I have seen many comments saying that lemmy.world sucks, and sh.itjust.works is good. I have seen that lemmy.world apparently has a very poor reputation among other instances. Why? After a quick look, sh.itjust.works doesn’t look much different to me. Can anyone explain?
Edit: many good replies. the conclusion I’m drawing is that for my purposes it doesn’t really matter. I appreciate everyone who responded
lemmy.world had blocked !piracy@lemmy.dbzer0.com
Not jolly, not jolly at all 😕
Join us, sail free in the high seas! lemmy.dbzer0.com
Legitimately the reason I dropped .world and made an account at SJW. I don’t want my instance admins deciding what I do and don’t get to see without my input.
Of course, the SJW admins could decide to block it anyway, at which point I’ll make a dbzer0 account
Here’s the description by both:
sh.itjust.works:
A bilingual (EN/FR) general-purpose instance located in eastern Canada! Powered by 99% renewable energy! Everyone is welcome eh.
Lemmy.World:
A generic Lemmy server for everyone to use. (…) Lemmy.World is a general-purpose Lemmy instance of various topics, for the entire world to use
The comments about instances being “good” or “bad” is just plain ol’ tribalism.
Users get attacked for the instances they registered to, even if they were unaware of instance politics when they actually registered. That sucks!
Lemmy world has more users and therefore more likely to have more jerks when the jerk to not jerk ratio within an instance is the same.
There are/were a few instances where staying with their registration is worthy of assuming the worst about them.
I don’t know if I would agree with that assessment entirely, yes Lemmy.world has the same starting Jerk to not jerk ratio. However on Lemmy.world the amount of jerks who aren’t banned is higher than instances like blahaj.zone, dbzer0, or pawb.social. So there are more jerks on Lemmy.world, not because it attracts more jerks or has more users but also because it doesn’t ban them as often as other instances do.
I’m using jerk kind of loosely but I’ll clarify because people will think I’m trying to say someone should be banned for a rude moment but I’m not. When I say jerk, what I really mean is alt-right troll, transphobe, sealioner, climate-denier, etc. Someone who isn’t obvious enough to be caught as a spammer would but who is still bad for the community.
The extra jerks on Lemmy world create more content so the mean jerk time is greater
If they were spread between other instances they would have the same total jerk time.
The two main reasons people attack LW is:
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people who criticise it because it is by far the largest instance, and thereby means lemmy isn’t as decentralised as it could be, I think this is a fair point, because it has caused federation issues with for example aussie.zone in the past.
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Tankies who get mad the average lemmy.world user does not share their admiration for China, Russia, North Korea, Stalin, and Mao. Thereby accusing the whole instance of being “libs” and “bigots”.
Lemmy.world has kind of awful moderation, which means people who are trolls or bad actors have lived here for a very long time despite multiple reports. It was only recently that Linkerbaan (the most notorious one of all) was banned, and it took a thread complaining about bans in !yepowertrippinbastards@lemmy.dbzer0.com and dbzer0 admins messaging them to get their attention.
There are other people here like that which never receive permanent bans for consistently horrible behavior. It’s not great, and while I don’t agree with Beehaw’s decision to defederate over it I do think that things could be better. It does degrade user experience to have known trolls and assholes running wild and only getting a slap on the wrist when they do something horrible.
because it has caused federation issues with for example aussie.zone in the past.
Just to precise, it’s still the case
I’ll add 2 more that resonate with me:
- Discussions of distributing copyright material is banned. (Not actually sharing, obviously that is illegal, but they’ve banned the mere discussion of it.)
- They have not defederated from Meta’s Threads
Fwiw, LW seems ready to defederate from Threads at a moment’s notice (post), but atm it doesn’t matter since Threads isn’t federating with Lemmy anyway.
