How are people feeling about Fedi?
Posted by youngeggboi@reddit | RedditAlternatives | View on Reddit | 68 comments
For those who went decentralized and are using the Fediverse to any degree. What's your main site or instance you're using it through, and how do you feel about it's general being of it at the moment?
Madbrad200@reddit
I use lemmy.world, although it's been getting ddossed a bit lately. lemm.ee is more stable.
I think it's the best alternative to Reddit out there, and the best part is that it's not owned by any centralised company.
All of these alternatives will go through the same stages that reddit did: they start off cool and user-oriented, they slowly grow in popularity, they start to introduce negative monetisation techniques (e.g ads), they begin to orient more towards a profit-driven perspective which begins the slow degradation of the site. This will happen to any alternative that isn't non-profit or federated.
Gottze@reddit
Not trashing, just curious. How are ads negative monetisation techniques? As in they downgrade performance? Because I'd think ads as one of the ways to monetize without harming free users. Maybe I'm just navie
Madbrad200@reddit
It starts with a simple sidebar ad and ends with extensive user tracking, ads hidden in feeds, and selling off of data.
tunachilimac@reddit
I'm using the fediverse but I really don't understand this argument. lemmy.world still has bills to pay, it doesn't run for free. If they're successful it won't take long before their costs exceed their donations. How does federation prevent operation costs needing to be paid for?
Sure if it goes down you can use another instance but you'll have lost your lemmy.world account and all the communities that were on lemmy.world will be gone. I don't see how having to make a new account on a new instance and joining new communities is any different from moving to a different established non-fediverse site?
Breadhook@reddit
The hope with federation is that costs can be covered with voluntary user contributions. Ideally, this involve a a self-balancing effect where more people means more contributions, or more people without more contributions means worse performance, which encourages people to move to other instances, which means fewer people and better performance for those who remain. Since the instances are not being run for profit (at least in theory), and content is shared across all instances, there is no real incentive to advertise or push for infinite growth. More niche instances can also achieve that equilibrium with a smaller userbase, since catering to a niche interest tends to make people more inclined to contribute funds. In this way, the burden of operating costs is diffused across the network and shouldered by many.
To address your point more directly: non-profit doesn't mean zero-revenue, it just means needing enough funds to cover operating costs, as opposed to trying to get as much income as possible to satisfy shareholders, line one's pockets, etc.
The second point is valid, but it sounds like they're working on features to make it easier to export or migrate your settings/subscriptions across instances. It's already possible with third-party tools, but it sound awkward (haven't tried it). Even without migrating settings, a difference compared to non-fediverse sites is that all the content is still available to you on the new instance (even if your personal settings are gone), which it would not be on a non-fediverse or non-federated site.
tunachilimac@reddit
As more instances federate together doesn't that increase the server demands of all instances in the federation though? Every post, comment, vote, or whatever activity has to federate out to every instance in the federation. So if lemmy.world grows huge and gets enough donations each month wouldn't smaller instances be forced to defederate as they wouldn't have the storage and network required to sync all of that data?
So if lemmy.world goes down for good, I can make an account on an instance in the federation group they were a part of, and all the lemmy.world communities still exist and function? My understanding is they'd all be functionally dead.
I'm trying to figure out what I'm missing for not seeing federation as an ideal solution to the problems it's trying to solve.
Action-Due@reddit
No, an instance doesn't have a copy of the entire network. When a user interacts with a post, that's when the instance federates, or copies over that information. That's just common sense.
tunachilimac@reddit
Per posts like this is does mirror the data. So while you claim one thing is common sense, the most common explanation that is upvoted here disagrees with you.
Action-Due@reddit
The post you linked says the instance mirrors the communities the user is subscribed to. That's different from copying the entire network, but still worse than I thought.
Breadhook@reddit
Yes, that's mostly true. I misunderstood your statement - I thought you meant you'd have lost your subscriptions, but you were actually talking about the communities themselves. I say "mostly" true, because, as I understand it, any existing posts that have already been propagated to other instances through federation would still exist, there just wouldn't be new ones. Depending on the circumstances of the instance going down, there may also be a possibility of migrating to a new server if the admins have offline backups. Not sure if there's an effort or not to make it easy for moderators to do the same for individual communities.
Disclaimer: I'm not an expert on this, so what I'm now writing is what I remember from other posts/discussions I've read over the past few weeks.
