New to Lemmy. I have a couple of questions.
from fididosooe@lemmy.ca to nostupidquestions@lemmy.world on 14 Aug 2024 18:21
https://lemmy.ca/post/26966518
from fididosooe@lemmy.ca to nostupidquestions@lemmy.world on 14 Aug 2024 18:21
https://lemmy.ca/post/26966518
Reddit is starting to suck more and more everyday so here I am. A couple of questions -
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I created my account at lemmy.ca, but most people I have seen have lemmy.world accounts. Am I missing out on anything by not having a lemmy.world account?
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Reddit has an offical subreddit for Reddit news. Does Lemmy have any offical communities?
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On Reddit, you can’t post on some subreddits if you do not have enough karma or if your account is not old enough. Are there any rules like that on Lemmy?
Thank you!
#nostupidquestions
threaded - newest
No, you’re not missing out on anything. You can have multiple accounts if you wish, you can have one. Short of an instance going down that you have your account on, you can interact with it all.
Official as in a centralized server with all the “main” stuff? No. Each server might have its own News community.
There isn’t yet, but with the way Lemmy mods are going, it won’t be long. Starting to get some whiffs of mods banning people because they’ve voted wrongly on posts. Lemmy is unique in that it lets mods see what you’ve up/down voted.
Use the ability to block entire instances, communities, or users as much as you want here. There’s not some low-number limit like there was on Reddit. You’ll stay much more sane that way. Like if you don’t want your whole front page filled with furry porn daily, blocking lemmynsfw is a good option, without nuking all nsfw content, etc.
Never. I joined lemmy specifically for the furry porn 🥵 jk
Thanks for the help!
It’s important to remember that if the admins of your server defederate (disconnect, not sync) with a given server, you will not have access to that instance’s posts. This is where multiple accounts can come in handy.
In response to your #3 point - this is absolute fucking ridiculous. This type of bullshit will kill Lemmy.
Yeah so much for diverse opinions
If the philosophy behind the platform proves true, it will just kill those instances.
Votes being public is one of my main turn offs of Lemmy. Anyone can host their own instance that federates with everyone and peek inside the database and see everything you’ve ever up voted or downvoted. I have personally done this just to confirm my suspicions that it is possible. I don’t vote on a lot of things I otherwise would because I don’t want people making assumptions about me. For example, if I see a copy/paste bot spamming a pro trans comment, even though I agree with the message, I might want to downvote because it is a spam bot. But I’m afraid that if someone sees that comment in a list of my downvotes without any context, they will incorrectly think I’m transphobic.
You could also not care what the type of person who would go to THOSE lengths (see: mentally unwell) thinks…
When that type of person controls your access to content, you typically are going to care. The people who see those votes are the ones that control if you get to participate or not.
In a broken shitty community unlikely to contain many people?
Yes.
Hell, one of the lead contributors to Lemmy and an admin of lemmy.ml is like this. If that person sees you say anything negative about China, you instantly get banned.
Interesting, I was of the understanding that the individual vote attribution doesn’t leave the community’s home instance and only aggregated counts are federated.
Given an instance spun up for this purpose would very likely not host any communities I’d be interacting with, it wouldn’t get much more information than you can already get through the UI/API
Am I wrong on this?
If I’m understanding what you’re saying then yes, you are wrong about this.
I hosted my own instance and was able to see the usernames of people who voted on communities that were not hosted on my instance. To prove my point, I had posted the list of votes on a comment that was claiming it was impossible to do this.
Well that’s not good news. This feels like a bit of a problem because a lot of people probably wouldn’t vote on stuff they otherwise would, out of fear of attracting the attention of some nutjob with too much time on their hands.
It kinda flies in the face of the “downvote (and maybe report) then move on” attitude that most of us will have taken on from Reddit.
I wonder if the devs have plans to correct this as I don’t see how this won’t limit engagement from good users aware of this and amplify toxic ones (due to people not downvoting out of fear of retaliation).
I think the devs like this design. They are currently contemplating making votes public for everyone. There is a discussion on their GitHub about it. They opened the discussion and asked if the users want to make all votes visible on the UI. If it happens, I will probably stop voting altogether.
I get what you’re saying: assumers (individuals who vomit conclusions based on little to no info) have access to this sort of info as much as decent people do. And if they’re in a position of power, they can ruin your day.
However:
(In this example the right thing to do, if you notice that a post is being potentially downvoted due to transphobia, is to check the voting patterns of the poster. If they’re transphobic they’ll be downvoting any trans-positive post; if they’re just against bots they’ll be downvoting other bot posts regardless of message. Due diligence is not a “nice to have”, it’s obligatory - and, alongside basic reasoning, it’s what tells activists and slacktivists apart.)