Though it’s still an excellent point to wonder why they haven’t done it preemptively, like pretty much every other instance I’ve heard of (even lemm.ee’s [blocked instance list[(https://lemm.ee/instances) that is shockingly short has that one). Perhaps bc the decision to defederate from any instance, and especially that one, has generated such negative feedback (as the post linked above mentions), they are hesitant to do anything at all, especially again while it does not matter right now.
The way they approached Threads is part of why I stuck with LW. Instance location doesn’t matter much to me and why would I go with an option that is more willing to take choice out of my hands?
Corporate or not, it should be my decision to interact with it. Unless it’s Nazis or some shit similar, I can block rather than rely on defederation and being told what to do.
Well, I hear that but at the same time the counterargument seems fairly strong. As I understand it (not being a mod of any communities here myself) apparently the mod tools suck pretty bad, especially across instance barriers. And in particular it is reportedly lacking standard filtering capabilities so that if Threads were ever federated with, the sheer VOLUME of content would quickly overwhelm the ability of the mods to keep up. Hence, if Threads were to join the Threadiverse, then Lemmy as it currently is now would have no chance but would cease to exist, almost instantly. And we would become an unmoderated playground.
I have no idea how Threads itself handles moderation, but at a guess, it wouldn’t (fully?) apply if people with Threads accounts were to comment on posts in Lemmy communities?
So Threads really is a special circumstance, not at all like federating with hexbear or exploding heads etc.
Even so, the admins do seem to be listening to the feedback of the users, rather than forcing that choice upon everyone, yeah:-).
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sh.itjust.works has a much funnier name.
can’t argue with that!
I agree with you. IMO, it’s not that different.
The big difference is between the tankie LARPer instances (lemmygrad, hexbear, parts of lemmy.ml) and the rest of the major instances.
As a socialist, you will understand I’m sure that constant being slurred with “tANkiE” from mostly .world users is very tiring
Says the person who has massive amounts of Antisemitic hatred and are quite happy to full on blow Putin’s dick whilst spouting his propaganda I’m not shocked you’re being called a Tankie
They never mentioned you or slrpnk
They got offended because they support that same crap and they see it being called out.
They used a political slur against entire servers and on the left, there is a concept of solidarity.
Solidarity with authoritarians has a long and sordid history of betrayal and being lined up against walls in the end. Anarchists have had to learn that lesson in the most brutal of ways.
Yep. They only tolerate you as long as you’re useful. As long as you don’t push back against their mass incarceration, assassination, and even genocide. Authoritarians are authoritarian first. Left or right is a distant afterthought.
Authoritarians are bad but lemme just stick up for Russia and Iran mmmkay.
There’s a difference between being a socialist, and blindly defending authoritarian regimes that claim they are socialist. Those instances earned their reputation for a reason.
Make it a stickie, because barely anyone observes this definition.
I am regularly slurred as Russian bot or a tANkiE when calling for peace and de-escalation of war.
Daily .
Have you stopped to consider that maybe you’re just an asshole?
No, seriously, you’re whining about being called a tankie when… like dude, you’re a tankie. Half your comments are just bringing up how EU/UK support for Ukraine’s defense is a frivolous waste or similar. I doubt you think of yourself like this but to an outside observer you’re deeply toxic.
I doubt you think of yourself like this but to an outside observer you’re deeply toxic.
From my position warmongering is deeply toxic.
No matter how much organizing you do with other anarchists offline, to the .world crowd if you’re to the left of Joe Biden you’re a tankie.
… the root of the problem is your apparent compulsion to call people “toxic” and “assholes” for having different views.
Ah yes, the “no u” gambit. Classic, deadly, refined. The most elegant of rebuttals. A refuge for only the sharpest of wits.
Anyways, do you mean different views like say, someone holding different (and by your own admission, quite common) opinions about how your conduct reflects on your character…?
They’re not calling you that for having different views. They’re calling you that for making up reasons to offend yourself and acting like a toxic drama queen. And the ratio shows they aren’t alone.
And what is your reason for adding your personal attack to this already well populated debate ?
