It feels like this is how social media and the Internet should have been all along. Truly run for the interest and good of humanity, and out of the hands of corporate control and profiteering. People, out of their own generosity and goodwill, host their own instances and let others use it for free. It’s such an awesome example of humans helping each other and working to create abundance for everyone to enjoy.
I believe that everyone putting their time, money, and effort into building up the Fediverse - the developers, server owners, mods, and everyone else who keeps it alive and interesting - is helping to make the Internet (and by extension, the world) a better place. You all are awesome. Keep up the amazing work.
Also hi, I’m new here. I found out about Lemmy today, and I was so intrigued that I spent all day learning about it lol.
It feels like the early Internet: it’s still being actively improved, it’s noncommercial, people are weirder, people are passionate, fewer bots, it’s kind of exciting.
I have no idea if it will succeed, but it’s a nice feeling.
Yeah, it’s not a sterile, bland, corporate-feeling experience like most mainstream sites. I’ve missed the charm and wild variability of the old internet, and this feels pretty close to it again.
Hey would you be willing to help me out? I’m a prince who needs help moving his money to the US of A.
Of course! You know, you’re the 4th prince I’ve helped this month - would ya believe it?!
Are Google play gift cards the currency in your country also?
No we only take circuit city gift cards
LMAO
I think that phrases quite well how I feel about it. Old internet…
You’re making me feel nostalgic now, in a good way.
Is the federated internet gonna be the equivalent of hippie communes for Gen Y & Gen Z?
yes. Pass the bong.
oh this sounds glorious, I always knew my destiny was to be part of a scapegoated counterculture movement.
Welcome! We all take shifts working in the hemp garden out back. Namaste.
Go look at the solar punk instance, it’s certainly looking that way 😀
Lmao i love my weird eco tech instance. Slrpnk.net for life 🤣
people are weirder
If I didn’t already love Lemmy, I do now.
I feel the same way. The federated aspect is brilliant and more social platforms should follow it.
To be clear: I’m referring to the people. The technology is fine - it works well enough. But the people and the “hey let’s make something new together” attitude is what makes Lemmy exciting.
I want to see it grow just to prove the concept works at scale. I genuinely believe it will and I’m a cynical bastard.
Isn’t Mastodon already proving that, with 13M users?
It does (along with many better apps), but for the microblogging (like twitter), not for link aggregators (like lemmy or reddit)
Interesting, is there some significant difference in the scalability challenges between the two? As someone who knows virtually nothing about either (I never could get into mastodon), they seem similar enough to me.
I’d say they’re comparable and have similar problems experienced in different ways.
On mastodon, a big name becomes the stress on the server. It’s like people showing up to a small coffee shop to hear a politician speak about something. If the politician becomes more renowned / popular, eventually they have rallies. Eventually those rallies are broadcasted and licestreamed… All that means more infra and more $
Lemmy has the problem of communities. Communities sometimes gather in small places like a person’s house or a bar. If that community grows large, maybe they need to have a conference / convention (like an anime or tech community). That means the instance that hosts that community has to has a conference sized instance, to host all the lads/lasses/etc of the fediverse.
More eyeballs / more discussion = more demand. Simple as that.
edit: I will add that there is one difference. You might have your own little small fragmented community, here on sh.itjust … like for skateboards. More intimate discussion, etc. This would potentially prevent c/skateboards on an instance from growing too large…
But there is only one @gargron that most people will follow.
Depends on the platform, some are scalable enough (pleroma/akkoma for example). Also, they still work with other fediverse software, so you can comment on lemmy from a misskey account, or talk with an mastodon user with an pleroma account.
Imo scaling challenges are more in the user side than software side.
One big difference is that the Twitter model is driven by individual users, whereas the reddit model is driven by communities, and a community driven model benefits significantly more from a greater centralization. For example, on reddit, subreddit names are one and done. Once someone makes r/leagueoflegends, for instance, that name is taken, and has the benefit of name recognition for new users. But on lemmy, people could make c/leagueoflegends on as many instances as there are. And given the increased visibility on local and the widespread defederation among major instances, the community ends up a lot more fragmented.
Thanks for the response. After reading your comment and @Kazaii@sh.itjust.works’s, I’m wondering if it would be good to have “bundles” of communities that new users could subscribe to, so that they don’t have to go hunting for communities they are interested in across many different instances.
Or really, even just a big directory of communities spanning many different instances. I’m sure many exist, but ideally it would be something that would show up when you’re first making an account, so you can quickly find communities you’re interested in, without having to put in too much effort unless you want to.
I’m somewhat used to federation because I’ve been using matrix for a year or two now, but I haven’t really explored many lemmy instances yet. Even on matrix, I haven’t really explored much beyond matrix.org.
I don’t much about mastodon. But if you say it preforms well then I believe this model works.
