- cross-posted to:
- fediverse@lemmy.world
- cross-posted to:
- fediverse@lemmy.world
It became the only reliable source of information I had. People posted links with a minimal amount of commentary, picking and choosing the best content from other social media networks. They’re not doing it to “build a brand” because that’s not a thing in the Fediverse. It’s too disjointed to be a place to build a newsletter subscription base.
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People complain about Lemmy having limited content and engagement. Not in this article so much. I’m sure there were fewer posts in the past too. But what I found is that there are real people on here and you don’t have to wade through bots and shills which makes this community feel much more whole to me.
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True, Lemmy feels this way almost exclusively because it’s small and hasn’t been noticed by mainstream media enough. The second that changes this place will become what reddit was pre-ipo.
My hope is that it will always be a little too disjointed to hold that kind of attention for long.
We take it for granted that as the fediverse grows in numbers and nodes that it will continue to stay mostly contiguous.
While Lemmy lacks those, PieFed already has both advanced automated mod tools plus other features that dramatically increases the democratization of moderation itself.
e.g. if someone wants to see less Trump and Musk content, keyword filters allow someone to personally set that up, without having to rely upon a moderator to make that decision for the entire community.
Another example along those lines is the automated collapsing or even hiding of content that falls below a certain score threshold - personally I have that turned off, but if someone wants that then again, they don’t have to rely solely upon the efforts of a moderation team, and can rely instead upon the community engagement. Again: if they want.
Still another example is showing icons next to usernames - e.g. one shows new users that are <2 weeks old, another shows someone who receives ~10x more downvotes than upvotes, and so on. These are not “filters”, just helpful indicators so that you know more about someone’s reputation prior to responding. Most conservatives for example have warning labels next to their usernames, in these more leftist spaces.
Also - and I cannot emphasize enough how crucial this is - PieFed moderator reports actually federate. This has been a source of huge pain in Lemmy, and tbf I think a future Lemmy release is planned that will do that… but meanwhile as with so exceedingly very many other features, PieFed has had them for months.
PieFed thereby helps avoid some of the major issues that cause community fragmentation. Which ironically PieFed also helps solves that issue too, by collapsing comments (old example of this phenomena), and with the Categories of Communities suite of features, including the user-customizeable and shareable Feeds.
Also PieFed is easier to install, requires less maintenance, uses fewer resources (even sending 25-fold less data to end-users), and so on. So yeah, I don’t think Lemmy is capable of scaling up, despite its reliance upon its sourcecode being in the hyper stable Rust programming language, because of all the other issues with it (database issues requiring constant restarts, and especially lack of moderation capabilities), so I am putting all of my hopes into PieFed. Sorry if this reads like an advertisement - I feel like PieFed is to Lemmy what Lemmy is to Reddit, except that analogy does not begin to come close since PieFed has added features that even Reddit never bothered to, plus some others that it continually tried to take away from people by not retaining it in new-reddit despite how it was present in old.
Also PieFed is easier to install, requires less maintenance, uses fewer resources (even sending 25-fold less data to end-users), and so on. So yeah, I don’t think Lemmy is capable of scaling up, despite its reliance upon its sourcecode being in the hyper stable Rust programming language, because of all the other issues with it (database issues requiring constant restarts, and especially lack of moderation capabilities), so I am putting all of my hopes into PieFed.
This is the first time I’m hearing most of this, except the part about Piefed having more moderation tools. Do you have any links to additional information?
Absolutely! Start here: https://join.piefed.social/features/.
The linked blog is also really interesting to me, e.g. this post: https://join.piefed.social/2024/02/09/comparing-network-utilization-of-lemmy-kbin-and-piefed/, which shows how 5x less data is sent for 5x more posts e.g. 25x greater data efficiency between server instance and client.
