I just said “Lemmy” and they went forward from there.
Helping people pick an instance is not as straight-forward task as many people claim. e.g. if you love programming, then perhaps programm.dev is right for you, except right now they are having enormous federation difficulties - e.g. https://programming.dev/post/20692281. They are far from the only ones doing so though - https://feddit.org/post/3524876 - and yet they do have more difficulties than most.
Any instance that is not Lemmy.World itself is going to suffer right now, until the deployment of 0.19.6 - https://github.com/LemmyNet/lemmy/pull/4623. And yet people piling on top of the already too-large pile of Lemmy.World will only make the future problems worse. This whole “federation” concept is still experimental, compared to a single-server model like Reddit had.
Blaze often tells people to go by default to lemm.ee. Which is one of the rare instances that defederates from none of hexbear.net, lemmy.ml, or even lemmygrad.ml. So if someone comes across this advice and follows it… BTW, Lemmy.cafe likewise defederates from almost nothing, except it DOES defederate from those big 3 (caveat: it seems run by only a single administrator, so is therefore far less stable than e.g. lemm.ee, and could disappear at any time - though there are so many other things about that instance that are so welcoming and friendly, and btw it is one of the very select few that are already running 0.19.6-beta! so a single admin yes, but one who seems VERY on the ball!).
But ultimately you are correct: they control the sourcecode, so it is YOU who are using THEIR platform - and they WILL do it THEIR way, regardless.
Until and unless more people switch to Mbin, PieFed, or eventually Sublinks. Admiral Patrick who developed Tesseract for dubvee.org and who has blocked lemmy.ml users has pledged to switch to Sublinks whenever it will come out. In the meantime you can view a demo, but I haven’t heard of any developments for it for like half a year. So I switched to PieFed, and am posting several bug reports to help make it better. I advise people to check all of these options out just to see what’s out there, though definitely more is yet to come due to the hard work from these very helpful developers!
And credit where it’s due: Dessalines is helping in his own way, to reduce people’s dependency upon Reddit, and offering that codebase completely free of charge - that’s not nothing. Though administering a server instance is an entirely different skillset… and if we want to see the Fediverse grow rather than shrink with time, I think that better fences are going to be necessary (or mere labels would be even better, except they seem to militantly refuse to do such - but could you imagine if “politically extremist” content had a label just like all the NSFW posts do? then we could all get along side-by-side in the same space).
Nobody enjoys being punched in the face, or to see their (or why not ANY?) nation mocked - especially normies who may have DEEP knowledge of their subject matter, yet happen to not use Arch Linux btw, or may not be actual full-on communists (yet?).
Right, and for people who want that low defederation, lemm.ee is not just a good but a great option. Though for normies, it may be turning people away.
But as you said, what other options are there? Lemmy.cafe seems so perfect in so many ways. Like their welcome messages are actually helpful, e.g. pointing people to !newtolemmy@lemmy.ca, as opposed to e.g. “What is Lemmy.ml” that is just a broken link to nowhere, or Lemmy.World’s Getting started guide that doesn’t mention things such as cross-posting. But then again, normies especially wouldn’t like it when/if the instance suddenly has to shut down for whatever reason… I get you there.
So who else defederates from the entirety of the big 3? (Btw lemmy.cafe defederates from almost nothing but these, and threads ofc, so still has e.g. NSFW and anime instances linked. And quokk.au likewise has only a single admin.) Or better yet allows custom user blocking? PieFed does, Tesseract on dubvee.org, and perhaps some apps (not sure which ones - and the trick is that some appear to at first glance, but it’s merely the same Lemmy back-end blocking that doesn’t block users, only communities). And I’m not clear about Mbin - I think not.