I agree with the community aspect, and I’m also happy about the open source part. I saw your post in my RSS reader as I was going through my other news and interests. It feels so good to not have the stuff I see decided by some big corporation intending to maximize my engagement at the expense of everything else.
If anyone is interested in RSS, let me know. I highly recommend it, it’s so refreshing to be able to follow most of what you’re interested in, in one app. Also a small app, ~10 MB vs many news sites’ apps that are ~150 MB. Also no ads, ability to dismiss read articles.
(Also yes I realize that Reddit supports RSS too, but I heard that they would have taken it away long ago if it their internal tools didn’t heavily depend on it. The API changes make this seem likely)
I am also following a specific community here on RSS. Nice to go through my articles and see someone asking for technical help / advice – or simply sharing something cool.
I think it’s great that more people are realising what’s possible, open source isn’t just going up change the internet into what it should have been but it can change everything from printers requiring proprietary ink to the major excesses of the political machine.
The working people have ALWAYS done the work and when we get together and do it for ourselves, and each other, we can build a world that exists for people not profits.
At some point, when instances get big enough, the large costs may require running ads for upkeep. But ideally it should stop at “just covering the costs” and not needing to do the capitalism thing to keep making more and more money every quarter
Or, with the community we were able to gather, maybe we should adopt a patronage system or a bitcoin system like the one used in “Odysee”. It would feel much more honest then, because I feel that in my opinion the adds system corrupts beautiful communities like these, and the best proof to what I’m saying is the “Reddit” situation. (It starts with adds to keep the site running… then blows up into full-on capitalism)
I’ve been all-in on the fediverse since early 2021. Just like anywhere more than one person is there’s disagreements and drama now and again, but it’s been the sort of place I want to be and spend my time.
This reminds me of how Reddit was after switching from Digg. It feels smaller and more organic and a much more friendly environment. I just feel like I used Reddit for a lot of information and searches for troubleshooting or how to purposes. That vast wealth of knowledge feels like it may be lost.
Same with moving from twitter to a mastodon instance, feels like twitter when it was young.
I like to call it the reddit effect. Any serious attempt to control the free exchange of ideas on the internet leads to avenues that are freer and less controllable getting built. Don’t mourn for reddit, they may have been captured by corporate greed, but they have passed the torch to a freer and less centralized community that is less susceptible to corporate invasion. You can’t stop the signal Mal
i think we have seen how algorithms divide us in a lot of ways, esp when we are unaware of the way they work and how they are altering our feeds.
I’m very curious how this type of platform might perform under mass adoption. If it started getting anywhere close to reddit level traffic I’m sceptical how well the more popular instances would scale, and how the people that can currently afford to run them would be able to afford the infrastructure needed to keep up with millions of users.
there will be updates to help with scaling, but also in general we should be trending to smaller home instances and working to integrate meta-community features IMO. Its generally easy and affordable to run a server for oneself and a couple thousand users. Its when you grow well beyond these scales that things become an issue.
There is not a ton of value to being on a large instance, esp as the federation code gets smoothed out.
Part of the problem will be how to make new users understand this, though. Lots of people will be coming from something like reddit where they’ll just want to sign up through a popular instance and likely won’t fully understand what that means.
More advanced users will understand this, but it’s not then I would be worried about.
Yeah I think that’s an important task for us users, communicating how we use the fediverse and which tools we find helpfull.
We also need to be making tools and filling lists, helping people discover and learn about the platform isn’t something we can leave upto a corporate advertising department, it’s upto us.
I was interested in hosting my own Lemmy server, but how would it work for getting a few thousand users?
- how would they discover it? I just picked a server that seemed popular, and I’m already wondering about defederation/etc. I don’t feel like I’d want to make more than a few different accounts, and I’d probably only actively use one or two, tops
- would I be responsible for moderating my users? What if they post spam/worse to other instances? What if they’re just nasty to others? I wouldn’t want my instance to be de-federated. (Though maybe as you get more users, more of them are willing to be moderators)
Besides those issues though, it’s awesome to hear that normal people’s servers could support a few thousand users. I’m sure there’s a person interested in self-hosting among every few thousand people.
Apologies if this is a basic federation question. I considered hosting a matrix instance once, but then I heard it consumed a ton of hard drive space* as you join popular rooms. And I wasn’t sure how it would work if I shared it with some friends, they shared it with some friends, and so-on, and then someone did something bad.
*RE hard drive space, this won’t be a problem when I host something at home, but right now I’m just paying $10/year for a KVM server that I’m using to share hobby web projects with some friends. It has limited storage space.
Step 1 is to run an instance, step 2 is to engage across multiple instances using your instance account, step 3 partner with other servers, post on groups, basically advertise, step 4 SEO things.
Also, every chance I get i advocate for people to find smaller instances they like and not to overload whats popular or big as there is little advantage to it.