Thanks, that was interesting about the network utilization. For a while now I’ve been trying to evaluate the resource efficiency of Lemmy vs. PieFed for my own curiosity. Rust has been shown to be much more resource efficient on the server, using a lot less RAM and CPU from what I recall reading in the past, but I hadn’t thought about the differences in network utilization that could counteract that efficiency, and I was also not aware that Lemmy was so reliant on Javascript. Javascript is still supposed to be quite more resource efficient than Python, but much less so than Rust since it’s still an interpreted language (an extremely optimized one, but still has inherent limits compared to compiled languages). I would still like to know about PieFed requiring less maintenance and the Lemmy database issues requiring constant restarts, if you have any links to information about that. Thanks.
One very popular account that you probably have already heard is here: https://jeena.net/lemmy-switch-to-piefed.
Another informative discussion relates to the upcoming (in 2026) switch of slrpnk.net from Lemmy to PieFed, see e.g. https://slrpnk.net/comment/18799445. Some highlighted nuggets from that:
the main bottleneck on performance is the database itself, and at that point the language the frontend is written in doesn’t seem to make much of a practical difference
the core issue with Lemmy is really that it is very annoying to run and maintain, has huge memory issues (ironically given that it is written in Rust) that the devs ignore since years, and the image integration is a stuff of nightmares. In addition, the upstream devs are often actively hostile to sensible suggestions how to improve things and the proposed solutions by them often make things actively worse (latest case in point: the next version will hardcode lemmy.ml as a source to pre-fetch popular communities). After nearly 5 years of running Lemmy, I am ready to cut my losses and rather give Piefed a try, and so far the devs and community around it has been very welcoming and actually have lots of sensible ideas.
(Note that the proposed hard-coding issue has been somewhat walked back, as in it will still be hardcoded to some instance but it only remains lemmy.ml by default yet can be changed. Using a single instance as the ultimate source of truth though, it will still be subject to issues of defederation.)
The Lemmy backend causes the Postgres database to use more and more RAM, to the point that it crashes with out of memory issues randomly and causes other processes to go down with it. I have reported the issue multiple times and I am not the only one with the problem since many years,
There are also some further links there to older discussions and additional blog posts, such as https://join.piefed.social/2024/02/13/technical-performance-of-each-fediverse-platform/.
See also notes for developers at https://join.piefed.social/docs/developers/, e.g. it mentions PieFed relying upon the Flask framework, and the code repository at https://codeberg.org/rimu/pyfedi, which reportedly the Docker containerization makes it fairly straightforward to install? (I have no personal experience with that though, or Docker containers at all myself.)
In my mind, PieFed is running circles around Lemmy and has been for like a year now. Nobody knows how scalable any of these approaches would be to handle like a million of people, but on the other hand the entire Threadiverse has only ~35k active users currently (last I checked) and that is already down from our peak at 55k just after the Rexodus. i.e., scalability is the least of our concerns right now, and can be postponed for another day, in lieu of aspects such as features proferred to users and ease of use to instance admins.
Then again, FOSS is FOSS, so I wish both Lemmy and PieFed (and Mbin, nodeBB, etc.) the absolute best of success - when one is improved, we all benefit due to the federated nature of content shared via ActivityPub Protocol. I just think that Lemmy has little hope for the future, while PieFed continually impresses me. Nothing is perfect, but on the whole I hear the best things about it, and I have little doubt you’ll enjoy having delved deeper into learning about it, based on so many stories shared in e.g. !piefed_meta@piefed.social that have said exactly that.
Great, thank you. I was not familiar with any of those links discussing these issues. I will read them to get more details. Thanks again.
This is the sort of advertisement we actually want
I think even if shills, bots and influencers gain traction in the fediverse, it’s still better than reddit or Instagram because of federation. There won’t be one corporation algorithmically feeding you ads. You can curate your experience more than you can on another platform.
There is no effective way to ban a person. As long as that remains true, moderation tools don’t really matter.
Israel alone is putting $760 million into propaganda. Lemmy may not be big, but it’s worth 0.2% of that budget.
And that’s just Israel.
