Disclaimer: I like the Fediverse, Lemmy, and the concept of federation, I’ve been here for two years, and I feel grateful towards people working on this platform - devs and admins and mods and everyone else. As such, I hope that what I’m voicing is interpreted as constructive criticism and food for discussion.
TL;DR: I’ll list some issues with Lemmy, how they relate to Reddit, and a few proposals on what should be done to address them.
The issues
When you’re posting/commenting you’re supposed to acknowledge and follow up to three independent sets of rules: of the comm, of the comm’s instance, and of your instance. This is a burden for good users, and yet another excuse for bad users to ignore the rules.
There are also up to three groups of rule enforcers, in any situation: two admin teams and a mod team. If any of those goes rogue (greedy pigboy or powerjanny style), you got a problem.
Usually the ones enforcing the rules - the mods - are the group that, by design, lacks access to user info like IPs. So they either play whack-a-mole with old trolls under new accounts, or they rely on assumptions (i.e. stupidity) to keep control of their comms.
Your feed depends on which instances yours is federated with. So you either deal with the fact that you won’t get content that you’d otherwise want, or you register into multiple instances to check multiple, partially overlapping feeds. One by one.
Federated instances mirroring content from each other causes sync issues (got removed from A, but not B? You’ll still see it in B), storage issues (raising the requirements for people to create their own instances), and it’s a big liability (cue to CP being posted to LW, and every single admin team removing it from their own instances).
The biggest instance (by MAU) is as large as the seven following instances combined. This sort of demographic concentration is bound to defeat the advantages of a federation (sharing the burden, sharing the power) without alleviating its cons (added complexity).
The top 10 instances is mostly populated by general purpose instances, doing redundant efforts to provide the same content to the users.
What do those issues have to do with each other?
Look at Reddit.
- Users want their own Reddit communities, but they can’t build new “Reddit instances”. So they create their communities as “vassals” (subreddits) of the single Reddit instance.
- Since you always post in the same Reddit instance as you registered to, there are no federation woes like “I want content from instance A, but I’m in instance B and they don’t federate”, or “admins of my instance vs. admins of the instance where I’m posting”.
- Reddit cannot rely on other instances to provide content for its users. As such, it hosts all its content in a single, general-purpose instance.
I believe that, once you apply those three aspects of Reddit to a federation, you get the issues that I mentioned.
In other words those issues are born from trying to replicate a non-federation into a federation.
So, what should be done in your opinion?
I’m no coder, nor I want to pretend to be one, and I’m aware that some of those might not be viable. Still, if I had to propose something…
First of all, a change of paradigm: we (users: including mods, admins, developers, everyone) should see Lemmy first and foremost as a federation of forums and advertise it as such. Similarities with Reddit should be only secondary.
People who code in Rust would do an amazing job if they focused on instance creation and management. Ideally, it should be feasible even for a tech-illiterate granny running a potato computer to spin up her own instance.
I think that content mirroring needs to go away, with the users pulling the content straight from the instances where it’s created.
Interface developers should expect users to have 2+ accounts, and to log into all their accounts at the same time. The resulting feed should be a combination of the feed of those instances; handle this through the interface/front-end. And when the user is posting/commenting, ideally they should be able to choose which account to use, on a per-community basis.
Desktop users should be encouraged to migrate from “my instance’s website” to instance-agnostic front-ends, such as Alexandrite and Slemmy. [This doesn’t affect mobile users, I believe.]
We should be contributing more to specific-purpose instances (for example: mander.xyz, ani.social, etc.), at the detriment of general-purpose instances (for example: lemmy.world). Perhaps, at the start even migrate our comms to those instances.
Eventually [in the far, far future] I think that the concept of subreddit-like communities should be deprecated, with communities becoming simple sub-forums of the instance where they’re hosted.
By default, admins should focus mostly on the activity inside their own instances. Let the behaviour of their users in other instances up to those admins; a dog with two owners ends either overfed or starved.
When possible/reasonable, admins should be moderating more communities in their own instances.
It’s interesting how, by hosting your own instance, your view over Lemmy changes. I hope that self-hosters like you become more common.
Or rather, “content not found in their single instance is not present in Reddit as a whole at all”.
That’s the point here - it’s true for Reddit but false for Lemmy, as content available in one instance doesn’t need to be hosted yet again in another.
I phrased it poorly. What I tried to convey is that easier instance creation and management should be a priority for coders, so other people have an easier time hosting/managing their Lemmy instances.
Ugly workaround or not, I believe that this would be still sensible given the current state of Lemmy. Because when people want content from non-federated instances, here are their current solutions:
So the current state of the things actively encourages you to hop into big, general-purpose instances. That is bad for the federation, and it aggravates the “three groups to rule you, three sets of rules to follow” problem.
Do you happen to have an alternative for this idea? Preferably, one that would work with the Lemmyverse now?
Alternative would be that defederation happens on user- not admin level, which we’re getting closer to with 0.19 where users can block instances and don’t need to rely on the admin. This hopefully will lower the need for admins to defederate so many instances them selves.
It might reduce the problem but I don’t think that’ll solve it, as in some situations instances will still defed each other. For example, where an admin says “users from that instance break my rules, I don’t want to deal with it, defed time”.
“Content not found in lemmy.ml’s single instance is not present in lemmy.ml as a whole at all”
It’s not like Reddit represents the entire Internet, IDK why you’re giving them special treatment to exclude content without criticism.
But we are working towards more tools that will allow for defederation to be less needed and hopefully just a last resort. Remember Lemmy is still alpha software.
I do think we need defederation to be separate for communities, posts from users, and comments from users. I could see it being useful to allow the communities and posts from and instance and only banning their comments. Or have default ban lists (of instances, communities, users, posts from instances, comments from instances, etc) that the admins set and users inherit from but can customize personally.
A more accurate equivalence would be “Content not found in the lemmy.ml instance might be found elsewhere in Lemmy.” I’m talking about the federation vs. the lack of.
I did not claim (or even imply) that “Reddit represents the whole internet”. And I am not “giving them special treatment to exclude content without criticism”. It is just that this content exclusion and the criticism are not relevant in the context of this discussion.
I heavily encourage you to re-read the title of the post (just the title is enough), for context, and contrast it with your own comment. Do it. Please.
I’m just saying that Lemmy is a software not a website or service, it’s a bit unfair to assume that everyone running the Lemmy software will host all of the content from different sites, you don’t see this issue with Reddit because no one else is hosting the Reddit software
It’s something we could improve, but I also think that it’s not right to suggest all content hosted on any Lemmy should be visible on every other Lemmy. I mean the users who enjoy the Beehaw community probably aren’t interested in seeing Hexbear content anyways, so this is actually a good feature for them. Each instance admin should have a target market/demographic that they want to appeal to, so they curate their content to match that for the optimum experience for their users.
Similarly Reddit users probably wouldn’t like it if all 4chan content was mirrored to Reddit.