Moreover, nearly every instance other than Lemmy.world is having federation issues with lemmy.world right now. But we can’t just keep sending people to lemmy.world bc it’s the only one that always works for >80% of the content on the Fediverse? That would somewhat work, but be a purely short-term solution. Yet nothing else would work… e.g. I made a post from StarTrek.website to tenforward on lemmy.world and couldn’t see the comments (or votes) that people made to it for at least 2-3 days. Eventually I responded from a third instance involved - discuss.online - but federation issues such as this tend to have a cooling effect in terms of shutting down conversations. This stuff is going to turn normies away as well, on top of the toxicity issues.
So there are problems with every instance. At least you get your choice of which issues you want to deal with:-). The toxicity issue though is particularly what has driven away 100% of the people that I’ve mentioned Lemmy to irl, so it seems to be the major one. Perhaps if not for it they might have joined Lemmy and then left it later, but as it is they refuse to even consider it bc they can’t get past that. So THAT is the one that I think we need to focus on to get more people. At which point yeah, perhaps add Lemmy.cafe to the recommendation list? Alongside PieFed that allows custom user blocking of whatever instance you want - and I mean the good kind, blocking not just communities but all comments as well.
Perhaps the reason that people are mentioning the defederation issues is due to Mastodon’s heavy fragmention and inability to really search for content outside of someone’s initial chosen instance? (Though that feature seems to be coming “soon™”.) If so that would make a LOT of sense?! However, the difficulties faced by Lemmy are of a different sort. Not being able to search for content from any other instance is nowhere near the same as e.g. the Western world defederating from an instance that constantly mocks and disrespects everything that it does - and kinda vice versa btw bc there is much that the Western world does not respect about how the Eastern world (specifically Russia and China) does things as well, e.g. the extremely heavy-handed banning from all communities, and how the East is “not” doing genocide, fully and literally directly, even while the USA “is” (I mean it low-key is, but how does that justify the Ukrainian invasion or the Uyghur situation?!) - the whole “one rule for thee, an entirely different set of rules for me” thing is a real turn-off for people to remain in the Fediverse. So while I don’t doubt that people are asking for instances that aren’t defederated from anything, I do question whether that’s truly what they want, especially “they” meaning the majority of normies. It’s complicated bc some truly do want something like lemm.ee, while on the other hand I see some people leaving Lemm.ee wanting to go somewhere that defederates from at the very least Hexbear. It’s one thing to foster and encourage STRONG diversity of opinions, but it’s another to open the door to people who consistently argue in bad faith (and rarely if ever do not do such). The former makes dull conversations better, while the latter ends conversations entirely.
You might have higher chances of convincing lemm.ee, lemmy.zip, lemmy.dbzer0.com, discuss.tchcs.de to defederate hexbear, than getting a small instance that does popular enough to enter the top 20
Or you can convince lemmy.cafe to get another admin, and get a bit more “professional” (a la lemmy.zip)
I made a post from StarTrek.website to tenforward on lemmy.world and couldn’t see the comments (or votes) that people made to it for at least 2-3 days.
May I ask you why you keep bringing that issue, when it has been solved in the meantime, and is a specific Piefed issue? Lemmy users on any of the top 20 instances are not experiencing federation issues, with the sole exception of programming.dev
First, I hope nobody is taking any of this personally. We were talking here about how to reach out to normies, and whatever best way there is to do that.
Second, you misread my comment. It is true that MANY instances are having issues with Lemmy.World. My own comment here said “from StarTrek.website” (to be most clear I mean https://startrek.website/c/tenforward@lemmy.world ), which itself is a different instance than PieFed.social, so I experienced these federation issues multiple times this very week, from two distinct places - i.e. I’m not continuously bringing up the same issue, I’m adding new ones to the pile, to show that it’s not just PieFed’s fault. And I don’t think I mentioned here yet that those issues also affected https://discuss.online/c/tenforward@lemmy.world - after a day or two the latter started to catch up but it was still a day behind lemmy.world. That’s 3 instances all struggling to receive that same content, none fully succeeding (at the time).
