People need to realize you can use alternatives

  • Menachem@midwest.social
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    2 years ago

    tbf people just wanna sign up and click on funny links, not browse through 100 rando instances to find the one that lines up with their exact interests and wait for approval and worry about uptime and whether their instance will still exist in a year

    • slashzero@hakbox.social
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      2 years ago

      Very true. It would be sad to build up a persona on a smaller instance to then have it go dark and take your user with it. Other than losing your collection of “upvotes,” you can just recreate a new user with the same display name on another instance and keep going. 👍

      Holy crap, you can do Slack style emoticons? Huzzah! 🎉

    • Sinnoh@feddit.de
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      2 years ago

      Let me see if I underatand this correctly:

      If I create an account on a random, small instance. And then go to the “all communities” feed. I can automatically see all communities that are in my instance. In addition to that, I can see all communities of other Lemmy instances, that are “federated”. But I cannot see other communities from other nstances, unless I go on there, find the communitis and manually subscribe to them (I believe there are other ways to get them to show up, like using the search etc.?)

      So, as a normal user. Who’s just looking for a replacement for /r/all, wouldn’t joining the largest lemmy instance that is fedarated to many others (Just by how many users it has, because it’s the users who link instances by their actions?) make perfect sense?

    • lemillionsocks@beehaw.org
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      2 years ago

      I feel that, while lemmy is still a work in progress, it is already pretty adequate for solving this need. If you want to subscribe to other instances you can do it from within your insance by going up to communities and searching. You can also click the all tab and see a bunch of instances from around lemmy that your instance is federated with.

      I think mastadon struggled with this because the twitter model is to follow people and depending how far removed the servers are this can be trickier. Compared to lemmy where people interested in a single subject will likely target and find the subject theyre interested in and bring themselves together naturally.

      Furthermore I think some people are splitting up and dividing into sub instances and tiny subjects a little prematurely. Reddit didnt get super esoteric with it’s subs until it got big and the larger subs either declined or got too noisy to talk about certain things. Like for example how beehaw has an operatingsystems instance instead of a linux, ubuntu, macos, windows, fedora, archinux, opensuse, openbsd, etc. Right now there arent enough of us that we dont need to subdivide.

      • thegiddystitcher@beehaw.org
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        2 years ago

        I’ve seen people literally signing up here just to make like 50 empty communities and not post or comment on anything at all. Definitely a lot of folks just trying to stake some territory that they think will be valuable in the future.

  • Gloomy@mander.xyz
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    2 years ago

    I joined mander.xyz because it has a lot of science oriented communities and that’s why I’m here. Super happy to have found it.

  • MentallyExhausted@reddthat.com
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    2 years ago

    As someone who intentionally joined a different instance, the biggest issue is the “federation” doesn’t allow cross-authentication. Clicking a link to another instance moves me to that instance where I’m not logged in. Authentication should really be cross-instance.

    • SmugBedBug@sh.itjust.works
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      2 years ago

      I think this occurs because people haven’t gotten used to linking to communities on other instances properly.

      They usually post the direct link like beehaw.org/c/technology . Instead they should start using the federated link which is more instance agnostic like this: /c/[email protected] . This link will load the community from your instance.

    • Menachem@midwest.social
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      2 years ago

      assuming the servers are properly federated you should be getting a link that is still on your server. i mean, you got to this lemmy.ml link alright at least

      wait, i think i get what you mean, like if you get an external link while not browsing on your instance? you should just be able to paste that link into the search function to find your instance’s version of the post

      • MentallyExhausted@reddthat.com
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        2 years ago

        Yeah, I can manually search and find communities, but hyperlinks move you to the other instance (on a webpage; browsing within an app like mlem seems to work)

    • Hot Saucerman@lemmy.ml
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      2 years ago

      This is the way. If you don’t like the moderators, don’t play on their servers. It’s that simple.

  • Ghostalmedia@beehaw.org
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    2 years ago

    Problem is that a) new users don’t know that they can join communities across servers, and b) it is intuitive use start with the servers that a lot of people like.

    Instance browsing and onboarding is probably the biggest challenge to Lemmy’s growth. The current experience either scares new people away, or encourages them to congregate on a limited set of instances.

    • nattekrant@feddit.nl
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      2 years ago

      If the registration process just picked a random instance for you, maybe something nearby, and assured new users that they can visit communities and interact with users across instances, very few would pick the biggest instance.

