Kichae

Lack of granular privacy / profile control

This has been covered. This is a content-sharing network. Emphasis on both sharing and network. This means things that are posted are, by design, sent across the network. It’s not a walled garden; it’s the antithesis of a walled garden.

The only way for your posts to be seen by people on other websites is for those posts to be sent to those other websites, openly.

Poor content discovery / lack of niche communities / limited diversity

This isn’t a Lemmy issue, but the fact that it keeps coming up again and again framed as one is telling of the giant misconception people have about the Fediverse in general, and “Lemmy” in particular.

Lemmy is not a website. Or a space. It’s a website engine. Complaining about the quality or variety of content “on Lemmy” is like complaining about the content “on WordPress”.

The content that is here is actually almost magically discoverable, because that content likely didn’t start where you are, and website search bars only search their own databases. This is as true of lemmy.dbzer0.com as it is of Google itself. That’s why webspiders exist, to bring the content of the internet into Google’s database.

Fragmentation across instances / duplication of communities

This is the nature of linking multiple different forum-based websites together. Some of them will have their own sub-forums for their own population to use that are similar to sub-forums on another website. Those two sub-forums may have similar, or even the same, name, but that doesn’t mean they should be treated as the same place by people outside of them.

The constant drive by people not using those sub-forums to consolidate said sub-forums, because of fucking aesthetics, is pretty directly disrespectful to the people using those sub-forums.

“Lemmy” is not a singular space. It’s a network of independent websites that have agreed to syndicate content. That means they are both in cooperation and competition with each other. Kicking and screaming that one or another should give up its own various cultures and nuances for the sake of some pan-fediverse whole is kind of a dick move.

It’s one thing if two websites just want to explicitly merge, but to just be like “why is there Burger King and McDonald’s on the same street? Everyone should just be in one burger joint!” is kinda entitled.

Bad User Experience (UX) / usability issues

Reddit users complaining that things are different isn’t really good evidence of bad UX. At least the NodeBB discussion is getting close to the fundamental issue, but everyone seems to want the solution to it to be to force websites running Lemmy servers to act as dumb nodes in someone else’s project. And you’re not going to get too many hobby site owners signing up for that.

The solution is to highlight the independence of Fediverse websites, but then you get everyone whining about how small it is, how hard it is to find things, blah blah blah.

Search and archive weak/incomplete

Search is actually pretty good, if you’re on a busy server. At least in my experience.

Archiving old content, though… That’s getting back into a whole “demand volunteers shoulder the responsibility for hosting other websites’ content indefinitely” thing.

Over-representation of particular content types (US-news, memes, agenda posts) and low content-quality

And we’re back to “users aren’t talking about what I want to hear”, which… K.

They’re visible on other fedi platforms, making it trivially easy for assholes to go looking for who downvoted them anyway. The illusion of safety is a dereliction of duty to users.

Also, downvotes exist to allow large social sites to give the illusion of moderation and user agency while ignoring their duty to actually manage their spaces. They’re not needed here, and their existence promotes excessively large and unmanageable communities where people shout into voids and engage with hostility rather than discuss topics with people. Their use and inclusion should be seriously reconsidered.

Is this something communities could opt out of? Not everyone wants their community flooded with comments from people replying to people who aren’t even community members.

Unpopular opinion, I know, but downvotes are an anti-feature, designed to excuse big, for-profit social media from actually moderating their platforms. They have no place in real social spaces.

As per usual, the “free speech on someone else’s dime” folks think the people running the forums they feel entitled to shouldn’t have actual moderation tools. Shocking.

Once upon a time, people overseeing web forums used to have the ability to move posts, split topics, and even shunt comment chains into other, exising posts. But all Reddit allows is to delete, and so this space that apes some of the worst bits about Reddit thinks they shouldn’t do any better than the lowest of fucking low bars.

You can’t truly bar federated content from being viewed by non-members, but you can totally make it not worth the effort for most people to see what’s posted, and totally prevent contribution.

These kinds of restrictions wouldn’t be about strict secrecy, just effectively creating a white list for speaking. A +v in IRC terms.

Ugh. The idea that there are two forums with the same name on different websites focused on similar topics isn’t a “community separation problem”. The “community” is not separated. There are just separate communities discussing similar things.

Those communities are all on different websites. Different websites, with different user-bases, and different governing rules. They are not the same space, in any way, shape, or form, and you should not imagine them to be.

There’s no need to want them to be, either. Content of interest to one will likely be of interest to the others, and will find its way to them. Content that is only of interest to one but not the others does not need to be seen by all.

Let go of the FOMO. It’s not serving you.

Do you remember forum culture? Where, if you joined a forum and were a giant pain in the ass, they kicked you out?

Large, monolithic social media sites like Facebook and Reddit got away from some of that, just because they’re too big to police. But the fediverse isn’t. Not yet, anyway. Bad neighbours are defederated from, and bad actors are banned.

Don’t be a giant pain in the ass if you don’t want to be shown the door. Or go back to spaces that are too big to GAF about you.

Because it abandoned the idea of the site admins being responsible for moderation, in the name of expanding to unmanagable size.

