This will take place ~24 hours from now. Feel free to post and upvote questions beforehand in this post, as it will turn into the AMA tomorrow.
This is a chance for any users, admins, or developers to ask anything they’d like to myself, @nutomic@lemmy.ml , SleeplessOne , or @phiresky@lemmy.world about Lemmy, its future, and wider issues about the social media landscape today.
Do you think Lemmy is decentralized enough right now, or are you worried about some of the bigger instances growing too much?
The big instances are bad enough but big communities are absolute killer of decentralisation
When you go to /c/books on your server, you don’t see an agglomeration of all /c/books on all servers of the fediverse. You only see that server’s /c/books, if it even has one.
This is a fatal flaw of lemmy which concentrates power enormously into the hands of the owners.
The default view should be all /c/books on all federated servers, with an easy way to filter only local posts.
Lemmy will turn into reddit if this is not quickly rectified.
What prevents from visiting /c/books@anotherserver?
Genuinely asking, because this is one of the core concepts of Lemmy and federation
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Yes, syntax link like /c/community@server is incompatible with http.
Doesn’t !books@lemmy.ml and !books@lemmy.world direct you to yourinstance.org/c/books@lemmy.ml and yourinstance.org/c/books@lemmy.world respectively?
I already posted to anotherserver/c/books and no one ever saw it.
Posting anywhere but biggestinstance/c/biggestcommunity is functionally the same as not posting at all.
And of course, the owners of biggestinstance/c/biggestcommunity believe in everything you don’t believe in and they really don’t like you in particular.
Welcome to new reddit, same as old reddit
Did you promote that community on !newcommunities@lemmy.world and other promotion communities? Did you actively post on your new community, to attract users to your new one?
I’m going to take two examples I personally had
I guess that shows that community takeover is possible, and does not need additional tools, just some time and dedication.
No, that defeats the entire point.
What point ?
The point of becoming a moderator that decide what everyone can and can’t say ?
The point of “making another reddit but I’m /u/spez” ?
The point of me having my own control over my instance. The bad moderator thing will always be a problem.
I don’t see how agglomerating vuew of all same name communities for the user impact you as a server owner ?
You still have totalitarian control over everything happening on your server.
You can still
Delete all post and comments
Change any text in any post or comment even if made by other users and without their notice
Ban any user
Ban any community
Even ban all users and all communities (whilte only model)
I must’ve read your comment wrong. Sounds like you just want a multi Reddit type feature? I agree that that should be implemented some apps have already did it. I don’t agree that the same word community should be lumped together universally and automatically.
No multireddit cannot solve this problem.
They are not a default agglomeration view so they will never make a difference as most users never change their defaults.
Covered in more details here
https://lemmy.ml/comment/7734804
A community cannot escape the stranglehold of moderators with a multireddit, because most users will simply not have it the backup community setup in their multireddit. They will never see dissenters posting in the backuos. And that makes multireddit largely useless
Who are the moderators in this scenario you’re talking about?
I kind of get where you’re coming from, but to me it sounds like you’re looking for a different experience than what Lemmy is designed for. It seems you are more interested in aggergating all posts about specific topics (like “books”), and strongly limiting the effect of moderation (as nobody would have final say about how to moderate an entire topic). If I correctly understood the experience you’re interested in, then for sure the design of Lemmy will not match that.
I don’t think it’s fair to describe this as a fatal flaw, though. Lemmy is not built around the idea of generic, “ownerless” topics, instead, it’s built around communities with clear owners. We have decentralization at the admin and infrastructure level (as in, a single admin does not control the entire network), but this does not really mean we also need to have it at individual community level.
IMO it’s totally fine that different people create different communities with extremely similar purposes. The entire internet as a whole also works like this - the internet itself is decentralized, but at the same time people can create different websites with very similar purposes (and even domains!), and it works out fine. For example, it’s totally possible for there to exist a news.com, news.co.uk, news.ee, news.fi, etc. Imagine if whenever you navigated to news.fi with your browser, it would also automatically insert content from all the other news websites of all possible domains - it doesn’t really seem like a useful feature, but that’s kind of analogous to what you’re suggesting for Lemmy at the moment.
Thst makes lemmy , a reddit with many /u/spez , but in practice it will end up like the actual internet of today, where only 5-10 sites control everything.
This process is already far along on lemmy, already very centralized and all the incentives are in place to make it even more centralized.
I expect the settlement of the defederation war, will create 2-3 cliques of the largest servers that each silence the rest of the lemmyverse on their property.
Give it a little time and they’ll probably make themselves fully private cliques.
maybe communities should be able to flag that they’re the same community as one on another server, and if they mutually do so be combined into one metacommunity that people can search for
If it requires the owner’s consent, it defeats the purposeof my proposal.
It is expressly to disempower the owners in favour of the users.
I really don’t hate this idea from a lemmy centric UX perspective but how do you handle federation with other platforms?
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This isn’t the first time I have proposed this, but the pushback leads me to believe the owners do not want to relinquish power to the users. Lemmy it seems, is a community for owners. The interests of instance owners and their delegates come first.
I think we will need the digg & reddit story to play out all over again so that in 10-15 years the next exodus out of lemmy might lead us somewhere we can actually be free.
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That is true because admins pay for the servers and are legally responsible for the content they host. However anyone can quite easily become an admin, the hosting cost for a single user instance is very low.
As someone who is on a medium sized instance, I can say its a little awkward when Lemmy[.]world goes down
I think its totally normal that instance sizes follow a power law distribution. Its similar to many other things, for example there are few large cities, some medium cities and lots of small cities. The wiki article lists many other examples. So I think its fine as long as there are no intentional attempts to lock in users into large instances or limit federation.