About two months ago I was talking about this model for funding artists in the Fediverse where backers would set a monthly "pledge" and then they would be able to define how to split their contribution among their favorite preferred people....
Admin team of LGBTQIA.Social Mastodon instance received abuse email from Russian censorship agency, where they demanded to remove an account. The account in question represented a small group that ran a collaborative blog for LGBTQIA youth and adults in Russia....
But blocking the instance at the DNS level does not stop the content from reaching other Russian instances, right? They would have to basically track every server that is federating with them and block like this.
I described another case in the blog post: it would be really cool if indie labels or indie artists got together around their own instances, so that they could distribute/promote their own content with less restrictive licenses.
I don't know, maybe it seems that you are experiencing a lot of the pains that comes with learning about self-hosting, which is fine and laudable but not at all an issue exclusive to Fediverse software.
Maybe my question is: are you trying to deploy your Lemmy for this long for the learning process, or do you just want to have a server of your own? If the latter, why not just go one of the hosting providers?
Look, this is software that has not even reached version 1.0. Of course it is incomplete. I totally understand your frustration, but if people are telling you "this is not for beginners", maybe it would be wise to listen to it? You still haven't answered my question: are you trying to run your own instance to learn or because you want "support the Fediverse"? If the former, it seems that you are trying to bite more than you can chew. If the latter, there are plenty of other ways to help beyond running your own instance.
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I'm a fan of the Fediverse, but what are the major issues we faced right now because of the limitations of the #ActivityPub protocol? Recently, decentralize social networks are at their peak, big players are trying to be part of it, and is constantly in the news....
No. A better analogy would be like phone number portability. You can "own" your number, and if you want to change your company you can take the number with you.
So, with news of Reddit making deals to sell user data for AI training, I think we should really start organizing ourselves for an effective migration campaign....
I agree on the importance of content, but I do not worry about "only one shot of making a good impression". People are willing to turn a blind eye for the things they want to work out - in Brazil orkut (remember that?) was so successful that the "server error" due to overload page a meme in itself. Twitter's "Fail Whale" as well.
This is why the idea is to focus on one single subreddit, and why we need the support from their moderators. If we successfully turn this into a mission for the community, then all of the missteps can be forgiven and used as lessons of what not to do in in the next one.
For the moderators, the story to tell it's easy: they are in abusive relationship with Reddit's management, and they are being offered a way out.
For the non-affected users, we can also find a very good reason: money.
Reddit is going to IPO soon, right? Let's get the WallstreetBets people involved, and let's show how people could make money by shorting Reddit's stock.
The problem I’ve faced is that even if the subreddit wants to build up a community here, users eventually stop posting if no one from their original community is seeing the content.
They were not opt-in (and I'm firmly in the camp that believes that "opt-in" bridges are a bad idea), but that was the second most important pain point that I wanted to solve with the alien.top bots (behind it being a tool to help one-click migration).
The tool should check if the OP of the post included a flag (...) either in the title, post body, or as a top comment.
This feels like it can become a brittle solution and can get way too complicated fast. My plan for fediverser now is to let people create bridges by authenticating with their Lemmy and Reddit account, and then specify what type of bridge. E.g, users could choose if want their responses in Lemmy to become a response on Reddit, or just to send a PM to the OP indicating the Lemmy link.
In any case, I'd personally favor any approach which establishes that the net flow of content is out of Reddit, not in. If we keep mirroring the content from here to Lemmy, the people there will have even less incentive to leave, but if we use the intolerant minority strategy we might end up forcing the majority to migrate as well.
Can we sidestep the usual complaints about federation or instance-specific issues? Instead of worrying about the potential roadblocks, let's look at the end goal and work our way back.
Onboarding new reddit users is not difficult. The system that I built for fediverser is running just fine on alien.top, and people can sign up with their Reddit login and already get auto-subscribed to all the relevant communities. If more instance admins decide to use it, I could even add it to https://fediverser.network where anyone coming from Reddit don't even have to choose an instance, and we just redirect them to the ones that are available and with the most affinity.
The real challenges now are related to chicken-and-egg of content. People don't want to leave Reddit because that's where their communities are. Moderators don't want to leave Reddit because that's where people are. The mirror bots were meant to solve one side of this, I'm just missing a good, easy, censorship resistant way to make the bridges.