On Reddit and Facebook, groups do not have a common moderation team, so they lack the right to dump a post in someone else’s group.

Downvotes are already a questionable design choice, which encourage passive-aggressive drive-by behaviour rather than engaging with and countering challenging ideas. They’re kind of a dark feature, which give the user a sense of participation, or worse, the sense of being a cop, while contributing nothing.

They are catharsis without praxis, and they almost certainly contribute to online toxicity.

Actually giving them forum or site moderation power is… Well, it sure is doubling down on that feeling like a cop thing.

And what are all cops?

No. The website you’re using doesn’t share them, and possibly doesn’t even track them. They don’t support downvotes, full stop.

There’s no Platonic “Lemmy” for you to see or access. There’s 1000 different Lemmys, as each Lemmy-based website on the network is it’s own thing, hosting both local content and remote content that is syndicated to it. You can only see what’s hosted and surfaced on the website you’re using.

You may as well be asking if there’s any other way of seeing Instagram posts on Twitter.

So, there are issues with something like inheriting comment threads in a segmented moderation space like Lemmy. Cross-posting a post from one community to another means crossing… let’s call them “regulatory boundaries”. Comments posted in Community 1, hosted on Website X may violate the rules of Community 2, hosted on Website Y. So, what would that mean in terms of rules enforcement?

As a moderator, you can delete the comments you’ve inherited, but it’s a lot harder to keep up when you’ve just gotten 50 or 100 comments dumped on you all at once. It also breaks the syncronization you seem to be looking for.

You can decide that moderators at the receiving community can’t moderate the discussion, but that’s just ends up seeming somewhat parasitic, and a clear and open vector for abuse.

On top of the moderation issues, it also means giving users the ability to just… inject people into a community who aren’t members, both without the consent of that community, and without the consent of the people being injected in. Like, what happens if I were to cross-post something into a troll community? Suddenly, I’ve just exposed dozens of people – if not more – to a harassment ring, with two clicks of a button.

Personally, I fail to see the upsides. This really just seems like yet another way to try and paper over the fact that we’re all using different websites, and to ignore the websites that we’re actually using in favour of make believing that we’re in the centre of the panopticon.

The nodbb lead dev is part of the threadiverse workinf group, which is focused on interoperability between different AP-based platforms, and the federated nodebb forum topics are currently available via lemmy: !activitypub@community.nodebb.org, !forum-wg@community.nodebb.org

You know things are going to get messy when the PoC are demonstrating. That’s when the cops turn off their body cameras.

I think a significant issue here is that Reddit is not built for fostering communities, and things that mimic Reddit will not foster them, either. The whole model is built around an endless number of very large, single subject discussion spaces with functionally no globally consistent moderation or oversight.

This is a model of content categorization and filtering for individual consumption, not community building. Lemmy “communities” are just content tags, they’re not real community spaces. They’re never going to encourage the kind of tight knit spaces with idiosyncratic customs, rituals, and rules that actual vommunities have. They’re never going to let you get to know others because “off topic” discussions are meant to be had in entirely different spaces.

Reddit and reddit-like services are about content creation and delivery, noy community. Thatms baked into the form.

The point of federation is to publicly share what you want to publicly share, not to have unfettered access to whatever you want to consume.

Now why am I on Lemmy? Because in my opinion, it’s the first step towards a mainstream Fedivers! Mastodon … [isn’t] very widespread, but when you see the number of people active in Lemmy communities, it’s really impressive!

🤨

Mastodon has an order of magnitude more active users than Lemmy - and the whole rest of the Fediverse - if not two orders of magnitude.

Lemmy’s a great platform, but Reddit is already the niche social media site among the mainstream, and the kind if niche interest forums that ultimately built Reddit just haven’t reached critical mass here yet, and that means Reddit remains very sticky. Pile on people being kind of uncomfortable with the local namespaces for both users and communities, and I don’t know that Lemmy’s really the killer platform for the 'verse.

Fediverse adotion is going to be a collective effort. Loops has a good chance of attracting people. It would be nice if Mastodon would actually use a standard ActivityPub implementation so it played nicer with neighbours. And microblogger discovering something other than Mastodon would be nice.

But it’s not going to be just one platform. If it is, then the fediverse idea has totally failed.

Cool. You… don’t have to use it, or any sites that leverage it. But the Fediverse is an open network, and to that extent it should be able to support everyone’s needs. But if we want the Fediverse to be anything other than an internet enthusiast circlejerk, rather than a backbone technology for the internet, then supporting a wide variety of use cases is necessary.

Yeah, if we want to get people off of centralized, private social media sites, we really need Patreon integration for a range of fedi services. It’s one of the significant pipelines for Discord adoption.

Lemmy/*bin, PeerTube, Matrix, what have you all have immediate drop-in replacement value. Other services, like Mastodon, don’t have the same level of potential segmentation and exclusivity inherent in how they’re built, but it’d be a way to set up paid access servers.

These kinds of gateways are important for actually making the fediverse seem like a viable alternative. Right now, the incentives are driving people toward closed gardens and destroying the open internet.