Lemmy, an open-source federated Reddit alternative, gets funding for development (opens in new tab)

That sounds like it would immediately exclude a huge number of potential participants from doing something similar.

This is not necessarily a bad thing for users - I often wish for a place similar to hacker news but with a wider range of topics - however, it almost certainly means they will never reach Reddit levels of popularity.

I do think that Reddit fills an important niche - a place where any topic is open for discussion, including porn and other forbidden topics like drugs. It's just unfortunate that the company currently ruling this niche is so morally bereft that they can't tell the difference between open discussion and fueling hate speech.

If we're to take reddit as an example moderation happens by individuals rather than all members of the community. And as such it is open to abuse whether it happens or not.

I thought about this for a long time and decided to write up what I would consider to be an acceptable framework for any given social media platform which would:

1. Help define the Overton window in a more organic fashion

2. Allow the platform to function within different jurisdictions.

3. Remove the overhead of central administration and opinion checking.

If it helps, I wrote it up here: https://gist.github.com/TheMightyLlama/bb77a05d3dde4da251142...

1. It needs to position itself as something other than not-reddit

2. There are a lot of issues Reddit really doesn't solve. Reddit encourages short, pithy, drive-by posts without much in the way of engagement at all. Compare old newsgroups, old forums, or even the average post here, compared to the average post (even in a niche sub) on reddit. Reddit:??Mysteryreplacement::Twitter:Blogs. I don't know what ??Mysteryreplacement will be, but there's certainly room for it.

If you make the mistake of discussing this on any other Canadian related sub where the /r/canada mods frequent, they'll ban you for life and say that you were "brigading."

Am I missing something?

[0] https://www.reddit.com/r/canada/about/moderators/ [1] https://www.reddit.com/r/metacanada/about/moderators/

But hey, that's the beauty (and ugliness) of federation: I don't have to like it and I can just start my own server. On the flipside, it also means I need to be beholden to a considerable amount of social rules, some of them unwritten, if I want to federate with the majority of the servers out there. I know how it goes, I've seen it first-hand when it comes to ActivityPub instances. That's how you get cliques.

Which wasn't enough as I understand since those communities would en-mass attack other communities that they disagreed with.

See: 4chan. It wasn't always like it is now, but since /pol/ grew to be so big, now pretty much every board has a sizable or majority far-right contingent. It's even worse on Voat.

The UI itself isn't horrible, it's the UX. It's incredibly bulky and slow, and some user links have been hidden while others completely removed.

For extremely wide screens it obviously looks awkward, but the idea seems sound in principle.

IIRC, the reason you'd want to restrict width of content is that it's hard for your eyes to track back all the way left, to the start of the content, when you need to go down a line. But the header is just a single line, so it doesn't have this problem.

In the case of very wide screens they should probably restrict the header width too, just not quite as much.

Never would have happened if someone hadn't made a post like this, so thanks!

edit: Aaaand instant regret, wow. Are you guys seeing this "Top Broadcast Right Now" shit? The best part for me is not just the ~1000px high random garbage video that takes up my whole screen, but before the video itself loads I actually get a ~1000px "white noise" animation, except it isn't just white but brightly colored, too.

I had a brief urge to heat up my soldering iron and stick it in my eye.

UX design used to be about good usability. Now it's all about shoving the latest hipster trends from Dribbble and Behance that look all "Shiny" and gives the CxOs orgasms.

One more odd thing that I found - maybe this is anecdotal - Developers who design interfaces based on OTS frameworks (Eg. Bootstrap) have a much better sense of UX than dedicated UX designers.

The role of mods is to delete off topic submissions and remove illegal content. Nothing more.

Is running your own instance hard? Then at best you’ll inevitably have some users who lack the know-how or time to set up their own instance. At worst, federated systems often link identity to home instance, so you can’t switch to a new instance without giving up your profile. Or they may even require other instances to have a human agree to federate with you, which is a big ask for a one-person instance.

Or is running your own instance easy? So easy that anyone can do it? Then there should be no disadvantage in bundle that into the client app so that everyone does do it. But now you have a decentralized system.

