I'm intrigued by this. However -- and this is probably a cultural thing with me being an old-timey unix guy who likes to build things from scratch -- I have a point of confusion.<p>If you choose Run A Server, it suggests two main options: Ansible or Docker. It specifically warns against "from scratch".<p>When I'm developing software, I want people to be building it from scratch. If someone likes something I made enough that they want to take it and build a docker or ansible thing out of it ... okay, that's flattering, albeit a little confusing, and it's not my default.<p>And I probably wouldn't agree to support those third-party ansible/docker things which someone else felt the need to create.<p>What happened to rolling a versioned tarball that you can chuck in opt or wherever and point nginx at it? Eg, if I knew I could pull in versions of lemmy server through my package manager, I'd be totally trying it out as my side-project this weekend.
The front-end is still buggy and needs a designer's touch. And the real-time aspects wear thin at scale with all the notifications in a mismatch of languages showing up in the main feed. Lemmy is practically unusable without a personal feed filter, it seems that of the new reddit alternatives only retalk_[1] want to get this right.<p>If you do decide to run an instance of lemmy be sure to nuke the absurd word filter - the code is designed to make it as difficult as possible to change out. Thankfully some nice souls [2] are maintaining that anti-feature removal.<p>[1] <a href="https://retalk.com" rel="nofollow">https://retalk.com</a>
[2] <a href="https://github.com/innereq/lenny" rel="nofollow">https://github.com/innereq/lenny</a>
My options are "Run a server" and "Join a server"<p>This is not an alternative to reddit, where you would see a front page with content on it.
People who don't see why platforms like these are critically important has never had an opinion that isn't allowed on the major tech platforms.
I have to say that it does seem to be pretty good unlike many other federated alternatives to poplar social media platforms.<p>Pretty good means switching to it will not be too tough for Reddit users since most of the users (anecdata) preferred the older UI to which it is very similar and is easier to use on mobile.
What happens with moderation of unethical subs? The docs say "each instance has a set of administrator Users, who have the power to do site-wide removals and bans." So does that mean someone can start an instance for (as examples) covid deniers or white supremacists and reject any request to ban them? Or is there broader community input?<p>What happens if I run an instance and these subs become popular - am I going to be liable legally for their use or will a broader community be able to input into their moderation?
At quick glance the communities look very sperate. In my ideal federated dream, most servers would subscribe to most other servers and thus you could see your posts on several of them. Is that the intention here?
FediTips, a Mastodon account, recently shared some concerns about the Uyghur-related content in the largest Lemmy instance, which is run by Lemmy's developers:<p><a href="https://mstdn.social/@feditips/106835057054633379" rel="nofollow">https://mstdn.social/@feditips/106835057054633379</a><p>This created a firestorm on Lemmy, on which it was noted that Lemmy removes conservative and libertarian communities with the reason "No conservative communities":<p>> Removed Community conservatives reason: No conservative communities<p>> Removed Community Libertarian, in the pursuit of a free society reason: No conservative communities allowed<p><a href="https://lemmy.ml/post/78808" rel="nofollow">https://lemmy.ml/post/78808</a><p><a href="https://lemmy.ml/modlog" rel="nofollow">https://lemmy.ml/modlog</a><p>Perhaps the underlying software is fine, but the largest Lemmy instance is not exactly the friendliest to anyone who wants to express themselves more freely than they are allowed to on mainstream social networks.
Could someone ELI5 how the federation model works in practice? From the understanding, there is one entity that owns the core technology but the operators of the servers are distributed and independent. How do they typically manage things like scale, data growth, security, monetisation etc.? Is the experience likely to vary a bit across the operators? And how do users trust which operators then want to join?
I would define myself as pretty progressive, but Reddit's been absolutely dog** due to all the anti-capitalist, populist rhetoric. Every post seems to be filled with comments these days of "eat the rich". Like, you'll have a gif of a dude petting a dog, and then in the comments, they'll be like, "Bro, you're financially oppressing this dog and that's why it's forced to be pet by you" (Hyperbole, but I've seen some crazy stuff).<p>I just wish, we could have a platform that was; not necessarily politically neutral, but where it didn't consume so much of the site.<p>Unfortunately when I visit Lemmy, I'm fronted with a lemmygrad.ml, and a "leftist" privacy focused one, which seem to be the only populated instances at the moment. So it doesn't inspire much hope.
Lemmy development is coming along great, but there are some things I think don't make a lot of sense on a federated network.<p>1) at the very least there should be an option to run it as a single community, not multiple communities. Federation means you can have multiple communities, each on their own server, the whole user created multi community paradigm makes sense on centralized services like reddit. Added bonus, you remove site administration and have only moderation, removing bureaucratic layers is good.<p>2) subscriptions on federated services should ideally be handled client side. If I want to subscribe to a community feed, needing to log in doesn't make sense when a community I follow might not be on my home server. I should only need authentication to interact.
Lemmy's default instance leans heavily to the contemporary american idea of leftism. This doesn't affect the actual software in any way, only that community is a bit disturbing.
Federated Reddit and federated toots and all that shit are just too obtuse and like the old regime. It's too hard to set up and run your own node, and joining an existing one is just like joining Reddit or Facebook.<p>The optimal way to distribute social news: bittorrent-style P2P swarms.<p>People copy and paste news articles with photos (maybe this is piracy?) and share them as files with known hashes. The swarm pulls down all the articles for you to read locally without ads or scripts. No HTML and script garbage. Beautiful plaintext with minimal markdown-style markup.<p>A core group of 5 or so people alone can probably scrape what's valuable of the old web on a daily basis, rendering the need for the web moot. The web is going away anyway with the social media giants. We should just own the method of distribution instead of having it locked away in Medium and AMP.<p>User identities in the system are PGP signed, but can be effectively anonymous. You follow people that you upvote frequently, and articles they upvote are given higher priority in your feed. You share your voting with others to create rich filters. If the system detects noise, you know where in the graph it comes from and can nuke it. It'll take time to build a reputation, so people won't risk it.<p>You can layer comments on top and distribute them the same way.<p>Content is ephemeral as you want and decays naturally if nobody keeps or seeds it. Some archive team might want to keep stuff, but nobody else has to go to the trouble of maintaining infrastructure to do so.<p>No spam. No ads. No VC-funded growth engines that require your phone or a mobile app. Just a solid protocol and beautiful reading and authoring client.<p>The protocol should include a plaintext legal preamble / poison pill that prevents companies from ever trying to coopt it: BEGIN. BY EMITTING THIS PROTOCOL, WE OFFER SHARES EQUIVALENT OF 1% OF OUR COMPANY ON A DAILY BASIS TO ANYONE WHO CONNECTS TO THIS CLIENT. Or something to make "embrace and extend" impossible by forcing companies into an impossible legal contract.