Votes being public is news to me. But regardless, how does anyone even do it? The apps and web uis I have seen don’t show that anywhere so do you think people are querying the API directly just for such a weird use case? I don’t find that likely.
You need to be an admin or mod to see the votes. There are discussions to make the votes public for everyone.
Thanks for the clarification
Yes, as the other person said, you need to be an admin or mod. As an admin, you have raw database access. I crafted an SQL query using a couple of joins of I think 3 tables, and I was able to provide a comment or post ID, and it would return a list of people who have upvoted or downvoted it.
The problem is though that anyone can be an admin. You could set up your own instance and do this if you want.
I think you should pitch in on this github.com/LemmyNet/lemmy/issues/4967
With #3, someone correct me if I am wrong, but I don’t believe your run-of-the-mill moderator can see upvotes and downvotes. But instance admins can, just by nature of having access to the server data. Federation wouldn’t work if instances couldn’t communicate upvotes and downvotes across the platform to other instances, so short of finding some way to encrypt all the data, it’s an unavoidable consequence of the standard.
Not yet, but it has been implemented in the backend, the front end needs to catch up github.com/LemmyNet/lemmy/issues/4386
Oh yikes, before I clicked the link I thought you were about to tell me that they were working on user data encryption. Not sure I am keen on enabling even more surveillance to be accessed by who knows who. Will definitely have to start worrying more about which communities I even let on my feed, in case I downvote some bigoted shit from someone’s personal community that shows up in All and they start witch-hunting users who took the bait.
To be fair, if a mod bans me based on my vote, maybe I’m better off their community
It’s not so much the banning I’m worried about as the brigading. If someone develops some mod tool that starts tracking downvotes in your community user by user, they could then essentially assign some sort of social credit score to people and harass them out in the wild.
People can be creeps online, too. I’ve seen more than one situation on Reddit before where people end up getting stalked by other users who harass them anywhere they see them. You say the right thing in front of the wrong person on the wrong day and they can just snap, becoming way too obsessive.
If some troglodyte spams hate speech that ends up in my All feed and I downvote them because that stuff deserves to be buried, I don’t want to have to worry about being potentially stalked and singled out by a weirdo who can connect their downvotes to me because they posted everything in their self-moderated community. Votes suck and internet points are dumb, but the system serves its purpose of providing an anonymous way to direct content and conversations in productive directions. Good stuff is elevated, bad stuff is buried.
What do you mean when you say they’re banning people because they’ve “voted wrongly” on posts? What does that entail, just curious?
This is the context I am basing that claim on: old.lemmy.world/comment/11766380
Ok so abusing the reporting system totally justifies a ban. But voting I think it’s just that the mod is unhappy about the vote direction; I really meant that I thought you meant there was like some objective reason. It’s just spite. That’s not really a desirable behavior but what can you do. We’re all human.
Number 3 cough cough lemmy.world cough cough
First, welcome!
So if
lemmy.cadoesn’t federate withbadlemmy.xyz, you won’t see any content from users frombadlemmy.xyzfrom yourlemmy.caaccount.For
lemmy.ca, their announcement community is !announcements@lemmy.ca and they also have !main@lemmy.ca and !meta@lemmy.caThank you!
I’m I missing out on anything with my world account?
Yeah man, but being on the largest instance, you’re missing the fun of federation. Go make a fun alt. I highly recommended dbzer0.
What am I missing?
Federation
That doesn’t really explain it to me…
Well you could join startrek.website and federate while chatting about the Federation. That could be neat!
Can’t argue with that.
Piracy content.
Is that not featured on my view?
I’ve thoroughly enjoyed dbzer0.
Lemmy.world is defederated from quite a few big instances (most notably hexbear) but honestly most people end up blocking hexbear anyway so you’re not missing much.
Hexbear (leftist instance), NSFW content, and all piracy content.
Oh okay; which one has access to everything?
Lemm.ee is good
I am on Midwest.social and I believe they only block lemmygrad, threads, and a few others. Check out the site + /instance to see who they are federated with and who they block. For example: midwest.social/instances. By clicking the blocked instances tab, you can see who they have blocked. Others that have very open federation is lemmy.dbzer0.com and lemm.ee. Others can chime in if their instance is good for this.
Btw: It's good you signed up with a smaller instance. Ideally we want the users to spread across instances. So for example lemmy.world doesn't gain too much power (which it already has). So signing up on a different instance is a good thing for the Fediverse.