If anything it’s Lemmy.world’s “fault” but only in the diagnostic sense of being centrally positioned in this debacle rather than blame being a “responsible” party to have caused it or being able to fix it. Though fortunately, 0.19.6 should help provide a fix for exactly this, and the Lemmy devs are currently doing their due diligence to test it out before deployment to the entire world:-).
And I am far from the only one mentioning such - here’s one example and here’s another. Also, the issue with my personal post was just a few days ago, so even if these federation issues are intermittent they are still ongoing, and seem like they will continue until such time as Lemmy.world finishes its update process to 0.19.6.
Great! I don’t really want the interlinking with Mastodon, but if you do… and like that interface, then that’s wonderful. It’s definitely quite polished. I don’t think you can user-block lemmy.ml users there like you can from PieFed - and another plug for PieFed is future integration with PixelFed and Loops, though tbh I’m not sure I care about that either, like Mastodon:-). Though being able to block users from Lemmy.ml and especially Hexbear.net (my two previous instances after Kbin went defunct did not defederate from either of them) definitely I see cleans up the conversations considerably. Not everyone wants that ofc, but it’s a VERY nice feature to have, to avoid so much of the gish gallop, reverse, didoing, the card says moops, and other “control the conversation” tactics that make me feel like I was reading content from a toddler… or a Trump supporter.
Hey, whether you want to use it personally or not, will you let me know if you see a way to block users of an instance? Someone said that Kbin used to have that, but I also saw a feature request for Mbin to add it, so it’s not entirely clear to me, without creating an account to find out, whether Mbin provides that functionality or not?
Haha, I got it! It’s not anywhere in the settings at all, lol. Like a hidden option. You have to go to the url “https://fedia.io/d/[instance domain name]”, like “https://fedia.io/d/lemmy.ml”. Then it will give you the ability to block, and that block will be reflected in your settings page.
So I actually forgot that I also made a fedia.io account back when I was trying multiple instances…there were literally like 100 people on fedia.io at the time so I stuck with kbin, but then kbin kinda imploded so I switched to lemmy…
We have the same issue at fedia as lemmy.cafe - single overworked administrator.
I do see comments that say it’s possible to block instances on mbin, but I don’t see any way to do that on fedia.
No, it’s really not - see e.g. https://youtu.be/BFSe5-i1LoU and actually I cannot recommend that entire channel highly enough, it is amazing! It is like a mini college course in the subject, and describes how the Alt-Right movement in America (following patterns used in Russia for years) resorts to many tactics that are low-effort and literally designed to waste the time of the responder.
Imagine you had a PhD, specifically in vaccines, and you were arguing with a 2-year-old who no matter what you said then responded with “nuh-uh”, and occasionally threw in zingers at the level of “I know you are but what am I?!”
It is not important to refute the bullshit of people refusing to engage in good faith, and in actual fact it is precisely the opposite: by giving them the opportunity to continue forward you are merely playing into their game.
Maybe you pick your battles I’m not suggesting otherwise, just that in general I find it best to not engage with trolls. I tried that on Reddit, as a mod of two small gaming subs, and I learned my lesson: it was me who was changed, not them. Until I decided to leave Reddit entirely, regardless of whether I came here or not.
And now that I’m here, forewarned is forearmed, and I’m not enjoying having to go through that fight yet again, but it must be done by the only way is forward… towards whatever goal I choose, and for the I choose happiness rather than continually hitting my head against a brick wall:-).
I’m gonna stop you right there, I’ve already found your problem. Try introducing them to instances that aren’t militant.
But, since all of Lemmy is run by those guys, maybe just skip Lemmy altogether. I honestly don’t see a future for it with them in charge.
I just said “Lemmy” and they went forward from there.
Helping people pick an instance is not as straight-forward task as many people claim. e.g. if you love programming, then perhaps programm.dev is right for you, except right now they are having enormous federation difficulties - e.g. https://programming.dev/post/20692281. They are far from the only ones doing so though - https://feddit.org/post/3524876 - and yet they do have more difficulties than most.
