Comment on Reddit’s 50% Plunge Fails to Entice Dip Buyers as Growth Slows.
OpenStars@piefed.social 1 month agoYou cannot. You never could. The difference that the Fediverse makes is that you can make your own instance.
Slight side-track here: in many ways Lemmy is even more authoritarian than Reddit, this is basically a Reddit 2.0. Here there is a modlog, but no modmail, no notification of a moderation action, no ability to ask questions as to why (if only so that you can avoid doing so again?), especially when the modlog merely says that the action was done by "mod" (so even if there were a moderator chat somewhere, or you wanted to send a DM, who would you send it to, unless you send it to literally all, thereby risking getting yourself getting banned from the entire instance for legitimately spamming DMs!?).
On lemmy.ml, people routinely get instance-wide banned from communities that they've literally never even so much as heard of!? More importantly, for a rule that is never written down anywhere or explained to new users. On midwest.social numerous people have been banned merely for downvoting posts or comments offered by the instance admin, or for submitting reports (not spamming, just one) literally calling out cries for (not against) murder - ideological purity testing is real there. Meanwhile back on lemmy.ml, I can point you (if interested) to an actual conversation where a moderator tells a user that he wants to kill him - but ofc he is protected by the instance admins so nothing will ever be done about such occurrences.
Now you understand, the "freedom" that the Fediverse offers is not extended to the users, but rather to the instance owners. If you want that freedom, you have to start your own server. Or join one that offers it downwards to its users.
PieFed offers MANY features facilitating democratization of moderation. Discuss.Online, a Lemmy instance, is quite well-known for allowing freedom to its userbase (though being located in the USA... for how much longer?). There are others - these are just ones that I definitely know about and recommend.
TLDR: you cannot and never could, that's a misunderstanding of the concept of the Fediverse, though there is potential to make freedom happen here, unlike Reddit where it's a lost cause from the start.
natryamar@lemmy.world 1 month ago
Thank you for such a long writeup to my simple question. I would definitely love to selfhost my own little lemmy instance someday in the future. It never made sense to me that this place was automatically better when it’s just technically someone else’s servers.
OpenStars@piefed.social 1 month ago
Well, there truly is a trickle down effect there: there is only one Reddit, but there are many instances running
Reddit 2.0Lemmy, and several running Mbin or PieFed instead. So as a user, if you do not like Reddit, there aren't really any good alternatives (read a book, Twitter/X or like Bluesky or Mastodon or GameFAQs or such, maybe touch grass, etc.:-), but if you do not enjoy a Lemmy, you can shuffle over to another one, or even start your own.What I said above is just the beauty of any generic Free and Open Source Software to run or be a user on a forum, but beyond that, the Federation model of sharing content via the ActivityPub protocol allows you to work with the identically same data from the new place as you would have from the old - more or less. e.g. if you get booted from Lemmy.ml and make a lemmy.world account then you could access the same communities on lemmy.ml, with the new account (although being careful this time not to cross the unwritten rules, including for ban evasion). Moving from Reddit to X doesn't allow that, but moving from a Lemmy instance to another Lemmy, or Mbin or PieFed, does.
So there is that tiny amount of freedom, which nonetheless still sets it apart from corporate non-FOSS Reddit, by virtue of the Federation model:-). The Fediverse software is quite resource intensive, depending on amount of network utilization, but widely considered to be better than isolated forum software for this reason of its interconnectedness:-).