Comment on Is the amount of Lemmy activity declining?
cerebralhawks@lemmy.dbzer0.com 1 day ago
I’m doing my part! Just joined a couple days ago. Thought I could stick with Reddit but it got too far to the right for me. They crossed a line I can’t ignore, but I like the format, so I’m here. I knew Reddit was going to be winding down soon so I didn’t put as much effort in. I’d like to start a couple communities here, whereas I wouldn’t have tried over there. I just hope the toxic people who run the communities there don’t see what I’m doing and try to invade. I mean we could use the numbers but not the toxicity — though I feel that that comes with any influx of new users.
Blaze@lemmy.zip 1 day ago
cerebralhawks@lemmy.dbzer0.com 1 day ago
Thank you! Subscribed to both and found a few things to sub to in the second one.
AFKBRBChocolate@lemmy.ca 1 day ago
Well, welcome aboard! It’s pretty good here. Fewer bots, fewer trolls, more civil conversation. I hope it works for you.
cerebralhawks@lemmy.dbzer0.com 1 day ago
Thank you! I’m mostly treating it like “Reddit but for left leaning people” and enjoying learning the differences.
AFKBRBChocolate@lemmy.ca 1 day ago
Yeah, it is that. I’m way left leaning, but I actually wish Lemmy was more of a cross section. I’m not sorry to see the total assholes on the far right not here (or not very vocal), but I don’t prefer an echo chamber.
OpenStars@piefed.social 1 day ago
Welcome! While you are still looking around, you may want to check out PieFed as well & e.g. https://piefed.zip/ . It offers tons of features that Lemmy lacks, like categories of communities, which are user customizable and shareable, flairs (both user and post), polls, combining together all cross-posts across all communities, etc. Check it out and prepare to just fall in love with it!:-)
Even better, while Lemmy is written in the Rust language and adds features at the timescale of multiple years (not joking here) whereas PieFed is written in Python and adds new stuff literally weekly. So the gap in feature sets, instead of ever closing, will only continue to widen over time.
Although if you are going to stay with Lemmy, you would be hard pressed to find a better one than what you are on now. Fortunately, you may not have to choose, if it opens up a PieFed instance by the same people (discussion).
cerebralhawks@lemmy.dbzer0.com 19 hours ago
So let me see if I understand you correctly. The “one I’m on now” you refer to in the third paragraph, meaning dbzer0, is an instance of Lemmy (along with others) that are federated (loosely united) together in the same feed.
You’re on piefed.social, so you’re federated with dbzer0 and the other Lemmy feeds. So it’s not like you’re on a whole other federated social network like Bluesky (which is more like Twitter whereas Lemmy is more like Reddit). But it has different programming, so you can access more/different features from your end than I can on mine, but we still have access to the same communities?
Still kinda struggling to understand how fediverse stuff works.
Kierunkowy74@piefed.zip 19 hours ago
Exactly like that.
cerebralhawks@lemmy.dbzer0.com 19 hours ago
Thanks! I went and followed the discussion link the other guy posted. I saw one concern — the handling of voting. But someone/some people are going behind a lot of those comments and saying they fixed it based on user feedback. So that’s good. I also feel I understand the two (Lemmy and Piefed) and their relationship a bit more.
If it sounds like I’m a bit eager to learn, it’s because I like to help others, but to do that I have to understand things first.
OpenStars@piefed.social 14 hours ago
Yup, as said already, exactly like that.
Most social media these days is a single system / platform, like Facebook or Reddit. Federated media is rather like email where whichever service you send it from (Gmail, Hotmail, Yahoo, etc.), the recipient receives it and you don't need to care about exactly how.
I feel that analogy is overly simplistic, and leaves people baffled as to what defederation means. So instead I like the idea that federation is akin to ships (pirate or free trade) passing messages around - some captains have beef with other captains and refuse to talk with them, but otherwise you have access to the entire network of all messages.
It does get slightly more complicated when you rise up above the forum-based "Threadiverse" (Lemmy, PieFed, Mbin, and arguably flarum and nodeBB) to discuss the wider ActivityPub-based "Fediverse" - those entirely different platforms can pass messages between them, but it is not always so easy or straightforward, e.g. Mastodon is based on people whereas the Threadiverse is centered around "communities" (on Reddit these were called subreddits), so for someone on Mastodon to talk to someone on Lemmy (or PieFed) they would have to jump through several hoops to make it happen (although Mbin eases that process). That's basically the end of my knowledge there bc I don't use Mastodon but I hope that helps to have gone that far at least.
Getting back to the ship analogy, you personally could, in theory, have your own ship, which you could use either privately, or share with a few friends, or even open it up to the public. That "machine" that you use, that "server", in Fediverse terminology is called an "instance". And it will have "admins" who run it, as well as "moderators" who run the communities on it. Also, it will need to pick which variety of software to run, so like there are Lemmy instances, and PieFed instances, and Mbin instances, etc. Sometimes the same admins run multiple of them, e.g. lemmy.world is by far the largest Lemmy instance, and now they have branched out to try out a PieFed instance as well called PieFed.world. It's the same people, possibly running on the same machine or at least you could imagine that, but a different software platform.
lemmy.dbzer0.com is a Lemmy instance, and one day that awesome admin dbzer0 (a real person, though surely that's not their irl name😂) may likewise make a PieFed instance, perhaps it will be called PieFed.dbzer0.com, or something, who knows.:-)
Regardless, the messages will get passed between them. Your choice of instance gives you a different experience bc you are picking a different captain of your boat - maybe you'll even decide to become one yourself - and then yes the software that is run on the instance greatly changes your method of access. e.g. PieFed has flairs (both user and post varieties) and polls, but since Lemmy lacks those, the only way to participate in such is to use that same software, i.e. to sign up on an instance that runs it (or maybe one day Lemmy will catch up and offer all 3 of those? I am sure that it will, but I sincerely doubt it will happen anytime "soon"). Here is an example of a post that uses a poll (and hashtags).
Btw the sidebar of that community has some good resources to learn more about the Fediverse if you are interested. But that post itself is not able to be viewed on a Lemmy instance, since it uses a poll which Lemmy does not know how to handle.
And then defederation is a whole other thing. When one captain (admin) gets mad at another captain (admin) for just absolutely REFUSING to respect the rules that collectively were agreed upon - sending spam, harassment of users, trolling behaviors etc. - defederation can be a method of last resort to cut off all communication with them. It stops any messages from that point forward - for good or bad - which can cause confusion but I want to point out that the captain ("admin") is literally the owner of their personal ship (machine/"instance") and so has the right to do as they please with it. And all the more so if the instance is open to the public, in which case they arguably have the responsibility to protect their users from the trolling and harassment campaigns. "Free speech" is never free, someone must always bear the cost, of maintenance, of platforming it, and so on.