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I actually like the slower pace. There’s no constant stream of content but I find that helps me to moderate my usage. It also helps me take a more active role because I don’t just see what I’m subscribed to. I’ll hop over to the top posts over the last 6 hours and find something that’s really hot elsewhere, or I’ll hop on to scaled and find something obscure. It’s slower and cranky but it embodies a lot of the old elements of scrolling that I miss.
People complain about Lemmy having limited content and engagement.
Maybe I would have thought this at one point? I remember when you could get to the bottom of the All feed in one session.
Lemmy is probably the fastest paced social I go on now. I’ve got my people I follow on masto and a handful of forums. So coming to lemmy from those feels downright metropolitan.
See I had forgotten the one golden rule of capitalism. To thrive in capitalism one must be amoral. Now you can be wildly sickeningly successful with morals but you cannot reach that absolute zenith of shareholder value. Either you accept a lower share price and don’t commit atrocities or you become evil. There is no third option.
Spot on.
The Australian Subreddits got overrun by extremist right wing people who tend to be 20x louder than anyone else, and exaggerate everything.
One even reported me for being racist (successfully) despite the fact that the entire time I was fighting back against the racism
Even worse, you now need to log in to even see it at all in a mobile browser. So f that
Stuff like this is why I banned Reddit first.
I was perma banned for calling someone “A fucking piece of human garbage” as they openly and brazenly advocated for the death of trans people.
I got banned, the person calling for Trans people to be killed did not.
That’s unfortunately pretty standard.
Whereas, on Facebook, nobody gets banned. I’ve literally reported people inciting violence towards others. However, it seems permitted by community standards these days
Those same fuckers are on a roll now, winning one MP seat.
Yeah. And they were apparently “never going to win in SA either”. Everyone was happy with that result. SA is happy they lost, and ON supporters were somehow happy with being absolute failures too 😂
I learnt something new today, cheers
So here is a stupid question
What exactly is the fediverse? What’s included in it? I’ve hear much about fediverse and Lemmy, but is Lemmy part of it or not? Are other systems like Blue sky a part of it or not? Do I transparently see posts from all those different systems?
Wow. I had to stop reading this one. Long on words, poor on writing and spelling and neither circling a theme so much as just edgelording on everything social, I’m not sure whether it was ever getting somewhere.
But life’s too short for 6000 words on The Things That Suck With Stuff I Don’t Use.
I watched a Greenlandic toddler munch meat from the spine of a seal with its head very much intact.
I kind of want to know the context of this
Also, do seals taste more like fish or more like mammal? Or like whale?
Idk, it looks disgusting and is overall described as fishy and oily.
There is someone on Reddit saying its like a mix of Ahi Tuna and Moose lmao. Unfortunately I have never had straight Moose steak, so I can’t really imagine it.
I really would like to somehow convince more people to adopt the idea that, like, Facebook and friends are run by bad people and you can choose not to use their products. Just stop. Find another way. Be uncomfortable for a little while.
But people aren’t up to the challenge.
Honestly people are more likely to just quit those websites rather than join new places. I support that though. And I am seeing a lot of people around me are going away from these platforms recently.
People are fucking addicted to instagram and I’m the annoying “get rid of that shit” preacher to everyone I can. My gf has reduced her usage, but still checks it from time to time.
I always ask “Do you really need to use it?” - and almost always, their answer is “not really, but it’s the only place I can find X”. Some of my gf’s friends use it to find new places to go. Some of my boardgaming friends still use it, mostly to “know what events are coming up” or what new games are being released.
Instagram is essentially this age’s yellow pages of a telephone list, small businesses are super dependent on it and they’re forced to post fucking stories everyday or get erased by the algorithm
It’s one of those self fueling problems. Businesses post on Instagram because people go there, and people go there in part because that’s where they found out about businesses doing stuff.
Better options are possible, but the big money is backing this hell. Less money to be made from RSS feeds , web rings, and email newsletters.
I don’t use any social media other than this. I find out about bands I like playing from their email lists or bandsintown. I’m on a couple “things happening in the city” email newsletters. It doesn’t demand my attention.