I expect growth to be similar to every other forum ive ever run, so far federation has made it a bit easier i think to get noticed.
Thanks for the response. I didn’t even think about having to advertise and SEO… I enjoy technical challenges, but having to self-promote is quite draining to me. It might be nice if there was some automatic way to recommend a new instance when new users are looking to create an account, even just based on capacity, but also based on common interests (e.g. people who live in <some region>, people interested in <some topic>, etc). It seems like join-lemmy.org tries to distribute new users somewhat, but it might be nice if it offered to narrow down the list for you based on some information you could choose to provide.
RE self hosting, I was more concerned about legal problems, like this post in !selfhosted@lemmy.world: "If I self host a Lemmy instance for just myself and maybe a few friends are there any risks?”. But more generally, if you let randoms make accounts on your instance, with the goal of taking some load off of the more popular instances.
TL;DR: I enjoy debugging technical issues for a few hours, but I have no interest in having to moderate heavily.
depends on where you are, if you are in the US you are still generally protected from prosecution (check your laws or talk to a lawyer). You do need to have a process for removing bad content (just deleting it) and be prepared to ban and purge content if you receive any legal notices.
also something to note, your server does not copy everything on the fediverse, just what users on your instance have subscribed to. Im looking forward to being able to block communities as an admin rather than simply defederating.
re: moderation load. I like topical servers, I run one around AI. I’ve always felt specific topic verticals are easier to moderate as its usually more expected to just shutdown anything not related to the core topic. You still deal with stuff from time to time but its never been a huge deal.
Running stuff here, my server is SFW so I have rarely seen anything terrible, I usually just ban and purge a user i see posting like that it only takes a couple seconds. If you are only subbing to safe, respectful communities its easy. If you want to walk lines, it can get hard.
What about your instance’s users? Are you responsible for what they post on other servers? Even if they aren’t posting anything illegal, but just spam? Or being very unpleasant? Is it likely that a popular instance could defederate from you if you have too many users like that? And what about someone making a bunch of bot accounts on your instance?
I’m perhaps a bit too paranoid, when I first got my own server and saw thousands of SSH login attempts in half an hour, and plenty of malicious HTTP requests in the apache logs… I’ve felt like it’s a jungle out there. I’ve since changed to a different port for SSH, and disabled password login (only SSH keys). Every now and then though, it seems like my non default port is discovered, and I need to change it again, or my logs will be filled with failed login attempts[1]. Perhaps I’m unlucky for renting a server in an IP space that often gets compromised… it’s just scary to me, since I’ve never even shared it with the general public (just a few friends).
[1]: I realize this isn’t a big deal, but I’d like to avoid it if I can. Perhaps I should investigate some software that automatically bans abusive IPs.
thats up to you, there are no laws against spam and as long as they are posting within the bounds of the law you have no issues. HOWEVER if your user is being annoying, breaking rules, or posting content that other instances don’t want to see it could get your server defederated.
really though, most of these are issuse if you want a big instance, if you keep it small and the rules clear, you are unlikely to deal with this and when you do it will usually be a matter of clicking Ban then Purge.
I’m bit of a noob on how this all works, but isn’t it possible to ddos instance to oblivion? As everything grows, there will be conflicts, bad actors, demand of sensorship and reactions to taken actions.
Right now we are a small village with communal spirit that hardly ever needs its sheriff.
Oh, for sure. And that’s on the instance owner to understand how to mitigate, and it’s not cheap to do for instances with large amounts of traffic.
It really does feel a bit like the old days tm (IRC and random PHP boards for me) and it gives me a bit of hope that some of the spirit of the old Wild West Internet is still here. To be honest I engaged more with lemmy in the last few days, then with anything in the last 5 Years.
Unfortunately, I think the feediverse in its unpolished, unoptimised and non-compliant state will run into some legal trouble as soon as it hits a certain popularity threshold.
*Looking at you EU and your relentless drive towards censorship >.>
In the worst case, we will have to rebuild a feediverse in the darker corners of the net.
Ha Yeah the EU and Canada aren’t going to like their citizens having access to such an open and free method of communication, I personally think it’s more likely that the technology resistant elements in government get displaced than progress gets halted.
Even China hasn’t managed to stop online communities where people express themselves freely
It has a long way to go but even Reddit was a small niche website (everyone was on Digg!) at one point.
We all should have done this a long time ago.
The old sites were always “good enough” and building a new community was always just hard enough to prevent this from happening. It’s actually a blessing in disguise that all of the internet is enshittifying itself now.
I’m also new here and I feel the same as you. I deleted my reddit account just before Sync died and ended up here (thanks for having me). I am still trying to figure out my way around the fediverse but I’ll get there. Lemmy feels a bit rough around the edges but honestly it has a certain charm to it that way.
Yup it has the potential to let people communicate and enjoy time together without big corps in the middle.
