He’s just some guy, why would anybody take it seriously?

I would love a platform that has collective community moderation through content flagging and voting which does away the need for mods.

This simply isn’t possible. If no one has responsibility, the community will inevitably devolve into chaos. Flagging content doesn’t accomplish anything if there’s no one to actually remove the clearly unacceptable content. If there’s no clear rules and no one to contact about moderation decisions, communities just wouldn’t be able to function at larger scales.

As for the other part of your comment, first of all it’s foolish to use blanket statements and absolutes. However, I wouldn’t disagree that some long term mods do seek power. But you also have to consider burnout, as it’s a thankless job where you get exposed to the worst of the worst, and if people don’t simply quit after a few years, they may become more harsh in their moderation practices as a mechanism to protect themselves.

First of all, 99% of people don’t have the technical expertise to self host Lemmy, and that’s who we are talking about in this thread.

Secondly, there are very significant benefits to using a well established server versus self hosting. The most obvious perk is having a built-in community to interact with and learn from.

But more importantly, more established servers will already be subscribed to many of the major communities, making the task of finding and browsing remote communities that much easier. Consider this:

Your local version of c/science_memes only has ~200 posts and 1.2k comments. Also, many of the older posts didn’t seem to federate the comments or upvotes. This is because your server only recently subscribed to that community, and federation doesn’t occur retroactively.

The sh.itjust.works version of the community has 3.9k posts and 94k comments, because we have been subscribed since the community started.

The main version actually has 3.92k posts and 99.6k comments. Most of the missing comments on the SJW version are likely from lemmygrad and hexbear users, who are defederated by SJW but not by mander.xyz. This is also another major consideration about self hosting vs. joining a larger server: defederations. Some people will see predetermined defederations as a pro while others will consider it a con (also depending on which servers are defederated). The main thing is that people have options that work for them.

Funnily enough, the communick version is majorly fucked up, not sure why that is.

At this point I’m just getting curious, so I checked the lemmy.myserv.one version as well, and it’s got an impressive 3.84k posts and 98.2k comments.

Might as well try it for c/greentext as well.

• Main community - 1.22k posts / 52.6k comments
• is.hardlywork.ing version - 501 posts / 901 comments
• communick.news version - 1.1k posts / 23k comments
• lemmy.myserv.one - 200 posts / 15 comments (I guess I never subscribed to that community on this account? Kinda weird)
• mander.xyz - 1.22k posts / 52.9k comments (not sure how it has more comments than the main version, someone should look into that)

So yeah, it’s not quite as simple as you make it seem. Hopefully someday Lemmy will integrate the ability to federate communities retroactively as some kind of option. Because I think that was more of a design choice than anything, technically it should be possible to toggle a setting and get your instance to download all of the posts and comments from a remote community, even from before you subscribed.

And I feel like without having access to all of the old posts and comments that we have built up over the past couple years, content on Lemmy probably feels a lot more sparse for a new user. Personally, I have always enjoyed sorting by top posts of all time in various communities, both on reddit and now on Lemmy. Even if you’ve been subscribed to the community the whole time, you tend to miss out on some great posts if you only ever sort by new or hot.

@[email protected]

I’m only now seeing that you are the same user, so obviously you can just browse older communities from lemm.ee and be fine. But it’s still useful information to know.

And btw, I luckily have a free lifetime subscription to the communick Lemmy server because they did a promotion back in the day. I do pay them to host my Matrix account though. My original Matrix account got killed when the admin randomly decided to shut down his server, so I figured I’d go with a paid option.

I won’t divulge the price since they no longer offer individual packages, but it’s quite reasonable. If you compare their current pricing to what people spend on streaming services like Netflix, I think it’s more than fair. $29 yearly for Mastodon, Lemmy, Matrix and Funkwhale access? I’d buy that as a gift for someone in a heartbeat if it would get them to start using the fediverse.

Maybe. But Lemmy isn’t close to that volume of users yet

Communick is a nice option. I have an account there too. Unfortunately many Lemmings are weirdly hostile to it being a paid service, so it hasn’t gotten much traction.

I think having more small business type Lemmy servers would be a decent solution to the onboarding difficulties people are discussing in this thread. There’s definitely a chunk of users who just need the security of having someone to contact if they are confused about something or something isn’t working. And if they’re paying for it then the provider has an incentive to give them customer support.

I like how the GenX and millennial is the only example that isn’t overwhelmed at first. I think it’s definitely worth considering that those particular generations have a significantly greater ability and openness to learning new paradigms and adapting to new UXs, because that was something that was unavoidable for all of our formative years.