I don't think the typical Reddit user cares much about shorting.
It's silly to dismiss a whole thesis based based on your concept of "typical" or "average" anything when the whole idea is to find and reach outliers in a large population.
Sorry for the personal callout, but are you always this negative? It seems like every comment or thread you participate is only to see how much you can put people down. Can you please at least try to see how it could work instead of spreading misery everywhere?
I thought the whole idea is to make entire communities migrate to Lemmy
Not entire communities. One. I'm saying let's find one subreddit (out of the 100k+ subreddits that exist) that could be interesting and let's focus our efforts on solving the problems of this one community.
I don't mind criticism, I do mind getting sidetracked with arguments and objections that are not related to the proposal. When you start arguing for something beyond the idea of finding one subreddit, it feels like a drag.
It failed in the sense that Reddit still not just got what it wanted, it was a test that showed that most people don't really care about the nature of social media and tech companies, as long as their precious content is still provided. It certainly emboldened to go ahead with their plans of IPO and on monetizing user data.
I'm not saying we should bash ourselves. Trying and failing is certainly better than subjugating to the status quo out of apathy. But Lemmy is stuck at 35k MAU, which Reddit is one of the "smaller" social networks and still counts 400 *million MAU. I wouldn't call a "massive victory" if we only managed to reach 0.01% of the userbase, and it's not even like the people here completely got rid of Reddit, a good number of them are still quite active there.
Sorry, not willing to engage in sophistry. If you can participate in the discussion from friendica, more power to you, but at the end of the day it's a lot easier to get people to use something if they understand the practical applications instead of the underlying definitions of the protocol. We need to put our marketer hats for this one.
So? You still need to convince the people of that community that it’s a good idea, or do you think they will just follow a handful of mods blindly?
Even the longest of the journeys start with a single step.
You are right, we need to find a mod that is willing to do it.
Then we need to work on how to message it for the redditors
Then we need to collect feedback and see what is working and what needs improvement.
Then we need to improve the existing Lemmy clients, because onboarding is still messy. I'd like to make a "friendly" fork of Voyager which can use my "login with Reddit" system to auto-migrate users, but if the main dev doesn't want to accept, I guess I will have to manage the fork myself.
Then we will need to improve the existing servers, because we are not really ready for 100-200k active users.
Then we will need to find a way to save on resources, because the new version of Lemmy is a hog.
Then...
Then...
Then...
I know it's a lot of work, but it makes no sense to let be taken by anxiety and just looking at everything that needs to be done. I'm just asking for you to look at the first step.
We could… but people have concerns about their communities being always operational and their accounts always working.
Part of the job of any project manager is setting the right expectations. We shouldn't be promising a flawless execution and we should be upfront to mods and the userbase that the whole idea is to do this as an exercise to find out the issues and learn the best workarounds, so that we can be ready to do it in a larger scale.
Not only I don't see any "harm" done there (I mean, really, was there any bad serious consequence of a system that replicated a few million comments?), to me it's a good example of this "progressive" generation acting like extreme reactionaries. Instead of adapting to a new scenario (hey, browsing by all is not really going to work if we have that many people posting content, maybe I should learn to curate the communities) and trying to learn with the new information and see where it would go, most people were just decided to take it as a personal attack on them (it wasn't) and their preferences.
Likewise, I refuse to see "trying to hard to get people to switch" as a bad thing. I honestly see it as a moral imperative: if corporate-controlled social media is bad for us, and if any social network depends on a sizable number of participants, then it stands to reason that we are only going to have a "healthy" internet when the mainstream is here. This is not just a fight over what site people use to share stupid memes, this is about not letting our collective imagination and culture be controlled by some oligarchs.
I feel kind of silly talking about "mission", even more so when talking about a tool. What is "the actual mission of Lemmy"?
But let's say that you are talking about the mission of the people working on the project. Do you think that something as crucial as our online communication networks should be majorly controlled by corporations? If you are using friendica, I guess you don't share that opinion, right?
And if you don't share that opinion, do you think that this "as long as I am out, I don't care about the others" approach is effective? I think that the best way to ensure that we get to have a corporate-free internet, we need to work as hard as possible to make that the reality of the majority, not just a niche thing.
