Following the other thread (550 upvotes and 366 comments at the moment: https://lemmy.world/post/16211417), one of the complaints that people had what that some communities only exist on lemmy.ml and don’t have alternatives on other instances.
Let’s discuss this and see if we can organize together.
I suggest to have one topic per comment so that is is easier to discuss.
Can we make some root cause analysis? Why is it a problem that certain communities are only on one instance?
Or better, why do communities need some relationship to an instance?
Hello Raphael,
For the first question, I redirect you to the thread linked in the OP: https://lemmy.world/post/16211417
For the second question, I guess this is beyond the scope of this discussion. Having communities unlinked to an instance would require a complete rework of Lemmy, this thread is just about moving away from lemmy.ml due to some abuse reported in the other thread.
What If I told you that it does not require a complete rework of Lemmy, but instead just additional services to use instances as independent “ActivityPub group servers”?
Are those services available today?
Soon ™ . It is coming to Fediverser.
@freeman@sh.itjust.works and @Majestic@lemmy.ml, what is so offensive about Blaze’s question that warrants downvotes?
Nice one ha ha
I think it’s creepy. Don’t like that at all.
Downvotes can be seen by any admin of any instance
That’s great. If the admin of my instance would be this petty over something harmless like a downvote i would definitely leave the instance and i have never seen any admin make names of a downvoter public before.
Do you think I will somehow be blackmailed because you tagged me dude?
I am downvoting all participants in this grassroots campaign against lemmy developers and diverse political opinions.
Nothing in this discussion is against Lemmy developers, and no one is trying to silence their voices. It’s just about creating/finding alternatives for those that are not interested in interacting with that instance.
Also, me calling you out is not “blackmailing”, just me ensuring that downvotes like yours don’t become a pile-on.
… Do you think I can just keep the last comment in mind or something?
The discussion takes place in a post linking https://lemmy.world/post/16211417 . Surely that brings it into scope? The linked post begins
That does seem hostile to me. As does the drive to try and split communities
You have to be kidding me. Why would tagging people who downvoted a post prevent a pile-on of downvotes? Is it a lemmy bug? Or is it that some people who would want to downvote your post would be intimidated by being ‘called out’? Maybe my English is bad but vote->get called-out seems to fit ‘blackmail’ just fine.
YES! It’s not like votes are worth anything here, but one of the reasons that voting mechanisms become completely useless as a way to signal quality conversations is when people blindly upvote/downvote everything just because they don’t like what is being said. People that do what you are doing end up showing more about themselves than about the one posting the comment that you didn’t like.
Would you feel so defensive about it if the communities were being hosted in a right-wing instance?
Because it makes people think about what about the comment they are downvoting, instead of reflexively clicking on a button.
It does not fit at all. I’m not trying to get anything out of you for my own benefit, and I am not doing it to submit you into compliance.
I think decentralization is preferable for a wide variety of reasons, most of which boil down to stability and adaptability.
As for why communities need to be associated with an instance, I think that’s a much more interesting question. The first thing that comes to mind is moderation and liability. Ultimately, someone needs to be held responsible if shit hits the fan and somebody hires a contract killing on Lemmy or something. Right now, those people are the instance admins. If you could have free floating communities, the moderators of the distributed community would need to take on that responsibility instead.
Also how would that work technically? Stuff would presumably still need to be hosted and mirrored on instances, even if technically “unaffiliated”.
What I am thinking as a possible solution would be to have some type of “community server”, akin to email list servers. The admin of the server becomes a “mere” service provider, and those that create communities are then responsible for moderation and that content being hosted there.
I believe that this would be perfectly possible to implement with Lemmy, so much so that I will add some of this functionality to Fediverser as part of my NLNet grant. The question is: who else would be interested in hosting these fediverser-enabled instances?
Would you be able to prevent admins to interfere with moderation of the communities? Seems to be the biggest issue here
Theoretically, any admin would still have access to the server and make changes to things.
Practically, no. Anyone providing this service would be a hosting provider. If something bad happens at the community, they would only be able to claim it’s not their responsibility if they are able to point to the actual moderator who is liable.
Interesting
If communities were global instead of instance-based, instance mods/admins would likely still be able to moderate posts and comments hosted on THEIR instance (which may be important to confirm to local laws), but they wouldn’t be able to moderate the ENTIRE discussion.
There are likely some advantages to this (such as discussion not being able to be stifled by overeager or politically extremist mods), but it would also mean there is no way to globally enforce any particular rule (unless all instance admins agree on it).
I think that’s a really cool idea, but I am apprehensive about unforseen consequences. I have previously pointed out that the current structure of Lemmy creates a nice balance of power between admins, mods, and users. I think all three groups have enough agency and independence that they can follow their personal preference in the fediverse without infringing too much on the experiences of the others. In theory, as the network expands, stability will continue to increase.
I’m not sure about messing with that paradigm in order to implement something like what you’re describing.
So just to clarify what you mean. The fediverser-enabled instances would be current instances like lemmy.world, except with additional functionality to subscribe to unaffiliated communities?
Or they would be a totally new kind of instance with only independent communities? Sort of like lemmy.myserv.one (they don’t host local content), except instead of subscribing to communities on other instances, you would be subscribing to standalone communities organized in some kind of lightly moderated community list.
Fediverser works as an auxiliary service. Any admin can install it and set it up to run alongside the Lemmy backend.
Personally, I don’t like the idea of having instances that are home to users and communities at the same time. It is the source of endless issues around identity. I think that a lot of the centralization around LW would be avoided if people could create communities outside of their own “home” instance, and I don’t think that “just create an account on multiple instances” is an acceptable workaround.
Makes a lot of sense, I have to agree with you that creating multiple accounts is not acceptable. Most of the people already here don’t mind it obviously, but in terms of future growth that’s a big hurdle that we need to figure out.
I’m definitely interested in the concept and I would certainly advocate for SJW to give it a shot in the future and see how it is.
That’s a very interesting blog post you linked. Lots of interesting tangents which I’m not gonna go down. But I mainly agree about corporations monetizing identity in the modern age. But I don’t think it applies to the fediverse, because instances are non-profit. And quite frankly, I don’t see the harm in playing to people’s sense of community and identity in order to lure them in. It seems to me that your vision is technically efficient, but maybe lacks some of the charm that Lemmy currently has.
Well there are a few that are easy enough to forsee and it would make me wary of doing it myself. I think the current system works OK, but I am interested to see how it works out.