This will take place ~24 hours from now. Feel free to post and upvote questions beforehand in this post, as it will turn into the AMA tomorrow.
This is a chance for any users, admins, or developers to ask anything they’d like to myself, @[email protected] , SleeplessOne , or @[email protected] about Lemmy, its future, and wider issues about the social media landscape today.
The big instances are bad enough but big communities are absolute killer of decentralisation
When you go to /c/books on your server, you don’t see an agglomeration of all /c/books on all servers of the fediverse. You only see that server’s /c/books, if it even has one.
This is a fatal flaw of lemmy which concentrates power enormously into the hands of the owners.
The default view should be all /c/books on all federated servers, with an easy way to filter only local posts.
Lemmy will turn into reddit if this is not quickly rectified.
I kind of get where you’re coming from, but to me it sounds like you’re looking for a different experience than what Lemmy is designed for. It seems you are more interested in aggergating all posts about specific topics (like “books”), and strongly limiting the effect of moderation (as nobody would have final say about how to moderate an entire topic). If I correctly understood the experience you’re interested in, then for sure the design of Lemmy will not match that.
I don’t think it’s fair to describe this as a fatal flaw, though. Lemmy is not built around the idea of generic, “ownerless” topics, instead, it’s built around communities with clear owners. We have decentralization at the admin and infrastructure level (as in, a single admin does not control the entire network), but this does not really mean we also need to have it at individual community level.
IMO it’s totally fine that different people create different communities with extremely similar purposes. The entire internet as a whole also works like this - the internet itself is decentralized, but at the same time people can create different websites with very similar purposes (and even domains!), and it works out fine. For example, it’s totally possible for there to exist a news.com, news.co.uk, news.ee, news.fi, etc. Imagine if whenever you navigated to news.fi with your browser, it would also automatically insert content from all the other news websites of all possible domains - it doesn’t really seem like a useful feature, but that’s kind of analogous to what you’re suggesting for Lemmy at the moment.
What prevents from visiting /c/books@anotherserver?
Genuinely asking, because this is one of the core concepts of Lemmy and federation
deleted by creator
Yes, syntax link like /c/community@server is incompatible with http.
Doesn’t [email protected] and [email protected] direct you to yourinstance.org/c/[email protected] and yourinstance.org/c/[email protected] respectively?
I already posted to anotherserver/c/books and no one ever saw it.
Posting anywhere but biggestinstance/c/biggestcommunity is functionally the same as not posting at all.
And of course, the owners of biggestinstance/c/biggestcommunity believe in everything you don’t believe in and they really don’t like you in particular.
Welcome to new reddit, same as old reddit
Did you promote that community on [email protected] and other promotion communities? Did you actively post on your new community, to attract users to your new one?
I’m going to take two examples I personally had
I guess that shows that community takeover is possible, and does not need additional tools, just some time and dedication.
Removed by mod
This isn’t the first time I have proposed this, but the pushback leads me to believe the owners do not want to relinquish power to the users. Lemmy it seems, is a community for owners. The interests of instance owners and their delegates come first.
I think we will need the digg & reddit story to play out all over again so that in 10-15 years the next exodus out of lemmy might lead us somewhere we can actually be free.
Removed by mod
That ends up like the multireddit suggestion. You might have a modded view of the lemmyverse where can see the obscure posts on 10 user instances.
But most of the lemmy population will still have the default view.
So in effect, these post are not visible to most users and they don’t becone culturally relevant. It is like they don’t exist and the only community is the “big one” plus maybe a 2nd one with only the refuse from the 1st.