Hrm, I would hate to think so but… maybe? If only it would helpfully label itself, we could appreciate the message itself untainted by such worries.

South Bank of the Rubicon

Yes, there is a difference.

I don’t know what is going on with kids these days. Whatever it is, is not good. And also, large portions of it seem intentional, while other parts (No Child Left Behind) due to incompetence.

I know that we grew up in the era of information. But that was then, and this is now, the new era of not just mis-information but outright, active dis-information. Your Chinese device may legit be spying on you - see e.g. TP Link routers - it’s only a matter of probability based on how cheap that would have been to accomplish (undetected) at the time it was made. And if not, then perhaps they should have done it - it’s just strategic!? :-P

I think part of a revolution must start with opening our own eyes. e.g. some people wanted Bernie Sanders - but lol “no, not like that”. I’m not saying “bOtH sIdEs SaMe” - I’m not - however… qualitatively if not quantitatively, they kinda are, yeah. Speaking of, Bernie has a recent video about oligarchy where he points out what that means. The thing in: as he described how the government exists to serve the interests of a single person and their family, my thoughts turned to how Biden pardoned everyone that he wanted to be exempt from whatever. He’s not “tHe SamE” as his opponent - he’s not! But… isn’t he though?

Regardless of Truth vs. Falsehood, I at least understand that this is how people perceive things. No nuance, no subtlety, no room for quantitative differences. So, now we will get what we wanted: not having to think deeply anymore in order to vote. Before, our votes barely mattered as certain oligarchs got what they wanted either way, whereas now, other, different oligarchs get what they want this way.

Brace yourself: I don’t think there will be another Presidential election, or least that the probability of such is maybe 50%. He said that he’d be a dictator, and he was. He also said that we’d never have to vote again. We’ll see. Long before that, Project 2025 says that it will start gunning for the liberal academic institutions present in this country. Be careful, and maybe start thinking of a backup plan? Teaching kids who don’t want to learn in the first place may no longer be a viable career option in the extremely near future - even for you who has the job already. Sorry, this has got to be stressful to think about… but it’s a real worry. Even if there is another election, the ratchet has been dialed up, and that tends to never go back down, especially lately, and only ever forwards:-|. Btw this is not “despair”, this is my attempt at least at being a realist.

Bc more to the point, it’s what the people want. As long as that remains true, and at some point long beyond that, such will continue. This is our new normal - and it’s not about “sad” or “happy”, it simply is.

Except that they also write the Lemmy sourcecode. Hence you can begin to understand why we cannot receive notifications about being banned or posts/comments removed, nor appeal via a modlog, nor be able to DM a mod bc you can’t even see who to talk to when the modlog simply says “mod”, nor if OP violates a rule somewhere - even on some other instance & community entirely - can others continue their discourse when OP’s post is summarily removed or then banned (on Reddit the link to the post is merely removed from the list of links shown in the community feed, but the post itself remains viable and people can finish their thoughts, unlike Lemmy where even after typing something all out you may literally not be allowed to hit Send), nor was it a priority to allow mods to see reports and thus be able to effectively moderate from another instance, thus freeing them somewhat from the control of a single admin, etc.

It’s not even a bad thing that I am saying - especially on their end: they develop the Lemmy codebase how they want it to be, bc it was their idea and they did practically all of the work. If we want different, then we would need to similarly put in the effort to create it (and before that, open our eyes to see clearly what is going on and where we might rather be heading instead). Many have already started, like K/Mbin, PieFed, Sublinks, Mastodon, Friendica, etc.

1. [email protected]
2. [email protected]
3. This one, [email protected]
4. There’s surely way more places for people to post such content, like I see it on 196 a lot as well.

Also, while it is indeed the admins that mass ban people from communities that they’ve never even heard of across the entire instance, the mods are not entirely unknown to Lemmy users themselves. There are many famous stories, such as the one who told a user that he wanted to kill them, bc they posted a screenshot of two people kissing in some kind of dating game claiming that it was “triggering”. Those mods are protected by those admins. In turn, nobody else across the Fediverse is protected from either those mods or especially those admins.

This is their software, and we are on their platform, always remember.

For anyone in the USA, I highly recommend the Discuss.Online instance - it has a great server and admin team, as evidenced by its fantastic uptime stats, plus is quite welcoming to casual discussions. I bounced around a couple of different instances before making this one my primary home and have had zero regrets since.