There’s a huge difference between a tankie and a socialist:
- Socialist supports economic policy aimed at just distribution of resources
- Tankie supports fascist-like authoritarianism under a mask of socialism
How you to choose define it changes nothing .
Uh… Yeah, it does. It literally defines the meaning and the context in which the term is used. Thats… how language works. Fundementally.
Goodness me, you are being difficult today.
I think you can appreciate, that no one user’s definition - no matter how agreeable you and I might find it - speaks to everyone’s definition of the same term.
Especially when we are talking about colloquial slur, like tankie, which isn’t in main dictionaries.
Sure, but it does speak to that user’s definition, which is what they were talking about. And honestly, their definition is pretty much the standard. ‘A pejorative term for supporters of authoritarian regimes, particularly communist ones’ is the definition in some form across every site I’ve turned up in the thirty seconds I spent on this. It’s what everyone else in this thread appears to be using. Seems like its pretty agreed on.
It’s fair to call people who white-wash authoritarianism, genocide and roleplay as communists tankies.
This is not a matter of different opinions. They openly support the russian invasion, the atrocities of the russian occupation and reject Ukrainian identity and self-determination.
It’s the literal definition of the word.
.world is the instance where most new users default to so and it has the highest user base and that includes a lot of trolls or just bad faith actors. Also, a lot of .world is based from reddit users who left and they brought that kind of mindset along. Some people don’t like that either.
What does it matter which users are on which server, since we all get the same content anyways, aside from defederation?
we all get the same content anyways, aside from defederation?
We don’t, though. We get whatever content people on our chosen instance have subscribed to. Even without blanket server bans, there are Lemmy-based websites that your host has never heard of, hosting content you do not have access to. Someone from your server has to introduce those sites, and subscribe to the communities on those sites, for your server to have their content.
The fediverse is subscription based. Shit doesn’t get sent around unless it’s specifically asked for.
some instances pre-subscribe to new servers/communities across the verse using bots to ‘pre-load’ the /all/new for new users to be able to see locally to subscribe to
They still need to know about the servers, though. There’s no centralized index of servers. If you set up a lemmy-based website today, and you do nothing to make contact with the rest of the network, the network’s not going to find out about you.
There’s no home to phone to.
There’s no canonical whole that we all have access to.
Check out https://lemmyverse.net/
thats kind of on the admins though.
definitely a pitfall for users joining a shitty instance
Being subscription based is what makes it feasible for smaller instances to exist on the fediverse. If every instance had to be a full mirror of the network only a few small groups could afford to host instances.
It also points to what the best use of a federated content sharing network is, and it’s not “create something that looks like it has unfettered access to some canonical whole”. It’s small networks of users with related interests having the majority of their discussions with each other, while also being able to pull content from other interest groups they may be interested in.
Like, a… to re-use a random example I pulled out of my ass in some other thread… Mazda enthusiast forum, where most people are talking about their Mazdas, but also one person’s really into the New York Yankees, and another also cares about their Dodge truck. The usage case is 80% local discussion, 20% off-site.
The currently attempted model is “everything is general interest, and you have to search for your niche, and it could be anywhere”, because that’s how it works on Twitter, or even on Reddit (subreddit squatting, subreddit splits, and early millennial internet humour come to mind). But it’s all being done to disguise what the fediverse is, and make it look like what already exists, rather than trying to usher in something different. And it just… can’t compete that way.
it really doesn’t. those that make it about server handles are the reason movements fail, like get over yourself, ppl! hexbear came @ me pretty hard for my instance. fuck em.
hexbear is true garbage.
It doesn’t, except for the ones who like to browse local. And the .world admins have quite a few blocked instances. They seem to be a bit too liberal in defederating to my tastes. I feel as if it runs against the concept of federation itself.