And yes, Communick is a commercial provider, but you got the order wrong. I created Communick to help me to achieve this goal of having open systems available to everyone, making money and having Communick growing is a means, not an end. And quite frankly, Communick has been nothing but a money pit. I'm still running it because I'm stubborn. If I just cared about money I'd be working at Google.
I don't see it as "telling people how to use it". What I wonder is how would people react differently if those were not really bots but just the people from Reddit actually moving over here. Would they keep complaining about people "flooding" or would they just accept that curating and filtering is indeed part of the toolbelt and should be used for this.
It's more or less the same people that complain about the bridges "because of privacy", but would be better off if they understood that using a "public social network" and keep expecting "privacy" is just the wrong tool for the job. If someone is using a system in a way that is not aligned with its intended design, there is no point in complaining about others breaking your expectations.
Anyway, I digress. I appreciate the improved tone in the conversation. I just hope that we can make it more productive as well.
But the protocol is the least important thing, it's the applications that come out of it.
Granted, I think it would be an improvement if we didn't have to care or think about what server you are using and people could keep their same identity regardless of the application they are using.
Yeah, it would be nice if I could keep my "communick.com" handle everywhere, but my usage and conversations on Lemmy are different from when I am on Mastodon. The audiences are different. It's a good example of The medium is the message.
Yeah, totally. My name is Raphael and I people keep confusing me with the Ninja turtle...
I don't want to waste any more time with this ridiculous argument. This is unbelievably boring. If you understand what I mean, then the communication was successful. Instead of nitpicking over the terminology, I would appreciate if you responded instead with something pertinent to the discussion.
just because i understood doesn’t mean anyone else would.
Then it's on me to adjust my language to the different audience.
Look, you made a request and I already denied it. If you are more concerned with the form over the content of the discussion, please find someone else to pester. I really don't respond well to this hallway monitor attitude. It's this type of tone policing that sometimes makes a normal conversation impossible.
What do you think about the idea of having the fediverser bots mirroring the subreddit content into the lemmy community? It would help both to bootstrap the lemmy community and also showcase the migration tool.
The thing is that fediverser (my project for mirroring content and to help people migrate) can work transparently with the actual Lemmy community. No need to create separate communities and then getting people to subscribe to two separate things.
We can turn the mirror into a bridge, and make the conversation two-way. And even if we didn't, you can take part anyway because there will be (hopefully) an increasing number of people there who are actually native to Lemmy.
I will be honest with you, I haven't put much work on Fediverser since December for two reasons:
I haven't come up with a design that is simple enough for the Lemmy users to indicate how they want their message replicated to Reddit (i.e, should the response be sent as a comment, as a DM, none at all?)
Time taken by job search and building more stuff in Communick to try to generate income. I applied to NLNet for a grant for Fediverser, and it's being evaluated. If I get it, then I'll be able to focus again on it, but if not I will be even more pressured to find some other way to make money.
Do you think so? I'd personally would prefer to not have any comments in the public threads. So, I'd like my comments to be sent as DMs to the OP just to let them know about the conversation on Lemmy and to encourage them to signup here. Don't forget that the main goal is to make it easy for people to migrate away from Reddit. If we just implement a two-way bridge, we'd be effectively giving no incentive for Redditors to move out.
My thesis is that content is king. There is a good number of people who are on Reddit not because it's their favorite platform, but because they can't find the content elsewhere.
If we mirror the content on Lemmy, then Lemmy will have the same content as Reddit, then the "lack of content elsewhere" stops being a problem, and then these people will be "free agents".
If we have content here, the "problems" of Lemmy are not going to be seen in such a bad light. Conversely, if Reddit does not have exclusivity of the content, people are not going to feel the need to put up with all their crap.
Having a "two-way" bridge is not necessarily bad, but the more we have people saying "look, someone responded <quote original comment> on <lemmy community>, to respond, signup via <link to fediverser migration tool>" it will start creating a situation where people will be realize that they can choose between:
staying on reddit, to see reddit content, deal with Reddit management and being periodically pointed to more content on Lemmy.
create an account on Lemmy, see all of the content from Reddit + Lemmy, free from Reddit management.
I am treating those in the "I will be annoyed by a bot asking me to migrate" as "people who are loyal to Reddit and not willing to move away", so the sooner they block the bridge, the better for everyone. But again, my thesis is that these people are not so numerous as the ones that will just move to the platform that provides them the most content.
