Kichae

It works the same on Lemmy, it’s just that on Lemmy you subscribe to groups, and on Mastodon you subscribe to users.

Groups just forward replies and other interactions it sees to subscribers.

Personally, I’d just like to see up/downvotes replaced wholesale with emoji reactions.

Downvotes are a dark feature designed to excuse Reddit (and YouTube, etc.) from actually moderating their platforms under the guise of “social” moderation, but it’s actually something that stifles speech that challenges the consensus, rather than preventing toxicity.

Meanwhile, custom emojis are another way for instaces to differentiate themselves.

Reddit trying so hard to shoot itself in the

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Social media in general just isn’t a good archive of information. It’s a discussion space – a living space – not an archive.

If you want information archives, you should creating websites for that specifically.

It entirely depends on whether you want to be a shepherd or a… I’m struggling a bit to come up with a metaphore that isn’t loaded somehow. Let’s go with “blogger”.

But if there’s a topic you want to discuss, log content for, and write your own articles about, there’s little reason to not create your own little space for it all that others can choose to participate in. Such a space can attract new users to the network who aren’t currently interested in Linux news and possum pics.

But creating a space that looks like a bunch of link spam with no human engagement can look fake, and dissuade participation, so you need to really put some effort into not looking like a bot.

It’s easier to fork an active community. Being a mod is work, but it doesn’t require you to write 3000+ words per week to try and catch attention from an unknown population.

Content aggregators are not forums. Just having categories doesn’t really cover it. CAs are designed so that old posts fall away quickly, so that people will keep posting new top level content and keep people emgaged in the constant scroll, much like Twitter or Facebook. They are largely unstructured, with different “categories” behaving quasi-independently from one another.

Forums are structured spaces where the same people post stuff to the same categories, that are mostly offshoots of the forum’s core theme.

People interact with and behave rather differently in these different contexts.

It’s harder to see on a large Lemmy instance like LW, but most of the fediverse is very patchwork. The network of Lemmy sites is itself very patchwork, with the MLs, Hexbear, Beehaw, NSFW, etc. all having different defederation profiles, but the whole space is an incomplete mesh. Mastodon has more themed instances than Lemmy, more very small instances than Lemmy, and a much bigger anti-capital, anti-commerce bent than Lemmy, with many more people complaining on main about other instances rules and federation policies, so if you look, you can really see it.

But the whole fedi project is patchwork by nature.

Most of these communuties using Discord are better served by something that isn’t a chatroom. So, so, so confusingly many of them use them as a store of permanent information. Like a website+forum.

Many times the benefit of Discord is the ability to paywall parts of it with Patreon integration. We need more foss and federated options that do this.

Maybe they’ll finally let me use Julia at work

So many AP platforms are made by a couple of guys in their garage, it’s not even funny, and the mentality of “just dicking around” means what gets used is whatever the whims of the day dictate, rather than the standard.

“If it works, it’s not stupid” and all that.

But that kind of work lacks real world testing, and depe concern for public expectaton or desire.

Plus, you have to keep in mind that the idea of interplatform interoperability isn’t this core conceit of ActivityPub. It’s a potential use case, but it’s not an expectation. There’s no reason anyone should expect interop like that, other than some developers wanted to try it.

But some didn’t, and now that their platforms are gaining audience, they’re refactoring to meet that audience’s expectations.

I mean, it’s not being resolved, since the issue is that LW is too big to effectively federate, and LW is refusing to take the steps to improve the situation. Weirdly enough, this is less of an issue if the network scales horizontally, with a large number of small nodes.

But also, this is a symptom of the current attitude of “it shouldn’t matter where the community is hosted”. The fediverse is a simulacrum of centralized social media, and a poor one at that. The more we try and beat it into that shape, the more it’s going to get all weird on us.

Like, a significant issue here is the insistence people have had that up/down-votes be synchronized. People want to know what the global passive-aggressive opinion on a post or comment is, rather than the local one, which requires every single button press to be sent to each and every subscribing website. And people expect stuff to be sent out as a live stream, rather than being held back for batching, too.

There’s a significant cultural issue to be sorted out here. Better mechanical features aren’t going to solve it in the long run.

I always like forum setups where you had limited posting privileges until you’d had a couple of posts. Usually, they’d have an introduction category where you could post, and then comment on some other users’ posts, to get your post or reputation count high enough to unlock the rest of the board.