The people in the early days of Fediverse who came up with cringey and misleading fediverse admins made a lot of claims that weren’t true. Like that here no one can censor (moderate) you and that it’s a freeze peach bastion. Both of these are not true at all. ActivityPub federation isn’t about no rules, freedom of speech, or lack of censoring. It’s about sites and services cooperating and inter-operating. Freedom of speech isn’t a goal of the fediverse, (alt-right trolls, transphobes, extremists need to be banned to have healthy communities) nor is it about not being able to be moderated. It is about websites to be able to cooperate and interoperate and share their content automatically with each others users.
If you wanted something for free speech and un-governability this isn’t it. You’re probably better off on Nostr. Until you realize how awful that actually is (even EH realized that hence why hilariouschaos.com exists).
I feel as if it runs against the concept of federation itself.
So, you believe that operating a website using Lemmy obligates you to host content from other sites that you don’t want to have a relationship with?
Because the concept of ‘federation’ does not come with the expectation that you abandon editorial control over what you host. That’s an expectation you’re projecting on it.
No one is obligated to do anything. The admins run the site and they can moderate how they feel. As a user, I can join their site or another one if I choose to.
My opinion of defederating is that it should only be used as a last resort. Taking a liberal approach to defederation means that a small amount of bad faith actors can completely shut down an instance and make it a pariah on the fediverse.
I think that having a choice about what instance you join and whether it’s liberal or conserative about defederating is the beauty of federation. someone might want to be on an instance that’s quick on the trigger about banning for transphobia, racism, etc, because they’re going through some shit in their lives, and later want to experience the greater variety of an instance where banning takes more consideration.
Like, I think you’re right about what you want for you, but people wanting different things and being able to get it is pretty great.
I agree, it’s a useful feature for certain people. I’m just not a big fan of site admins making the decision for you. It should only be used as a last resort IMO or to protect yourself against illegal content, CP for example. Normalizing defederation between instances can be abused by a small amount of bad faith actors. If you as a person don’t like a certain culture on an instance or community, just block it yourself.
They are just two different servers. Lemmy.World is one of the really big ones. I had an account there but because of the size there were a lot of performance issues. I would recommend you join one of the smaller servers like sh.itjust.works. You have access to almost all the same information on the Fediverse.
You’ll miss out on the Beehaw community on Lemmy.world and sh.itjust.works, since Beehaw defederated from them
Lemmy.cafe is a nice general purpose instance that only defederates from the most extreme instances, while still giving access to Beehaw and all other instances. It’s still small too, so it’d more effectively spread the load compared to creating an account on sh.itjust.works, which already has a pretty huge user count.
You’ll miss out on the Beehaw community
Beehaw seems completetly dead to me, there’s only ever a handful of comments on posts.
They still have a little over 300 Monthly active users, which puts it in line with my own instance. So not huge, but certainly not dead.
They have really heavy handed moderation
Yeah they’re way too extreme up to the point of walking on eggshells around them. Personally I never participated there but from what I’ve seen they go way too harsh. I think their intentions are good but they still need to loosen up a bit, okay a lot.
Though in a way it’s good because it means they broke the early network effect they had in their communities by cutting off lemmy.world and sh.itjust.works.
If you consider lemmy.ml and hexbear.net “most extreme” then sure.
Lemmy ml are huge terrorist apologists
Considering their main export is genocide and dictatorship apologia, I do
An instance who is federating, with pedocriminality, far rights, etc,
Super this workaround,Not every person on lemmy.ml is an “leftist” who wants imperialist system,
Beehaw is not worth the effort. Their audience is way too sensitive to participate with any reasonable level of social interaction. You will live on eggshells if you wish to participate there,
Their audience isn’t the problem it’s mainly the moderation style they use, which is very extreme, even compared to similar instances like lemmy.blahaj.zone.
I’ve never had a problem, always enjoyed my time interacting there 🤷
Same.
Same, my posts in Beehaw technology community often get more upvotes than on lemmy.world’s one and I never had any problems with it
I have seen that lemmy.world apparently has a very poor reputation among other instances.