In a fully decentralized network you can meet new people and moderate your own view of the world without putting any burden on others to adapt to what you want. Moderation can be done with a system like this: https://adecentralizedworld.com/2020/06/a-trust-and-moderati...

We use Electron exclusively for GUI. The real app is a Go binary with a GRPC API. It’s all fully isolated, so if you don’t want to touch any Electron, you don’t have to. Use the API to build a CLI app, for example.

To be more specific, we have two Go binaries that we ship, one is the aether-backend that talks to the network, the other is the aether-frontend that compiles the content coming from the network into a social graph. Both are properly isolated and talk to each other only over declared GRPC APIs. I’ve tried very hard to keep it hackable that way.

- Default mods, which are either the creator of the community or those that are assigned by that person

- Elected mods, mods which are chosen by the community. Election goes both ways, you can both be elected or impeached. For example, a default mod can be impeached by the election system, and that would render that mod a non-mod for you

- Mods you've personally chosen. Choosing someone to be a mod for you is your vote in the election.

So the system isn't 'enforcing' mods you haven't chosen onto you as a result of the elections. Elections only make the decision only if you haven't made a decision for that mod in either way — if you make a decision that is ironclad (for you, in your personal, local view), since nothing can override your personal vote for or against somebody. The more you vote in elections, the more you shape your own view of the universe.

The article is long, but what I can see there that is not implemented in Aether is the transitive property of trust, instead of having a vote which is binary, he seems to be advocating for a 0 to 100 trust, and the idea that trust of the people you trust means something to you. (Let me know if I got this wrong).

This is great in theory — and this was actually considered for implementation at one point. The issue isn't that it doesn't make sense but it is quite literally impossible to implement, since it makes it so that almost every trust decision made by someone on the network at some point in time affects almost all other entities, which leaves you with an almost entirely 'dirty' graph that you have to traverse in entirety and recompile.

This can be done on a centralised service since there is one graph to compile and everyone submits to it. However, in Aether, what we try to do is that we try to keep the graph compilation part on the user end, both because it's a P2P network, and also because custom graphs compiled on the client end is what allows the votes to be able to modify the graph structure itself. That sort of gradual outflow of trust across a social graph making decisions on what to show or not show for every single piece of content is an intense amount of computation to do for every new modification to the trust gradient.

However, this is actually the most common feature request we have right now, an ability to block certain communities from transmitting. We are converting the SFW list to a 'filter lists' feature, much like adblock filter lists. These lists can be whitelists or blacklists, and they will be able to control not just visibility, but also the receiving and transmittance of content as well.

So the expected behaviour is that if a community is in your blacklist, your computer will never fetch that content from that community by checking against its fingerprint. That should be helpful to solve this issue. We'll be providing a default whitelist as well.

It's always irked me that most people seem to think that people with different politics to them shouldn't be allowed to communicate.

Now, if I can give a limited use address that cant be tied to me as an individual,expires after a period of time and messages are E2EE encrypted with no metadata leakage I don't mind that.

I have spent almost an entire day trying to sign up to one service withour having to give up my phone number,real IP,creditcard or real email address to anyone as a challenge. I have tried countless anonymous email providers and sms code receiving services. I failed. Email abd phone number collection is a modern tech evil for me.

You may not care about these issues, and you might have the correct opinions for now which don't irritate the tech overlords. But lots of people have learned the hard way that providing an email address is, at the very best, going to result in spam. At the worst? You could be physically assaulted, lose your job to an outrage mob...

Everyone here who disagrees is just saying, "I don't want to join those communities, so they shouldn't even be allowed to exist."

Twitch and Discord did well there for instance. Started out as gaming focused, then became more mainstream.

By doing this, you bring in non extremists early on, and tilt the audience pecentages in such a way that most regulars aren't such extremists.

The problem is most 'alternative' platforms market themselves as 'Reddit/Facebook/Twitter/YouTube except with free speech and no rules' rather than 'an art/gaming/music/sports themed alternative to Reddit/Facebook/Twitter/YouTube with free speech'.

Former means you draw in the outcasts and extremists, latter means you draw in another audience that can then be made more mainstream by opening up support for more and more fields of interest.

I would love to switch to Reddit from 2008.

