I’ve been looking for a free Reddit alternative and preferably one that was federated. I’m not really sure how federation works with this though. A lot of similar sites are just personal projects that people made as a hobby that lack a lot of important features or the interface was really ugly.
I haven’t seen how to moderate communities though but the Github page says this can be done, which I consider important since I want moderation to be done by communities and users rather then admins. If there’s a quarantine feature similar to Reddit that would be useful too so I don’t just have to ban communities.
Funny to see that they got banned after a few hours for being an alt-right memelord. I guess this platform wasn’t what they were looking for after all…
Perhaps they are still interested in the sense that they are willing to create their own instance.
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Same here! I actually like how small this community is. But I still find it hard to wrap my head around the whole “federated” part. I het that I could message other users on other sites and instances of the fediverse, but how would I follow them, or subscibe to content that is not on this site? Or is that not part of this?
For now federation is only between different Lemmy instances
Oh I see
I have created a post in Fediverse Futures to address Ideas for federating Lemmy to the Fediverse. It is a brainstorm area, so feel free to add your thoughts on what Lemmy should offer :)
Here is a federated community: !communism@lemmygrad.ml. Just click on it, then you can subscribe, vote, comment etc.
I see, so since all the lemmy instances are federated, I could visit all of them and subsribe to different communities, right?
Yes, just paste the url of a community, post etc into the search bar of your own instance to interact with it.
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Yep, it’s the closest thing to what I’ve been looking for in a long time.
Though I wish it focused a bit more on “topics” or categories that were cross-instance rathen than specific communities centralized in specific instances. I use sites like reddit more as a way to get aggregated news rather than as community forums. But I think it’s getting there little by little.
topics" or categories that were cross-instance
Do you mean … ?
- the ability to create a community hosted on two instances at the same time
I don’t the point of that. You create a community on one instance and people from other instances can join it. What is wrong with that?
Or mayne you mean …?
- Automatically merging two communities with the same name that exist on different instances.
What if the same name labels two different topics? On the other hand, what if two communities on the same topic have different names? (eg on reddit there’s r/howyoudoing and r/friendstvshow) I think it’s up to the communities to decide whether to merge or not.
If you are involved in communities that you think should merge, I think the only viable first step is to understand why they are differennt communities.
I feel that lemmy is a bit too centralized around lemmy.ml, there’s very little point to make, for example, a “!Fediverse@some-other-less-popular-instance” when you already have !Fediverse@lemmy.ml where most people are …unless you make your instance centered around some specific subgroup, subculture or language (but even in that case you could have also made more communities in lemmy.ml to include those groups too) …it kind of defeats the point of federation if most of the network is centered around a single big instance.
Maybe your idea of merging 2 communities could be a way to mitigate this, but it doesn’t necessarily need to be done based on their name. Reddit has a feature called “multireddit” that basically aggregates multiple subreddits. For example, here’s a multireddit that combines a subreddit for each of the 7 continents: https://old.reddit.com/user/lookseerouw/m/continents/
I feel that lemmy is a bit too centralized around lemmy.ml
Agree, but this is not a feature issue. The problem is that most people are on lemmy.ml, and so are naturally the communities that they create. The question is how to get newcomers (including myself actually !) to register on other instances.
Reddit has a feature called “multireddit” that basically aggregates multiple subreddits.
Right, but multireddit are just aggregated feeds from different communities, not actual merging.
Anyway, I don’t think that this merging idea is a good one, I was just trying to figure out what you meant with cross instance communities.
The question is how to get newcomers (including myself actually !) to register on other instances.
I agree, but imho it is a big deterrent if making a community in a smaller instance means competing with bigger instances that are way more popular.
Personally I’d actually like to self-host my own instance just to register myself on it (just like with email or XMPP), manage my own identity, my own profile, and don’t depend on whether any particular small instance is gonna dissappear tomorrow, or if the allowlist of that instance isn’t what I’d like, or if I’d rather change the UI in this or that way.
Anyway, I don’t think that this merging idea is a good one, I was just trying to figure out what you meant with cross instance communities.
