cross-posted from: https://literature.cafe/post/641633
I was never extremely active on Mastodon until recently but I followed it’s development relatively closely from its infancy. And I will say that it’s really strange to watch lemmy face nearly identical issues that Mastodon did when it was in a similar development stages. (Though, some of the drama thus far have been essentially a speedrun of what mastodon went thru over a gradual amount of time.)
The fediverse as a whole is essentially a return to the Internets roots, and with that comes new problems that OG internet communities did not have to grapple with due to the changes the internet has faced in the past few years alone. When building communities, most large internet communities have been largely corporate since the rapid centralization of the internet of the mid 2000s. There is truly no blueprint for this, and the volunteers that are making these communities from scratch are going to make mistakes (as we have already witnessed more than once, even this week alone.)
A large issue that has resulted from the corporate centralization of the internet that is really hard to break from is the expectation of an extremely smooth streamlined experience on emerging platforms like lemmy from new users. And you aren’t going to get that in these early days. You just aren’t. Things are going to be messy, we are just getting our feet on the ground. And this results in a lot of frustration and just generally a feeling of walking on thin ice with a user base that has been largely built initially from the exodus of an already established platform. To many regular lemmy users there’s this expectation that tends to be “well, if other social media platforms can do it, why can’t we?” and to admins and those building these communities it can be frustrating and feel like the users are being entitled to things that just aren’t possible from volunteers at this time.
With recent drama and inter community issues, the honeymoon phase of this place is officially ending and how we move forward is entirely dependent on how we respond as a community as well as what people using this platform as a whole want from it. You get what you put in.
I don’t say this to discount the drama that lemmy has faced these past few weeks but if you honestly think that this place has been toxic so far, the early days of Mastodon would have seemed like pure hell in comparison. Early Mastodon drama was like, doxxings, entire instance admins quite literally being chasing off their own sites over petty nonsense, things like that. It was bad. Really bad. And despite the existence of fedidrama, that stuff has stabilized. Why? Because the community stabilized and gradually formed their own cultures and the community volunteers building communities learned from their mistakes. People moved to smaller communities and stopped being hostile to decentralization. The necessity of defederation was embraced by most who began to understand its importance.
Some of the biggest issues lemmy has right now aren’t easy to solve, but we have a blueprint to what solutions worked and what didn’t from Mastodon. There’s also the issue with lemmy having a generally different culture from Mastodon, and that’s OK. We want our own community identity, not the same as Reddit or Mastodon or Twitter. In many ways that is already being built as well.
Right now, the biggest thing is just sticking with this place and persevering the growing pains. It is so easy to get burnt out, and the Mastodon instances that got too big for the admins to actually deal with are clear examples of that. I know it’s easy to look at recent events and feel disappointment as well as feel that just generally the most toxic Redditors migrated over, but doing that is just giving up before we even began. If you used Mastodon in it’s early days, it fucking sucked so bad. We have a leg up here that it’s overall easier to navigate communities and discussions out of the box (and with the current development, it’s only going to get better.)
Why uneasiness? This is federation working exactly how it’s supposed to. People are free to spout whatever garbage they want, and no one else is obligated to listen to them if they don’t want to.
No one is infringing on hexbears so-called “free speech”. They’re still free to shout into their megaphone. But the rest of us can close the damn door on them if we don’t want to listen. That’s quite literally the best of both worlds.
The only people that are “uneasy” are the people who think that “free speech” means being able to force people to have to listen to their bullshit. It’s not. Never has been. Never will be.
I for one love how federation tends to sort itself out without stripping away anyone’s right to free expression. Hexbear, or whatever instance happens to be controversial at the moment, can still say whatever they want. No one is shutting them down. No one is censoring them. No one is stepping on their rights. The rest of us just have the power to not have to listen to them. It’s a great system working exactly as designed and it’s absolutely how the future of social media has to be.
Aye, the right to free speech does not mean the right to an audience.
The rest of us just have the power to not have to listen to them
You’re describing this like we all, individually, are blocking Hexbear users. That isn’t what happened. They were defederated by a handful of individuals. They were censored. An authority blocking your words from reaching others is censorship.
Now, I agree with the defederation, don’t get me wrong, but you’re missing the forest for the trees, here. This is an obvious case where defederation makes perfect sense, because the instance’s admin was not controlling and banning users or stopping them from brigading other intances. That whole instance was an almost explicit raiding ship pulling up to the rest of Lemmy. Defederation makes sense.