Any instance that is not Lemmy.World itself is going to suffer right now, until the deployment of 0.19.6 - https://github.com/LemmyNet/lemmy/pull/4623. And yet people piling on top of the already too-large pile of Lemmy.World will only make the future problems worse. This whole “federation” concept is still experimental, compared to a single-server model like Reddit had.
Blaze often tells people to go by default to lemm.ee. Which is one of the rare instances that defederates from none of hexbear.net, lemmy.ml, or even lemmygrad.ml. So if someone comes across this advice and follows it… BTW, Lemmy.cafe likewise defederates from almost nothing, except it DOES defederate from those big 3 (caveat: it seems run by only a single administrator, so is therefore far less stable than e.g. lemm.ee, and could disappear at any time - though there are so many other things about that instance that are so welcoming and friendly, and btw it is one of the very select few that are already running 0.19.6-beta! so a single admin yes, but one who seems VERY on the ball!).
But ultimately you are correct: they control the sourcecode, so it is YOU who are using THEIR platform - and they WILL do it THEIR way, regardless.
Until and unless more people switch to Mbin, PieFed, or eventually Sublinks. Admiral Patrick who developed Tesseract for dubvee.org and who has blocked lemmy.ml users has pledged to switch to Sublinks whenever it will come out. In the meantime you can view a demo, but I haven’t heard of any developments for it for like half a year. So I switched to PieFed, and am posting several bug reports to help make it better. I advise people to check all of these options out just to see what’s out there, though definitely more is yet to come due to the hard work from these very helpful developers!
And credit where it’s due: Dessalines is helping in his own way, to reduce people’s dependency upon Reddit, and offering that codebase completely free of charge - that’s not nothing. Though administering a server instance is an entirely different skillset… and if we want to see the Fediverse grow rather than shrink with time, I think that better fences are going to be necessary (or mere labels would be even better, except they seem to militantly refuse to do such - but could you imagine if “politically extremist” content had a label just like all the NSFW posts do? then we could all get along side-by-side in the same space).
Nobody enjoys being punched in the face, or to see their (or why not ANY?) nation mocked - especially normies who may have DEEP knowledge of their subject matter, yet happen to not use Arch Linux btw, or may not be actual full-on communists (yet?).
You pointed out the biggest issue with that instance.
If you have a better alternative (so blocking hexbear and lemmygrad, with a large userbase and managed by a group of admins), feel free to suggest it.
Also, do not underestimate the importance some users give to low defederation.
Lemm.ee is still the second largest instance for a reason.
Right, and for people who want that low defederation, lemm.ee is not just a good but a great option. Though for normies, it may be turning people away.
But as you said, what other options are there? Lemmy.cafe seems so perfect in so many ways. Like their welcome messages are actually helpful, e.g. pointing people to !newtolemmy@lemmy.ca, as opposed to e.g. “What is Lemmy.ml” that is just a broken link to nowhere, or Lemmy.World’s Getting started guide that doesn’t mention things such as cross-posting. But then again, normies especially wouldn’t like it when/if the instance suddenly has to shut down for whatever reason… I get you there.
So who else defederates from the entirety of the big 3? (Btw lemmy.cafe defederates from almost nothing but these, and threads ofc, so still has e.g. NSFW and anime instances linked. And quokk.au likewise has only a single admin.) Or better yet allows custom user blocking? PieFed does, Tesseract on dubvee.org, and perhaps some apps (not sure which ones - and the trick is that some appear to at first glance, but it’s merely the same Lemmy back-end blocking that doesn’t block users, only communities). And I’m not clear about Mbin - I think not.