      • _cnt0@feddit.de
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        2 years ago

        That isn’t guaranteed, though. The other day I wanted to create a new community and was browsing instances on join-lemmy.org/instances for an instance that was compatible rulewise. The one I picked evidently wasn’t a good pick (burggit.moe). Trying to advertise my new community, I found out it was defederated from beehaw (and likely others) and got insulted as a pedophilia sympathizer …

        Randomly assigning new users to instances would make a substantial fraction of people very unhappy.

    • goat@burggit.moe
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      2 years ago

      How’s it work if I get banned from one instance? Yet I can still comment in that instance I got banned from? No clue how that works

      • Barbarian@sh.itjust.works
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        2 years ago

        If you get banned from your home instance, you’re banned everywhere.

        If you get banned on a different instance, you can no longer post/comment/vote in communities there but otherwise you’re fine.

      • Vlixz@lemmy.ml
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        2 years ago

        Just joining in, and what will happen if the instance you created your account on decides to stop running. Does your account just dissapear?

  • derek@lemmy.one
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    2 years ago

    First I created account there and then landed on my current instance, because lemmy.ml’s admin views looks sketchy for me. Been living in ex-ussr for all my life I just cant accept all that communists and marxists and the fact that lemmy.ml has /c/Communism on it.

    I know that’s silly but that’s why I’m not there anymore.

    • underisk@lemmy.ml
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      2 years ago

      Profit motive ruined Reddit so you’ve come to a place created by communist then get upset that the people who made and operate it are communists. Yeah that’s more than a little silly.

      • that_one_guy@lemmy.ml
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        2 years ago

        There’s a difference between being a communist and blindly supporting authoritarian dictatorships wearing communist masks.

    • PolDelta@sh.itjust.works
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      2 years ago

      It’s not silly at all. I also made an account there before realizing the admins are tankies. It honestly sketches me out about Lemmy in general considering they’re the two lead (and currently only?) devs. Casts a big shadow over all of Lemmy when the devs are posting Xinjiang genocide denialism and their instance is at the top of the recommendations on join-lemmy.org. With lemmy.grad pretty high up there too.

      • Korgen@lemmy.korgen.xyz
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        2 years ago

        Yeah that’s what Lemmy started out as. The thing is with all the Reddit refugees flooding in it is diluting out the tankies. Besides, lemmygrad.ml is blocked by many instances. As for the values of the devs the great thing is that Lemmy is FOSS so if they go rouge someone will just make a fork of Lemmy.

      • ImplyingImplications@lemmy.ca
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        2 years ago

        At least with the way Lemmy is designed it doesn’t seem like even the main devs can have much of an impact.

        They even write themselves that if they made changes to the Lemmy codebase that some instance admins didn’t like, then those admins can decide not to upgrade their instance. The code is also open sourced so anyone with some tech know-how can fork the codebase and remove whatever they don’t like.

      • Gray@lemmy.ca
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        2 years ago

        All I know is that you should avoid lemmy.ml. In their /c/WorldNews community, an admin gave a four day ban to a user for posting an Axios article about the Chinese succession plan for the reason of “Orientalism”. Those guys are tankie shills. In my experience, lemmy.ca, sh.itjust.works, and lemmy.one seem solid. Obviously I personally went with lemmy.ca. But you should check out the admin profiles before you join any instance. That will tell you most of what you need to know. That and the modlogs (found at the bottom of the page) that will tell you what posts have been taken down and what people have been banned by mods on various communities.

          • Gray@lemmy.ca
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            2 years ago

            China and Russia. Thus censoring legitimate western media articles about China. There’s also a lot of anti-NATO bullshit. Here’s the Axios article they banned a user for posting.

              • Gray@lemmy.ca
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                2 years ago

                I generally align with the left most of the time, but I hate making one label the basis for your entire political opinion. I am very against censorship. My greatest pet issues have to do with censorship and democratic principles. In terms of American politics, I will never vote Republican. If I feel a Democrat has let me down in a big way, I would consider voting third party, but 99% of the time I would vote Democratic. Centrist Democrats piss me off more than leftist ones. My foreign policy stances are probably the least in line with the further left. I am generally pro-NATO with the understanding that NATO isn’t perfect. I just worry way more about a world with China/Russia at the helm given their propensity for censoring opinions that oppose their majority parties.