As for the performance concern, what you describe is a risk, but one that can be mitigated through optimizations. Most of the content is text, which does not take up much space to begin with - the real concern would be images, audio, and video, which, for the most part, is hosted by third party sites anyway. The way federation works in Lemmy is that it's driven by the users. By default, instances do not proactively seek out other instances and automatically download everything from everywhere. Instead, they wait for users of the instance to subscribe to communities on other instances. Only after some user has subscribed to something on the other instance does federation take place. After that, the instance will receive posts/comments pushed from the other instance as they happen. This means that a smaller instance means fewer users and fewer subscriptions, so less of a scalability concern. Resources are not wasted on getting updates from instances/communities that local users are not interested in. This raises other questions about discoverability, of course, but that's another discussion. Space will still fill up over time, but it's up to the instance admins to strike a balance that works for them between retention vs. deleting old, large files that nobody is looking at.
kiwiheretic@reddit
AFAIK the communities that only exist, or originate, on that Lemmy server would disappear.
tertiary-terrestrial@reddit
Also, it doesn’t solely apply to fediverse servers. There are plenty of independent social media platforms that run on user donations.
pleasenoreddit@reddit
I don't understand. If it's supposed to be decentralized how is it susceptible to DDOS'ing to begin with?
Madbrad200@reddit
Lemmy isn't being ddosed, Lemmy.world is.
Lemmy is working just fine on other instances.
WamwethawGaming@reddit
The branding of "fediverse" is complete dogshit and reeks of cryptobro scam, despite obviously not being one.
Lemmy is fine as an alternative but it needs more users and content. I tried contributing for a while but it was frustrating to never get any interaction and being the only person posting in a community.
Mastodon kinda sucks, none of the communities I'm a part of on Twitter seem to have even a slight presence on there.
Stiltzkinn@reddit
Your problem is thinking it is related to crypto, ActivityPub has nothing to do with blockchain but it is decentralzed.
WamwethawGaming@reddit
I know it isn't. The problem is that it sounds related and uses many of the same descriptors, i.e. describing it as decentralized. The difference between crypto scams and ActivityPub is pretty obvious when you actually know what ActivityPub is, since there's literally negative financial incentive to run an instance, but if you don't it's very easy to see people talking about the "fediverse" and assume it's more of the same speculative bullshit that crypto is. That's a branding issue.
Stiltzkinn@reddit
One way or another people will have to accept terms as decentralized, BlackRock already accept Bitcoin.
IRunWithVampires@reddit
That’s a problem I have as well. I’m the only person who posts in my communities on Lemmy and it kinda sucks. 🥺😩
IRunWithVampires@reddit
I’m dealing with that problem currently.
IRunWithVampires@reddit
I’m dealing with that problem currently.
DouglasJFalcon@reddit
I enjoy sh.itjust.works fun domain, Canadian, and renewable energy. I didn't think too much about my choice but I like the moderation style.
SpiritMountain@reddit
Can you explain how this is relevant?
Emkayer@reddit
The servers runs on renewable electricity which is pretty cool how you could choose how carbon responsible is the website you forum and shitpost on
Practical_Cartoonist@reddit
That is cool, though I think that's just a consequence of them being in Quebec. Most Lemmy admins are just running an old laptop or old desktop in their closet or something. Quebec's electricity supply is 95% renewable, so if you're in Quebec, you don't really have much choice in the matter: your server will be running on renewable energy.
coldrolledpotmetal@reddit
sh.itjust.works isn't being run off a desktop, I can't find the owner's post about it but it's being run on a pretty powerful server (probably also located in Quebec though). At the time of the instance's creation, it had the most powerful server out of all Lemmy instances but that's probably changed since then.
Practical_Cartoonist@reddit
Oh nice! Sounds like a serious set up. They might have it in a data centre somewhere even?
Emkayer@reddit
That's actually what I would assume with most non-solo instances, just renting a server somewhere.
SpiritMountain@reddit
Well shit. I may just migrate there then.
FlushableWipe2023@reddit
Using Lemmy.world, and apart from being DDOs'd intermittently by some raging cunt, its fine. The more mainstream communities and some tech oriented ones now have lots of traffic and posts, niche ones are still struggling but are starting to come alive one by one as active users migrate there.
I dont know if its the best alternative all round (factoring in usability, appearance etc), but the fact that its federated across lemmy and kbin means that it effectively has the greatest user count which is what is needed in order to support niche communities which makes it best for me
chesterriley@reddit
old.lemmy.world is fantastic.
Looks like a duck. Smells like a duck. Quacks like a duck.
FlushableWipe2023@reddit
Just started using it, its great isnt it?
pleasenoreddit@reddit
I don't understand. If it's supposed to be decentralized how is it susceptible to DDOS'ing to begin with?
FlushableWipe2023@reddit
Good question. I dont know either
CultureReal3810@reddit
I'm on a smaller instance and feel like I have the best of both worlds: more stable than lemmy.world but can still use all the communities on lemmy.world.
efrique@reddit
I use lemm.ee - lemmy.world was getting hugged to death and having a bad day when I decided to make an account.
