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?
What you’re worried about is basically what federation was built to stop.
If you don’t like the moderation of a community or other aspects, you or anyone else can make a new one on the same or a different instance, if you want.
You can even make it “private” (not federate) to keep others from coming in and recreating the problem you just fled.
To be optimistic, I’d hope the federation would be able to guard against deeper centralization like a more extreme .world or .ml, a la meta or whoever. There’s always space for grassroots instances, and I’m pretty sure there will always be someone out there running something or with enough interest to learn.
It will still probably end up like email. There will be a working group, public or private, that defines minimum spam requirements. If you don’t comply, you’ll be defederated.
You’re totally right. My optimism gets around that by hoping if it isn’t Lemmy, this federation, that federation, some other new initiative or tech, community will find a way to make itself. I guess my bigger worry is accessibility and notoriety/viability, but I think that will always come in time too. There are smart, willing people out there, and gathering is human instinct.
I agree with everything you said.
I’m thinking/hoping that this new wave of Europeans going to European instances will help spread out the centralization of .world and .ml, now and it’ll hold into the future, but we’ll see.
Hearing that several people have started country specific instances also gives me hope in this. With country/geographicly specific, topic specific, and just general instances, I think/hope it will lead to a more balanced user base.
Not just Europeans. I was talking to my roommate about how I deleted my Reddit accounts and fully committed to switching over to Lemmy, and his main concern was which instances were hosted in America so he could avoid them.
That’s awesome to hear.
Hopefully, the newest reddit influx will be able to settle in without any/too many issues.
I just made another comment that elaborated my stance more too.
I didn’t realize there was a trend of European users. I haven’t really thought about it, but Lemmy could use some sort of translation layer to facilitate multi-but-not-bilingual community. There’s a lot of German, French, Spanish, and Portuguese speakers I’d probably love interacting with and would never know! For now I rely on bilingual non-English natives or the little French I remember and just lurk.
Lemmy has language tags. Clients could offer integration with translation tools.
I don’t know how big the “wave” is but !buyeuropean@feddit.uk has jumped to the 11th(?) most popular/active community in the last week or so. The activity level reminds me of more niche subreddits, where you’d see a couple posts every hour through the day. Quite an increase over what it was at.
I also recall seeing a chart of a German (?) instance that had linear growth and over the past week it went exponential. I doubt the exponential growth will last more than a couple weeks before going back to linear, but still cool to see.
Edit: Added link to the community.
How does one do this without hardware?
…. Acquire/rent hardware, or pay for cloud services?
“How does one cook without a stove”
Yeah no, I’m not paying to do what reddit charged nothing for
Then you should expect enshittified experiences if you aren’t willing to pay for them
Reddit didn’t let you host your own Reddit. Also, you don’t need to host your own instance, you can just use someone else’s for free.
Reddit may not have financially charged you but it came at a cost
“I want everyone else to do everything for me for free, I DEMAND it”
Plenty of people are ok with ads and such, and that’s fine. People who don’t want that may need to pay for the infrastructure of having an alternative platform. It all comes down to what you value more, and there’s no inherently right or wrong answer.
You’re not required to run your own instance on your own hardware; you’ve just got to find an existing instance with an admin team you’re comfortable with, create your community there and recruit moderators just like you would on Reddit.
Literally the only answer not trying to fleece me. Thank you.
? That’s a bizarre response.
No one here is trying to fleece you. People are suggesting ways to run your own instance as that’s the major difference between Reddit and Lemmy; you’re not obligated to use someone else’s hardware or be subject to their rules, you can setup your own systems and have a bit more freedom. Reddit doesn’t give you that option.
Your account is subject to the rules of the instance it was created on, as well as the rules of each community you’re interacting with. If you run afoul of the admins for your instance, you can be banned, losing access to that account completely.
If you were to run your own instance; no single admin could ban your entire account if you pissed them off. You can still be blocked from communities or entire instances if you don’t play nicely with others, but you won’t lose the account so you can still use it in other instances/communities.
For most people this isn’t really necessary; but lemmy also has a pretty large number of tech nerds that like to self-host our own services, so you’ll get quite a bit of ‘heres how you can do it yourself’ type responses.
Unlike reddit, you can just setup your own space on your own hardware completely under your own control, if you don’t like what’s available.
Fleece you? You act like we over here in a shady alley forcing you to buy shit.
??? How are the other answers trying to fleece you?
Take your meds
You appear to have asked a vague question and people responded on what they thought you meant with your question.
You seem to be interpreting that as people trying to take your money rather than seeing that what you are looking to understand and what people are answering do not line up.
Another user has already given you other information that looks like what you were looking for, so I won’t bother reiterating.
I just want to say that I hope in the future you’ll try not to assume people interacting with you are trying to take advantage of you and there may just be a disconnect in the conversation.
Regardless, best of luck with everything :)
You rent hardware.
The fuck I do
You didn’t need to stand up a whole instance to create a community.
I’m kind of sidestepping the point, but I think the average user will always be able to depend on the community to some degree, at least hopefully. All it takes is one savvy and willing user to support a huge section of community, bless the admins. If I’m being pedantic, most admins don’t own the hardware anyway, but that’s not the point. It’s not even the software necessarily. If it isn’t Lemmy itself, the spirit of independent web won’t go away. People will be always running Tor, I2P, fedi, I’ll even include crypto. The community isn’t the platform, it’s us.
I apologize for the uncalled-for Ted Talk.
I need to know a bit more what you are specifically asking to answer appropriately, but I’ll guess in the mean time.
I’m assuming you asking about starting an instance without hardware. My understanding is that many of the top Lemmy instances are hosted on server farms (companies) rather than self-hosted on their own hardware. Hosting with a company would be essentially renting their server to run your software (Lemmy). You would have control of all the software decisions (instance admin), but would not own the hardware.
I’m not particularly knowledgeable in the area, but the above is my understanding and hopefully that answers your question. If not, let me know and I’ll try again :)
Also, I believe the !buyeuropean@feddit.uk community just posted in the last couple days a list of European companies that could be used to host Lemmy instances.
Edit: added correct community and link.
So I have to pay. No thanks.
Infrastructure costs