I didn’t say “cross instance communities”, I said “topics” or “categories” because I don’t think it necessarily has to be “communities” what needs to be cross-instance.
I was presenting a problem, not a solution. You made 2 proposals: the merging of two communities as “option 2” that I think might mitigate the issue (I agree it might not solve it, it depends how it’s done) and your “option 1” which might also help if it were possible (but it’s probably more complex).
I didn’t say “cross instance communities”, I said “topics” or “categories” because I don’t think it necessarily has to be “communities” what needs to be cross-instance.
What could that be except communities? Hashtags maybe? Or maybe having communities that affiliate with each other, not as a full merge, but providing a mutually agregated feed, something like a multireddit but that would be accessible from the communities’ respective pages.
Yes, all those are valid ways to approach it, imho.
(Hash)tags is the obvious one. Also the most chaotic and mob-driven. But it would be the least centralized and more community-driven way to approach it. I expect each community would be able to moderate what tags are allowed for the posts that are submitted to it, and/or be able to correct mis-tagged posts. And ideally each user browsing by tag should be able to add his own blocklist to exclude communities he doesn’t want content from. This approach has the advantage of being more granular and offering a categorization that is “perpendicular” to communities. So you can actually browse by tag in only one community (as a way to subdivide it further) just the same as how you can browse by tag on a particular instance or on the whole fediverse.
Multireddits are curated aggregations of subreddits, but that means it requires maintenance and in the end it has a centralized point of control. In the reddit example, any user can decide to make a curated list of subreddits to form a multireddit, when people “follow” the multireddit the user who created it is the authority to decide what new subreddit might be added/removed. I guess it could be seen as meta-communities (a community that instead of managing an aggregate of post manages an aggregate of communities). This way you can have multiple meta-communities for the same topic that organize communities in different way, or that gave different “authorities” so if a meta-community disappears, stops maintenance, or you don’t like the set of communities one person has chosen, you pick another (or make your own), so even if the authority is centralized, you can switch it around and have it your way without really losing content. This means centralization of that control is not a big a deal as long as you can fork it with no further consecuence.
Whichever path is taken, the goal is being able to subscribe to a topic in a way that’s cross-instance, without having to manually keep track of each instance, taking advantage of the federation and not having to rely on big community nodes to form around one server. Ideally even if there were many small communities in separate instances it should work just as well as if there was only one big one.
Without something like that, I don’t see what advantage federation has for a reddit-like service (the main advantage I see right now is shared user accounts, but you could have also done that without needing federation, by separating the user/session management to a different service/API that independent servers could use for their own communities without needing to federate with other communities).
a community that instead of managing an aggregate of post manages an aggregate of communities
I don’t agree : “managing” doesn’t mean the same thing. AFAIU, there’s nothing more to managing a multireddit than updating the list of subs it contains. Managing a community (or a sub) includes moderating the content. The only way for a multireddit maintainer to have any control is that the multireddit be more followed than the subs it contains, so that being part of the multireddit is in the sub’s interest.
without having to manually keep track of each instance
I don’t think one has to manually keep track of the instances. One can subscribe to a community on another instance, follow the updates in their subscribed feed, and comment from their instance.
Ok, if there are two communities on the same topic on two different instances, that’s two communities that one has to subscribe to, but that’s a one time operation, right? Also if the communities have to be created on two instances, it probably means that they don’t share the same code of conduct (CoC). So it does result in two different communities being created, right?
Maybe what you are asking for is that instances being able to whitelist only a community from an instance, e.g. if the community has stricter CoC than the instance? I have don’t have any idea about whether it already works that ways, or about how hard it would be to implement that.
Off topic:
Sorry, this was a post I accidentally deleted by misclicking (it might be a good idea to add a confirmation prompt or something).
I pressed “edit” on the deleted post hoping at least I could re-write it that way, the edit dialog was empty so I started re-writting the whole thing and saving.
Then I realized the edit did nothing on deleted posts, so I had to post a new comment (the one above).
