Hello everyone,
Opening this thread as a kind of follow-up on my thread yesterday about the drop in monthly active users on !fediverse@lemmy.ml.
As I pointed in the thread, I personally think that having some consolidated core communities would be a better solution for content discovery, information being posted only once, and overall community activity.
One of the examples of the issue of having two (or more) exactly similar Fediverse communities (!fediverse@lemmy.world and !fediverse@lemmy.ml ) is that is leads to
- people having to subscribe to both to see the content
- posters having to crosspost to both
- comment being spread across the crossposts instead of having all of the discussion and reactions happening in the same place.
I am very well aware of the decentralized aspect of Lemmy being one of its core features, but it seems that it can be detrimental when the co-existing communities are exactly the same.
We are talking about different news seen from the US or Europe, or a piece of news discussed in places with different political orientations.
The two Fediverse communities look identical, there is no specific editorial line. The difference in the audience is due to the federation decisions of the instances, but that's pretty much it, and as the topic of the community is the Fediverse itself, the community should probably be the one accessible from most of the Fediverse users.
What do you think?
Also, as a reminder, please be respectful in the comments, it's either one of the rules of the community or the instance. Disagreeing is fine, but no need to be disrespectful.
Deciding on a single community to rule them all is a bit hard because of defederation - shall we choose .world and we basically remove beehaw users from discussion, and .ml also has their defederation list. Communities like c/fediverse and c/lemmy must be available to everyone IMO.
Maybe there should be a dedicated Fediverse discussion instance, federated with everyone, as a kind of United Nations of the Fediverse?
Moderation could be tricky, but I guess a few people could give a hand.
How can we force this instance to federate with everyone though? If we centralize the discussion in a single place, we would put a lot of trust into maintainers of said instance. We can build "backup" instances for that purpose, but that would destroy the initial goal - to have a single discussion place.
It's interesting, because it can be compared to real politics where you have nations that are neutral and can serve as hosts for events where countries with completely different views and sometimes even high tensions can meet.
The League of Nations (that preceded the United Nations) used to be hosted in Switzerland, which is usually seen as a neutral ground.
Maybe we could try to have something similar? Or we can even imagine a large list of admins, all from different instances, so that everyone watches what is happening with the instance, so that no one could hijack it?
In the end, it would still be on someone's server. And people would need to trust the owner of that server to pay, maintain and not interfere unnecessarily.
Every server is someone's server, your point is also valid for lemmy.ml and lemmy.world as they currently exist.
Yes, but you wanted a neutral ground, and my point was that it's hard to have something like, because in the end it would just be another server. I am not saying we don't need a solution, I just pointing out a flaw in your proposed solution.
That's fair, and this is why I said having an admin team composed of people from different instances would be a way to mitigate that.
Regarding costs, as it would be a content instance with only a few communities (you want everyone to be able to access the communities on that server, but without any users, this server would not have to replicate any of the other communities) the cost should be kept quite low.
Donations could come from other instances as a way to show their good faith about an open fediverse space.
I'm questioning now how the United Nations is funded, but it's probably based on member countries donations.
I'm also curious about users. If this instance basically federates with every instance, even the most bigoted one, wouldn't it become a host for users with maligned interests? And communities on that instance would be a very dangerous and noisy space too for the same reason.
The instance would only hosts a few communities (!fediverse, and maybe a few others).
Users would not be allowed to register there. Moderation would indeed need to be heavy, you can imagine only moderators being able to create posts, while users would be allowed to comment (you would have to ask a moderator to open a topic. Cumbersome, but at least you prevent topic spamming).
I don't really think this is viable. Most posts on c/fediverse, c/lemmy, c/plugins, etc. are made by users, and these are quite active communities, I doubt mods will be able to deal with the load.
That's a fair point.
Interestingly enough, !plugins@sh.itjust.works is a good case of a single community where no other community exists on that topic, and it seems to be doing well.
True, but it also means Beehaw users can't really reach new plugins/themes announcements. And I'm not sure how many other instances defederated from sh.itjust.works tbh.
That's also a very good point. I assume current Beehaw users who want to access that community use alts.
I actually saw a complaint the other day about !patientgamers@sh.itjust.works not being accessible from Beehaw.
Defederation sucks a lot. And since Reddit migration is over and everything seems much more stable, I think Beehaw could refederate with shitjustworks easily.
That would be nice indeed
On a completely related topic, your instance looks interesting, how did you find it?
I wanted to move away from the defederation drama on average-to-big instances (I was on blahaj) and checked instances with >200 users. I quite like the branding of this one so decided to give it a shot. I'm only a week here but can say my experience was smooth and stable so far.
Interesting, thanks!
No, please. Most of the defederations are for a good reason. In !fediverse@whatever I want to read about fediverse, not racist bullshit and spam.
That's not actually how defederation works. You would still not be able to see those your instance has defederated from.
I mean, that's exactly what I want? Defederating from the spammy and racist instnaces means I will not interact with them at all, which is what I want - I don't want to read their racist bullshit and spam. I don't see where I misunderstood how defederation works.
I'm saying you wouldn't see racist bullshit and spam in !fediverse@whatever.
If there were no defederations, yeah, I would. I've seen racist and homophobic bullshit in a community for my instance news before I defederated.
That's an interesting question.
I just had a look at lemmy.ml block list, and EH are blocked.
I guess at some point you just have to block the bigots.
An instance dedicated to the Fediverse would be the ideal solution.
Lemmy in general could use a lot more instances centered around specific topics.