This is a new feature to federate some popular communities when a new Lemmy instance is created. Previously it would be completely empty. The development code was hardcoded to lemmy.ml for a while, but I already changed this and made it configurable.
Comment on FYI: Reddit trademarked some community names (Digg link)
OpenStars@piefed.social 1 day agoIf lemmy.ml chooses not to federate with an instance, then those communities would not be in the listing, hence a veto power?
In full fairness, it is fairly easy to add a new community after the new instance is spun up, which is why I said “what communities are allowed to be acknowledged as existing to new instances”, i.e. using that built-in source without additional efforts to go against that trend.
This change increases the level of “centralization” towards using “lemmy.ml as the source of truth for that”. Trends towards centralization go against the spirit of a decentralized system, imho. Federation takes on a whole new meaning when it is interpreted not as individual rights but as a means to propagate the content authorized to exist in a central source… exactly as the OP topic covers, where community names must adhere to Reddit’s mandates.
nutomic@lemmy.ml 1 day ago
Blaze@piefed.zip 1 day ago
The development code was hardcoded to lemmy.ml for a while, but I already changed this and made it configurable.
That’s good news, thank you for this.
FYI @openstars@piefed.social
flamingos@feddit.uk 1 day ago
They seem to have blocked Nutomic, so won’t see this.
Blaze@piefed.zip 1 day ago
I’ll comment higher
Blaze@piefed.zip 1 day ago
Comment from Nutomic as it seems you might have blocked him
This is an unreleased feature to federate some popular communities when a new Lemmy instance is created. It was hardcoded to lemmy.ml for a while, but I already changed this and made it configurable. Obviously the entire development code for Lemmy is not ready for production now, and needs a lot of fine-tuning. Its not an argument against the stable release version of Lemmy.
OpenStars@piefed.social 12 hours ago
Nutomic is not in my blocklists - I may not agree with the devs philosophies but I do highly respect them nonetheless (I realize that may not always come across well), for offering their software as FOSS rather than keeping it private. I did block all users from lemmy.ml though, as the VAST majority of the time those comments just waste my time so while that throws out good replies sometimes, I find the balance highly worthwhile, personally. If it were possible to make an exemption to that, I would have done so specifically for Nutomic.
Anyway this is excellent news!! Sorta. It now being configurable, I will stop spreading this as misinformation, particularly against the lemmy.ml instance being authoritarian, and I thank you both for your correction in this matter.
That said, at a quick glance it does still look like the way to replace it is to use a different instance’s community listing? (lemmy.world, lemmy.zip, whatever) Which is still a trend towards “centralization” - even if configurable now as to which source of bias the instance admins chooses?
I agree that it is entirely fair that Lemmy sourcecode development is slow (possibly the constraints of language choice, and/or funding concerns, etc.), and so Lemmy instance admins must make do with things that can be changed more readily while awaiting more difficult solutions to be implemented, with lower prioritization.
So overall still not an ideal situation, but I thank Nutomic and you for pointing out that it is a LOT better now than the earlier choice to hard-code lemmy.ml specifically into the codebase.
Blaze@piefed.zip 11 hours ago
That said, at a quick glance it does still look like the way to replace it is to use a different instance’s community listing? (lemmy.world, lemmy.zip, whatever) Which is still a trend towards “centralization” - even if configurable now as to which source of bias the instance admins chooses?
At some point, you have to refer to an existing instance.
Lemmy.today’s blocklist is empty, that one could be used for people who want to avoid all bias.
OpenStars@piefed.social 7 hours ago
I meant that choosing to implement the algorithm to refer to a singular instance is a step towards rather than away from “centralization”. Other algorithms could be envisioned such as pulling from all instances that are federated with the newly created instance - although I don’t know the ordering of steps so that specific solution may not be viable, so I only meant it as a (possibly very bad) illustration of such a concept that would implement a more decentralized ideal.
pivot_root@lemmy.world 1 day ago
I dislike centralization as much as the next person and have my issues with lemmy.ml being allowed to control anything outside its own instance, but I think the way you phrased it is misleading.
That suggests .ml has the ability to prevent communities from being acknowledged at all by other instances, while the anti-feature is actually about them being the sole source of truth for what counts as a “popular” community.
They can censor and curate that list to their authoritarian-apologist desires—which is a problem—but it only affects discoverability when browsing for popular communities, and instance admins can (and should) turn that off.
OpenStars@piefed.social 1 day ago
I don’t know if there is an English language issue here (understandable if there were), but that is literally not what I said. I added “to new instances”, which precludes the possibility of interpreting what my words here to somehow mean “communities from being acknowledged at all by other instances” - the latter wording itself seemingly implying existing instances, which runs completely counter to new ones.
Anyway, it is not a blocker as you are saying (that I said), but a discovery impediment, wherein lemmy.ml acts as the central authoritarian decider for what listing of communities is presented to new instance admins upon first starting up a lemmy instance.