                • GarbageShootAlt2@lemmy.ml
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                  2 years ago

                  I am generally pro-NATO with the understanding that NATO isn’t perfect.

                  I’m terminally-online enough that I am used to the paths of most arguments that have appeared on this website about politics, but – and I say this to be transparent – this one baffles me and I don’t know how to respond to it. I’ve seen people say it but, well, it gets hard to explain within rule 1.

                  Maybe if we agree that “NATO is an extension of US foreign policy” we can sidestep the issue for now.

                  I just worry way more about a world with China/Russia at the helm given their propensity for censoring opinions that oppose their majority parties.

                  This one I am much more used to. Remembering that NATO is a military organization and not, you know, “who controls the internet,” I’d like to just present you with a simple pair of questions:

                  1. How many of the past thirty years has the US been at war?

                  2. How many of the past thirty years has China been at war?

                  Beyond that, for all the fearmongering people do, China is remarkably less interested in unilaterally dictating relations than you might think, so explaining things in terms of “which country is the master of the unipolar world order” is not justified. Unipolarity has only been the state of things for a little over 30 years (and only obvious for a little over 40) and was unheard of before that. There is no reason to suppose that the future can only be unipolar, especially if the country that ushered in unipolarity and viciously guards it with world-historic levels of violence (the US) is no longer the strongest force.

                  China has shown every indication of seeking bilateral development and cooperation. An example in severe microcosm is the US banning China from the International Space Station and China responding by making its own space station which the US isn’t banned from, nor most other countries (though I think it is still a finite list and not totally open, owing in part to being a new program). Stories like “debt traps” from China are grotesque projection, as China doesn’t do things like forced restructuring or asset seizure, unlike the IMF.

                  I truly think this sort of “US is the least of the available evils” ideology has a hard time existing except in a subcultural bubble where it meets no challenge at all, because it is an astoundingly flimsy position.

    • Marko 😆@lemmy.ml
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      2 years ago

      Is it possible to move instances once I’m registered or do I have to create totally new account on other instance?

      • thegiddystitcher@beehaw.org
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        2 years ago

        You’d need to sign up for a totally new account. There is talk of adding a migration feature but obviously that’ll require a bit of patience, they’ve got a long list of feature requests!

        • AgreeableLandscape@lemmy.ml
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          2 years ago

          Unfortunately an account transfer feature is pretty complicated to develop so it might still be a while. Devs need to make sure it doesn’t cause issues with federation when content changes home instances and domains, and transferring live user content over while retaining points, interactions by other accounts, and while having the same timestamp but now being hosted on a different instance, while ensuring there is only one canonical location/URL of the content on the fediverse, is not easy.

      • Liz@midwest.social
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        2 years ago

        The people who run lemmy.ml also run lemmygrad.ml and that second one has a fair amount of communist propaganda. I’m not talking about stuff like “workers unite!” I’m taking about stuff like “actually no one was killed at tiananmen square and if anyone was it was soldiers who were killed by those unruly students and not the other way around.”

        This wouldn’t be so bad, except that they federate Lemmygrad so the main instance will occasionally get to see literal propaganda that the admins won’t take down.

        Edit: So as not to get into a dumb argument, I’ll spell it out here in the edit for anyone who missed the point. The problem is not viewing the world through a different lense, the problem is an outright denial of reality. Denial of basic facts. You’re free to interpret facts however you want. You’re not allowed to just deny reality. This is a problem all over the world, and it’s bad no matter who is doing it.

        • mrmanager@lemmy.today
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          2 years ago

          I dont understand why it bothers you so much. Why do you need to have the same political views as people who run an instance?

          It doesnt even bother me that people have those opinions. You know how much stuff from the US that is complete lies and propaganda? You probably dont even notice if you are used to it. :)

          Its just the world we live in. There are no good countries. The US shot down hundreds or thousands of middle east civilians using drones from kilometers away, just routinely, like its nothing. Not seeing them as humans. Its like a computer game.

          I think its best to just focus on our lives and not try to act as forum soldiers for the countries we happen to live in. They are all bad.

          • Drew Got No Clue@lemmy.world
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            2 years ago

            No one is saying that the US is good though.

            Exactly because of what you said in your last paragraph, some don’t want to use an instance run by people with a certain political agenda.

            • mrmanager@lemmy.today
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              2 years ago

              I think its a mistake.

              We already divided the earth into countries, and now we are supposed to divide ourselves in the fediverse also because we cant stand eachothers opinins?