Moreover, nearly every instance other than Lemmy.world is having federation issues with lemmy.world right now. But we can’t just keep sending people to lemmy.world bc it’s the only one that always works for >80% of the content on the Fediverse? That would somewhat work, but be a purely short-term solution. Yet nothing else would work… e.g. I made a post from StarTrek.website to tenforward on lemmy.world and couldn’t see the comments (or votes) that people made to it for at least 2-3 days. Eventually I responded from a third instance involved - discuss.online - but federation issues such as this tend to have a cooling effect in terms of shutting down conversations. This stuff is going to turn normies away as well, on top of the toxicity issues.
So there are problems with every instance. At least you get your choice of which issues you want to deal with:-). The toxicity issue though is particularly what has driven away 100% of the people that I’ve mentioned Lemmy to irl, so it seems to be the major one. Perhaps if not for it they might have joined Lemmy and then left it later, but as it is they refuse to even consider it bc they can’t get past that. So THAT is the one that I think we need to focus on to get more people. At which point yeah, perhaps add Lemmy.cafe to the recommendation list? Alongside PieFed that allows custom user blocking of whatever instance you want - and I mean the good kind, blocking not just communities but all comments as well.
Perhaps the reason that people are mentioning the defederation issues is due to Mastodon’s heavy fragmention and inability to really search for content outside of someone’s initial chosen instance? (Though that feature seems to be coming “soon™”.) If so that would make a LOT of sense?! However, the difficulties faced by Lemmy are of a different sort. Not being able to search for content from any other instance is nowhere near the same as e.g. the Western world defederating from an instance that constantly mocks and disrespects everything that it does - and kinda vice versa btw bc there is much that the Western world does not respect about how the Eastern world (specifically Russia and China) does things as well, e.g. the extremely heavy-handed banning from all communities, and how the East is “not” doing genocide, fully and literally directly, even while the USA “is” (I mean it low-key is, but how does that justify the Ukrainian invasion or the Uyghur situation?!) - the whole “one rule for thee, an entirely different set of rules for me” thing is a real turn-off for people to remain in the Fediverse. So while I don’t doubt that people are asking for instances that aren’t defederated from anything, I do question whether that’s truly what they want, especially “they” meaning the majority of normies. It’s complicated bc some truly do want something like lemm.ee, while on the other hand I see some people leaving Lemm.ee wanting to go somewhere that defederates from at the very least Hexbear. It’s one thing to foster and encourage STRONG diversity of opinions, but it’s another to open the door to people who consistently argue in bad faith (and rarely if ever do not do such). The former makes dull conversations better, while the latter ends conversations entirely.
What do you mean? Having a quick test right now
It does not seem like “nearly every instance is having federating issues with LW right now”.
It’s always the same issues, there is no generalist instance that fits the bill:
You might have higher chances of convincing lemm.ee, lemmy.zip, lemmy.dbzer0.com, discuss.tchcs.de to defederate hexbear, than getting a small instance that does popular enough to enter the top 20
Or you can convince lemmy.cafe to get another admin, and get a bit more “professional” (a la lemmy.zip)
May I ask you why you keep bringing that issue, when it has been solved in the meantime, and is a specific Piefed issue? Lemmy users on any of the top 20 instances are not experiencing federation issues, with the sole exception of programming.dev
First, I hope nobody is taking any of this personally. We were talking here about how to reach out to normies, and whatever best way there is to do that.
Second, you misread my comment. It is true that MANY instances are having issues with Lemmy.World. My own comment here said “from StarTrek.website” (to be most clear I mean https://startrek.website/c/tenforward@lemmy.world ), which itself is a different instance than PieFed.social, so I experienced these federation issues multiple times this very week, from two distinct places - i.e. I’m not continuously bringing up the same issue, I’m adding new ones to the pile, to show that it’s not just PieFed’s fault. And I don’t think I mentioned here yet that those issues also affected https://discuss.online/c/tenforward@lemmy.world - after a day or two the latter started to catch up but it was still
a daybehind lemmy.world. That’s 3 instances all struggling to receive that same content, none fully succeeding (at the time).If anything it’s Lemmy.world’s “fault” but only in the diagnostic sense of being centrally positioned in this debacle rather than blame being a “responsible” party to have caused it or being able to fix it. Though fortunately, 0.19.6 should help provide a fix for exactly this, and the Lemmy devs are currently doing their due diligence to test it out before deployment to the entire world:-).