Also if anyone wants to see a peek of what’s coming up in the future, while it’s just shy of being fully ready for the masses yet, PieFed is an amazing project that will soon enough overtake Lemmy. It already has tons of features that Lemmy lacks - like Categories of Communities, hashtags, YouTube embedding, an absolute ton of customization options, and much more - even if there are a few still missing in reverse (like “searching” for content, user account tagging, the ability to preview a message prior to sending, receipt of notifications is quite buggy… - for early adopters though, it’s almost fully functional, especially for someone experienced in knowing how to fall back to Lemmy when necessary).

There are lots of exciting things happening on the Fediverse lately!:-)

Other reasons to avoid, besides those already mentioned here, include that you will not be allowed to say things offhand about countries such as Russia or China or North Korea with your same account even in communities located on other instances. You either comply FULLY, even when elsewhere, or else you are banned from the entire instance. You can read more about such practices in communities like [email protected].

Also a lot of other “not extremists” have blocked that instance altogether, so besides having access to your community able to be yanked out from under you at any time (far more than usual I mean), you also will miss out on interactions with those other people. You will be willfully choosing to remain inside of that echo chamber, which is such to a significantly higher degree than the vast majority of Lemmy overall, and legitimately much higher than even Reddit (no joke, again, read for yourself the stories in that and other communities). Whereas if you choose a community not on Lemmy.ml, then you can still interact with people from that instance, just elsewhere.

Also, you could be told that the mod hopes to kill you someday. Sadly, I’m not joking there either (some selected quotes: "nono I don’t want to shoot for pointing that it’s a game, I want to shoot you because…”, and then later tripling down still further, e.g. stating “I hope you die soon.”).

See e.g. https://lemmy.world/post/22359447.

It’s been too long, but there might be a way to click all at once or some such. But those are details, compared to Lemmy that has All or None (and empty Subscribed), with nothing whatsoever in-between. It’s a step in the right direction I am saying.

Nothing will ever entirely “solve” anything at all - people even on Reddit complain about “lack of content”. There’s tons of content here though, it just gets really difficult to find it. However, check out this link for Arts & Crafts. There are lots and lots of posts there - PieFed shows like 5x more in a listing than Lemmy - virtually none of which would make their way to All bc of being swamped out, and yet if that is the content that people are TRULY looking for… this brings them straight to it, with one click! Why isn’t that a “solve”, at least for the issue of content discovery?

Then they can subscribe to the communities they want to see in their Subscribed feed, which is less relevant due to being able to use those Categories. Also you can trigger a Notification for anything at all on PieFed - a user account, a community, a post, and I especially love seeing that you can turn OFF notifications for a particular comment, if abusive trolls decide to spam you for WEEKS and WEEKS afterwards, which is a real story that has happened to me at least twice on Lemmy, once on hexbear.net and another on lemmygrad.ml - in either case, my consent ceased long before they eventually got tired of harassing me (in fairness, that is supposedly what communities such as [email protected] are for, so it’s not that I want the community to cease to exist so much as to not have its content promoted as if it were adopting the same standards of behavior as every other space that I was used to across the Fediverse, without at least a warning of some kind delivered, which is yet another beneficial capability that PieFed offers).

So in addition to Categories and Subscriptions, I also have Notifications sent to me for lesser-trafficked but highly desirable content for me to see like [email protected]. And sometime this year there will be yet another method of handling all of this, in user-defined topic areas like a Favorites or other category of content that the user asks to be separated from all the rest.

And respectfully I disagree, bc depending on implementation, Categories of Communities has the advantage that it could make discovery of new communities obsolete - e.g. if there’s a [email protected] and a [email protected], it could put both of those into the same Category, and isn’t that what you are essentially asking: that wherever the content ends up moving, that the software go and find it and bring it to you, wherever you happen to be at?

Granted, the solution that PieFed offers needs to be improved upon:-), but at least it exists now.

Not Fediverser per se but the underlying concepts. In detail:

Content is King

Here, PieFed is no better nor worse than Lemmy. It uses ActivityPub to connect with Lemmy, as well as having its own communities, like Mbin (except unlike the latter it doesn’t have its own separate voting system, nor does it federate with Mastodon).

One thing PieFed does have though is the ability for someone to block all users from a particular instance of their choice, without requiring admin approval. This helps SO MUCH for certain instances that nobody wants to defederate from… yet I don’t want to read content from either.

Painless onboarding is second. Fediverser is meant to help with that, but no other admin has shown interest in adopting it.

There is a wizard where you choose what content you want to see - News, Politics, Arts & Craft, Technology, Movies & TV, Science, etc. - which then signs you up to communities in those Topic areas. You can later unsubscribe or subscribe to any individual communities that you wish, but the wizard helps the onboarding process so that you don’t have to simply stare at All bc your Subscribed feed is initially empty, as Lemmy does, bc on PieFed it would not be empty. It thus makes it much easier to find less prominent content, such as poetry, that would otherwise get swamped out by all the memes and politics and such.