              • Drew Got No Clue@lemmy.world
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                2 years ago

                We are not supposed to do anything.

                Everyone is free to join any instance they think it’s good. We can communicate freely (bar a few exceptions) throughout the fediverse, so it’s not dividing users. Furthermore, lemmy.ml is overloaded, so that’s a good reason to choose another instance. The admins themselves don’t expect the majority to join that server as the primary one (they run it as the ‘flagship instance’).

              • Jeremy [Iowa]@midwest.social
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                2 years ago

                Are you seriously pretending things such as

                “actually no one was killed at tiananmen square and if anyone was it was soldiers who were killed by those unruly students and not the other way around.”

                are mere opinion?

                • dingus@lemmy.world
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                  2 years ago

                  I see this often in debate topics. Some people seem to think that every opinion is valid and worth listening to when no, I’m sorry, that really isn’t the case. There is no need to casually try to debate people who don’t believe the existence of the literal sun, or holocaust deniers, or those who think all gay people should be euthanized.

                  It’s a bit of a pet peeve of mine tbh, and I’ve always run into issues like this on discussion boards, especially of the past. Those with blatantly offensive and wrong viewpoints get bitchy when others don’t want their debate topics present because every opinion can be respectfully debated. No. Yes…often two opposing viewpoints can be valid. But other times, they most certainly are not. If you’re of the opinion that child porn should be accepted for example, it doesn’t matter how “respectfully” you try to present it and yourself. Your view is wrong and you do NOT deserve a platform to speak about it.

                • mrmanager@lemmy.today
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                  2 years ago

                  My point is, we shouldnt act like little fighters here on the fediverse, not when there are so much positive things to focus on.

  • kadu@lemmy.world
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    2 years ago

    I’m using Lemmy.world, but I still need to get away from the traditional mental model of usernames. It bothers me a bit knowing someone could use my username on another server and interact with the servers I do… But then again, nothing prevents someone from creating my Gmail on Yahoo. So it’s just a matter of getting used to things.

  • slashzero@hakbox.social
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    2 years ago

    It’s at the top of the list on join-lemmy.org’s popular server list, next to lemmy.world and beehaw.org, of course new users will sign up on the more popular ones. Plus, a few posts on reddit called out these three which set everything in motion.

    Once folks start to understand how it works, they might start to sign up on other ones, for a “cooler handle @ address” for their user, or register a domain and start their own instance like I did.

    Anyway, welcome aboard, right?

  • WalterzarBoBalterzar@lemmy.world
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    2 years ago

    I tried to make an account on lemmy.ml and it looks like their servers are (understandably) overloaded

    I ended up choosing lemmy.world instead

    My understanding is I’m not missing out on anything by chosing a less-popular instance. Did I get that right?

      • NekoRogue@beehaw.org
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        2 years ago

        Oof, I can see why some of those instances are blocked, though. Since I’m on Beehaw, I checked their block list and…wow. Scrolled through each one for a few minutes and now I’m hoping I’m not on some kind FBI list for it. A few highlights from my research expedition:

        • A meme featuring various characters (MLP, Vaporeon, Peter Griffin, etc) unironically mourning Ted Kaczynski
        • NSFL gore
        • People calling for the execution of cops who stopped rioters on Jan 6
        • SO. MUCH. LOLICON.
        • “Hahaha look at this WOKE LIB 🤣🤣🤣”
        • QANON. QANON EVERYWHERE.

        I was only on each one for a minute or so. I don’t think I’m missing out on anything except maybe being put on some kind of list.

        • amki@feddit.de
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          2 years ago

          Even if you wouldn’t like it, the cool thing here is you can decide for yourself. If… you feel the need to do so.

        • voxel@sopuli.xyz
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          2 years ago

          same, I’m on Sopuli and their Blocklist is pretty short but has the worst ones.

          they are really, really bad and some are straight up illegal in some countries.

          Mostly far-right ones, straight up terrorism (seriously there are people with RAF and other terrorist organization’s logos on their profile pics there), nsfl gore videos (like people dying and being tortured type of stuff), and nsfw ones full of underage anime girls in suggestive poses…

          lemmygrad is probably the worst one out of all of them, just because of it’s size (tankie terrorist group)

          • Skelectus@suppo.fi
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            2 years ago

            I haven’t blocked anything on my instance yet since I haven’t encountered that but maybe I should copy sopuli’s blocklist.