I cannot stress this strongly enough: You have not been “using Lemmy” for 1.5 years now. “Lemmy” isn’t a service the same way Reddit is, it’s a web engine, like Joomla, or like phpBB.

You’ve been using lemm.ee for 1.5 years.

Nobody wants to hear this, but there’s no “Lemmy”. This emergent network of social media sites isn’t a coherent thing, and it’s not a stable concept. The attempts to make this look like a singular space are to the ultimate detriment of the network, because implicitly lying to end users about what they’re doing informs how they behave.

You’ve been using lemm.ee. Lemm.ee has copies of content on other websites, but those websites have different rules, and different expectations than lemm.ee. You don’t get to pretend otherwise because of where you’re reading the content, and there is no guarantee that you will have further access to content from any other website than lemm.ee.

This is a reality that people simply do not want to face, for some reason. Everyone wants to imagine that federation is just centralized social media with some voodoo in the background, but it is a fundamentally different paradigm, and this is the wild fucking west.

You’re going to get your toes stepped on if you treat it like something it’s not.

You should understand the rules of the places you are posting to, yes.

This is why “let’s pretend this is centralized social media and ignore the fact that we’re all on different websites” is a bad idea, actually. You don’t get to parachute into someone else’s house and expect the rules of your own home apply.

A lot of people get ants in their pants over the idea of people talking about the same or similar things in different places, for some reason. Decentralization’s just a buzz word, I guess.

Well, they’re on different websites, for one. That context, despite what many here want to believe, is meaningful.

Your feelings are no less valid than others. But your feelings and your reactions or behaviours are different things, related as they might be. And those reactions and behaviours may be making others think that you are challenging their feelings.

That doesn’t make those reactions unjustified. I have no idea what situations you’re encountering, or how you are reacting to them, but some people are often quick to try and shut down discussions or actions that make them feel bad, particularly if they think they are or should be in a position of authority over others.

Any deal with Trump is no deal at all. He’s the kind of guy that, if you give an inch, starts waving his hands around about how you stole 16 inches from him, and how you must be thrown in a hole somewhere.

Granting him anything is telling him that you are weak and ripe to be exploited.

Yes, perhaps. But I suspect that still distracts from the fact that we’re trying to sell an illusion with the fediverse, and I personally believe that that is a mistake. So many issues people voice about their experience here come from the design of everything emulating Big Social, and Big Social is centralized.

Aping the design language of centralized social media and then trying to get anyone other than enthusiasts on board is never going to work.

One of the ways we do this is by referring to “Mastodon” and “Lemmy” as if they are places you can go to, websites you can use. This is why I chose phpBB as my reference point. I’ve used WordPress and Joomla in the past, with less impact. We don’t and have never spoken about phpBB as a singular location. You would respond to someone suggesting you “use phpBB” with, at the very least, a confused look. Or, if you didn’t know what it is, you’d ask them “what is that?” and they’d tell you “forum software”, revealing that their request of you was absurd. “Get an email address” is, at the very least, something that isn’t a nonsensical request. Websites demand it of us all of the time.

Mastodon servers are separate entities, too. The fact that they communicate with each other doesn’t change that, and the persistent desire that folks here have to imagine otherwise is a hurdle to adoption.

The mental model is of a central space that instances grant or bar access to, but that’s simply not how the technology actually works. Too much effort has gone into trying to make ActivityPub-enabled websites look like something they’re not (centralized social media), while totally ignoring what they are: small forums and microblogs that have optional access to other forums and microblogs.

Mastodon is web server software. “Mastodon” doesn’t exist. It’s an illusion. And the fact that everyone keeps trying to sell this illusion is exactly why there are all of these broken expectations and hurdles.

The server selection problem goes away if people stop treating their hosting website as an after thought or dumb terminal. People really have to stop promoting web server software as if it’s a platform, and start finding reasons to recommend actual websites to people.

Ain’t nobody ever recommended phpBB to anyone who wasn’t looking to host a forum.

You have misread their comment and understood it backwards. AP’s saying people on Mastodon are engaging in Lemmy discussions.

There is no way to follow Mastodon users from Lemmy. Lemmy simply does not work that way.

That would require people actually recommending specific websites, and all people seem to want to do is circle jerk about “lemmy”, as if it’s a tangible place and not a website engine

The onboarding process should be happening after this point. People shouldn’t be going “I want to join Lemmy!”, because that’s kind of a non-sensical statement. Lemmy is a website engine. They should be going “I want to join awesomewebsite.com. Oh, and look, I can see stuff from anotheraweseomewebsite.net, too! That’s so cool!”

If the website itself cannot provide a compelling reason as to why someone should sign up for it, then why should they sign up for it? So that it can be a dumb-terminal for some other website?

Honestly, I think federation being (mostly) invisible is actually part of the problem. Trying to make these spaces look like something they’re not makes people believe they work in a way that they don’t. It makes “Lemmy” look like wish-dot-com Reddit, and Mastodon look like temu Twitter.

This is all something new. This is a thousand Reddits, where you can see over the fence at what each other Reddit is talking about. It’s ten-thousand Twitters, where you can talk to people on other Twitters.

If you could post on Facebook articles from Twitter, people would get that maybe they don’t see every single comment, or every single Facebook article all of the time. This would be understood. Twitter and Facebook look like, and are discussed as if, they’re two totally different websites. The same would be true of AVForums and CivicForums, if they could cross-post.

But fediverse platforms go out of their way to hide what they are, and to strip each website of its identity. And that seems wildly fucked up to me.

People need to stop sending people to “join ___” sites. I get why they are, or at least were, necessary, but they’re totally superfluous when users are making recommendations to other users.

Just recommend a website for them to join. Word of mouth + systematized signup makes zero sense.

Default instances would go a long way

No, suggesting actual websites to people, rather than “Lemmy”, would go a long way.

Default instances result in centralization. In recreating the existing structures that, ostensibly, we’re all here to reject.

Well, it is a photo sharing platform.

That’s heavy

No. I think it works to hide the distributed nature of the fediverse, and works to make things that are inherent to a distributed model seem uncanney and broken.

It also strips some value out of the ‘local’ experience, communicating that each Mastodon-based website is the same as any other, and presenting something that looks like a dumb terminal, rather than a stand-alone website.

Ultimately, I think it’s bad for the fediverse.

I mean, most of the communities are on .world, and if they’re not federating with .world, they’re just not going to show up in the majority of comment sections.

But also, HB is much more of a communal space than most of the big instances, and much more aligned on how they engage with off-site content. And as the fediverse grows horizontally, a significant part of it probably going to be through focused instances, rather than more general purpose sites. We have those covered already, and most of the people interested in something like that aren’t going to leave Reddit anytime soon.

They have what they want.

This means there will be more “we don’t want to host this kind of content” discussions over time, not fewer. The fediverse will look more patchwork, not less.

So, I gather what you’re encountering is communities that are tossing out posts and comments that do not break any laws, on the basis that they find them distasteful. And you’re looking for an instance where communities will not do this, but that is also federated with all of the instances hosting the communities that are doing this.

But to what end? If you are still trying to interface with those communities, the posts will still be removed. Being on a “free speech instance” doesn’t insulate you from the rules of the communities you are engaging with. There’s only an issue if you’re finding yourself under pressure to change your own behaviour under threat of the admins banning you from the site.

You’re looking for a space where you will feel welcome, but where one of the key defining elements is making it easy to ignore that local space.

I’m not sure you’re presenting a coherent desire here.