5 to 10% of people creating new accounts would be amazing. The mirror accounts from fediverser collected around 1.5M accounts in about 2 months. 5% of that is 75 thousand, which means that we could be bringing 37.5k new users to Lemmy per month.
folk having less incentive to engage with those threads if it’s extremely unlikely
This will change with (a) the cumulative effect of new users migrating and (b) if we successfully explain to people that the idea is part of the orchestrated effort to get people out of Reddit.
I very strongly feel that a true 2-way bridge is the best solution,
There is also a practical issue to avoid sending comments to every reply. I will only have a message being sent to the comment if I can send it from the Reddit user (meaning, the Lemmy user that wants to use the two-way bridge needs to have an account on Reddit as well, ideally use their own API key to do it). I rather not use the fediverser API key to do that, because it can be flagged as spam and it will be likely to trigger a game of cat-and-mouse between Reddit admins and those running fediverser instances.
So this is why I'd like to make it configurable. There will be people like you, who'd be okay with mirroring your comments. There will be people like me, who do not want to contribute to Reddit further and just to use the response system as a tool to get more content on Lemmy and eventually start converting some of the users.
A couple of years ago, IFTTT did a thing where they asked people to sign up to premium and they could pay whatever they like and could keep the service forever. I didn't use many of the services, but thought it made sense to try and preserve something so useful for in case I did need it. In the meantime, I would allow it to...
Using a CDN does not come without downsides, though. Cloudflare itself is becoming another "too big to fail" entity of a system that is not supposed to depend on the resilience/capacity/budget of any single actor.
Personally, I'd rather see a tiered architecture for data, where servers are only responsible for guaranteeing the data from actors on their own servers, but everything else stored in a distributed, append-only stream of data. This would make a lot cheaper to run individual instances and would allow clients to obtain the data from multiple sources.
Yeah, my response was a bit tongue-in-cheek because one of the things that I don't like about Lemmy is this coupling to a specific storage backend. Maybe it was just immaturity of actix that led the devs to take this approach, but most mature web frameworks already allow pluggable storage backends, so in the end it seems that Lemmy will reinvent a bunch of wheels.
@fediverse Fediverse user growth jumped to ~50'000'000 users. What happened ?
The FediDB Fediverse User Growth graph shows a significant jump in user count in February. Software distribution is also 81% other, and the biggest server is fediverse.hanbitgaram.com with 39 million users ! What happened ? https://fedidb.org/
Could you please write the same comment, but without the namecalling for what seems to be an honest mistake?
Good Lord, for all the talk about the Fediverse being a nicer place than corporate-controlled social media, comments like yours really show how that is very far from the rule.
You want a real DNS Server at home? (bind9 + docker) ( www.youtube.com )
A zero-commission crowdfunding platform to support content creators in the Fediverse ( blog.communick.com )
About two months ago I was talking about this model for funding artists in the Fediverse where backers would set a monthly "pledge" and then they would be able to define how to split their contribution among their favorite preferred people....
Russia's first politically motivated block of a Fediverse server ( reestr.rublacklist.net )
Admin team of LGBTQIA.Social Mastodon instance received abuse email from Russian censorship agency, where they demanded to remove an account. The account in question represented a small group that ran a collaborative blog for LGBTQIA youth and adults in Russia....
Funkwhale might be the most overlooked Fediverse project ( raphael.lullis.net )
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What are the proposal to make the ActivityPub protocol better? ( kbin.social )
I'm a fan of the Fediverse, but what are the major issues we faced right now because of the limitations of the #ActivityPub protocol? Recently, decentralize social networks are at their peak, big players are trying to be part of it, and is constantly in the news....
Bluesky opens up federation, letting anyone run their own server | TechCrunch ( techcrunch.com )
A different strategy for promoting the Threadiverse
So, with news of Reddit making deals to sell user data for AI training, I think we should really start organizing ourselves for an effective migration campaign....
Self Hosted IFTTT RSS Replacement
A couple of years ago, IFTTT did a thing where they asked people to sign up to premium and they could pay whatever they like and could keep the service forever. I didn't use many of the services, but thought it made sense to try and preserve something so useful for in case I did need it. In the meantime, I would allow it to...
How much difference does a CDN make to a fediverse instance? - PieFed ( join.piefed.social )
cross-posted from: https://discuss.online/post/5391072...