And I am far from the only one mentioning such - here’s one example and here’s another. Also, the issue with my personal post was just a few days ago, so even if these federation issues are intermittent they are still ongoing, and seem like they will continue until such time as Lemmy.world finishes its update process to 0.19.6.
You’ve convinced me to try mbin. I had a kbin account and I really liked it, but federation with lemmy was soooo slow.
Great! I don’t really want the interlinking with Mastodon, but if you do… and like that interface, then that’s wonderful. It’s definitely quite polished. I don’t think you can user-block lemmy.ml users there like you can from PieFed - and another plug for PieFed is future integration with PixelFed and Loops, though tbh I’m not sure I care about that either, like Mastodon:-). Though being able to block users from Lemmy.ml and especially Hexbear.net (my two previous instances after Kbin went defunct did not defederate from either of them) definitely I see cleans up the conversations considerably. Not everyone wants that ofc, but it’s a VERY nice feature to have, to avoid so much of the gish gallop, reverse, didoing, the card says moops, and other “control the conversation” tactics that make me feel like I was reading content from a toddler… or a Trump supporter.
Hey, whether you want to use it personally or not, will you let me know if you see a way to block users of an instance? Someone said that Kbin used to have that, but I also saw a feature request for Mbin to add it, so it’s not entirely clear to me, without creating an account to find out, whether Mbin provides that functionality or not?
Haha, I got it! It’s not anywhere in the settings at all, lol. Like a hidden option. You have to go to the url “https://fedia.io/d/[instance domain name]”, like “https://fedia.io/d/lemmy.ml”. Then it will give you the ability to block, and that block will be reflected in your settings page.
So I actually forgot that I also made a fedia.io account back when I was trying multiple instances…there were literally like 100 people on fedia.io at the time so I stuck with kbin, but then kbin kinda imploded so I switched to lemmy…
We have the same issue at fedia as lemmy.cafe - single overworked administrator.
I do see comments that say it’s possible to block instances on mbin, but I don’t see any way to do that on fedia.
One problem is we get people from ml posting on .world and other sane instances.
Yes, but rarely. And you won’t get banned from .world for a slight criticism of China.
I see em alllll the time. But I don’t block anyone, ever.
Sigh… I used to be that way. But it does get exhausting, and I now prefer to spend my time in other ways.
Yeah, but it’s important to refute their bullshit if we want the fediverse to get better.
No, it’s really not - see e.g. https://youtu.be/BFSe5-i1LoU and actually I cannot recommend that entire channel highly enough, it is amazing! It is like a mini college course in the subject, and describes how the Alt-Right movement in America (following patterns used in Russia for years) resorts to many tactics that are low-effort and literally designed to waste the time of the responder.
Imagine you had a PhD, specifically in vaccines, and you were arguing with a 2-year-old who no matter what you said then responded with “nuh-uh”, and occasionally threw in zingers at the level of “I know you are but what am I?!”
It is not important to refute the bullshit of people refusing to engage in good faith, and in actual fact it is precisely the opposite: by giving them the opportunity to continue forward you are merely playing into their game.
Maybe you pick your battles I’m not suggesting otherwise, just that in general I find it best to not engage with trolls. I tried that on Reddit, as a mod of two small gaming subs, and I learned my lesson: it was me who was changed, not them. Until I decided to leave Reddit entirely, regardless of whether I came here or not.
And now that I’m here, forewarned is forearmed, and I’m not enjoying having to go through that fight yet again, but it must be done by the only way is forward… towards whatever goal I choose, and for the I choose happiness rather than continually hitting my head against a brick wall:-).
Depends on how you engage. If you recognize a troll, don’t fall for the sealioning. Just call them names and make fun of them until they run away.