OpenStars

Isn’t ActivityPub extremely network intensive though? If all you wanted was a single user subscribing to a handful of communities then Lemmy would be inexpensive but to pull from a lot of communities I thought people have said that it can cost a bit of money, time, etc. Also defending against attacks such as CSAM.

Maybe make a distinction then between running a “tiny personal instance with only a few niche community subscriptions” vs. a small instance, either with multiple users or even just one person subscribing to many communities, if that cost would start to become more prohibitive?

Yes and moreover, feeds work at the community level, not individual posts. Which is a step in the right direction but you may want finer-grain control. Filters may offer more what you are looking for in that case.

I did not mention previously but PieFed also allows you to block all users from a user-specified instance, without requiring admin approval to perform full defederation. It is not perfect but it is very good and e.g. I use it to block Lemmy.ml, which saves me a lot of headaches as most of the worst, most argumentative and unfriendly (and batshit insane) comments I’ve seen come from there. Lemmy’s instance filter is horribly misnamed - it would have much better been called a community muting, as it blocks communities from that insurance but the users remain free to troll you in communities located in other instances, leaving replies, triggering notifications, etc.

The Lemmy apps Sync and Connect can also block all users from an instance.

Edit: also check out !bestoflemmy@lemmy.world - it uses cross-posts to build up a curated listing of “good” posts by some metric. Conversely, the entire instance of beehaw.org works the opposite by extensive manual curation efforts to remove “bad” content by other metrics.

I can think of 3 easy ways to do it off the top of my head… all using PieFed. (1) Straight-up filtering of keywords, which allows All, None, or Some; (2) user customizable and shareable Feeds, so someone creates a good collection and everyone benefits; (3) the entire model of browsing content using PieFed is different: by offering more than simply Subscribed vs. All, you can do something like not subscribe to any political or news communities (i.e. have your cake), so that it doesn’t show up in your Subscribed feed, but then when you want to read that content, it is a click away in the News and Politics Feed (or another similar one of your choice made by you or other users; i.e. eat your cake too).

Using Lemmy though, no not really (not “trivially” I mean). Search for people using ad blocking filters, possibly Ublock. Maybe an app would help? But I don’t know which ones and kinda doubt it - I haven’t seen such a thing in Voyager or Thunder or Interstellar, etc. Development of the Lemmy codebase, in the highly difficult Rust language, is super slow. Basically if you want something like this, you’d have to code it yourself.

A workaround could be to make several Lemmy alts - one for each type of content you would want to include in your Subscribed feed. Like one could be only uplifting news. Most of the time you’d be looking at the same older content though… without being able to widen your view that would allow bringing in of new content.

Edit: I did think of another way: you could run your own Lemmy instance, and use a bot to curate the content however you wish.

Or again, PieFed already has multiple forms of it.

Instance blocking works on:

1. PieFed
2. the Lemmy apps Sync and Connect
3. instance admins who can choose to defederate
4. someone willing to go deep and make a custom web browser filter (presumably like Ublock Origin I would guess)

Nothing else works.

PieFed is trying a bunch of new stuff that even Reddit does not have, enabling the democratization of moderation by putting more power into the hands of individual users (e.g. mods don’t have to be as aggressive as removing many posts with keywords when users who want such can set their own preferences via the built-in keyword filtering, which enables All, Some, and None).

Lemmy to me looks more like a straight attempt to copy, although the modlog is a great addition - unfortunately in the absence of notifications of a moderation event, lack of modmail, and presence of an obscured moderator name, Lemmy has somehow become even more authoritian than Reddit.🤷😳

Though with a MUCH more friendly userbase, and most admins, and ofc lack of profit incentive which all by its lonesome helps a ton.

Bc he’s just that chill, obviously! 😁

I used to think it was that, but now I realize that it’s not “just” communication.

Like Lemmy for instance is somehow more authoritian than Reddit itself - not for an instance admin but for the end user I mean. While there is a modlog, there is no modmail, no notification about an event such as removal of someone’s post, no ability to even know who to DM to ask for clarification or appeal (the modlog used to say more, but nowadays simply says “mod”), and on Lemmy.ml people are routinely banned from communities that they have never even so much as heard of, for making a comment in some other community, and importantly, for violation of an entirely unwritten rule (that while the instance is e.g. pro-genocide when done by certain nations, any negative portrayal of an action done by other nations is not allowed). The latter, especially when the end user receives no notification of it happening, sounds an awful lot like shadowbanning to me.

