That sounds like a much better implementation of community discovery.

And that’s fine for you, I’m not knocking the experimenting and learning process. That was the whole reason I spun up an instance myself.

What I’m saying is that to the other users that would be impacted by these things, it sucks. People are patient to a point but the fediverse has a lot of odd quirks that make it more difficult than it should be to use for a lot of people. Things have gotten better in the last year or so but it still feels like we’re asking people to know more than they should have to just to figure out that Lemmy isn’t empty. Many people will get frustrated and leave long before they start making excuses for a site they don’t know anything about.

It’s easy to sit around proclaiming that reddit sucks but the fact of the matter is that it’s easy to use and everything they have to offer is covered under one domain. Again, I don’t have the solution to these things for Lemmy, but we can’t deny that this platform is harder to use than most and a lot of people aren’t going to handle that well.

Maybe.

But I’d counter that it’s prohibitive to growth. People aren’t used to turning up at a domain name only to find out 90% of the content can’t be accessed without jumping through a bunch of hoops.

you can always defederate if an instance starts abusing it

Sure, but potentially after at least one of the instances subscribed to the bot goes down and someone realizes what’s happening. It’s incredibly easy to overwhelm a small server’s database just by subscribing to a lot of communities the normal way. The difference here is potentially any instance federating the bot in both directions is susceptible to this.

Not that much different to the normal flow, really.

The impact across the fediverse vs just one instance would be the main difference. Plenty of people are using that bot having no real idea of what it’s doing.

But this is only true if the user looks at the All feed

It impacts what content is available to users at all. The All feed is just the visual representation of what’s actively federating.

Let’s say you join a new instance for whatever reason with no outside awareness of how the fediverse works. If you try to search the instance for “sportball” and get zero results the natural assumption is going to be that there are no communities and no interest in that topic. The user has no idea that lemmyserver5000.com has a sportball community with thousands of users because no one with those interests ever did the work to get the content flowing in a way that they could access it intuitively. It’s a poor design IMO.

The reason I brought it up has more to do with starting a new instance or using a smaller instance. Communities that the instance isn’t aware of (via someone previously subscribing) won’t show up at all which causes places to appear non-existent or dead by default. Someone trying a federating website for the first time isn’t going to know this, so to them, that’s all the fediverse has to offer.

Note that many instances either have a bot subscribed to other communities to force federation, or use something like https://lemmy-federate.com/

FWIW this approach can be helpful but is flawed in its own ways.

Firstly, since not all instances participate you still aren’t getting the “complete” fediverse so to speak. This becomes less of an issue as more instances join the bot program, but it’s another step that roadblocks what should be an easy and organic process.

Secondly, the bot can pose a potential security risk depending on how it’s configured. If you use it to federate in both directions you’re subject to malicious actors spinning up tons of new communities on instances that don’t restrict user registration. This will in turn hammer the database an instance uses for EVERYTHING and eventually causes slow downs, crashes, etc. The solution to this is to only seed your communities outwardly but if everyone only does that the bot is rather useless…

I don’t have a solution for any of this, I’m just pointing out some rather frustrating problems this platform has in its current state.

Does that mean that an “all” view is "onl"y all of the subscriptions/places people from my server have?

Correct.

The easiest way to explain it is that the instances have no native ability to crawl other instances for communities or content. For all intents and purposes, a fresh Lemmy server is on an island and all other instances are their own island until someone builds a bridge to them.

The ability of an instance to receive content is dependent on the subscriptions users add to the database. Once the instance is aware of these other places it will begin checking them for updates and you’ll see them regularly whether you interact with them or not.

This goes completely against what the average person is expecting and causes a lot of confusion.

For those who may not be aware there are alternative front ends available for Lemmy.

MLMYM is like old reddit. You can see what it looks like here:

mlmym.walledgarden.xyz

Voyager is multi platform interface that also offers a Lemmy frontend. Our implementation is here:

voyager.walledgarden.xyz

I’m not sure it’s been entirely solved. Our host is working through an unrelated hardware problem that hit in the middle of our last round of tuning but things have been behaving better aside from that.

The answer for us has been in adjusting the lemmy pool size to the database and tweaking the available resources to find a happy medium.

Can my humble, single-user instance handle it?

Maybe?

FWIW this information is based on the experience when using remote hosting not self hosting.