What’s the danger there? (Just curious)
Same as reddit, every instance can choose to just start monetizing if they wish and even stop being part of the fediverse. If they get too big and decide to do it then it’ll be a blow to the content on all the fediverse. That’s why it’s better to spread out a bit more to avoid one big instance controlling the whole.
Happy cake day
Aw, I thought we all agreed on beans day?
If the LW admins decide to wrongfully ban someone, that person is banned from a lot of communities and from interacting with a lot of people. In a more equal network, each individual bad decision has a smaller effect on the whole
First of all we had big instances die. Like feddit.de and kbin.social That always damages a big part of the network. If things were distributed more evenly, it'd be a smaller chunk of the fediverse that vanishes in such a case.
Then, being way bigger than the others gives someone disproportionately bigger power. If you're not having any issue with that, you might as well join Reddit. And the first big Lemmy instance (lemmy.ml) arguably explots(?) that. They'll act against you once you say something negative about communism, China, ... and that's not okay to do. Now we have lemmy.world as the biggest instance and it's way better. But still I've also read people complain about their moderation practices.
If we have some dominating entities, they'll disproportionately shape the tone, atmosphere and behaviour on the whole network. We might or might not want that.
In the end I think what actually happens should reflect the vision and the capabilities of the software. The Fediverse is supposed to be an interconnected network of instances. If the technology works as intended (and the vision behind the Fediverse is correct) I expect that to manifest in the way it actually grows. If it favors one or two large instances, we either might have an issue with the technology/software and it's not able to truly achieve it because of some shortcomings. Or the idea behind all of it might not be more a theoretical concept than viable in the real world.
If we want to look at it in the end-state, we have email as an example. That's a super old federated standard and now also dominated by a few big players. It's still possible to host your own email. But not really fun because of lots of complications that come with it.
[Edit: The dynamics could also be viewed as competition succeeding. If someone does their job well, they'll naturally attract people?! And that's not necessarily a bad thing. I'm not sure what to make of this. And I'm not sure if that's the dynamics at play here in the first place.]
hey I really appreciate the insight and the explanation! you made me understand that concern and helped me learn :) thanks!
Thanks for the kind words 😊
If LW admins really care about the fediverse, they probably should close their registrations for the time being, otherwise every newbie will start joining LW because it is the biggest instance out there.
On the flipside, that also scares people away. New users want to take part and immediately hit a barrier. The place where everyone mingles is closed off. They have to learn why that is and how the Fediverse is supposed to work, find some instance overview list and make a choice. Be angry for a short while until they understand the concept and realize it's for the better... I think that'd be detrimental to the cause. I rather live with the issues that come with big instances than with a complicated onboarding process. But I think people already complained about onboarding on the Fediverse in general. I think we need to solve that issue first and then we can go ahead and also add some mechanism to steer people towards a more even distribution. But I don't see anyone working on any of that for Lemmy. Until then, I'd say don't do it.
(And btw: I don't want to see lemmy.world shrink, which wold be the outcome. What I'd like to see is other nice instances come into existence and grow to a similar size. Because they're a nice place and people can identify themselves with the community there. It'd foster good behaviour if things happened because of some good reasons. Not just you grow because you're already the biggest. That doesn't foster anything. It's just like playing Osmos.)
Naturally. This is the fediverse, if newbies don’t want to understand how it works even a little bit, they shouldn’t be here.
And lemmy.world won’t shrink. I said “for the time being”, not forever. If LW keeps growing rapidly without giving other instances a chance, then it won’t be any different than Reddit.
There’s also no fix for the “onboarding problem”. That “problem” is federation itself.
Well, there are some proposals to change this. I'd say it's fixable by technology to some degree. For example instead of a sign up page that directly signs someone up with the specific instance, we could have a more general Fediverse signup page. Maybe ask the new user a few questions what they envision their instance to be. If they're more aligned with this set of rules or the other. If they want "free speech" or a place with more moderation and less argumentative people. And then make some suggestions.
Or instead of just signing them up with whatever instance they visited first, display a list of the current instance and 5 other random ones, shuffle them and make them deliberately click on one of them.
That'd all help. Of course it can't be solved 100%. But we could at least make an effort to do something about it.
That’s what join-lemmy.org does. It asks 2 questions:
Yeah. My proposal is to replace the "Sign up" entry on every single instance with a page like that. And move the actual sign up one level further down, so everyone needs to click through that process.
Why? That’s really ineffective and just looks bad imo. That’s just a solution to people linking instances to join instead of leading people to join-lemmy.org.