Instance admins are free, mods can be depending upon the graces of their admins, but end users… are given whatever freedoms the admins allow. Just like Reddit, except less content, and no modmail. No amount of merely explaining this to people who tried Lemmy, got bullied (stories abound in r/RedditAlternatives), and went back, is going to convince them to try again. The tools themselves just don’t live up to the hype that people have already tried promising, and the development moves at a snail’s pace.

Though PieFed gives me more hope.

To add to what InEnduringGrowStrong@sh.itjust.works@sh.itjust.works said, Beehaw has much more strict standards for behavior than Lemmy.World or sh.itjust.works that both prioritize free speech more (the former from a kind of centrist perspective). It’s not that either of those two instances are “bad” per se, just that they are enormous in size and the Beehaw moderation team felt that they could not keep up.

Beehaw has much less content overall though. But it is worth looking at if you are hoping for a nicer place on the internet.

Also for people who live in West Virginia, USA, consider dubvee.org, which uses the alternative Lemmy UI “Tesseract”. The admin AdmiralPatrick puts in a ton of effort trying to keep toxic people out, and is a fairly chill dude himself:-).😎

Perhaps especially after this.

Not just that, but “Reuters and CNBC reported it” as well. It snowballed from X to mainstream news then back to X again and back to people talking in “reputable” news again, again and again.

At this point I’m wondering just how much if any that mainstream for-profit media is any better than X at reporting anything at all.

I am currently at 100% of the people that I’ve told about Lemmy irl actively chiding me for having mentioned it to them. It doesn’t help that (1) Lemmy.ml is the #1 Lemmy instance in a Google search, and (2) that instance uses Local rather than All when you don’t have an account. If someone told me to consider joining Lemmy.ml, and that first couple of pages of content were all that I saw - especially just before any election in a Western nation - well then now I understand their reaction perfectly, as it is the correct one!?!?

Conversely, PieFed has a number of features that Lemmy lacks, one being the ability to actually block all users from an instance (rather than merely mute communities but not actual users on it - leaving them free to troll you in other communities, reply to your comments, trigger notifications, downvote your content, etc.). Since blocking lemmy.ml, I have had zero regrets, and enjoy interacting with Lemmy communities much better:-).

The real biggest problem that Lemmy has is lack of users and overall dearth of niche content - which ofc wraps back around to why would someone willing come here to be bullied just for being a mainstream centrist or even “leftist” by USA standards (Reddit is based in and its largest userbase is from the USA)?

Bullying is why Lemmy will never grow. That, and how the tools are somehow even more authoritian than Reddit - i.e. there is a modlog but no modmail, nor notification of a moderation event, instead the modlog simply says that a “mod” did something, if you go to the trouble to find out why nobody bothered to respond. And worse, on Lemmy.ml you’ll find yourself banned from communities that you’ve never so much as heard of, citing having broken a rule that seems not written down anywhere. The lack of transparency is very reminiscent of the spez.

Fortunately, PieFed and Mbin offer non-Lemmy options to the Threadiverse.:-)

That’s great!

I was just talking with an admin of Lemmy.zip who automatically puts up a community muting of HB for new users joining that instance, but not going so far as to defederate from it. So… that surely helps a little bit? Except when Hexbears brigade a community located on a different instance.

But the example I gave of a mod throwing out death threats to users involves lemmy.ml rather than Hexbear. Both instances are problematic in that regard, ML mostly for the admins and the mods that they choose to protect, while HB the subset of users that go outside of the instance to engage in trolling. In both, it is also entirely possible to have completely sane and normal conversations on the instance itself, which muddies the waters a bit, though the presence of sanity on occasion does not negate the presence of insanity on others.

And I was thinking of editing my comment but instead I’ll put it here, your own posts such as https://www.reddit.com/r/RedditAlternatives/comments/1fmuk7o/post_to_address_the_usual_criticism_about_lemmy/ most definitely covers both the strong benefits as well as strong criticisms of using Lemmy, as well as solid solutions to the latter problems.

Lemmy has a well-known reputation as being a “Nazi bar”. e.g. as mentioned in this example post in r/RedditAlternatives complaining about toxicity on Lemmy, here is one of the comments therein (not from OP but as part of the overall conversation):

If their experience is anything like mine, it’s populated by mostly far left wing Americans who were banned from Reddit for being too extreme. I disagreed with someone about a topical left wing American position and received death threats. In fact I’ve never received that many death threats on Reddit. Lemmy is extreme.

Even if the threats came from Hexbear or one of the lemmy.ml mods who are allowed to make death threats against users without any repercussions, “we” still expose “our” users to such content when we federate with those communities. i.e., for exactly the same reason that we defederate from instances that share CSAM, if we really, truly, genuinely don’t like it when mods make death threats against users, then we need to put a stop to it - by defederating those instances that are known to do exactly that.