A clear way to find-what-goes-where is third.

There are Categories of Communities that combine posts from all of the topic areas, whether you joined those communities or not. So if you don’t want any politics filling your feed, yet you occasionally do want to look up something related to politics, it is just one click away. So not quite mapping specifically to Reddit subs, but yes mapping to content areas - which imho is so much better, bc that would also help someone migrating not just from Reddit but from X, or Bluesky, or Mastodon, or Lemmy, etc. You don’t need an account to see this feature btw - just visit https://piefed.social/ and look at the top.

Or here is an example post showing the Categories above the post, hashtags below it, YouTube embedding of the link, a link to watch that rather on Piped, and if you scroll down note how the sidebar text appears below every single post (some apps make that exceedingly difficult to find on Lemmy, but it’s very often helpful to see not just when on the community page, and rather when in an individual post, e.g. to read the rules).

Does it provide a separation between topic instances and user instances?

No, there are extremely few instances so far and the whole project is still in late alpha as it adds features to catch up to Lemmy, although as detailed above it already has many features that Lemmy lacks. And I didn’t even begin to get into some of the best thoughts for how to democratize moderation practices to rely less on authoritarian control of “remove” vs. “allow” content, by expanding upon those binary choices to include user options to control their own experience - e.g. automatically collapse any comment with >20 downvotes (though it can easily be uncollapsed with one click), and labels next to usernames (e.g. “account <2 weeks old”, “may be an unregistered bot account that posts but never comments”, “controversial user receiving >50x downvotes than upvotes”, etc. - except these are icons not words as I relate here, plus you can add your own icons whenever and to whoever you wish, that only you will see, on top of these conditional-based ones), and even more than this besides.

When it catches up to feature parity with Lemmy, damn it’s going to be so exciting! Right now it’s more of a future thought, except I (who know how to fall back to Lemmy when the occasion demands, e.g. when searching for a post) already use it as my primary daily driver - not that I would recommend that mind you, just saying that it’s possible, if that gives you any indication as to how close it is to being ready for the masses. It’s very close, I do believe!:-)

And yet that is precisely what the mods chose - by abandoning the community for days at a time (tbf they claimed to read it “daily” and thus be active - but the difference between that and actually checking the moderation reports submitted is an enormous gap!), they left it to her to have to clean up. She did not want it, but she stepped up nonetheless. Then they threw her under the bus and drove it over her.

I wish them luck in the new community. The rest of the community though seems to have different plans:-). e.g. [email protected] has 9 posts submitted in the last day (24 hours), and [email protected] has the same (10 but close enough), while for [email protected] I stopped counting when it reached that same amount in just the last 2 hours, and then I did continue just one more time to see that it again had that same amount in the previous 2 hours before that.

Also, a week ago that’s how many posts [email protected] had before the mods moved back to it. So that community basically has no new posts at all since the attempted move.

While the community with the new mods ([email protected]) has 10 times more posts than both of the other 2 communities combined. It’s as clear a signal as one could hope to hear that they were not fans of this whole process. They choose Ada and lemmy.blahaj.zone and the new mods over the old remote LW mods in charge of the LW community, even at the cost of the effort to move to another community.

no other admin has shown interest in adopting it.

PieFed solves all of that. It isn’t quite ready for the non-technical masses from Reddit, but those particular issues at least it does solve.

I kinda want to recommend people to simply visit https://piefed.social/ and see what will eventually become available as a standard Threadiverse software suite just like Lemmy and Mbin.

As the developer himself states, and me as someone who uses it as my primary daily driver concurs, it is not quite ready yet. e.g. a good fraction of the Notifications I receive end up being dead links to posts that don’t exist anymore, or to users that I have blocked, etc. Also user tagging is not implemented yet and searching often does not retrieve things that you can find much more easily using Lemmy, plus tools for moderation of remote communities remain very primitive.

Soon now, it will be user-friendly enough to recommend to people, but for now it’s primarily for beta testing the software and those of us prepared to use an early adopter mindset when using it - e.g. switch to a Lemmy alt to do things that PieFed cannot yet.

Though more features get added seemingly weekly or at least monthly, it’s so exciting to see! I love the new inline comment feature, though inconsistently applied e.g. not yet available for edits. But it’s coming!

There is just an absolute ton of nuances involved.

SOME types of Federation issues is due not to the local instance but rather Lemmy.World and overall lack of distribution of users and communities across the Fediverse (some of which is better now than the past, but not nearly enough).