Because what the user wants is to sign up on Lemmy. We have to meet them at exactly that point. When they click on "Sign up". And then our motive comes at play. We want to say to them »Hey stop, In case you don't know, the Fediverse works differently than other social media platforms you might be used to. You have to make a decision here.« And I think it's super effective to do it at that point. Doing it later is too late, because then they're already signed up on a random place without being informed. And doing it earlier is inconvenient. They might not be motivated to find out yet. Or it's a hassle to gather that info yourself without even knowing it's a thing.
And why is the way the Fediverse works looking bad? If it seems that way to you, you're might be wrong here. So even more reason to prominently display these kinds of things.
And it doesn't have to be complicated. As with software design in general, don't overwhelm the user with options. Just offer a description on what's happening and why. And give some sane default options. Don't make it more than let's say 5-10. And it's just one click more in the process. It's not too hard for the user to click once more if it's for a good cause. And if done right, they could just randomly click on something if in doubt.
I'd just make it like in my earlier proposal. Add the page. Force the user to choose. Either they want to answer a few questions and get a tailored instance. Or sign up at the current instance. Or sign up at one of the 4 other instances we promote for a better distribution. And then continue to ask for a username and password.
That’s extra work to be done when we already have a join-lemmy.org website by the official devs that does what you want. People changing the link in their comments from lemmy.world to join-lemmy.org is not hard, is it?
But why have an extra website? I just don't see the point. That's just extra work. And a good amount of people will never find out it's there and get here in a different way. We could just do away with all of that.
This way the Lemmy devs have to maintain a seperate website. Curate a list of instances. I have to agree with that. Everyone has to remember to always post links to join-lemmy.org. Users who're just lurking and deciding to go to the menu and just click "sign up" will miss that information. All of that to save someone from doing a single click?
Assuming most people use Google, when searching for “lemmy”, it is the third search before some guy named lemmy and when searching for “join lemmy” (logically) it’s the first. So we can conclude that people don’t use it because most of the people link to lemmy.world and not to join-lemmy.org. Most likely not everyone searches for “join lemmy” anyways since most people come from Reddit.
I fail to see any connection with what I said. Sure. The name "Lemmy" is a bit unfortunate. Given that it's not discoverable via Google search.
Wdym not discoverable. Lemmy instances have been indexed for years
I know if offers options to people, but the majority of people don’t want options, they want a single website
I guess a balanced approach would be to suggest Lemm.ee as a default option, and suggest the join Lemmy link for people curious about options
A default option is bad imo. We want a decentralized platform. Distribution will keep the fediverse alive and well. Maybe a dynamic “default” option would be one solution. One that just changes the default option to a different somewhat known instance once the current default option reaches a certain user count. For this to work, you’d need to lead people to join-lemmy.org.
I don't think I agree. The big difference in total users and monthly active users tells me lots of people abandon their accounts. As long as that policy is in place, it'll naturally shrink because people leave and there aren't any new users anymore to replace them. The only question is at what rate that's going to happen.
And I also don't agree with people who don't understand the Fediverse shouldn't be here... People should be here because it's a nice place and they have a good time engaging here. The exact technology behind it shouldn't matter too much. If at all.
I never said “people who don’t understand”, I said “people who don’t want to understand”. I am satisfied as long as a newbie knows what the fediverse is, why it is here and what instances are. They are the basics, aren’t they?
I'm also not sure about that. Do they really need to be bothered with that? Can't they just expect a social media platform to do whatever? Without learning anything? I mean they might just want to use something and not be bothered. And arguably they'll have more freedom here then they'd have for example on Reddit where this isn't any issue. I'd say design the software to get out of their way, cater for them and have them here. I mean ultimately there is a limit. Sometimes you need to know how things actually work to get anywhere. But I still refuse to accept your point. I think that should be kept to a minimum. And users should be eased into it at the point it becomes necessary to know. That can be done by good software design.
The reason is simply because this is not the kind of social media people have been using for years. Just like how they “learned” how the centralized web works, they also should learn how the decentralized web works. I’m all for the fediverse to grow but I also don’t want ignorant people that don’t want to learn anything about the tech they’ll be using in here.
Quality over quantity or quantity over quality? Choose.
Yeah. I think in theory I disagree with you. But in practice I agree. I've seen people do exactly that. And almost everytime that behaviour comes from a place that also causes more issues. These people are better off with something else. I agree. And usually they're annoying (to me) anyways so I don't consider them a loss for the platform.