Otherwise we give our tacit approval, and moreover whenever we encourage people to join Lemmy instances, we willingly expose those people to this kind of content. Would you expose someone to CSAM, knowingly and without warning them first? Then why is it different when we can see the death threats, delivered by mods, who are not censured in any way, yet still encourage people to come here to Lemmy communities? Are we truly that desperate for content that we are so inconsiderate to them as to expose them to that without warning?

If you somehow have not heard of this yet and really don’t know what I’m talking about, a lot of details are offered in Discuss.Online’s (successful) Petition to defederate from hexbear.net, although that particular mod in question is from Lemmy.ml.

The Alt-Left is my own phrase for people who act identically to the Alt-Right (as described in e.g. Innuendo Studios’ The Alt Right Playbook - gish gallop, didoing, pyramid thinking, controlling the conversation, etc.), just on the “left” side. The more traditional term is the (much more?) pejorative “tankies”. There are several communities that discuss these events - one entirely dedicated to tankies in particular is !meanwhileongrad@sh.itjust.works, but as the abuses are rampant you will also see it in !yepowertrippinbastards@lemmy.dbzer0.com, !fediverselore@lemmy.ca, etc.

This graphic depiction may also help:

This will explain SO MUCH why so many people are site-wide banned from communities that they have never even so much as heard of, citing a rule that makes no mention of anything that their supposed offense is. Once you realize that the reason that Lemmy was created was bc Reddit banned the code developers, you will see why they created their own Reddit 2.0, which in many ways is somehow even more authoritarian than Reddit itself is. e.g. here we have a modlog, but there is no modmail, nor a notification of a moderation event, and the modlog simply says it was done by a “mod”, so you have no idea who to ask for clarification, or to appeal the decision - all you are left with is the “choice” to go somewhere else (or…?).

Mind you, instance owners are very free, and mods likewise have a great deal of power subject only to instance admins, but individual users not so much - not even the right to be notified that your content was removed (sounds similar to shadowbanning doesn’t it?).

OTOH, software is software, and so we are here as well, trying to find some way to talk that isn’t owned by a corporate entity.

Here’s a highly relevant post: https://lemmy.world/post/21055894, see also it + the comments in the OG cross-post it was from (its first link).

If it helps to add: ditch the analogy about the Fediverse being like email, for the level of understanding that you are seeking. Instead, consider it like a bunch of ships (hehe, free traders and… otherwise), each passing messages around.

When A posts to C, A knows about it, but more importantly everything connected to C also knows about it too. A copy of the message has been shared with all the partners. So yeah, thus B knows about it too, despite the lack of direct connection to A.

Although then when B sends C the downvote action, A is not told, bc of the defederation. So everything connected to C and B knows about the downvotes, with the exception of instances that have disabled downvotes entirely, and those who ignore all messages coming from B, plus those who likewise ignore all messages coming from A.

Where it starts to get tricky is that defederation does not have to be symmetrical, although ideally it always would be. In theory, and it has most definitely happened, messages sent from one instance to another can definitely be influenced by an asymmetrical pattern of defederations.

I wouldn’t worry as much about Alt-Right conservatives here - they tried but couldn’t get a foothold, and after being defederated from all instances eventually collapsed internally, and went to Truth Social.

Here, we ironically have much more to worry about from the Alt-Left that uses identical patterns of behaviors, just ostensibly on the “left”.

Just use the search function and sort by Top All Time and you’ll find everything you need. But if it helps, here’s my own (successful) Petition to defederate from hexbear.net on Discuss.Online, making that USA instance safer to recommend to aid people fleeing Reddit. You can click the links and read with your own eyes examples of those admins being caught lying to other admins, and one case of a mod tripling down in saying how they wanted to kill someone for a simple misunderstanding of a scenario in a game (although do such details matter in the slightest?) - that one was on lemmy.ml though. And btw in case it helps, How do I block users from an instance of my choice? (TLDR: it’s super difficult, not really entirely possible without jumping through some rather hefty hoops, but with enough effort or sacrifice of freedom of other choices it is possible).

Thank you - I just found that after writing all that out:-).

I just commented over there too, saying:

There’s a huge difference between someone “doing precisely what they said they would do in advance” vs. a “Power-Tripping Bastard”, imho.

And my reasoning is that he outright says in advance that that is precisely what he will do?:

As an instance, we’re pretty heavily moderated in order to maintain a welcoming atmosphere that fosters civil discussion. We don’t “tone police” everything, but we do expect users, local and remote, to behave themselves and act in a rational, civilized manner. Those who cannot, local or federated, are quickly shown the door.