I wouldn’t say it’s “not up to the challenge” insomuch that like when you want to convince someone to not use Chrome, you’re running into the problem that you have to create a framework under which the amount of problem Chrome can be can actually be measured/registered.
People always assume “Yeah but the average user doesn’t care”, but never truly read that line and realize what it implies.
It’s not that my mum opens Chrome, sees that it’s 74/100 on the problematic-software-you-shouldn’t-use-scale, and then decided to use it anyways.
She opens it. That’s it. It ends there.There is no “This is a 74/100 problem”.
There is no problematic-software-you-shouldn’t-use-scale.
There is no scale.
There isn’t even the conceptual idea for it, and hence no reason or impetus to ever internally have such a scale.And now comes an important question: Why? Or rather, why not?
And the answer is both easier and also impossibly harder than most of us trying to convince others would want to accept: Because it doesn’t matter.
To my mum, she couldn’t give a flying fuck what others think about Chrome, she wants to open a web page. She has actual problems in her actual life, she doesn’t care a rat’s arse what the tiny computer she looks up the weather and contacts her kids on does to allow her to do that internally. She’s worried about her health, about her colon surgery healing or about her mum (my grandma is 93) having fallen down.Well, yes, “why don’t you care about things?” is a timeless problem. People don’t like to see beyond the immediate. Probably because in pre-history, the creatures that focused on right now did better than the ones who went “but if we keep cutting down the trees, eventually it’s going to cause problems.”
Well, now we have many problems, and our brains have not advanced.
I am having a great time exploring the Fediverse and of course having a blast here in Lemmy. That said I have found a lot of limitations as well that makes the Fediverse work “for real” when you want to go in deep into the federation part of it. For example I was really trying to move away from instagram and I wanted to create my own instance of Pixel fed. The expectation is that I have my own instance in the fediverse I can own and I can connect to the rest of the network. The reality is that from your little bubble you can’t see old posts from accounts on other servers. Only new ones. Which does not really make it work for real. There are plenty of other use cases that work better, but assuming that’s the “only way” and it’s perfect is not being fully honest. A lot of people like to shit on ATproto, but it’s a protocol that feels less extreme on federation and more friendly on the “normal person” usability part of it. Every person have their own needs in the end.
I can’t speak to how Pixelfed works, but PieFed pulls in old posts. e.g. when lemm.ee (a Lemmy instance) shut down, several communities were migrated, including its old content.
Perhaps one day Pixelfed will implement that as well.
I really hope so! That was a big let down moment.
Tbf all of these tools - and Pixelfed more than most - are so very new, and being developed on a shoestring budget using volunteer efforts that are not seeking capitalistic remuneration. And being able to pull in old posts is a very niche feature that affects an instance pretty much only once, upon its initial creation and then never again, so it might not be a top priority for its dev team to implement. Though a lot of teams for Fediverse tools (like PieFed) tend to be quite responsive, and pinging them may help them realize that it needs to be done sooner, i.e. communication of that may be helpful rather than annoying?
Whereas ATproto’s main downsides lay in it lacking “robustness” for the future - what happens when like pretty much every Internet company that ever existed (Google, Meta, Amazon, etc.), they decide to switch from attempts to attract a wider user base to trying to monetizate its content? Suddenly all those ATproto connections become a liability where someone can access the content held hostage therein without having to watch advertisements that benefit the main branch, thereby switching the collaborative model to a competitive one.
ATproto is strictly better in the short term, and will cause much pain later on, as opposed to the Fediverse that has some onboarding and ongoing pains now but to some people offer better hopes for the future of a more unfettered/unconstrained method of interaction between people, where control is placed more democratically into the hands of the end users rather than centralized authorities.
Good read, but I think the author touched on something that is way more troubling. Sure, you can get reliable information from regular people who are living in other parts of the world, but spreading that information with any kind of veracity is almost impossible due to the collapse in public trust of mainstream media.