Their developer code of conduct also looks good in that regard

https://github.com/LemmyNet/lemmy/blob/master/CODE_OF_CONDUC...

Seeing how the flagship instance is run by people who are socially conscious I don't see this being a problem. Pretty much same thing happened with Mastodon Social, and with millions of users the community is still great. It's far friendlier and more civilized than Twitter.

Your own scenarios exhibit this, for example:

- You ask if the far-right are magnitudes more vocal, ignoring the comparison to the extremely vocal far-left which is heard regularly on mainstream social media

- You conflate "conservative" with "selfish", presumably ignoring the selfishness of the extremes at both sides.

Frankly, I think the left (and by extension, most social media sites) are WAY more comfortable with censorship, banning, hiding, etc., especially of ideas that don't align with the left. (Typically characterized as "evil".)

The far-right, on the other hand, I think is a lot more tolerant of at least the notion that "other" speech exists. They'll insult you, make fun, etc., but the compulsion to censor others is far less frequent.

So when you have a whole segment of the political spectrum treated as evil and silenced, they tend to gravitate to fora that enable speech, even if unpleasant speech. The far-right might be most noticable on those platforms, but if you look carefully, you'll see a whole gradient of right-ness.

And even some lefties!

These large segments of the population will demand moderation from platforms they use to protect them from targeted harassment. It's these sorts of platforms that have the potential to truly become massive.

Platforms that are strongly moderated from day one (e.g. don't allow targeted harassment of minorities) don't need a "herculean effort to shift things enough to the left to be publicly palatable." A good example is the Reddit alternative raddle.me or even hacker news.

The far left has people who are also very angry, but they're generally not as bigoted. The demographic they're most angry at is rich people, which is punching up instead of down at least.

And most of the rhetoric there simply isn't as vile. It's stuff like, "take rich people's assets so we can redistribute it equally". I may not agree with seizing wealthy people's stuff, but that's nowhere near as offensive as "kick out all the gay/non-white people".

So if 1% of the population are far-right extremists, but most normal platforms ban or restrict them, any new platform with poor regulation will tend to fill with them.

I do think that the very extreme (and thus bannable) far right _are_ probably more common than ditto on the far left; you just don't get that many Stalinists, anywhere. But the normal left (and normal right) aren't generally nasty enough to get banned everywhere, so most of the internet's displaced population of commenters is far right.

I think there is an aspect of option 1, too, though. In Ireland a while back we had a referendum on allowing same-sex marriage, which passed by 62%, and another one, on legalising abortion (until then only legal in very limited circumstances), a few years later, which passed by 66%. Now, if you'd gone based on web polls and opinions being expressed in the comments on mainstream sites, you'd have assumed that both would fail by a landslide; it was really kind of incredible. Comments on news sites etc were grossly unrepresentative of the actual public mood; the right really does seem to be a lot noisier.

or duplicate accounts to give the illusion of larger numbers.

For example there are a lot of Reddit accounts created with in the 3 months or so very active on the same post pushing the same agenda.

In a forum with ten reasonable conversation threads and one highly controversial one, attention is likely to move towards the controversial topic.

The phrase "don't feed the trolls" is well-intentioned but it's difficult to scale the message when so many people are online and can witness and partake in minor and major conversations alike.

It also doesn't help that engagement (regardless of reason for engagement and any human stress created as a result; they're harder for software and metrics to capture) tends to be seen as something to optimize for, both within companies themselves and also by their investors.

Controversial conversations are sometimes necessary. People who repeatedly raise controversial topics to gain notoriety or attention are generally not - although their behaviour may be a sign that they need help in other ways.

- people who disagree with the restrictions of other places on principle and want a freer alternative

- people who can't say what they want to anywhere else, because it's generally disliked

and most people probably do not want to read stuff from the second group.

This did not used to be the case. It's a relatively extremely recent phenomenon, that I would say only really coalesced around 2014-2015.

It used to be that the wild west of the internet was, to the extent that it reinforced anything at all, a boon to liberal and left wing politics and organizing. And a lot of the cultural aspects weren't co-opted the way they currently are. Gamer culture was surely unconsciously sexist, misogynist, but not to the extent that it is now where it's a full-on reactionary identity. Internet atheists didn't used to be misogynist right-wing trolls, but they are now.