So it’s not 100% a bad thing, nor is it a wonderful thing either for people’s modlogs to be contaminated with a preemptive ban for a community that they have never heard of. He definitely seems to be trippin, but like, not maliciously, if that makes sense? Rather, like Beehaw, he seems to be attempting to make use of rather inadequate tools to do a job, and not caring so much how others interpret his actions.

One thing that is HUGE for me: let’s say that you don’t want an abortion. Okay then, so don’t get one? Something that affects purely oneself should be a decision made purely by themselves? To the extent that he is making a decision that affects solely his instance, he is entirely justified in doing so. Except that’s not 100% what is happening: there is a modlog entry that gets made. It’s tiny, it’s trivial, but it does involve the other party. Hence he gets some flak for that, and that’s fair.

But tbf, let’s examine the other side to that story: have you see the front page of Lemmy lately? Half the posts call for murder, if not outright in the title, then at least in the comment section?! I get it, the recipient was a bad guy, but let’s not mince words: vigilante justice will not end well. Imagine a guy walking home after finally getting his first month’s pay, except they delayed his first paycheck so he is walking home with $1000 dollars from his first two months paycheck in his pocket. If someone kills him and takes the money b/c “he’s rich” - never mind his home, his family, the medicine that his sick kid needs - how is that justified? I’m saying: who gets to decide who “deserves” this style of “justice” or not? The Russian bot farms posting on Lemmy? The people who hear it and genuinely believe & spread it around further?

I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again: I am not against porn existing, but I am against it existing outside of bounds - it’s not friendly, when it appears without consent. Similarly, calls for murder shouldn’t be appearing in “memes” or “shitpost” communities that are made for fun. Like, I may be down for a serious discussion every now and then, but dammit can’t I have 5 fucking minutes to look just at puppy and cat videos?!? The answer, ofc, is no, b/c I am not offered that choice: my only choice is to “use Lemmy”, to “not use Lemmy”, or “to spend hours and hours and hours and hours configuring Lemmy to suit my needs”.

Have you noticed how we have less content / posts than we used to? We have more “users” - I have had 4 alts in the last year, 3 of which I actively maintain so I am 3 of these “monthly active users” all on my lonesome. And Blaze is like upwards of 20 (with good reason, though that level is likely unusual). Conversely, look at communities such as !nathanwpyle@lemmy.world - it had ~4 posts per month routinely, but now has none in the last 2 months. Where did they go? Damn, I REALLY loved those comics too:-(. I don’t have an Instagram account but I see much more content - including related to December - at https://www.instagram.com/nathanwpylestrangeplanet/?hl=en, just not on Lemmy anymore?

When we become known for being the Alt-Left, “Nazi fascist bar” that we are (advocating for extreme violent solutions = the most extreme form of leftist), mainstream people aren’t going to want to hang out here anymore. Admiral Patrick is one of the few that are fighting back. Now you are too, in even so much as asking for an instance that has defederated from the big 3 tankie instances (although imho it’s already too late for that: yes the “tankieness” is contained on those 3, however the extremism that so often goes along with that has spread to beyond those 3 instances - it’s fucking everywhere now), but he’s putting in some EFFORT to clean up this space.

I am halfway thinking of joining dubvee.org tbh, if he’ll have me… sure his method contaminates the modlogs, but it’s something to try to stem the tide of toxicity and extremism? And that’s better than nothing, to at least be able to take a break from it all for a handful of minutes each day and just breathe? I am not against others being free to vent their thoughts, but my thoughts should matter too, at least to myself?

I concede that there are no perfect solutions here.

About Admiral Patrick: really? I had not heard that. That would be horrible if true I agree, but is it? What I did hear is that he preemptively bans people before they comment at all, based on their past history. There is one troll in particular that he mentioned banning despite how they kept making alts (I dunno exactly who, just the situation), and that seems fine to me (assuming the situation was as described). However, every single person that I ask for details refuses to provide any. I did hear indirectly one reason offered: “syncing instance bans to community bans”, which I don’t know what it means but also seems likely to not be nefarious?

Speaking of, I read through !yepowertrippinbastards@lemmy.dbzer0.com fairly regularly but haven’t seen anything at all for him like that - do you happen to recall any further details that you could search for and send me a link? Searching for like dubvee or admiral or ptz all returns zero hits.

I did see this post in another community: Admin log from DubVee, with text body:

This is from the same instance that randomly bans people from being too “extremist” who have never interacted with it’s communities.