And I also regularly complain about the internet having become less than it used to be. Back then when it took some skill and effort to operate a computer and be on the internet, it was filled with intelligent people and people who were there for some reason. That meant they were motivated enough to go through all the hassle. You could engage with them in a different way than you nowadays do with the average user. Now everyone is here and lots of places and discussions feel different. It certainly affects things. So there is that.
It's the same question if I ponder whether Linux should be used by more people. There are some other dynamics at play with that. But in the end, growing to a broader audience (on the desktop) is certainly going to change it. And I'm not sure if in a good way.
For the most part, you don’t miss anything. The only exception would be if there is a server that has defederated (basically disconnected) from your instance. I’d say you made a good choice with .ca since it has very few big important instances that are defederated from it.
There are some communities on lemmy.ml (the instance run by the devs) that specifically are there for interacting with the devs. !lemmy@lemmy.ml is the main place for questions about using lemmy. Whatever client you’re using should also have its own community for questions about the client itself. Generally you shouldn’t ask those sorts of questions on asklemmy communities.
Global karma isn’t a thing in the lemmyverse. It’s not impossible to calculate it (by adding up the karma of each post and comment on an account), but it’s not a primary statistic tracked by the software itself.
No.
No.
Depends on the instance the community is hosted in.
I like having accounts on multiple instances so I can see more posts, but you don’t have to.
Many good answers here. So I will just say welcome. It’s great to see you here.
Not really. If you’re new it’s fine to pick an instance based on location, or even at random; in fact it’s better than if you went to lemmy.world (nothing against that instance, it’s just a bit too big already). Later on you want to look for things like:
and if you deem appropriate you go to another instance. Or just use multiple accounts, like I do.
Plenty instances have their own “meta” communities for official news and the likes. But there isn’t one for the whole of the “Threadiverse” (Lemmy/PieFed/Mbin side of the Fediverse), or even for all “Lemmy instances” - because no group controls the whole.
Check !lemmy@lemmy.ml for the software itself.
So far as I know no community here prevents your participation based on account age. And global karma doesn’t exist here.
Welcome !
Hello, i’m a .ca!
Lemmy.ca is also a site. Open in your browser and click/tap to open the sidebar. Lots of info there.
I don’t have any issue with the Lemmy.ca instance. Great Admins, lots of community feedback.
!main@lemmy.ca is the main community.
Welcome to Lemmy. I see most people answered your questions but just so you’re aware, the only reason world has as many users as it does is because it was basically the only instance that didn’t close it’s signups durring the first reddit exodus and that also had enough resources to handle the massive influx of users without completely breaking. Most people didn’t pick world for any reason other than it was the only instance they could sign up for at the time. Joining any other instance is better because a more diverse fediverse is a healthier fediverse.
The reason I started an account on Lemmy.World vs sh.itjust.works, is because there was no way I was gonna tell my parents/friends/others that I saw something on ‘shit just works.’
You could just say that you saw something on Lemmy regardless of the instance.
Yeah… I guess for me, it seemed weird to say that I saw/read something on Lemmy, as it’s similar to saying I read something on Wiki. They’re both frameworks for a kind of website. And not really narrowing down to the website you were actually on.
With federation, thinking of them as websites in the traditional sense doesn’t really fit. By saying “on Lemmy” you’re narrowing it down to the platform you viewed it from which is actually more specific than necessary.
No. That’s the beauty of federation. Lemmy is not centralized like Reddit. You don’t need to be on lemmy.world to see things from it or from other instances like lemm.ee, lemmy.ml, ani.social, etc. There are exceptions though, for example lemmy.world might be defederated with X instance while some other instance might be federated with that instance X. So you wouldn’t be able to see things from that instance X from lemmy.world but from some other instance that is federated with X.
Since Lemmy is not centralized, there’s no “official” community (subreddits are called communities here) here. Your instance might have a meta instance community though.
There’s nothing like that here, at least not builtin. You can easily code up some bot to implement it though. !asklemmy@lemmy.world had a bot do that once when the fediverse was being spammed by some group.
Note: Do keep in mind that you CANNOT bring your comments and post with you if you want to switch instances. Only subscribed communities and some account settings. There were some discussions about using DIDs and one other tech I forgot to make that possible, but it’s not implemented yet.
Good info here !newtolemmy@lemmy.ca
Welcome to Lemmy. I hope you enjoy your stay.
Many others have answered your three questions. So I’m gonna help get you started.
Check out: lemmyverse.net/communities
to help you find communities you would like to add to your feed. This can even be useful for blocking communities you’re not interested in or want to see in your ‘Local’ or ‘All’ filter options.