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How to avoid the Reddit downfall
(lemmy.world)
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this post was submitted on 01 Jul 2023
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Reddit Was Fun
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I agree to a point, but this is also how you get communities that are REALLY easy to squash. Because they're fragile and incoherent. Bad actors can easily overwhelm them, astroturf, go after hosting....etc and small self funded communities won't have the manpower, tools, or resources to combat it.
You want to build a strong community that lasts, and is resilient.
So how do we make our communities more resilient, well resourced, less fragmented, and also accessable for member growth?
About the "less fragmented" part.
I don't see how that is possible in the fediverse.
Let's say I like fishing and a fishing community exists in five instances... That fragmentation you can't avoid... In the other hand it helps with the resilient part I guess. The more fragmented it is the harder it will be to take a community down.
Having multiple communities under the same subject in different instances will soon become normal, for better or for worse.
I have read some comments in github discussing possible ways to develop something akin to "mutireddits" (or more recently custom feeds) so people can group communities like this across different instances.
Let's see how all this plays out. Interesting times ahead in the fediverse.
That makes me think having something like "federated communities" could be neat, where a community on one instance could opt in to have content mirrored/visible from a community in another instance. In practice it would be something like subscribing to a community on one instance essentially being equivalent to subscribing to multiple communities on different instances, but if there is disagreement on e.g. moderation practices moderators might decide to "defederate" the communities.
I've functionally mass-subscribed to every community that overlaps with my primary interests regardless of which instance it is on and make use of the feature to view submissions from subscribed communities.
The fragmentation is frustrating because it makes individual communities seem less populated than the topic actually implies. For example, there are multiple large Games communities across the biggest instances, but as they are not on the same instance, people are likely to participate in a subset of all of the available communities. This generally reduces the volume of participation in any one community, even if the volume across all those communities summed up is very substantial.
A "multireddit" at the community level would be quite nice (rather than the process of subscribing to a large number of communities and using the "subscribed" feed).
I like the idea of having first party support for joining communities across instances. That would relieve some pain points.
Though,human history has shown that we are largely incapable of promoting consistency without a governing body of some sort. Which necessitates some level of centralization.
One of my biggest concerns about Lemmy is the seeming inability to prevent astroturfing by various groups. I also wonder how it will survive when (not if) they receive GDPR fines, legal holds from law enforcement organizations, and a variety of other legal and regulatory topics that Lemmy (or at least the instance owner) is subject to even if the user base doesn’t believe that to be the case.
Hopefully the donation model will allow enough funding to address the realities of running a popular service.
Does GDPR apply to non-commercial web services?
We could self-host using our own computers and infrastructure, and secure them from hackers.
Can we?
For real, can we assist with hosting using our own servers as distributed nodes? I have business fiber and plenty of dedicated compute just hanging around. I'd happily host nodes to assist with stability, redundancy, and general compute/networking.
You literally can just download the Lemmy program and install it on any computer you want to use as a server. I used to run Mastodon servers a few years ago, and it's not without its hurdles, but with some Linux knowledge and a little bit of server admin knowhow, you absolutely could.
You'd need a computer you're gonna use as a server, put Linux on it, then install NginX or Apache on it, then Lemmy, then set everything up and get a domain name to attach to the computer's IP. Question mark, profit. It might be a bit of an oversimplification, but with some research and work, it can be done.
I mean to contribute distributed resources to existing instances. Not so much make new ones. Assuming Lemmy has a protocol for distributed resources built on something like the raft consensus algorithm.
I'm mobile ATM, so not at home, trying to learn as I go. The goal being by the time I'm home I'll know enough to provision resources if such a concept is a thing.
I have a whole cluster at home with business internet, so plenty of ready to go resources 🤔
Lemmy isn't distributed like that. Each instance does its own user and community management with local storage and processing. The community content - posts and comments - gets distributed to any other instance that asks for it, and that instance then presents it to its users. The result is that the content is replicated & distributed across many instances, and the load of presenting that content to users is shared.
So, running your own instance, where you're the only user, will cause that instance to fetch whatever communities you've subscribed to via API. That probably reduces, slightly, the load on those servers, but it's not going to be a huge effect.
Running your own instance and getting a dozen or a hundred friends to use it instead of lemmy.world or feddit.de, on the other hand...
Ah gotcha.
Isn't that a hard barrier/limit to scale then (as well as support)? Would it even be possible to run say a 5 million user Lemmy instance with a single write postgres DB (I assume compute can be load balanced, you can utilize CDNs for media content, can heavily cache the API, and that it supports read replicas?)
