As Lemmy is a different beast than Reddit, I feel the need to summarize the Lemmy situation for everyone. Especially with how it affects this community.

  1. Federation vs Defederation – This is turning out to be more important than I recognized initially. But not “too important”. As long as Federation works, we’re not supposed to think about it. But… when things don’t work… well… we gotta start talking specifics. The long-story short is that https://lemmy.world is where !realtesla exists, and thus any federation and/or defederation issue that affects lemmy.world will be affecting this community. Keeping track of this will be a pain, but hopefully the lemmy community figures these things out in the long term.

  2. https://beehaw.org – Defederated with https://lemmy.world for internet drama/political reasons. In particular, beehaw.org does not want open signups, not until more moderation tools become available. https://lemmy.world is aiming at a Reddit-like open signup scheme, so its fundamentally conflicting with https://beehaw.org’s philosophies. The expectation is for better moderation tools to be invented and eventually allow the two servers to federate again.

  3. .18 vs .17 – https://lemmy.world has been hit with a huge number of bot-accounts, so the admins around here have enabled CAPTCHA-enrollment. However, CAPTCHA was broken in .18, so https://lemmy.world has decided to stay on .17. This seems to have broken federation to some extent (not fully decoupled like Beehaw.org… but there’s a HUGE number of glitches occurring right now with .18 instances).

You lemmy.ca users? (I know you exist, we talked on Discord, lol), you’re on .18. You’re gonna get glitches with a .17 instance like Lemmy.world. But Lemmy.world will not upgrade until the promised .18.1 CAPTCHA release.

  1. kbin – kbin, especially kbin.social, is entirely different software from Lemmy. There is only one glitch I’m aware of: the Lemmy-post will break if you forget to select a language (ex: “English”) when you write a response to kbin users and/or kbin.social.

  2. Search to bring in a community – An interesting “Lemmyism”, is that communities in the Federation don’t exist until a user searches for it. For example, if there is a [email protected] that https://lemmy.world is unaware of, “someone” on the server needs to search for it before the https://lemmy.world server is aware of its existence. This sets off some kind of backend process where the https://lemmy.world server begins to download all the posts / history that makes it possible to subscribe to that community. Eventually, the user needs to subscribe to fully bring the community into lemmy.world. This process can take a long time, minutes or even hours. I don’t know. If anyone is having issues finding a community across the federation, you can message me to help bring it into the https://lemmy.world server. Or message me if you wanna learn how to do it on your own server. I’m still learning the details myself, but its obviously not the easiest process.

That should cover it for now. This federation thing will be a pain to keep track of, but it offers benefits. Lets hope the benefits outweigh the downsides.

  • Dr. DabblesEnglish
    2•1 year ago

    One of the big things that users have started to notice on Mastodon is that the “Local” timeline tends to matter quite a bit for discovery and casual browsing purposes. Larger instances have more users, so they have more content, and it’s geared toward whatever the instance’s topic/genre is.

    This is starting to happen with Lemmy instances already, too. Yes, content can be federated to other instances, and yes you can follow any federated communities as long as federation works between the instances. But that local timeline is still a major part of just casual scrolling, and IMO being on one of the largest lemmy instances is probably good for users and communities both.

    I will say, some of the claims of bot influx seem to be grounded in reality, but they all seem somewhat overblown. Obviously bots are going to appear where users want to be because of legitimate purposes as well as illegitimate. But so far lemmy.world’s active user count is about 20% of the total accounts on the instance. For comparison’s sake, a LOT of the mastodon and other fediverse properties have a 10% active user ratio. So lemmy.world doesn’t seem that out of whack. Granted, these numbers are based on FediDB data, so if that’s severely out of date then my ratio calculation will be wrong.

    • @dragontamerOPMEnglish
      1•1 year ago

      I will say, some of the claims of bot influx seem to be grounded in reality, but they all seem somewhat overblown

      My understanding is that the administrators quickly banned all the spam-bot accounts and then installed a CAPTCHA to stop the flood. So the problem is solved on https://lemmy.world due to grit and hard-work, but its not a thing the admins want to waste their time on.

      CAPTCHA, as awful as it is, stopped the bot-flood. So whoever was doing it was script-kiddie level. Presumably, if this instance updates to 0.18 (without CAPTCHA), the spammers will notice (and since https://lemmy.world is the largest instance, there’s a “target on these server’s backs” so to speak).

      Note that the 0.18.1-RC1 test failed today. Admins tried to update, but it had too many performance issues, so we’re back to 0.17.4. https://lemmy.world/post/744421

      We’re likely stuck on 0.17.4 for the near future (days/weeks). .18 was a big change to Lemmy, and its clear that not all the performance bugs have been ironed out yet… and for a large instance like https://lemmy.world, those bugs made the server unusable for a few minutes during the test earlier today.