If I say something with any degree of authority or confidence, someone in the comments will inevitably chant the ancestral magic spell “Source?!” and suddenly my evidence of a conversation with a stranger on the internet is reduced to merely anecdotal at best. Able to be dismissed outright without thought or care.
However, if I post a link to some legacy media rag, existing in the modern day as a mere husk being puppeteered by corporate oligarchs, wearing the skin of a legitimate and trustworthy news source, the credibility of the information is then called into question by anybody reasonable - knowing full well that right-wing governments have managed to capture most of the remaining independent reporting, or at least have threatened them with who-knows-what in an attempt to influence their press releases that would otherwise paint the government or any of their cronies in a negative light. If someone decides that the provided source doesn’t line up with their narrative, it’s hilariously easy to attack the reporting itself as being “fake news”.
The brain shuts off, and information gets siloed. Objective reality is no longer shared. We are still living in a state of simply believing whatever we want to believe and the few people who are able to break out of that are not going to be influential enough to have an effect on anything. We can pat ourselves on the back for not being a group of people concerned with being brand-builders, I guess, but in the end it’s a meaningless victory.
Not sure I understand your point. Your self reported experiences, as a random internet stranger in a sea of bots and malevalent actors, IS only amecdotal at best.
Welcome to the post-modern era of truth. Where objective reality doesn’t matter, only personal truth and reality. If what you’re saying doesn’t fit my personal truth, you’re using fake news or making it up. Even scientific research is fake news if it doesn’t fit my narrative. Just look at who funded the research.
Honestly, idk what we’re going to do. It feels like with all the age verification laws being pushed, the mass surveillance, and the quelling of dissenting opinions, the world admins are looking at 1984 as a guidebook. Are we going to get a Ministry of Truth established soon to “verify” what is accurate and what is not?
People talk a lot about the protocols that power Bluesky vs. ActivityPub, because we’re nerds and we believe deep in our hearts that the superior protocol will win. This is adorable. It flies in the face of literally all of human history, where the more convenient thing always wins regardless of technical merit. VHS beat Betamax. USB-C took twenty years.
Hopefully, unlike betamax and laserdisc, the fediverse will trudge on despite the megacorporate protocols
you don’t need special equipment to use the fediverse, so imo it’s unlikely it will “fail”
Yeah and I’d like to see it become increasingly scrappy and decentralised using lightweight fedi software like snac.
This is weird ass article. It’s like the author has never used an Internet forum before and didn’t understand how the Internet works.
Don’t stop at the Fediverse. Keep going. You’ve only just begun.
Even better.
Most instances have human moderation, gating for bots, and yes, and you actually have to take 5-10 minutes to figure out how it all works, so the stupid people are automatically excluded by sheer complexity.
I fucking love Mastodon.
Stupid people can just use AI, so nothing is truly barred, not like it requires more than a 3rd grade reading level either. Your post being upvoted this much shows how easy it is for the average NPC to make an account.
And it has not enough users. If the fediverse ever became popular enough to hold significant marketshare, we’d see similar issues. The upside to the fediverse is that you can defederate from misinformation peddlers.
Fediverse doesn’t (as of yet) have a monetization path because of it’s “self hosted” structure - I put it in quotes because most people use large instances, but anyone can spin up their own and federate.
The big risk with this is that if it reaches a critical mass where advertisers see potential for profit, the mechanism that would be most convenient, especially with LLMs, is bots.
Say Toyota wants to promote their new car. They contract an advertising agency, who spins up a few dozen LLM agents trained on Lemmy data and instructions to talk up the latest new car. It might make posts, or just comments, but in all cases it will eventually promote that product.
All that for the cost of a few tokens, and the only giveaway would be the “AI phrasing”, if anyone catches it.
That’s already happening. Bots are posting from open instances, and malicious instances are manipulating votes.
The best solution I see is allowlisting servers you want to federate with.
i love lemmy for what it is now. it sadly doesn’t have some communities as active here as reddit may, like stuff for soccer in particular for me, but it’s solid for everything else
To me it feels like Reddit mini