But that doesn’t mean it is always going to play out this way. There are countless ways for defederation to be used as a weapon by admins, and just like we saw with the piracy change, communities can be vanished without defederation. Basiclly, there are so many tools available to admins of every instance to create invisible walls through the fediverse for any reason they like, and users will not be able to get around all of them, and more importantly, they may not even know about them. They may not be aware of what they’re not seeing. That creates a lot of avenues for manipulation and censorship, in both direct and indirect ways. That’s absolutely concerning, especially when there isn’t some unified standard admins have commited to.
Like, if this is the fediverse working as intended, then people need to stop advocating for this place as a reddit alternative, because it will never be. Reddit would never have gotten to be what it is if subreddit moderators could manipulate the visibility of others subreddits.
They were not censored, they are undoubtedly still active and able to say what they want. We just can’t hear it. You can choose to hear it by joining a instant federated with them.
Dafuq are you on about censorship?
Just becuase you can see something if you change perspective doesn’t make it not censorship if you attempt to block it from view. I’m not getting into a semantics argument; the point is really simple: those with the ability to frame the appearance of Lemmy to visitors using that ability to hide things from certain POVs. Regardless of what Hexbear was, that ability, unchecked, is going to harm the federation’s ability to grow naturally.
That is what federation is and that is the natural growth of a federation.
If not for exclusion and inclusion it would not be a federation.
It’s puzzling that you think this is semantics.
Anyway, this isn’t a productive exchange and I choose not to continue it, hope you don’t think I’m censoring you.
You’re describing this like we all, individually, are blocking Hexbear users. That isn’t what happened. They were defederated by a handful of individuals. They were censored. An authority blocking your words from reaching others is censorship.
No it most certainly is not. Not by any legal definition of the word. Preventing people from speaking is censorship. that’s all. “forcing people to listen to you” isn’t free speech. And I’m not even going to bother going into the fact that free speech is quite LITERALLY in regards to government’s and have absolutely nothing to do with private servers like Lemmy instances.
As someone has already mentioned, the right to free speech is NOT the right to an audience. Just because you don’t agree with that statement doesn’t make it not true. Facts don’t give a shit about your opinion.
I never said anything about rights. I’m not suggesting anyone should be forced to host anything. I don’t care what each instance opts to block, they’re within their rights too. And I don’t care what the legal definitions are, restricting the visibility of certain things is censoring them. But “censor” is not a dirty word. Blocking childporn is censorship, and I’d say that’s pretty good. I can already feel an argument about semantics coming and I genuinely don’t care. Whatever you want to call it, just fill it in there.
My point is that without some central authority or doctorine to which all admins adhere to, these tools will be absused for far less dramatic shit as Hexbear, and it will break the fediverse apart at best, or at worst, be used to shape it in dishonest ways. I support Lemmy because I hoped it would be an alternative for reddit, but it can’t be as long as this fracturing and curating is allowed to break the shared reality of the platform.
Hexbear has been the best thing to happen to the Lemmyverse.
It’s also important to point out with the people sick of the constant talk of Reddit, that same issue was quite big in Mastodons early days as well especially during the first big migrations. People constantly talked about Twitter.
Don’t know if I’m out of the loop but what drama has there been recently?
Toxic generally extremist instances both left and right finding out that not only can people de-Federate from them but that they will. And that it is their right.
Mostly explodingheads and hexbears. If you search for those two you can read about it all to your heart’s Delight.
Ahhh hexbear. I was there at the beginning, and left after a few months. It’s strange to see their dysfunction become more widely known. There were some nice features on their fork though.
They are not alone in their dysfunction. Even lemmy.ml and especially lemmygrad get quite toxic. The biggest difference is they tend to keep to themselves and stay in their echo chambers. And this can generally be pretty easily avoidable. But people still accidentally straight and upon them. I don’t remember how I was browsing the other day but a post from their instance came up. And I clicked on it out of curiosity not realizing. Only to see someone inside there making cogent rational arguments getting down voted pretty hard. At which point I took a step back and looked at everything that was going on and realized with horror where both of us had wandered into. I specifically made a point of just informing him of where he was and what to expect. Which got plenty of down votes. I think I only said one more thing in the thread in response to one of the denizens and cut my losses.
The only thing different really about the hexxbears was the constant brigading outside their domain. And I say all this as a socialist myself. Just very anti-authoritarian. Those places are all fanfiction and charismatic hero worship.
Ooh what features?
I don’t really see much EH, mostly shitposting about chris christie. Mostly HB brigading.
There was a significant amount of transphobic content coming from Exploding-Heads. You might be able to find some of it if you go to their meme communities
Hexbear. They’re tankies, and they brigade and spam a shitty meme. You can recognize the users because they all have pronouns in their username when no one else does. Just asshats, and I feel bad for the coder than fixed it so they could refederate, because almost everyone defederated with them. What a waste of his time.