Trolling was just trolling, it wasn't organized into mobs or propaganda in the sophisticated way it is now. Anonymity and revealing one's 'true self' didn't channel it into a cultural current of toxicity that is now established and ready to welcome those impulse and stoke them and use them to nudge a person into a right wing trolling infrastructure.

I think it's been weaponized by state actors and by bad actors who figured out how to use the tools, to turn everything into a nuclear wasteland. I don't believe it inherently disposes anyone toward any particular set of politics necessarily, and it didn't used to be the case that it got channeled in this way.

The problem is not so subjectively limited as to be a right-wing problem. Communities, unless extremely well policed, tend to become gravities of like mindedness when there is a visible vote system. This seems to occur because vote counts, whether positive or negative, are viewed as a form of credibility and because people are generally hostile to disruption and originality.

When you step back from a subjective slant the phenomenon of group think has been well studied.

Now the virtually everybody out there already supports gay marriage and legal weed, and those are a baseline for everything left of center and basically mainstream thought now. Everybody right of that gets pushed out of communities, so whenever some new community pops up, you get a whole spectrum of right of center as well as sovereign citizen types again looking to settle down and establish a community like left of center people did with places like reddit all those years ago. One bad thing for these new communities is that the internet is far more accessible now, and the more extreme members see their chance to finally talk, and those with extreme opinions like talking a lot.

Consider two possible statements:

1. Hitler wasn't that bad.

2. Stalin wasn't that bad.

I think, for most people, the first provokes a much more extreme reaction. Both were objectively terrible human beings, but defending Hitler is seen as far more extreme than defending Stalin.

This has two effects:

Firstly, far-right people are continually kicked out of communities. Far-left people are not. So any new unmoderated community is going to attract these "refugees"

Secondly, nobody notices or cares when a community goes far-left. But its far more noticeable when a community goes far-right.

There's a large population of people out there with views that annoy left-wing people, who don't really have a place on most internet platforms, because all internet platforms are left wing, because the dominant culture of silicon valley is much more left wing than the mean of, say, US citizens. (And everyone who wants to keep their job pretends to be more left wing than they are, too.)

Anyway, this means there's this mob of people without a place to talk, and they want such a place. So if a place ever opens up that doesn't strictly persecute right-wingers- well, it's like being a town during the inquisition that doesn't persecute witches. Obviously, all the witches are going to flock to you!

There's a large population of people out there with views that annoy left-wing people, who don't really have a place on most internet platforms, because all internet platforms are left wing, because the dominant culture of silicon valley is much more left wing than the mean of your average person. (And everyone who wants to keep their jobs pretends to be more left wing than they are, too.)

Anyway, this means there's this mob of people without a place to talk, and they want such a place. So if a place ever opens up that doesn't strictly persecute right-wingers- well, it's like being a town during the inquisition that doesn't persecute witches. Obviously, all the witches are going to flock to you!

(Witch metaphor courtesy of Slatestarcodex, may it rest in peace.)

Far-right definitely stand their ground, and can easily go unfazed by logical arguments.

Dicks fuck pussies. We need assholes to shit on the dicks.

https://medium.com/@pylorns/the-reddit-spring-the-great-liba...

Also you have a big "create community" button at the top. Surely that doesn't spin a completely new instance of the application every time? And if not, how can we tell which instance a community belongs to?

Honestly I don't really understand the need for something like that to be federated. In the olden days you had a bunch of forums/BBS/IRC network/Whatever that served various niches but didn't communicate with each other.

For instance, what would we gain if we decided to turn HN into a Lemmy federated service?

If anything it seems like in the long run it would be a disservice, as very large communities with lower standards would end up spilling and wrecking niches where the community is more tightly knit and post higher quality content.

This fediverse thing makes some sense for IM and similar applications where you want to be able to connect easily with anybody. For forums however, it feels rather pointless to me.

How is that different from how Reddit/Voat currently are?