Nevermind 10, 30, or 50 million user communities 🤔
Though at that point you're essentially just lighting your bank account on fire for infra costs.
Probably, but the idea is lots of smaller instances, if you run into that barrier, your instance is probably too large. The largest fedi instances have around 20K - far less than a few million. Most smaller instances, like the one Im on are around 1-1000 users.
Id strongly discourage people from letting their instance reach the million user level as costs would probably far outweigh what a donation or subscription based server can support.
The point is to avoid the diminishing returns of monolithic instances and spread the load and users across multiple instances - if I were lemmy.world, kbin.social and beehaw I'd put a hard cap at 50K users. Wether they do that though is up to them.
What about general fragmentstion of large communities? I suppose by the time this has that level of adoption similar communities across instances may already be a solved problem as far as readership goes.
If there are caps on users that's a wet dream for corporate entities. Imagine groups preventing themselves from organizing, self-limiting knowledge sharing, and generally preventing themselves from being a collective force in an age where the internet is an integral part of life & society. Pre-broken down into fragments too small to be affect change or progress.
Also considered the user experience aspect of it. Fragmented communities are a poor user experience, where do I go? Where do I post? Am I missing information here? Which communities do I partake in? How do I collect information from disconnected, unaffiliated, sources? Experiences like that drive people away, not bring them in, and concepts like the fediverse rely on momentum to become more than just a transient niche.
That's my concern. 50k people is... Nothing. Even if it was a single topic. Nevermind general instances. Even simply for sharing knowledge that's a cripplingly, ineffectively, small number in a world where knowledge and information is becoming increasingly critical 🤔
I think you misunderstand the point and reasoning behind the fediverse in general
The point of the fediverse is to spread the load across multiple instances so everyday middle class people can afford to run them out of pocket or via a donation based fund. It's not to grow the instances so large that they become a monolithic social platform in and of themselves.
The reason behind this is the mistrust people have in general of these big techbro social media companies and the problems they cause when they inevitably get enshittified - we're trying to avoid doing that. That's why you're seeing hundreds of instances pledging to block/defederate with meta - especially with prior knowledge of what happened when monolithic google talk federated with the XMPP protocol. Others are waiting to see what happens and what Facebook plan to do before taking action, and some are all for it.
As for measuring the knowledge sharing power of the threadiverse (Lemmy and kbin combined) and the fediverse in general, we shouldn't look at a single instance, but rather the verse as a whole. If the fediverse gets large enough, search engines will have to come up with a way to better index the knowledge that comes from them, otherwise they are missing out on a huge chunk of the internet. Sure lemmy.world currently has 20-30K people but across the whole threadiverse we have 100K+ members across known instances and thats only set to grow higher as time goes by.
Some people are already worried that lemmy.world has already gotten too large too quickly. Beehaw outright defederated with lemmy.world due to the fact their small moderation team struggled to moderate the huge influx of members coming from lemmy.world - and others are concerned about what happens if lemmy.world goes down and takes it's communities with it - In a threadiverse of 100K+ users, 20-30K users is a significant chunk and it gives lemmy.world a lot of staying and federative power. People don't want it to become too big, because as a result people will have to federate with it out of necessity.
Interestingly the defederation of Lemmy.world and beehaw have lead to people moving their communities off of those instances to ones that are still federating with both, which I think is actually a good thing, as it takes some of the power from Lemmy.world
This leads to why I think community fragmentation is actually a non issue - it's entirely possible that app developers could create multis so people can combine a list of communities into a feed. They could even set up an automatic name-based combination based on what communities your instance already knows about. In the end the actual maintaners of Lemmy could add the functionality to save these multis to your account in a future update. Also, people have a tendency to go where the people are - which is why Lemmy is becoming a viable option in the first place, big communities will get bigger, smaller communities tend to stay small.
These are all problems to be solved and can be solved - we just have to keep the point and reason behind the fediverse in mind when we come up with a solution.
Lemmy hasn't even reached the 1.0 release yet (some instances are on 0.18 and some still on 0.17) it's still a beta, maybe even alpha build. There is plenty of work to do, and I wouldn't consider the current version even remotely feature complete. There are still tonnes of issues and feature requests to sort out too. But due to the open source nature, you can not only contribute, but you can also outright fork if if you don't like the direction of the software or want to quickly include your own features - I know lemmynsfw has their own fork of the software to help cater for the nuance of NSFW posts.