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.
It totally depends on how many people one needs in a community, and how much content they’re posting to feel served, doesn’t it?
The persistent FOMO that has floated around Lemmy for the past two years has not been a positive for the space.
It’s not “instance tribalism”, it’s making sure the website you’re using isn’t just some dumb terminal, and preventing the network from collapsing down to “lemmy.world and some empty tributes”.
It’s creating a space that is resilient to network splits, and accepting the fact that, at some point down the road, network splits will happen.
It’s seeing the fediverse through a “Local+” lens, and encouraging people to treat their local site as meaningful. And rejecting the illusion that this is centralized social media.
Look for what you want on other sites. But there’s no reason to look off-site first, if what serves you is already hosted locally.
Welcome, new neighbours!
While checking out this wacky new space, I’d like to emcourage everyone to check out the Local tab, either at the top of your feed, or in your app menu. That’s where yoi’ll find posts from “communitues” (Lemmy’s “subreddits”) that are hosted on lemm.ee!
A lot of communities are on different sites, and are ported (tarriff free!) for your enjoyment, but as with most things, it seems, the most sustainable way forward is to support Local!
One thing that many people new to Lemmy and the wider “fediverse” (because it’s not just people on Lemmy-based websites that you’ll find posting in the communities here, surprisingly enough) struggle with is that each website on the network has its own “name space”, meaning that each community name can be used on each site. So, you can have, say, [email protected], [email protected], and [email protected]. People often fret over “having to follow all of them”, and wanting ways to collapse them into a single forum. And for a really niche topic, that might make sense (the thing to do, though, is just pick the one that best serves you and don’t worry about what’s going on on the other side of the fence). But for bigger topics, this “splintering” is often a godsend, since we can all have real discussions about the topic in smaller spaces. And, of course, !politics is going to just be meanibgfully different on .ca vs .ee vs .world.
If you look to local first, it becomes much easier to stop worrying and love the bomb distributed network.
Oh yeah, the American Empire is over. By the time anyone else is willing to trust the US again, it will no longer be important enough to care about its hissy fits.
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.
You could spin one up this evening if you wanted. Or go use catodon.social.
That’s not the point. The point is, there are reasons Mastodon is being rejected, just like there are reasons you seemingly cannot pay people to use a Misskey-based or Hubzilla-based website.
It’s not where the people are going, and the public or semi-public figures are going to follow the people.
Why switch to Mastodon when there is Misskey?
Why use Misskey when there is Hubzilla?
That would require people actually recommending specific websites, and all people seem to want to do is circle jerk about “lemmy”, as if it’s a tangible place and not a website engine
If what you mean by centralized apps is apps having a default website, or a hard-coded website that it accesses, then that’s also going to lead to centralizing the website.
The fediverse is just the web. It’s not really suited to an app-first model of operation. Like, imagine having a blog-viewer app that only let you read one blog. We see this kind of behaviour from the business world, and people kind of hate it.
The only reason it would be different here is if the network collapses, and if it does, it’s going to collapse into lemmy.world.
Which, apparently, is a “deal breaker”.
No, that’s not true. The big email providers absolutely block smaller and personal hosts. There’s a whole system of features and options you need to install and support in order to get through the door, thanks to spammers.
The onboarding process should be happening after this point. People shouldn’t be going “I want to join Lemmy!”, because that’s kind of a non-sensical statement. Lemmy is a website engine. They should be going “I want to join awesomewebsite.com. Oh, and look, I can see stuff from anotheraweseomewebsite.net, too! That’s so cool!”
If the website itself cannot provide a compelling reason as to why someone should sign up for it, then why should they sign up for it? So that it can be a dumb-terminal for some other website?
But it’s better from many angles that they are. Discoverability alone. Consistency of instance level rules. Theme.
It just makes sense on some level that sports communities would be on a sports-focused website, and such a website is where people whose primary interest is in discussing sports would have their accounts. From there, they can follow other topics they’re interested in, but their primary focus is still on, I don’t know, basketball or whatever.
Same for cars. Some of the most active forums on the internet are car ownership forums. If you could access CivicForums from IoniqForums, then it would make sense to do so. Much more sense than finding people discussing Hondas on lemmy.world and Hyundais on sh.itjust.works.
Just because you don’t give a shit where these discussions are taking place, doesn’t mean it makes sense for people to just shit them out anywhere.
It’s probably not cheaper than just shooting orphans for sport.