The main issue for us was tuning the database performance. The bot can beat your database to death sometimes and just throwing resources at it won’t necessarily solve it. related low effort meme Our experience was that the bot performance hit wasn’t really noticable immediately but it adds up as more and more communities are added to the database. There also seem to be bursts of database load at times, maybe that’s when new instances join the network? They seem to only last a short time though and haven’t really caused problems.

TLDR- Expect an eventual performance hit. If it’s too much you can always disable the bot or adjust what it does.

Bingo.

Sure! But, in this case Lemmy is literally a federated copypasta of Reddit, like Madtodon is of X.

This is being overly simplistic IMO. Lemmy is not a direct copy paste of reddit, just the idea is the same. Lemmy is missing many of the tools reddit has come to depend on for things like moderation and community engagement. The idea is the same but the framework is different and that comes with its own challenges.

Lemmy is a good enough platform for now and for future growth. It wasn’t a drop in replacement for reddit when the exodus happened and it isn’t a drop in replacement now, but it’s closer. There are still lots of little things- quality of life improvements, moderation improvements, discovery improvements, etc that need to be tuned or fixed before Lemmy is ready to shoulder millions of active users, but that doesn’t mean it isn’t worthy of the effort today.

The beautiful part of the fediverse is we’re all free to form our own ideas about how it’s best grown and supported. If there’s something you are passionate about there’s nothing stopping you or anyone else from spinning up a community or instance about it and creating the niche communities everyone seems to miss. It all takes time, and individual and group efforts.

There’s nothing wrong with this approach either but I’d remind you and anyone else seeking this experience that Lemmy is infinitely more customizable for this than reddit ever was. The ability to block users, communities, instances, etc can be invaluable. Some instances also don’t federate with everyone so it’s fairly easy to find a smaller space that isn’t so busy if the larger instances are too much.

Lemmy gets a lot of shit, and deservedly so at times, but there are already some very handy tools in the kit for curating your feed to your liking.

I’m just sick of Reddit.

How can we convince the people over there to move away?

I see things like this all the time on the fediverse. There’s this sentiment that reddit sucks and it’s nothing but bots and shithousery, but for some people they still want that crowd to migrate here.

I think Lemmy needs to let go of the idea of the “good” parts of reddit transferring here and everyone miraculously behaving differently, because it just isn’t going to happen. The people left on reddit are there because that’s the experience they want. Trying to import them en masse to Lemmy again is just going to bring more irritation and frustration IMO.

I think Lemmy would be better served working to improve and develop the communities they already have through users that are already here. Find ways to make your interests appealing to others. Be active in ways and places you usually wouldn’t, and Lemmy will grow up around us organically. None of these social media giants have anything of substance to offer their huge user bases besides the niche communities you guys are missing, and that’s why people spend so much time doomscrolling.

What we are missing is that someone on Reddit took the time to get these communities going too. Reddit wasn’t an instant success, it took the efforts of the early membership to drive engagement and user growth. Lemmy is obsessed with the idea of short cutting this step to steal members from other networks, and that’s silly.

No one is going to leave a well designed botnet social media for a black hole called the fediverse. In order to gain more meaningful membership we must first prove that Lemmy is worth overcoming the barriers to enter and engage with the people that are already here. Once the rest of the internet finds out we’re cool, they’ll show up.

Clowns doing clown things. I’d recommend an instance with downvotes disabled but it’s all personal preference.

My path to veganism has more to do with refusing to be poisoned by the corporate clowns that don’t care they’re killing us all with listeria and microplastics in EVERYTHING and a supply chain that I refuse to depend on.

It shouldn’t be unreasonable to buy and consume healthy vegetables from a normal store but it gets harder every day. My means of survival will not be affected by recalls and cross contamination, corporate greed, or animal slavery.

IMO- Our survival will depend on our ability to take back control from companies that would sell us our doom with a shiny ribbon wrapped around it. Self-sustainable veganism is my bet for our future and I’m doing everything I can to bring it to reality as quickly as I can.

Thanks for not fucking up the planet any faster than you have to, and for being a better person than I am.

Agree with this however I’m not vegan and don’t want to take underserved credit for the effort it takes to make it a permanent change.

I’m heading down the path but still have a ways to go to the destination.

There are definitely more vegans on lemmy but given they are frequently targeted with harassment and trolling I doubt all of them are willing to expose themselves to such behavior.

I’m happy lemmy is flexible enough to offer spaces for all of us, assholes be damned. Thanks for offering places for people to feel comfortable!

SHOTS FIRED, SHOTS FIRED!!

(also entirely true)