this post was submitted on 13 May 2025
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I was just thinking about this, when I'm facing an issue, the first thing I do is go to a search engine and usually there's a Reddit post. But I don't want to ask there. And the only way we're going to build up the info for folks to find us and come here is for us to just start asking here. On the Fediverse. We need to build up that mountain of knowledge that Reddit has and will always have. So we should be championing ANYONE asking questions here. Even if we think it's obvious and we think you can just Google it. There was a time where you literally couldn't just Google it. That was built over time. We need to build that here. So start asking your questions here! Find the answers and then post your answer to your own question. Or let someone do it for you. We need to build the knowledge here to be found. It's not just about people looking for alternatives. We need our knowledge to be more valuable than their knowledge.

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[–] J52@lemmy.nz 3 points 4 hours ago (1 children)

I think it shouldn't be a competition but possibly something with added value. Possibly in the form of structure, ie something that doesn't create hundreds of same/similar questions but constantly updates the best answers closest to the existing date. (Alphabetically searchable hashtags, etc..., build it communally, ie #NoStupidQuestions , how to best build a free information platform?).

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[–] mriswith@lemmy.world 13 points 7 hours ago* (last edited 7 hours ago) (2 children)

Is there a way to encourage people to post more? Because the main problem seems to be getting actual posts, not replies to them.

For example "nostupidquestions" only has a few questions a day, but there are 40k subscribers and 1500 people or so checking in every day. It has 4.2k posts and 170k comments.

"asklemmy" has more posts, fewers subscribers, and over 2k a day check in. 6k posts and 317k comments.

[–] xavier666@lemm.ee 7 points 6 hours ago (1 children)

This is a habit that prevalent everywhere, even on reddit. Only 20 or even 10 % of people produce content and rest just watch/consume. If we can have that kind of split on lemmy, it would be fine.

[–] mriswith@lemmy.world 3 points 5 hours ago* (last edited 5 hours ago) (1 children)

Indeed, the vast majority on any social media platform does not engage. And when they do it's mostly just liking content and not even replying. You see it on lemmy as well, with news articles often having few comments. And when they do it's one or two top comments and a bunch of replies.

Over the years the only thing I can imagine is to add another anonymizing layer, where people can send in questions and the "best ones" are posted by a general/bot account. But that is something people much smarter than me have tried to figure out for years, so I have no idea how it would be implemented.

[–] xavier666@lemm.ee 1 points 4 hours ago

I remember a social media platform where each user had a thread specific ID "curious rabbit/astonished baboon", and users can discuss anything without any fear. The moment you created a new thread or participate in a new thread, your ID changed. I think it fizzled out eventually, but the concept was interesting.

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[–] Nioxic@lemmy.dbzer0.com 5 points 7 hours ago* (last edited 6 hours ago) (3 children)

But can people find your question on lemmy by googling?

coz thats how i personally found reddit back in the day. And i'm sure it is part of how reddit grew to what it is today.

If google cant find you, you cannot be a success, is my guess. But of course, NOT being found on google has it advantages too.

I can find this topic by searching on lemmy

but i cannot search comments, which limits the usability somewhat

[–] aradgus@lemmy.ml 2 points 5 hours ago

i dont know if google shows lemmy results but duckduckgo does

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[–] intensely_human@lemm.ee 3 points 7 hours ago (1 children)

Another idea is an asking system that compiles answers from the web while also posting the question here. Gives the benefit of immediate answers while also populating the fediverse.

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[–] Phen 5 points 9 hours ago (3 children)

What's the right translation for "pepper" in German? And red pepper, green pepper and so on? I found several words that seem to mean pepper, but not sure if any is better than the others.

[–] AngryPancake@sh.itjust.works 3 points 9 hours ago

Also, Bell pepper is Paprika in german

[–] ZonenRanslite@feddit.org 2 points 9 hours ago (1 children)

Pepper is Pfeffer, red pepper is roter Pfeffer, green pepper is grüner Pfeffer und so weiter. Ich hoffe ich konnte ihnen helfen. Einen schönen Tag noch.

[–] stiephelando@discuss.tchncs.de 5 points 7 hours ago

Pepper can also translate to Paprika though when talking about plants. A pepper plant is a paprika in German. Spicy peppers are chillies.