Due to the rapid pace of technological advancement from 1980-2010, it was simply necessary to adapt to brand new systems and interfaces every few years. And the rewards for doing so were enormous, so we naturally learned that if you took the time to figure out these new technologies and interfaces, you would be rewarded with much greater capabilities. For previous and subsequent generations, that process probably didn’t shape their way of interacting with technology as much, so they’re reluctant to put in a significant amount of effort in learning to use new technology.

https://lemmy.world/

Copy past that into your browser, then log in with your username and password?

I’m not very tech savvy compared to a lot of Lemmings but I’m definitely above average. So I’m not trying to throw shade, just trying to help. The more people who get the hang of things is the more people who can teach others how to do it.

This is a good point. And also reddit is astroturfing hardcore, it’s likely that many comments are coming from botted accounts and especially upvotes are heavily manipulated.

I’m not disagreeing with the fact that a lot of people genuinely struggle to get started on Lemmy. But just pointing out that perception is actively amplified on reddit, because they obviously want to discourage people from joining Lemmy.

It’s not a conspiracy at all, I’ve seen countless positive comments and posts about Lemmy removed over the past year or so. They know about us and they are worried.

Agreed. Also if we’re being honest servers would probably start crashing left right and center if ten million redditors decided to join next week. The software still needs time to mature, so slow and steady growth is actually perfect for right now.

You can find the defederation info quite easily just by asking, or going to the blocked instance tab on whatever server you’re wondering about.

Your other questions are somewhat ambiguous, so there’s no easy way to simplify it into a data sheet. Because of the fact that the vast majority of instances are federated with each other, it also doesn’t matter that much.

I don’t think that kind of numerical information would really make the decision any easier, it’d be more likely to confuse people even further.

Servers are either general purpose or with a specific focus. Ani.social, ttrpg.network, slrpnk.net, are servers that clearly advertise the specific content they host and focus on. And obviously the geographical/language based servers (feddit.uk, aussie.zone, lemmy.nz) do the same thing. That’s pretty easy to figure out imho.

The distribution of joined communities just seems way more complicated than necessary. Number of users is already the most widely available stat, just go to fedidb or lemmyverse and you can easily see the list of instances ordered by monthly active users.

https://lemmyverse.net/?order=active_month

I do think a cheat sheet about defederations would be nice to have though, I might try to make one when I have a chance.

Both can be true. We can welcome everybody who wants to come, and also realize that having 100 million complete noobs suddenly join wouldn’t necessarily be the best outcome either.

Show people the way and if they indicate that it’s too much effort to do a bit of research for 10-20 minutes, understand that it’s not exactly a huge loss for them to not join.

You don’t need paid mods. If you have a good community people will volunteer to moderate out of altruism, because they enjoy the community and want to make sure it stays good. Paid mods are actually worse than volunteer mods imo, because they don’t actually care as much.

True, but I also wanted to share that information

Good point. But on Lemmy, we tend to reverse those colors so it actually kinda works perfectly.

Upvotes are orange and downvotes are blue on reddit. On Lemmy, upvotes are blue and downvotes are orange/red. Reddits whole brand revolves around orange.

Lemmy doesn’t have a well established brand identity and it doesn’t really need one imo. But if it did, it would probably be blue/green, along the lines of how join-lemmy looks.

Pretty much exactly like the Jedi versus the Sith 😂

Yea he kept making new accounts and I kept banning them, so then he did that. Well, good luck with the rare deliriants my friend. Pour one out for me.

God damn you really do be litty right now.

I didn’t take it as rude or insulting at all, you’re just overthinking and paranoid bc you’re high af.

Plus I’ve already taken an immense amount of abuse on Lemmy because I’m an admin, people always end up popping off on me no matter what I do. I see you’ve been here a long time so you may remember a few months after the APIcalypse when trolls were spamming the most disgusting stuff and I had to keep banning them as quickly as I could. This guy took it personally 😂

Yes this is the most efficient and foolproof method for dealing with bully mods, can confirm.

I feel like you’re probably joking but that’s a possum, not a doggo.

I was gonna make a joke about not trying to pet one of those or you might get rabies, but it actually seems that they have natural resistance to rabies and are generally pretty chill animals. TIL.

https://www.humanesociety.org/resources/what-do-about-opossums

I’m not making any claims that require sources or links, it’s simply a philosophy and a fact of life, depending how you look at it.

Just because something is a rule and you may face consequences for breaking it, does not mean that you must follow it. You always have the choice and the option to refuse to follow a rule or a law.

Rules and laws are just strongly worded suggestions