And while you can turn that feature off, then Lemmy has to limp along without that leg to stand upon. Yes you could replace it entirely too, but once you start replacing code are you really running “Lemmy” anymore, or like a de-authoritarianized version of it? Basically a decentralized fork? At which point such an action would go along with my latter wording “unless we fight against it”.
So my point was basically that there are centralization trends going on inside the Lemmy code, which I pointed out. A similar event occurred several years ago where lemmy.ml decided that certain swear words were inappropriate, and hard-coded those filters. When asked to remove them, they said:
- Nutomic
But then later recanted after a huge outcry. It makes sense that lemmy.ml makes the Lemmy codebase to suit their own needs, and only considers the desires & needs of the wider world outside of that as secondary. My point though is that that is what is going on… “unless we fight against it”.
pivot_root@lemmy.world 1 day ago
I agree with your overall opinion, but I jusy don’t agree with how the problem was presented. Your statement, with more of the surrounding context:
The key words here are “allowed to be acknowledged as existing”. Not acknowledging a community’s existence means not federating it. .world does that with db0’s piracy community because of EU laws, and it’s basically an instance-imposed community ban. Pyfed has/had a hard-coded denylist of community names in the source code that stopped them from being federated, and the result was none of the instances running unmodified Piefed were able to access them.
I wouldn’t have an issue with if you said a change in Lemmy “gives lemmy.ml exclusive control over promoting what communities show up as popular in other instances”. They don’t have the ability to censor the existence of communities that go against their views just the ability to censor their promotion. That’s a big problem, but it’s not as catastrophically bad as them having the power to censor the actual content on other instances.
OpenStars@piefed.social 1 day ago
Begging your pardon, but that is not what I said. You included my actual phrase in your quote even:
(emphasis now added) I am not sure why you think we are disagreeing here, when it seems we are in perfect accord. e.g. in your words, it:
Yes, that, exactly. It only affects new instances, not existing ones, it is only discoverability, not acting as a blocker to actually bring in those communities, and yet it is something that admins need to be aware of now and turn off. Almost like the instance admins cannot trust that the code will run according to their principles, without some modifications.
I concede that my phrasing sounds entirely different when you leave out the “to new instances”… but that is precisely why I put that wording in there?
Anyway, getting back to the - ahem - central point (pun intended), the aspect under discussion here is that centralization gives admins & mods too much power, whereas defederation places that power into the hands of the people.
Lemmy.ml is extremely famous on the Threadiverse - dare I say, infamous? - for doing precisely this. And now those same developers are increasing the trend towards centralization by baking right into the code something that will increase the trend towards centralization even further. Not by an enormous leap of course, but step by little step is precisely how such things have always gone? I never said the word “catastrophically”, just that it was a step that I felt like was in the wrong direction.
i.e. “The Fediverse doesn’t work like that” is a statement that encourages complacency, as if it never happens here. It does, albeit to a MUCH smaller degree than on Reddit or Digg. If the statement had said “The Fediverse does not do that to nearly the same degree”, then I would agreed, but I took issue with the binary logic of exclusively only yes vs. no, and pointed to where the answer is not quite “entirely no / never” here on the Fediverse too. “we all can easily fall prey to authoritarianism, unless we fight against it.”
Skavau@piefed.social 1 day ago
No, that’s just relevant to the mass community lookup tool. Piracy communities can still be federated individually on the Piefedverse (so to speak), and I believe that Rimu has removed that term from that.
FauxLiving@lemmy.world 1 day ago
It’s also a hypothetical, not the actual reality.
If it ever becomes a problem then it requires editing a single line of code (which could easily be setup to read a user-specified location).
Complaing about Lemmy while not doing anything to contribute to fixing the problem shows that some people are mentally stuck in Reddit and don’t understand open source processes.
There’s no product manager being paid to scan social media looking for complaints to relay to development.
If someone notices a problem or has a problem with the design then the answer is to create an issue on the issue tracker for the project. It’s even better if you edit the code how you think it should be and include a pull request.
The answer isn’t to misrepresent changes or discussion from the issue tracker in order to stir up anger and outrage.
In the FOSS world, if you want things to change then go change them.
OpenStars@piefed.social 1 day ago
Being aware of the practices going on inside of the codebase seems like something that we agree on. As for an actual solution… go ahead and make a fork if you want then, or perhaps provide a fully-coded solution and see if they will replace their code with yours - for me I’ve switched to PieFed.
FauxLiving@lemmy.world 1 day ago
Yeah, for sure. Be aware, make your point known and offer alternatives… in the project that you want to change.
Stirring shit on social media isn’t contributing.
Create an issue in the issue tracker is free and takes as much time as writing a post on social media.
This specific issue is something that is 1. Not an issue because the hypothesized ‘attack’ that’s available to lemmy.ml using this system is not being done and, if it was, would be easily detectable. 2. Trivial to change for any instance owner who wants to make another instance the source of their initial community grab.
The impact of this issue is currently non-existent and relies on a hypothetical situation that isn’t occurring. If the bar is that low for someone so that they will crash out on social media and swap projects, well that someone is going to be very busy swapping projects… because the FOSS world has an endless source of technical quibbles like this.