So far pretty solid, it occasionally hiccups but then usually works after reloading the page. I haven't seen much reason to move instances yet, but we'll see how things go as my activity continues to ramp up and I start posting regularly rather than just making the odd comment.
garrettw87@reddit
Kbin definitely had a quirky interface, to put it nicely, when the whole Reddipocalypse happened and many of us discovered it. A lot of us volunteer contributors have been doing a lot of work trying to improve it, and it’s getting better, but it’s going to take time.
efrique@reddit
Thank you so much for your helpful reply. That at least partly clarifies one issue for me, which is quite useful.
I take it then that to really structure my feed to topics of specific interest to me and have it include mastodon posts on those specific interests I'd have to be a magazine owner myself?
garrettw87@reddit
I see where you’re going with that and you could be right, at least under the current code — but I believe there are changes in the works that will allow you to follow hashtags without all that extra work.
efrique@reddit
Thanks. In any case, your previous comment helped me a lot.
IRunWithVampires@reddit
I use Lemmy. I’m also on some centralized platforms. But honestly Lemmy is the one I like best. :)
BarfHurricane@reddit
I like the concept, the apps, and Lemmy in general. But honestly I never use it for one simple reason: there’s 0 content for any of the niche things I’m into. Like, absolutely nothing.
IRunWithVampires@reddit
Be the change you wanna see. :)
vincentofearth@reddit
Went back here because everyone on Lemmy and Mastodon were just talking about Reddit and Twitter half the time.
I also couldn’t get Mastodon to stop showing me non-English content, and the amount of porn was seriously surprising and I didn’t want the hassle of hopping servers just to find one with a moderation policy that I liked and whose admin I trusted.
I also just don’t believe that ActivityPub has solved the problem it’s trying to solve. I doubt it will scale, and it introduces a lot of unnecessary complexity. They also haven’t solved the moderation issue but only made it worse in my opinion.
There’s also just not enough content there to satisfy me, and although the “algorithm” is mysterious and fraught with problems, it is sometimes better than just a simple timeline. I want to see things that are trending or interesting to me. If you mostly just interact with a few dozen people then it’s easy for your community to migrate to the Fediverse, but right now there’s still no beating the sheer amount and diversity of content—especially niche topics—on Reddit. There are subreddits I’m in that didn’t even blink when the protests happened.
The Fediverse is an interesting idea, but this current incarnation isn’t there yet.
virtueavatar@reddit
Instead of viewing "all" or "local" posts, join communities you actually want to follow, and view "subscribed".
I don't know how anyone gets any enjoyment out of reading random feeds.
vincentofearth@reddit
An aggregated feed is a reasonable feature to want. Sometimes I just have a few minutes to kill and wanna look at what people on the internet are talking about or laugh at a meme or funny gif or two. You and I can argue about the specific merits of various algorithms, but the fact is that if an aggregated feed is what I want, both Lemmy and Mastodon provide a worse experience today.
world_without_logos@reddit
Not sure if it makes a difference to you or not at this time, but I find swapping between top hour or top 6 hours gets me different results.
westwoo@reddit
People are getting accustomed to the algorithms using analytics about them to automatically build personalized feeds. Initiative and control of your own consumption habits seem to be atrophying, people move towards a fish in an aquarium type of situation
tunachilimac@reddit
I signed up on kbin.social just to test things out while I try to get a better understanding. It's been frustrating. There's doesn't appear to be a lot of activity on the instance I'm on so I browse the feed of everything. I see a post from lemmy.world or wherever and comment then I'll get 3 replies but only 1 is visible when I go back into the post unless I open it from the lemmy.world domain which then I can't log in with my kbin account to reply. So it seems effectively you're cut off from random subthreads. It doesn't help that when I click the link of a comment in my inbox it seems to just load the whole thread instead of linking to the comment so I have to scroll around and try to figure out where it is or if it's missing.
Another bug is that I posted a link to wayback machine and apparently there's a bug with lemmy so any users viewing the post from lemmy were telling me the link was broken when it wasn't.
I created my own magazine to try to learn more but I've noticed that at least on my kbin.social instance a lot of people joined during the reddit protests and registered a bunch of common name magazines and then haven't had any activity since. I don't know if they've abandoned their accounts or if they're just camping on 100+ magazines in case the instance gets popular, and if there's any way to reclaim a name that's being camped on unused.
As far as the content when I'm browsing most of the content is all old stuff like years old memes that been reposted forever on reddit already.
I also don't understand the arguments that fediverse is awesome because you can just move instances if you don't like your own. That still requires making a new account and joining new communities so I don't see in that circumstance what I'm gaining over a non-fediverse site.