It’s the largest by far, with five times the monthly active population of #2. One of the main things people want out of federated systems is decentralization, and having one huge dominant server goes against that goal.
I should note .world wasn’t the biggest when I signed up. I picked it because mastodon.world was a known quantity, which led me to believe the same team would run a stable server.
Basically none. Both are mainstream instances, not practicing any extreme moderation policy.
You might have confused lemmy.world with lemmy.ml which does have some communities with bad reputation.
I have accounts on both. Sh.itjust.works has a piracy community that .world blocks and is still federated with Hexbear for some reason. .world has old.lemmy.world if you liked the old reddit UI.
Otherwise, not that different.
Lemmy.dbzer0.com has the best piracy community :D
Damn. I was considering making a sjw account to see if the better performance claims are true but hexbear is a dealbreaker. Never going back to that crazy cult site. I know I could block it but they’d still see my posts and comments.
For the record, I just added hexbear to the sjw blocklist.
They use an allowlist and they previously removed us from it, so we were effectively defederated already for most of the past year. But it seems that they may have refederated with us silently within the past couple weeks. I’m not exactly sure.
Anyway, I’ve heard this rumor about us still being federated with hexbear a few times, so I decided to clarify the situation.
great! and thanks for telling me
For the record, I just added hexbear to the sjw blocklist.
Good to know, that whole thing was always a bit confusing
Basically we were in the process of having a discussion about defederating them, and then they blocked us before we could have a vote in c/Agora.
So it seemed like the problem was solved. But the fact that they don’t appear on our blocklist has been misleading to others, so I think it’s better to make it official.
Especially because they likely did it knowing they could sneakily refederate later without people knowing, which is probably what they did recently.
Also note that “blocking” it doesn’t actually “block” much of anything at all - it stops you from seeing the communities located on that instance, but the users will still appear in posts all across the Fediverse, sending their harassing messages to you, pinging your Notifications every time they reply to you, downvoting your own comments, etc. The instance block function is horribly misnamed.
If you want to avoid this kind of thing, I second that recommendation to try Lemmy.cafe - it is the only Lemmy instance that defederates from the Big 3: hexbear.net, lemmygrad.ml, and Lemmy.ml. The latter one is like 1000x easier to deal with than hexbear, yet still nearly all of the most batshit insane comments I’ve received on Lemmy after defederating from the other two have come from it - and for similar reasons that they get used to how things work inside their echo chamber, and then behave the same way when they venture outside of it - so I consider having defederated from it too worthwhile overall. Although you will miss out on some content such as !Firefox@lemmy.ml that way.
You just wanted a pepsi! And they wouldn’t give it to you!
shit has the same or better level of infrastructure for a smaller user base
To those who promotes lemmy.cafe as a solution,
No shame that the instance doesnt block far rights and pedo instances ?Start considerate your self at a moment,
Not every leftists are for imperialisms… True leftists are humanists, and want the right for people to get autodetermination,
At a moment, stop being ridiculous,
So far my experience with sh.itjust.works has been shit. I was banned from a community there for “vibes”.
Which community?
https://sh.itjust.works/c/noncredibledefense. They could bother to give me a reason.
I just looked at your modlog history and it could be for multiple reasons. You have used some offensive language in the past. That probably has something to do with it.
The ban predates all of that. Do communities ban for comments in other communities?
You’ll have to message the community mods for clarification. They’re the ones who created and maintain the community, so they get to decide who gets banned and why.
Getting banned for a comment in another community is certainly possible, depending on what you said. I don’t necessarily agree with that moderation style and it doesn’t represent most communities on SJW, but that particular community tends to attract some heavy trolling, so I can understand if they’re a bit trigger-happy on the ban hammer.
Most servers don’t micromanage community moderation. That sort of thing could happen almost anywhere.
Many libs, racists, and bigots on both
Thanks for adding yourself to my block list :)
lmao you should add me too, I hate having libs, racists, and bigots reading my posts
A pleasure.
