It appears to me that the current state of Lemmy is similar to other platforms when they were smaller and more insular, and that insularity is somewhat protecting it.

I browse Lemmy, and it feels a bit like other platforms did back in 2009, before they became overwhelmed and enshitified.

If I understand it correctly, Lemmy has a similar “landed gentry” moderation scheme, where the first to create a community control it. This was easily exploited on other platforms, particularly in regards to astroturfing, censorship, and controlling a narrative.

If/when Lemmy starts to experience its own “eternal September”, what protections are in place to ensure we will not be overwhelmed and exploited?

  • @gigglybastard
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    1 hour ago

    So every lemmy instance is separate?

    For instance, I’m on lemmy.world now, reading nba community. If those mods go nuclear and someone creates another nba community elsewhere, will I see those posts on lemmy.world?

    edit: i get it now … it’s a different server with different community, but they can be “linked” and you can subscribe to communities from different servers from your own server and you can also comment on different servers too from your own little world

    i have more questions though … how do all these decentralized servers find each other and share information between instances? is it blockchain based? or is there a central server somewhere orchestrating it all ?

    • qaz
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      1 hour ago

      …they can be “linked”

      What do you mean with that?

      …is it blockchain based? or is there a central server somewhere orchestrating it all ?

      It does not use blockchain or a central server, but instead uses the ActivityPub protocol, just like Mastodon. That’s why Mastodon users can see some Lemmy posts and the other way around.

      • @gigglybastard
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        135 minutes ago

        ok thanks . by linked i meant this fediverse thing. I was reading here on reddit

        Here is the catch, users from each server can interact with one another. So users who created their account in lemmy.world can comment in the subs of lemmy.ml aka the other server.

        Now, when it comes to the last point, this is only possible if the two servers admins agree to do so. This is called federation