For me at this point, it's basically just a much more buggy version of Reddit. I'd like to find somewhere with more of a focus on new content
world_without_logos@reddit
kbin is a software trying to combine both mastodon and lemmy. I think it's still growing in maturity. kbin was the first one I switched to, but after seeing that I wouldn't see any older content on lemmy, I swapped to lemmy for trying this whole thing out.
tertiary-terrestrial@reddit
Don’t expect the issue with comments from different instances not syncing to get better. It’s been an issue on Mastodon for years, and there’s apparently no easy way to fix it since it’s part of how federation works.
garrettw87@reddit
Kbin is still a much younger piece of software than Lemmy. Development is still very active.
AmirZ@reddit
Lemmy is a lot less buggy than Kbin atm
Madbrad200@reddit
kbin currently has some issues with how it syncs up with reddit, but there's plenty of great content on lemmy.
I made a list of casual communities with decent activity recently, might be worth subscribing to some.
ProbablyMHA@reddit
It feels like it's getting a shot in the arm, but the shot looks less like medicine and more like poison.
This is coming from the perspective of microblogs (so less Reddit, more Twitter).
The incumbent users are two different brands of malevolence, with one set on turning the place into a rotting shit pile and the other so obsessed with the former they're willing to make the platform unusable to score a "win."
The newfound popularity of these platforms is attracting their friends like flies to a dung pile, invading the few remaining neutral spaces, bringing their agendas with them.
The people who lose out of this are the normal users who'll go back to their corporate controlled ad farms when they realize Spez and Elon are actually sane compared to those people, and that's a very very low bar.
The instance I'm on has already had one side run roughshod over them. Now it's the other's turn, and this time I think it'll do them in.
textuist@reddit
getting started with Nostr, not sure if it's considered "fediverse" although decentralized in a comparable way
Stiltzkinn@reddit
It does not work with a fediverse but it is more decentralized than ActivityPub.
Stiltzkinn@reddit
Lemmy has the best clients so far as Sync, Voyager or even old Reddit layout with mlmym. The main point of the fediverse is decentralization, usesr have a choice of which instance with their own rules and speech can join, no more centralized power with tripping mods and censoring.
world_without_logos@reddit
I use Lift Off on my phone so I switch between many instances but mainly lemmy.world and sh.itjust.works. I'd have to say LiftOff made my experience more enjoyable since you can add all the instances you want to browse, so I can even browse beehaw without an account.
The_Pip@reddit
Mastodon sucks, Lemmy isn’t bad, and the Kbin folks are jealous of Lemmy.
HTTP_404_NotFound@reddit
I use https://lemmyonline.com/.
A bit biased, but, it works quite nicely. Pretty quick though. Lots of the biggest instances have tons of performance issues. Nope, mostly buttery smooth here.
I--Hate--Ads@reddit
I like it, but I don't think it will replace reddit anytime soon. I think if Reddit f*** U* few times more, I can see Lemmy becoming a serious threat. My main concern is sustainability, how do they plan on sustaining these servers?
cecilkorik@reddit
As an early adopter of reddit before the Diggpocalypse happened, I think this is exactly how it will go. Lemmy reminds me a lot of early reddit, both in state of development and in the community who's migrated there. And I'm absolutely sure that given what they've done so far, Reddit is nowhere near done fucking itself up. I can't wait to see what user hostility they can come up with next.
westwoo@reddit
Well, the next one is scheduled to be about subscriptions and coins that they just nuked
TheRealRikster@reddit
I host my own Lemmy instance (Laguna.chat). Which allows me to to connect to a lot of other instances without the risk of being defederated.
milkymist00@reddit
I have my account in lemmy.world. i liked the concept. I log in there daily and scroll for contents. Have a decent activity happening there. Still more content is needed. Now my daily cycle is reddit + lemmy. Can't avoid reddit completely since more interesting contents are still here.
cecilkorik@reddit
lemmy.ca is a nice plain boring instance, they also added old.lemmy.ca after a few other big ones did the same. Overall, no issues. The "interface assistant" addon by cynber is a must-have no matter where on lemmy/kbin you end up. It's not anywhere near "RES" yet, but it is the first important steps in that direction, and provides some much needed quality of life features to the fediverse, most significantly the ability to set a "home instance" where you can redirect other posts to so you can easily subscribe and view them in your own preferred environment and style.
barktreep@reddit
I like Lemmy.world. I'll probably move to a smaller instance at some point, but for now it works well. That said, i still come back to reddit for more niche interests or to read old threads (like episode discussions for old tv shows). My time on reddit has dropped about 95% over the last couple months.