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[–] lordnikon@lemmy.world 78 points 16 hours ago (3 children)

We need to seriously AI proof before that happens or the bots will clean us out and eat all our bandwidth. The only thing keep us safe is we are under the radar.

[–] throwawayacc0430@sh.itjust.works 33 points 14 hours ago (1 children)

Here's your cupcake receipe ingredients:

  • 1 cup of water
  • 1 cup of flour
  • 1 egg (tastes better if tariffed)
  • 12 fl oz of Polonium
  • Access to a window in a tall building

Enjoy! 😋

[–] Nioxic@lemmy.dbzer0.com 9 points 7 hours ago

finally, a recipe with a unique killer flavor

[–] ToastedRavioli@midwest.social 13 points 14 hours ago

Even if Lemmy grows to a point of being on the radar, theres still no hope for any real IP to lock down for anybody. The whole design is fairly antithetical to being taken over and turned into a cash cow of some kind, despite feeling very much like something centralized in terms of how we interact with it.

I agree with OP, and I think this can even become an even better repository for information than something like Reddit, because it’s more democratized and deters astroturfing or many types of malfeasance by design. Especially as it stands now, early on. Thats why I started a community for billiards. The reddit community for billiards, as well as old forum sites, are great wealths of information that is hard to otherwise find. It would be great to build something like that here over time

[–] Deebster@infosec.pub 4 points 12 hours ago

You're right, and it's infuriating that the AI scrapers are just so lazy/incompetent that they do things like try to scrape every dynamic page of a git repo instead of just cloning it. Similarly, they could just connect over ActivityPub and it wouldn't have much more overhead than another private instance.

There's Anubis which uses JavaScript to force browsers to do some work before they can access, but given how unpopular Cloudflare is around here, I imagine there'd be a lot of complaints if it was deployed on every instance.

[–] dumbass@leminal.space 11 points 12 hours ago (6 children)

Ok then.

Why does everyone hate the issi classic in GTA online, everytime I take my little beast out for a drive some massive car or Batmobile comes along and focuses their energy on destroy it.

I just want to do tiny burnouts.

[–] ripcord@lemmy.world 4 points 11 hours ago (1 children)

At least four, possibly more.

[–] dumbass@leminal.space 3 points 10 hours ago

Finally I get an answer, thank you.

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[–] Flax_vert@feddit.uk 12 points 12 hours ago (2 children)
[–] remotelove@lemmy.ca 2 points 9 hours ago (2 children)

That needs to be in the form of a question, right?

[–] Tungsten5@lemm.ee 2 points 8 hours ago

I don’t know, does it?

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[–] BeefPiano@lemmy.world 53 points 16 hours ago (3 children)

Kagi has a search lens for Fediverse forums like Lemmy. More content in Lemmy will make that even better

[–] FundMECFSResearch@lemmy.blahaj.zone 25 points 15 hours ago (4 children)

Just to save people a rabbithole.

Kagi is pretty cool. But it’s not free. And for most people who don’t have much disposable income it’s not really a justifiable expense to pay for a search engine.

[–] Steve@communick.news 15 points 14 hours ago* (last edited 12 hours ago) (1 children)

Of course if one truly can't afford it, paying for search can seem a luxury.

However I would argue as a counterpoint; If there's any online service one would consider paying for, it should be search. Search is most literally our "front page to the internet". It's our first stop in any quest for information. Even the founders of Google knew early on, that putting adds in search creates a perverse incentive against the best results, favoring instead worse results, so people perform more searches, creating more opportunities to show people adds.

$5 a month isn't much to know your query will give the results you want, instead of the results advertisers want.

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[–] ApollosArrow@lemmy.world 16 points 13 hours ago (4 children)

There is one worry I have about Lemmy being the knowledge of anything and it’s what happened on reddit. Many people went through and nuked their comments, essentially making many posts useless. There are already people here on lemmy that delete their profiles, comments and start over every few months. Not really sure what that means for all the federation, but I assume different instances may have different versions of deleted information in the long run?

[–] trillnsfw@lemmynsfw.com 2 points 2 hours ago (1 children)

the whole point is a living breathing community, not a wiki

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[–] Sterile_Technique@lemmy.world 6 points 10 hours ago (1 children)

On the flip side, keeping your personal online footprint small is definitely more secure.

Maybe we need a soft kill switch to disassociate content with an account after x amount of time. Like for me personally, I've put zero effort into mopping up old content, and as often as I post, I'm sure someone with the desire could put the pieces together and dox me.