So people seem to be complaining about him banning extremists / tankies, although in the context of this post seems to be presented as a positive “feature”? Seriously though, if somehow the community at yepowertrippingbastards has voted him as a PTB - which again, I can’t find that by searching - please do let me know? A key point there is transparency: if he says one thing but then does another then that’s a PTB, but the instance seems very clear about what’s going on, with text “Offering a safe, chill environment for a better, nicer Lemmyverse.” Essentially it’s a mini-Beehaw, which he also cites as his model.

So if someone doesn’t like it then they don’t need to join, problem solved:-). Other than the Dubvee.Meta community, I am aware of no other communities located on that instance, so unlike Lemmy.ml, it’s not like he’s holding any users or content hostage there - it’s entirely up to the locals there if they want that kind of experience or not, being taken care of by such an admin as would keep away what he deems as trolls.

I don’t know much about infosec.pub, beyond what is said here: https://lemmy.fediverse.observer/list. It is the 18th largest instance iirc, based in Germany, very high uptime, its sidebar has next to no information about it, and it’s fairly small with only 2 admins and ~4k monthly active users. I can add though: I think they must have only recently defederated from Lemmy.ml bc Blaze and I checked all the top 20 at some point. I see no discussion about it in !infosecpub@infosec.pub. A local search also shows nothing. I wonder if most of the uses there even realize that, and notably I wonder if it could be temporary, due to the server sync issues with it a month ago (see here). If so, then joining this themed instance specifically for that temporary condition may lead to regrets…

Sadly, there are no “great” options here:-(.

Side-note: “instance blocking” is misnamed, don’t be mislead - all that does is mute communities on that instance, but it still shows you all of their comments on posts to communities not on that instance (cough Cowbee cough cough), plus they can reply to you, generate constant notifications (for WEEKS and WEEKS on end if they choose to - it’s happened to me, once for hexbear.net and again for lemmygrad.ml, back when my instances were still federated with those, and when I was naive and fresh and had no idea what I was walking into by replying to a post that I had found on All, not having read the community sidebar first), and also they can vote on and influence your content. Only true defederation will prevent the latter though.

1. lemmy.cafe as you saw, but it has some technical problems - e.g. notice how none of the image previews load when you visit? I have no idea what further problems lie behind that one - all I know is that it has persisted for weeks, which does not fill me with confidence. Still, not a bad idea to at least test for yourself?

2. dubvee.org, which has a friendly site admin though a nonstandard (& nonintuitive?) web UI “Tesseract”; he is super aggressive at blocking both the Alt-Right and also the Alt-Left and also trolls regardless of instance; the major down-side being that it is not a wide-spread general-use instance, and limited to W. Virginia USA atm. Anyone who likes to argue may get booted quickly though.

3. quokk.au, although it has only a single admin rather than a team of such, and people say that their requests to join can get ignored for days as a result, also it’s in Australia, so with that geographic distance I would worry about federation of content particularly from Lemmy.World that holds ~80% of the Lemmy users and most of the Fediverse content (at least, this is a major issue for Aussie.Zone also in AU). Here too you could make an account and test it out, prior to recommending to friends? If so, let us know your experiences with it?:-)

4. PieFed allows you to block all the users from any instance of your choice without needing a site admin; this Lemmy alternative also has many fantastic upgrades over Lemmy (categories of communities, hashtags, YouTube video embedding, which Tesseract also offers, and more), however it lacks many of the more foundational aspects (user tagging, searching is primitive, many Notifications do not actually go to what they point at so that gets super frustrating), so while I am located there myself this is not something that I would recommend to everyone, only “early-adopters”, particularly those who can fall back onto a Lemmy alt when necessary.

5. I have heard that the Sync and Connect apps can block all users from any instance of your choice, without needing admin approval. They have a number of other nifty features as well. I have never used either of these, but these might be your best option?

6. Sublinks… well, that’s not an option “soon” at any rate.

7. Otherwise someone would need to spin up a new instance, at which point they can do whatever they choose, but it’s a lot of work, particularly a lot of network bandwidth. Or convince an existing admin team to defed from lemmy.ml? It’s hard enough for most to decide to defed even from lemmygrad.ml and/or hexbear.net though.:-(

More details

Face it: we are a Nazi bar, or rather the Alt-Left equivalent of one. It takes enormous efforts to carve out a corner of this open social web that fights back hard against a Nazi fascist, and most are unwilling to do what it takes. Though slowly but surely, I do see MAJOR improvements over time - e.g. Discuss.Online recently defederated from hexbear (though unfortunately not also Lemmy.ml), so I view that as a strong even if not entirely sufficient step forward.