Amazing work as always!

You can’t solve what’s fundamentally a social problem with technology alone. Technology is simply a piece of the bigger picture where it can provide forums like this where genuine organic communication can happen without it being mediated by corporate interests. However, the shift in the Overton window is ultimately driven by the material conditions. As the standard of living continues to deteriorate in the west, more and more people end up falling out of liberal mainstream. We see this process happening at an ever accelerating rate now.

I fully expect bluesky to go the way of twitter eventually. Even though the protocol is somewhat decentralized, the reality is that there’s already one main instance and that’s where majority of users will end up. It’s still an oligarch owned and profit driven platform at its core.

I do think the situation with the fediverse is fundamentally better because the profit motive isn’t the driving factor. And yes, we do have big liberal bubbles here too, but that’s just an artifact of the fact that liberalism is still the dominant ideology in the west. It’s not surprising that they will be the majority on any western social platform.

I find Mastodon is avoiding this problem at least so far. Pretty much all the instances are run by volunteer efforts and they’re community funded, avoiding the problem with the profit motive. The federation aspect of Mastodon also makes it commercially unappealing because content doesn’t propagate as easily and this makes it difficult for people to build up huge followings the way they do on centralized platforms.

My view is that Mastodon or Lemmy approach works pretty well in practice. You end up with fairly small hubs of thousands of users that can create their own social norms, and then these hubs loosely federate with each other.

🎉

🥳

Congratulations on yet another release filled with enhancements that improve user experience. 🎉

I imagine that the dynamic here is reminiscent of the western media’s self-censorship. Western journalists learn to conform to certain standards and topics because they understand what kinds of articles are more likely to be published and advance their careers. This is largely influenced by the preferences of media company owners and advertisers, creating a selection pressure for content producers to conform to these expectations.

In contrast, in China, censors strive to identify potentially politically sensitive content and tend to err on the side of more aggressive censorship. This is due to the understanding that being overly cautious in such matters will not result in negative consequences, encouraging a more conservative approach to content regulation.

A distributed knowledge base is indeed an excellent concept since it enhances resilience against potential disruptions or manipulations compared to a centralized database like Wikipedia. By distributing servers across numerous countries and legal jurisdictions, it becomes more challenging for any single entity to censor the content. Furthermore, the replication of data through federation ensures higher durability and reliability in preserving valuable information. Kudos on making it happen!

The fact that the issue exists after 4 years clearly shows that you are in fact blowing it out of proportion. Actual issues that affect large numbers of people running servers end up being addressed by people contributing to the project. Lemmy is an open source project that anybody can contribute to, and fix the issues that are affecting them. The fact that this hasn’t happened shows that this issue is not as high priority as you want to make it out to be.

This doesn’t mean this isn’t a real issue that should be fixed at some point, but it’s simply not the show stopper you paint to be.

So yeah, you are absolutely doing a hack job here.

Oh yeah, it popped up in Mastodon feed and the guy mentioned how this post was from a while back but suddenly blew up.

Very much agree with all that. The main reason centralized git providers emerged was due to the fact that they made discoverability and contribution easy. Federation directly addresses these issues, and it’s really encouraging to see that Forgejo is starting to get some serious usage. I think another big aspect federated hosting could address is censorship, if you have servers hosted in different jurisdictions, and mirroring content then it becomes very difficult to remove content from the network.

Thanks again for all the work you’re doing on the project, and hopefully the funding situation will continue being sustainable after the NLnet grants run out. It would be great if community manages to step up and fully cover the salaries through donations. It’s been an exciting ride using Lemmy and seeing the community grow. I can’t wait to see what the next few years will bring!

The point regarding notifications is really important. Managing a popular open source project can be really overwhelming in that regard, and it’s easy for individual users to forget that it’s only a couple of people dealing with all their issues on the other end.

People stepping up and contributing is a great development. Community involvement is key for the success of open source platforms in my opinion.

And love the long term vision, I completely agree that the fediverse replacing corporate platforms would be the ideal scenario in the future. From what I can see, fediverse has already reached the point of sustainability. It’s still niche compared to mainstream platforms, but I think it’s clear that it can exist in its current form indefinitely. And I think this provides an important advantage over corporate platforms. Commercial companies have to continuously demonstrate profit and growth to their shareholder or die. This means having to constantly chase new ways to attract new users and monetize the platform leading to the sort of behaviors we see happening with Reddit. On the other hand, open platforms can grow slowly and sustainably. This allows the fediverse to evolve on a completely different time scale. I’m optimistic that the fediverse will likely outlive every single corporate platform that’s around today.

Thanks again for all the hard work you’re doing, it’s very much appreciated!

First, just want to say thanks for building and maintaining Lemmy. It’s an incredible project, and it provides an incredibly valuable public forum that’s completely open. This is the way internet was always meant to work before it got hijacked by corporations.

The questions I’d like to ask would be whether the platform is developing in the way you originally envisioned, what surprised you in terms of how the platform ended up being used in the wild, and what were the biggest technical and non technical problems that came from the rapid growth after the Reddit migration. And finally, how would you like the platform to evolve going forward, and what your long term vision is.

It’s been amazing to watch Lemmy evolve over the years, the project has come such a long way. Kudos on the amazing work!

Amazing work as always!

indeed

Right, the internet is just a network that more complex things like social networks are built on top of. Hence why the question is with the design of Mastodon and completely unrelated to how the internet works fundamentally.

And I didn’t say Mastodon actively prevents propagation, rather that some design decisions are at odds with viral propagation. It could be possible to build separate tooling on top, or to create forks that are more friendly towards propagation. However, Mastodon is by far the biggest ActivityPub based network right now, and the way it works plays a huge role for how Fediverse can be used at the moment.

There is nothing inherent about the design of the internet that prevents information from spreading and going viral. The thread is talking about some design decisions that Mastodon makes that are at odds with propagation of information through the network.