Most Lemmy sites are small enough to have a local introduction community or other ‘free’ communities for newbies to dip their toes and acclimate. They’d be good places to centralize posts on how all of this works, too.

Wouldn’t scale to large servers, though.

Thank you!

It doesn’t take that many people to create an active forum. It takes even fewer to make for an active sub-forum. And it’s so easy to pull in content from elsewhere here if you want to discuss it with your little group.

The push towards centralizing Lemmy has always seemed like an artifact of people not actually wanting to leave Reddit, but drawing a line in the sand anyway.

Tankies are people who play apologetics for authoritarian dictators who have claimed to be socialist or communist, and who will often excuse any action in opposition to “the west”.

More formally, they’re the cathartic branch of Marxist-Leninists (MLs). Lemmy’s a small space, and it’s a place that many MLs landed after bouncing off of Reddit, and the core developers count themselves as MLs.

The flagship Lemmy server is lemmy.ml, but the Tankie trolls have their own server, lemmygrad.ml where they go and be all 4chan-like.

I cannot stress this strongly enough: You have not been “using Lemmy” for 1.5 years now. “Lemmy” isn’t a service the same way Reddit is, it’s a web engine, like Joomla, or like phpBB.

You’ve been using lemm.ee for 1.5 years.

Nobody wants to hear this, but there’s no “Lemmy”. This emergent network of social media sites isn’t a coherent thing, and it’s not a stable concept. The attempts to make this look like a singular space are to the ultimate detriment of the network, because implicitly lying to end users about what they’re doing informs how they behave.

You’ve been using lemm.ee. Lemm.ee has copies of content on other websites, but those websites have different rules, and different expectations than lemm.ee. You don’t get to pretend otherwise because of where you’re reading the content, and there is no guarantee that you will have further access to content from any other website than lemm.ee.

This is a reality that people simply do not want to face, for some reason. Everyone wants to imagine that federation is just centralized social media with some voodoo in the background, but it is a fundamentally different paradigm, and this is the wild fucking west.

You’re going to get your toes stepped on if you treat it like something it’s not.

You should understand the rules of the places you are posting to, yes.

This is why “let’s pretend this is centralized social media and ignore the fact that we’re all on different websites” is a bad idea, actually. You don’t get to parachute into someone else’s house and expect the rules of your own home apply.

Yes, perhaps. But I suspect that still distracts from the fact that we’re trying to sell an illusion with the fediverse, and I personally believe that that is a mistake. So many issues people voice about their experience here come from the design of everything emulating Big Social, and Big Social is centralized.

Aping the design language of centralized social media and then trying to get anyone other than enthusiasts on board is never going to work.

One of the ways we do this is by referring to “Mastodon” and “Lemmy” as if they are places you can go to, websites you can use. This is why I chose phpBB as my reference point. I’ve used WordPress and Joomla in the past, with less impact. We don’t and have never spoken about phpBB as a singular location. You would respond to someone suggesting you “use phpBB” with, at the very least, a confused look. Or, if you didn’t know what it is, you’d ask them “what is that?” and they’d tell you “forum software”, revealing that their request of you was absurd. “Get an email address” is, at the very least, something that isn’t a nonsensical request. Websites demand it of us all of the time.

Mastodon servers are separate entities, too. The fact that they communicate with each other doesn’t change that, and the persistent desire that folks here have to imagine otherwise is a hurdle to adoption.

The mental model is of a central space that instances grant or bar access to, but that’s simply not how the technology actually works. Too much effort has gone into trying to make ActivityPub-enabled websites look like something they’re not (centralized social media), while totally ignoring what they are: small forums and microblogs that have optional access to other forums and microblogs.

Mastodon is web server software. “Mastodon” doesn’t exist. It’s an illusion. And the fact that everyone keeps trying to sell this illusion is exactly why there are all of these broken expectations and hurdles.

The server selection problem goes away if people stop treating their hosting website as an after thought or dumb terminal. People really have to stop promoting web server software as if it’s a platform, and start finding reasons to recommend actual websites to people.

Ain’t nobody ever recommended phpBB to anyone who wasn’t looking to host a forum.

You have misread their comment and understood it backwards. AP’s saying people on Mastodon are engaging in Lemmy discussions.

There is no way to follow Mastodon users from Lemmy. Lemmy simply does not work that way.