Only after that did I found out you can actually press the delete button on a deleted comment to “restore it” (I guess “delete” just hides it?). But by then the earlier edit had overwritten the original post (so I guess editting deleted posts works, it just doesn’t unhide them).
I’d suggest: either disable the “edit” button on deleted posts, or make it so pressing “edit” on the deleted post restores it right before you start editting it (maybe change the text to “restore & edit”)
Cross instance communities are an interesting idea, although it’s unclear how they would be moderated, or how executive decisions would be made.
Whats unclear to me is how “cross instance communities” could be implemented in activitypub. Honestly I dont see any way to do it, because every
Grouplives on a single server.Couldn’t it be done by the application, where at AP level there exist 2
Groupobjects, one on each instance? One is the leader, the Community that was first created, the other is a follower. The group actors synchronise activity between them, such that in the UI it seems they form a single Community. This means e.g. that the follower group is authorized to perform admin activities on behalf of admins at the leader group (and possibly vice versa).I know this is something of a trick, less desirable than native protocol support. Note that I am very interested in seeing the Community concept go next-level, see e.g. Standardizing on a common Community domain as AP extension?. Also there’s renewed interest in standardizing Group behavior, now that PixelFed will release support for them. See PixelFed Groups on SocialHub.
If there is a leader then its still centralized, and its not clear what will happen if that leader disappears. Sure there might be some hacks to make it work, but I think that decentralized groups would need to use a different protocol from activitypub.
I am also interested in standardizing activitypub groups, but for now i’m busy refactoring our entire federation code, to make future changes easier (including compat with other projects).
Maybe leader/follower is the wrong concept. Synched groups might be better. To the user-observer they are similar to decentralized groups. But it’ll be a bit hacky, for sure :D
Good luck with the federation code. I am super curious about the features it will bring to Lemmy!. Thank you for all your efforts and dedication 💚
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There are certainly 50X more groups I am interested in compared to ruqqus or votal.net and that fills me with glee.
I am turned off by the leftist bent, though. I realize that a person’s mindset is often reflected in politics, but that isn’t always the case. I get really tired of politics and religion, because both are full of hypocrites and both lead to fighting because ideologies so often lead to intrusiveness. Forcing a person into a box also seems very wrong to me. I hate the Right and Left equally for that reason. I belong to ME, not to YOU or to society! But, i didn’t sign up for most politically-motivated groups, so this should work out fine for me. I thought this would be connected to Element, Jitsi, Mastodon, irc, XXMP, and other federations, but I am not seeing icons with links, windows, or menus for that. I am very new to the federated concept and it is rather over my head - though, it is something I hope to understand, because it represents freedom to me.I can understand what you mean by that. I am not interested in politics myself, so I do practically the same as you. From my experience, if you subscribe just to communities whose posts you want to see and show only posts from the
subscribedcommunities, there should be no problem whatsoever with seeing politics-related posts, if that is what you prefer. It is great one has the option to choose what they want to see. In my case, it is tech-related stuff and not a single political discussion ever for me.The reason you do not see anything from other platforms is simple: The federation currently works only with other Lemmy instances, not with other ActivityPub compliant platforms. Federation with other platforms is in the works. Firstly federation with Pixelfed (work in progress), then possibly with other platforms. Hope you have fun and enjoy your time here :)
There is a brainstorm topic for federating Lemmy and on the technical end a new discussion on standardizing Groups across different apps.
Connecting protocols and apps together, improving interoperability is a hard subject. It goes very slowly, because individual developers need to be willing to spend the time and effort, and - most importantly - find others willing to do the same and collaborate. In the grassroots communities that are behind all this such organization is very hard, and amounts to “herding cats”. I wrote about this yesterday in The Fediverse Saga.
Maybe someone could do a quick tutorial and post the link(s)? Even a few quick, sloppily-made videos would be a great start.
I would like to do that… Maybe if I have time, idk it can be cool
I’m here from Reddit because r/nonewnormal was shadow banned. Made me look into alternatives. I found ruqqus but knowing it wasn’t fedirated that it would fall into the same issues that current Reddit is facing which is censorship by the webmasters.
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