I've left it up anyway cuz I don't want to do to Lemmy what you're concerned about, but if I could nuke all my content older than a few months into an anonymous version, I'd be all for that. Leave the info up for anyone who might benefit from it.

That said, for community building sake, I'd hate to see posts go anonymous right out the gate like some 4chan shit; and posts should be associated with an account at least long enough for mods to have a reasonable amount of time to take action against an account that breaks the rules. But again, posts that are months old? The conversation there is over - my personal involvement is moot at that point, it's just data now.

[–] ApollosArrow@lemmy.world 1 points 9 hours ago (2 children)

Disassociating with old comments and posts would be a good way to go, but I’m not really sure that’s an option for the fediverse? In theory couldn’t someone in the future set up an instance whose sole purpose is just back up and collect data? How would someone even go about trying to erase themselves from a situation like that?

[–] Sterile_Technique@lemmy.world 1 points 2 hours ago

I don't think there would be any way to protect from that, but you'd have the same issue with full deletion.

[–] Walk_blesseD@lemmy.blahaj.zone 1 points 4 hours ago

You're absolutely right, somebody totally could do that (instances that don't respect post/reply deletion requests are already a known issue), and there's very little you could do about that sort of thing once it's already happened.

[–] throwawayacc0430@sh.itjust.works 6 points 11 hours ago* (last edited 11 hours ago) (1 children)

We can make a Fedi-Wiki that requires you to agree to the terms that everything you publish is considered public, kinda like a source code under GPL.

Edit: Lol I just remembered it's called Creative Commons. Its what Wikipedia uses.

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[–] ozoned@piefed.social 3 points 11 hours ago

You can't stop people changing their mind about deleting stuff. That can and should happen for any number of reasons, both good and bad. There are servers that would still have the information, but it feels like there's less incentive to fully delete an account on the Fediverse as you can literally pick up the same conversation with a new account. Maybe I just don't do enough social media use and miss the point. I deleted my stuff from Reddit, because I don't want to help Reddit and it should be my private data. Fediverse we are all public and there is no tracking anyway. So whoever you are here, you're it here, no where else, even with the same name.

[–] Olap@lemmy.world 32 points 15 hours ago (2 children)

Reddit took many years to build that reputation. And earned creepy badges along the way. I'm not saying the fediverse doesn't need to do it, but let's not be in a rush. We have technical challenges, and a lemmy.world, and a .ml problem before we're ready for the big leagues

And being niche is fine for now, email was tiny for decades

[–] ArmoredThirteen@lemmy.zip 4 points 12 hours ago (4 children)

What's going on with lemmy.world?

[–] xavier666@lemm.ee 4 points 6 hours ago

Centralization issue. However, it can never be as bad as Reddit.

[–] Olap@lemmy.world 2 points 8 hours ago

It is lemmy essentially. By far most communities, users, and a single point of failure in essence. That makes is quite good for getting it technically correct however, the best kind of correct

[–] Stovetop@lemmy.world 8 points 11 hours ago (1 children)

Depending on who you ask, a lot. Or very little.

For me today, though, it was the large downtime earlier. It's big by Fediverse standards, microscopic by Reddit standards, and as-is it struggles to keep stable uptime some days.

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[–] audaxdreik@pawb.social 23 points 15 hours ago (3 children)

100% agree and I would like to add on to it that it's worth just posting information, too.

Did you run into a weird error with your Linux install and have a difficult, yet interesting time troubleshooting it? Post the solution! Even if it doesn't directly address someone else's problem, often finding pieces of an issue and correlating them with a bigger problem can help.

I don't run a personal blog and downvotes mean literally nothing here, so have at it!

I went cold turkey on Reddit when they stopped API access and it was rough in the beginning, but I get ever so slightly hints of the old internet here on Lemmy. It's raw, but it's fresh and it's ours. I love it.

[–] johntash@eviltoast.org 4 points 9 hours ago

I'm happy to see people post about something cool they found, like some new software or whatever. Even if everyone else already knows about it and no one interacts, it's not useless information.

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[–] malloc@lemmy.world 17 points 16 hours ago (2 children)

Fediverse to replace stackoverflow would be something I am interested in.

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[–] Binette@lemmy.ml 11 points 15 hours ago (1 children)

I personally only ask when I can't find anything on the internet, but that's a good idea

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