He tried to get people to use it for a while, but since it was just a less-functional and empty Reddit, nobody was very interested. Eventually some of the users/subreddits banned from Reddit started using it since they had been kicked off real Reddit, and the developer ended up welcoming them while justifying it as "free speech". I think he mostly just seemed happy that some people actually wanted to use his site.

It's all been downhill from there, and the original creator even abandoned the site a few years ago and handed it over to someone else.

Take for instance Ruqqus, another site created as a free speech reddit alternative. It consistently has horrifying content on the front page regularly; viciously racist content, anti-Semitic memes, unironic pro-Nazism/pro-genocide discussion posts, and generally terrible content. This is likely because it is exactly this content that is being "censored" from Reddit, not these harmless free speech advocates who are silenced by a big company.

Can anyone actually tell me what valuable discussion is being censored on Twitter, Reddit, etc? Banning this type of content is mandatory if you want a platform that is safe and available for trans people, Jews, gay people, women, etc.

People shouldn't have to tolerate people @ing them with slurs, be exposed to "reasoned" arguments for their extermination, or memes dehumanizing them for the sake of "free speech."

If a mod removes, hides, or takes other mod action on a comment or post, the browser extension and federated storage system still allows me to see and interact with that content and it’s writer (“showdead” globally). You could subscribe to “mod actions” (which is just curation) by mod, which would govern your experience of the content.

I appreciate the mod work here, for example, but I also want to be able to bypass that “filter opinion” so I can still interact with folks and content out of band if I so choose (one person’s “flame war” is another person’s vigorous debate).

Also, Reddit has more moderation than Reddit. Subreddits exist for a reason.

That's the biggest limit of moderated forums, they only reflect the opinion of the most active groups who can steer the discussion helped by moderators who benefit from rewarding the largest groups instead of the best comments

If moderation was visible and moderators were forced to leave a note about why the moderation took place it would be a real discussion platform

HN is not

Slashdot is a lot better than many others in this regards, but it's not popular anymore and you can't make money on it, while a lot of people leave by posting shit on Reddit

Worse is better always wins

Which "Fediverse"? As I understand the concept, it applies to social networks in general. But it appears that you are referring to one specific network which contains the Gab server in it.

It does?

> B+R is a community-owned space that seeks to foster solidarity between people from all backgrounds that share a common character. We reject policies of social dominance, Neo-liberalism, patriarchy, the gender binary, white supremacy, and other social ills espoused by capitalism. We support worker/union/trans rights, empowering those without a voice, and each other.

> Do not advocate for obvious bad shit like landlords/cops/capitalism/etc. This is a leftist space.

Sounds like they're quite explicit about what things they're non-open/inviting about.

Their attitude sounds like D&D/C-SPAM turned up to 11. Even as a Bernie-loving social democrat, I'd have to say 'pass'.

Sometimes the lack of exposure to real-world problems creates people that are completely disconnected from reality.

If not for old.reddit.com, my time on Reddit would've gone way down :/

Edit: to add, while touching the buttons for the different sections, it seems sometimes my touches are not registering, requiring me to try again.

"I think we should eliminate all of (((those people)))." I didn't use the k-word, but everyone knows what the sentence means.

On the other hand, you can't post "tranny" or "bitch" but, bitch is contextual: it's definition is a female dog, but even in the context of "wow she's such a bitch" bitch is not a slur. "Tranny" is derogatory in the context when used against trans people, but it's also used quite often in mechanics to mean "transmission." There are so many different contexts in which these words aren't derogatory, and in some cases represent the power of people to reclaim what was previously a slur.

Banning certain words is incredibly short-sighted, and punishes everyone who uses the platform while not addressing the real issue: extreme right-wingers can still use it just fine, and have absolutely no problem coming up with new dog whistles in order to get around your elementary word filter.

If I don't want to see offensive slurs, I won't associate with people who use them. Let me decide what is a slur or not, and let me decide who to associate with.

> We have > 2200 connections to the server right now, its a DDOS. Rust seems to be handling it fine, but the nginx is having issues.

https://dev.lemmy.ml/post/35712

Sounds about right - I'm amused that whoever saw this thought it was a ddos though.

dessalines - if you're reading this - I expect looking at referrers would be a good way to (manually) diagnose real attacks vs people becoming interested in your site.