And they often use those huge emojis in their comments.
Apparently the huge emojis are more of a bug within lemmy itself. I’d love to see a fix because they can be annoying, but I believe there’s other things on the priority list first… like individual users being able to block an entire instance would be a great feature. But the giant emojis getting fixed is also up there; I just don’t know enough to say what the underlying issue is
It’s a single line of CSS. It’s very easy to fix on the Lemmy web UI (not so much on Jerboa). At one point I even considered fixing it myself and making a PR but then other stuff came up and I had to disable emojis on my instance, so it’s no longer a problem of mine unfortunately.
I just bought my first domain and am already starting to dive-in to self-hosting. Even if my server isn’t used for the fediverse (at first), I’m excited to stumble my way around a new adventure lol
Best of luck for your self hosting adventure! Great choice, it’s well worth it.
I would like to see Lemmy used like PHPbb or vBulletin was back in the early 2000s - interest/hobby-specific instances designed to house a set of users with a few general discussion boards outside of the main topic to aid community-building. A lot of people seem very focused on joining instances that federate with as many instances as possible, but there’s a lot of value to be found in going the opposite direction, I feel.
Why do you think so? To achieve that topic-specifc community it’s not necessary to block out all the instances that don’t align with those interests, that’s what the local feed is all about no?
To me being conservative with defederations allows potential users to avoid feeling stressed that if they choose the wrong house for their account they might eventually miss out on something, which means they’ll have to make a second account, which could face the same issue itself down the line.
Defederating from extremistic or spammy instances should not be hurting regular users.
What I find annoying is when defederation happens because of individual communities on otherwise good instances. E.g. when that drama about shitjustworks started, because somebody created an empty The_Donald community there…
Defederating from extremistic or spammy instances
If it was meant that way then yes, I agree
when that drama about shitjustworks started
What happened there?
Not much. Somebody created a community called The_Donald (which wasn’t even active) and the admin didn’t immediately delete it. Then people that hate Trump demanded that their instance defederate because of that.
Oh wow, some people are a little too quick to think lol
Hopefully the LemmyBB ui starts getting more love too
Honestly focusing on UX would be a major boost for Lemmy. And when I say UX I don’t mean just the look of it… but the feel of it too. Making the experience smoother for users (and admins/mods).
Anyone know of a vBulletin to Lemmy importer? I have a very old forum that dates back 20+ years that’s still active I would like to convert, but it’s not practical and I’m not going to lose that history or force the users to go elsewhere
startrek.website checking in
That’s more or less the idea, just that you can use one account for all those forums. And sometimes interesting posts from other unknown forums show up in your main forum.
So the problems I’m reading here are mostly admin drama and community isolationism.
Which don’t sound like problems. If anything, sounds like things sorting themselves out. I see hexbear politics-addled community, I block hexbear politics-addled community. Solved, no one else the wiser. Admin is a cunt and defederates from several places while barely hiding their emotional outburst to the change? I use the Lemmy Migration tool, solved, no one else the wiser.
And were NEVER the actual problems I had with Mastodon, much less even close to the top one that still plagues it (Discoverability).
If I understand correctly, the admin drama is no different to the mod drama on Reddit? It’s just more exposed here than it is there?
Mastodon is full of netsplits caused by instances de-federating at the whims of various local BOFH.
Wow I don’t think I’ve read BOFH since Slashdot. Bastard Operator From Hell.
I guess that drama passed right over my head. Lucky me for having chosen the right instances right away (norden.social and feddit.de)?
Jeez really makes me wonder what happened on Mastadon
So much. Just… so freaking much. There’s quite literally hours and hours of content to sift thru on that end.
A very nice write-up. Thanks for sharing your insights! You’re right, these new platforms need time and experience to grow and thrive.
For how new some of these platforms are I think things are going well, recent dramas included.
> drama
Out of Reddit to Lemmy I am come. In this place will I abide, and my heirs, unto the ending of the world.
mastodon is crap. you need actual verified accounts to id there. it’s a total shitshow.
You really don’t.
Huh? I’m a bit confused by what you mean with this. I mean I even run my own single user Mastodon instance for myself, and I certainly have never needed to “verify” my account.
You can put links on your profile that get a “verified” checkmark next to it if you put in a special meta HTML tag anywhere on it, but that’s more of an “I control / own this page” thing, and doesn’t actually really mean much to people as far as I’ve seen - is that what you mean?
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