, just like reddit, is ripe for abuse and doxxing
there can be no discussion of tolerance or free speech when there can be no way to block other abusive accounts from your content or you from harrasment
Oh that sucks. Tbf the entire concept of the Fediverse is an enormous security nightmare regardless: someone was telling me how a person could spin up an instance and share a picture also served up from their machine, then maliciously correlate the incoming IP addresses from the latter of people who viewed it vs. make interactions (voting or comments) in the former to identify you irl. But at least that takes some technical effort, and there seems no reason not to put additional obstacles up to make it harder.
Unfortunately the Lemmy developers seem to have little incentive to add features that are primarily for Westerners who e.g. don't agree that an authoritian admin and/or mod is always correct regardless of the facts. And Westerners don't seem in that much of a hurry to make alternatives - although K/MBin exists already and Sublinks is coming as well. If we want better, we would need to put in the work to make it happen.
It's still a thousand times better than Reddit:-). Except I no longer recommend Lemmy to people that I meet irl - I can't keep doing that in good conscience anymore, until there is an instance that defederates Lemmy.ml. Yes the new person could block many people and even whole instances, but it seems a little similar to recommending that someone use Arch Linux - like, really!? Hopefully the concept of the Fediverse will improve someday soon and I can do that once more, bc I really do want to.
I think content really should be served on a p2p basis recon it would improve robustness and reduce load on servers also would stop the whole ip vote association. I believe thats how peertube serves its videos but i dont see why it can't be extended to serve all media
I presume that would have security issues of its own:-), and this is just a guess but it might look more like traffic that some ISPs may want to ban, if implemented like that?
I haven't done anything remotely piratey for decades but people say that there are forums that way. I'm not intending to conflate P2P with the likes of TOR that is merely one implementation of that, just saying that apparently the implementations exist.
The security issues are minimised compared to havibg a centralised instance. And yeah some ISP may block/rate limit thats why net neutrality is so important.
It means that each actor can only expose themselves to a subset (more peers less people) of the total network. As opposed to the current situation where u can collect information on more people as a singular actor. But yes you do expose yourself to the peers you connect to.
An IP address alone does not identify you. It might identify your general area.
Any other website works the same way. I can go buy a domain, set up a plain html site, and view the IP of anyone who visits the site.
What kind of features are you looking for?
Whoever you'd recommend is already exposed to the lemmy.ml people or worse, it's just through Facebook or Instagram or Reddit. At least here they're a little self-contained.
I don't go to Facebook, X, Instagram, or Reddit. Some people that I talk to irl also don't follow social media. Why should they - what does it offer then? To those people I have been recommending Lemmy in the past, and now I don't do that anymore. I would like to though.
Honestly, I think the future of fediverse advocacy for now should be recommending a specific instance and not explaining the federation part until they are using it
Agreed - as Blaze always says, save the why and how it works (under the hood) for later and for now just show them the goods.
And when a major instance defederates from Lemmy.ml I will start recommending that exact instance to people.
Or, an admin at sh.itjust.works mentioned the possibility of automatically applying a user level block to it for all new users, along with a bot message about how to remove that block. As discussed above, it would be far from perfect (e.g. someone mentions that the genocide going on in Ukraine is bad and gets hit by many downvotes with no clue where they came from bc they are not shown notifications from the people who may reply to say how it is actually good though, bc Russia is the one doing it...), but indeed it would be better than now.
Hard agree. A while ago, Feddit UK nearly lost it's domain and I was a hard advocate of carving our own identity without using terms such as "Reddit", "Lemmy" or "Federation". Basically have our unique identity. As right now all I have told about it see it as a reddit knock-off.
I would actually not go that far - I respect the devs enormously for having written the code and shared it with the entire world. If someone else wants to write new code - K/Mbin and Sublinks come to mind - then sure replace Lemmy for those instances that run that, but e.g. Lemmy.World is definitely a Lemmy and I'm okay with that.
I'm also okay with Fediverse - should I not be? I suppose an alternative is something that implements the ActivityPub protocol, but why not the Fediverse?
Basically I am okay with anything so long as people don't stumble upon it unawares.
But I do see your point that we can't just say that we are a Reddit knockoff, even though that's literally what we are. It should be the start of additional description. So far I call it "social media" - where people share and talk, bc that seems about right. "Link aggregator" doesn't do much for me, and suggests more of a purpose to read news stories rather than make our own posts.
The beautiful thing about the Fediverse is that those 75 users are in an ecosystem with the 50k+ Lemmy/K/mbin users, along with users from Sublinks, Mastodon, Firefish, etc.