Not a great day for social media. Twitter down, Reddit has not 3rd party apps, Lemmy is being hugged to death by people bailing Reddit and Twitter.
I guess I’ll go outside.
this post was submitted on 01 Jul 2023
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Lemmy isn't hugged to death. The issue is that everyone is just heading to the same handful of instances.
I didn’t realize this until I started self-hosting my own instance, but if you don’t join one of the 3 large instances (beehaw, world, ml) then you miss out on a LOT of historical content. The way federation works is that it only pulls in new post/comments after someone on your instance subscribes to a community on another instance. So if you find a cool new community on another instance, you can subscribe to see any new posts and comments, but you won’t see any of the old content at all unless you manually search for the post/comment.
Long winded way of saying, the best user experience (content wise) is always going to be on the largest instances unless Lemmy/ActivityPub changes how content backfilling works.
It also means that your server load / storage needs blow up with the more users you have.
Maybe they should update the join-lemmy.org page to suggest joining smaller instances. They put popular instances at the top and presumably that’s what everyone wants to join.
Edit: and then randomize the list of smaller instances to further distribute the load.
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Here's the current usershare breakdown by instance, if anyone's curious:
Source: https://github.com/tgxn/lemmy-explorer/tree/main/frontend/public/data
Lemmy.world is getting a very big chunk, but other than that it actually seems fairly distributed.
I guess there has to be a lowest common denominator instance. Not at all a bad thing, it leaves the dedicated communities out of their inevitable implosion range which still having access.
Really everyone always wants to be on the most popular "site" instance to ensure it will just not go away suddenly. After that they go for ones that give them a cool @ domain name. This is how email and Jabber/XMPP worked for years. Modern fediverse should be using some form of modern distributed identity, not 1965 email style identities.
Yes, I figured. My domain name is not as cool as "shitjustworks" or whatever. But I can say that my instance is gonna stay for as long as Lemmy as software is supported, no matter if there are many users or not. I strongly believe that FOSS and the Fediverse are the future and I want to give something to the community by hosting the instance.
I went through the evolution of email.. At first it was universities, then ISPs etc. Having your identity tied to them SUCKED every time you no longer qualified for an account, changed providers ETC. I was a hotmail user before Microsoft purchased it, and an early beta Gmail user.. While this is some centralisation these two identities have lasted decades, where AT THE TIME AOL was the (this is the biggest, never going away) option, now almost no one has an @AOL.com address.
Point being that no matter the current promise your instance could DIE if you get ill or can't afford to host it etc. The model is BAD. I have said it before and will say it again, Identity SHOULD NOT be tied to instances, AND it needs some form of bot and trust system built in.
I seem to remember some parts of the Fediverse being able to pick up your user and move to another instance? Is that Mastodon by any chance? If that's so, sounds like something Lemmy should look into.
It doesn't sound like it would be too hard, pack up your user stuff in a JSON and sign it (basically a JWT), and establish a protocol by which one instance passes the user to another. Or, even better, let the user take their JSON and import it manually into another instance – this could also double as personal backup.
I believe Mastodon has that (seem to remember seeing it when I setup my account) but I think the instance you are on has to still be alive at the time to do i so it doesn't quite address the sudden shutdown of the instance that holds your identity.
That's a good point. 😃 All the more reason for them to offer the ability to download your account data.
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2023 has been historical for social media, so much changing so fast.
The instance I'm on is working fine, I think the problem is people are gravitating towards the largest 2-3 instances.
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I've been feeling a significant amount of sadness at the feeling like I've now fully lost the 2 places that were my havens for safety and community during the pandemic (Twitter and Reddit). I mostly disconnected a few weeks/months ago, but this weekend feels like the full, official breakup. I wonder if anyone/everyone else is feeling the same?
Yesterday felt to me like the day Web 2.0 died. It's actually rather awkward. Web 2.0 devolved into enshittification, Web 3.0 to many looks to be a scam from the outset, and that leaves us with the Fediverse as the most hopeful continuation of what we liked about Web 2.0. But what is the Fediverse? More of the same as Web 2.0? An entirely new thing? I've been coming to view the Fediverse as being Web 2.0.1. It's a bug fix. The corporations controlling Web 2.0 were the problem, not the idea of a more dynamic and interactive web. The solution isn't strictly speaking Peer 2 Peer solutions, as many people still want a curated and moderated space, so they're not dealing with a constant onslaught of dicks and nazis they didn't ask for (I'm sure someday the Peer 2 Peer networks will have a viable solution for that, but for now, they don't as far as I can tell). But a networked governance structure in which volunteers own the instances and the users have more choice in how their space is moderated seems like a major fix to what we were seeing before, and I think it's a major benefit for all of us
I've been really intrigued by the developments coming from the Web0 / small web train of thought. https://web0.small-web.org/
Absolutely, and the coordination is deeply suspicious. Steve Huffman said he didn't want to be like Twitter, but then admitted in interview that he'd had several meetings with Elon. u/spez's nose is brown, and it smells musky.
Totally. I was just thinking about how my very specific life circumstances mean that I'm otherwise distracted and handling it pretty well. But if I were in a rough patch right now this situation would be really, really, really hard. I hope the people in that situation are okay and finding new refuge in places like this ❤
Same honestly. I regret not connecting with people on Twitter offline more often.
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I truly don't understand why people keep trying to use Twitter despite open and obvious changes designed to be hostile to users. Not to mention the reliability issues that continue to crop up as a result of axing nearly your entire engineering staff.
sunk cost fallacy is a hell of a drug. it's also why a lot of people stay in bad relationships (friends/romantic/family/etc)
Imo, there was no greater news aggregator than 3rd party Twitter apps. I will miss them very much. A couple of my favorite sources are not on Mastodon (yet?) and the 3rd party apps aren't up to snuff yet. Hopefully we get there one day.
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It's time to abandon Twitter to the fascists and bots.
My choices now are
Mastodon
Lemmy
Kbin
Actually edit the novel
Let's get them over to Mastodon! #fediverse (yes I'm going all in)
apareantly theyre agressively rate limiting: 300 posts per day for new accounts, 600 for unverified, 6000 for verified
I bet Elon is furiously Googling how to downgrade to a micro/free tier instance on AWS.
I have to say the silver lining in all of this is that decentralized forms of community building are on the rise, and this is a good thing. I don't think it's healthy to centralize all data and power in the hands of private companies that can decide to, oh you know, kill api access etc.
I'm overdosing on schadenfreude right now.
Some people cannot seem to even be able to login.
Just went over to Twitter for the first time in a while, and everyone's bleating about wanting an invite to Bluesky.
Meanwhile, Mastodon's over there just working fine and doing what they want Twitter to do.
It's bizarre.
Normies are confused by Mastodon and how it works. Tried suggesting it as an alternative on /r/worldnews and most people just said that it was too confusing; one guy said that he couldn't login but turns out he forgot which instance he had signed up for originally.
I was able to login 🤷♂️
What is happening to my internet?! ): It's all going downhill.
Capitalism
It's like having most of the content and communication being hosted by few corporations running on the faith of investors and struggling to realize the expected profits was a bad thing.
The rise of federated communities is actually not going uphill.
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