Other types involve the instance, and in turn its hardware and even more so its number and skill of admin support. Like if you have to wait several days for a manual sign-up procedure (people say quokk.au was this way, at least sometimes) then you may have already moved on elsewhere.

Some of the issues have greatly improved - like I switched from Kbin.social to Star Trek.Website and for super frustrated with how often I would try to do something - like vote or comment - and so switched to discuss.online, which I have been exceedingly happy with. The thing is, Star Trek.Website’s technical issues got WAY better (still not perfect) in the past year, and also I still have had issues with discuss.online - again, most often I would guess that Lemmy.World’s lack of updates to the latest Lemmy software was to blame for that (even though I understand that there are a whole bunch of reasons for the delay).

Yet people also report that Lemmy.World itself can be quite slow to access from some parts in the world like Australia and the USA. I don’t know how much that has to do with method of access like an app vs. the web UI, and even then, would an alternate front end app like https://photon.lemmy.world/ further affect the speed?

A simple score isn’t going to come close to describing any of this. But if it would, uptime % might come the closest? Especially in conjunction with other factors like avoiding recommendation of an instance that has only a single admin.

Discuss.online is tried and true, and I unreservedly recommend it. Anyone who likes can make an alt or two and see tor themselves how good the experience is in comparison between them. Also the admin is quite responsive, both in reacting to requests and remaining on the ball proactively before even being asked - see e.g. the pinned post on that instance.

Hehe go for it then:-).

Yeah, and while it may not solve everything, it could still help!:-)

And then only with deeper knowledge of how the Fediverse functions under the hood - like how “instances” relate to “communities” and specific moderator names, especially when working from a remote account on a different instance than the community structure… Hey, where are you going? 😯

The hard part is that for some people, News and Politics is actually what they are looking for. Others want only Memes and never not that, while still others want content types like Gaming or Arts and Crafts, etc.

So when Categories of Communities and/or Topic areas is implemented, this issue will be solved, but until then these are merely a best guess about what an “average” user desires to see, rather than allowing them to choose their own experience.

In reading through all of these comments, I hate to keep saying it, in case it comes across like I’m harping on the point or some such, but genuinely PieFed already does most of it.

Want politics? Click Topics->News and Politics. Don’t want news or politics? Click one other ones: Arts & Craft, Technology, Science, Gaming, Health, Hobbies, Music, etc.

Okay so memes is problematic yeah, but you can also unsubscribe from communities too, as well as block any instance of your choice without requiring admin support to do so. Then reverse your decision at any time, then re-do it again later, back and forth as you choose (unlike defederation where you would miss all messages delivered during the period of defederation). Though most are not nearly so bad, like Arts & Crafts.

You can also subscribe individually to something like [email protected] and have it show up in your Subscribed feed. I barely used the Subscribed feed in Lemmy as it didn’t seem to offer much in comparison to either All or visiting specific communities that I wanted to go to, like [email protected] that regardless of how well it competes with the more popular meme communities, I still enjoy more. But on PieFed I use the Subscribed feed all the time, it works for me better there. Also I have notifications sent to me for the smaller communities that nonetheless have the primary content that I want like [email protected] or [email protected], though we saw earlier how Favorites or customized Categories will likely be coming in 2025 and that will be an even better way.

Right now some of the foundational aspects of PieFed suck, especially searching for content. Then again, Reddit’s search sucks even harder so… how much will that matter to people? Tbf, Lemmy’s search feature is nice, and I saw somewhere a plan to allow searching strictly for post titles rather than keywords in them - that effort is appreciated!

I hope that the code being written in Python will help it grow faster. You might ask Rimu about some of these ideas mentioned here like a Trusted and Hesitated set of instances, if showing the former and by default at least blocking the latter for new people or those without accounts would help allow a better glimpse into the Threadiverse (minus Threads).

Otherwise, if Admiral Patrick is willing to add this capability to Tesseract, then any instance willing to run that could gain that feature, though at the enormous cost that someone using an app would not be able to take advantage, I think? Btw did you see this post discussing adding Tesseract to sh.itjust.works?

The OP idea sounds really cool too, except it would require someone to do it, and also I thought there were some major administrative issues with defederating from lemmy.ml, particularly in relation to communities. But if jgrim and m_f are on board with that… then that sounds wonderful?

I do wonder how widespread the desire for it would be though. You and I might enjoy that, but how many others, really? Probably more than a few, but less than a lot? 😁

Except instance blocklists don’t really work much, and are too controversial, and some kind of community sourced user blocklist also is far too controversial. Libs blocking tankies, tankies blocking neolibs, so many in the middle blocking neither, or perhaps both I dunno:-P.