The domain https://fediverse.observer/ redirects to sedo now.
On October 11th these two commits where made to the repo:
this will be my final release, glad to have contributed since 2011 to some fediverse stats, https://fedidb.com/ is a great resource with more interest
this software is no longer developed
Sad to have lost such a great resource.
Probably would have missed it. Appreciate the tag :)
Honestly, as long as I can easily enable it, it doesn’t matter to me if everyone has it by default (only viewed your instance without logging in). Might be worth a user poll, but I have no idea how wanted that feature is.
FYI I altered my [FR] on Codeburg to reflect you’d already implementing the feature.
Link doesn’t work, but I think I know what it’ll look like.
Given both your responses, it seems I didn’t conveyed the idea well to OpenStars. My understanding is that an instance sends to the appropriate “hosting instance” a post or comment. My thought is, if it doesn’t already happen, have the “hosting instance” send an ‘acknowledgement’ back to the sending instance. Then, if the comment has been ‘acknowledged’, the sending instance would put an indicator on the comment (check mark or something) to show “yes, my user, your activity successfully arrived at it’s destination.”
In my mind, this wouldn’t be every instance checking every other instance’s user’s activity to make sure it federated properly. This would be an instance confirming things for only its own users.
Hopefully that makes sense. I graphical up-time graph is probably nice to have too. I was going to say those are available on fediverse measurement sites, but with a quick look, it seems like that was a Fediverse-Observer (RIP) only feature.
Happy to help and thanks for being so responsive, open-minded, and just all around great :)
Edit: when making my comment to OpenStars, I checked a post I made to the [email protected] community yesterday, which did not federate (https://programming.dev/c/Servo is missing my post).
I think the “acknowledgement” feature could also help elevate the issue entirely. I’m not sure how to ‘force’ a re-submission of my post, but if an instance didn’t get an ‘acknowledgement’ the instance could check that the ‘"hosting instance” is still receiving and then try resend the post/comment after a certain time interval.
I don’t know if such an admin tool as you describe already exists - perhaps the grafana one meets that need? - so I will leave it to those who choose to install the code and become admins (even of just a personal instance) to comment further and give feedback.
That said, the community that you pointed to might be in a weird lockdown state, since I noticed that it has zero active mods. See the sidebar on the home instance and then the modlog offers the further knowledge that the only prior mod has been banned from that instance. If you want to revive it, you could appeal to the instance owner and become the new kid of it?
And that situation illustrates the difficulties that people face when coming here: this place isn’t quite a ghost town, but it is more empty than it is full. The people that have thrived here so far are those who approach it from an IT hobbiest standpoint and are willing to roll up their sleeves and get to work building it. But most people are not willing or capable to do likewise, which turns many away. The tools are still being built, and definitely lack polish atm.
But we are building them nonetheless (well, Mia is:-P, though we can help with suggestions!), steadily over time. So I am less concerned about current number of MAUs than in seeing the challenges be overcome, such as building these tools. Although that requires funding which in turn requires some level of MAUs, thus I am ecstatic about these subscribable blocklists to help keep people from fleeing this place!! 🤩
I was going to take your suggestion, because I doubt it is much mod responsibility, but it looks like programming.dev was having federation issues when I tried to post and the post never made it. Remade it just now and it went through, no issues.
Agreed. I feel it’s currently very much a make your own space and if people come by great, but don’t expect or rely on it happening.
Agreed :)
I do need to find better language though, so that I don’t annoy people when I say that it is sometimes hard to have hope that this place will grow.
Bc really, growth isn’t the point?
Though it is necessary, even to remain afloat.
You may want to try using “feeling language”. I’ve found it helps a lot online and IRL.
Ex: “I feel like that …”, “My understanding of the situation is …”, “To me that …”, etc.
Agreed, for all the reasons you mentioned earlier, plus I think it would be nicer if the activity, administrative, and development load was spread out a bit wider (makes it easier on everyone/less burnout, and provides redundancies).
A lot of the problems with Lemmy boil down ultimately to overall lack of moderation. Many people were banned from Reddit for many reasons, among them including an extreme level of toxicity, so the need for such is dire - that is, assuming that our goal is not to provide a safe space for everyone to vent their feelings, and instead to offer a space welcoming to newcomers. The recent thread in the Fediverse community praising the devs of many Fediverse platforms is a great example: it became highly toxic, ultimately being locked.
So (1) we need to identify what we are. Some places, like dbzero and anarchist nexus will choose to become more like 4chan, with the admins themselves literally flinging actual death threats against admins of other instances. Others, like PieFed.Social, will become more actively hostile against such trolling and tankie (and tankie-supporting) behaviors. So there will never be a solution to this step that involves all of us getting onto the same page.
The problem here comes from lack of transparency. Hexbear’s Chapotraphouse is fairly open about what it is… though many 3rd-party apps bury the sidebar quote deep into their menus, especially if you encounter a post on All and so you will basically never see it. I do decry the right of places such as Chapotraphouse to exist, but I do think that they need to be labeled properly, with a warning label, so that non-extremist mainstream normal folks do not encounter them unawares, and by virtue of their inclusion and lack of distinction from any other content here, think that the entire Threadiverse is a tankie haven, full of extremists who support genocide and the violent, bloody overthrow of the entire Western civilization.
PieFed made huge strides towards this regard. Most 3rd-party apps barely support any PieFed features that differ from base Lemmy, but at least the browser UX is somewhat better, in some ways.
However, PieFed advancement in this regard seems to have ground to a halt before picking up speed in the opposite direction. But to focus on the former for a moment, e.g. the instance picker (the last time I checked) was very confusing and came nowhere close to explaining what individual users could expect when signing up to an instance. Fortunately PyLova has picked up the slack here and advanced that cause significantly forward. Unfortunately, PieFed seems to be continually actively working against this goal now, making the options more opaque rather than transparent - e.g. any PieFed community on an instance that does not explicitly disable the downvote feature (and which ones have done that? how is anyone supposed to know!?) is shadow-censoring contributions offered from many different software platforms (Lemmy, Mbin, nodeBB, Friendica, Mastodon, etc.), without disclosure of that fact. However, I see no acknowledgement of that fact at e.g. https://feddit.online/auth/instance_chooser, where for PieFed.Social the closest item of explanation offered seems to be “Newbie friendly: yes”.
Only after someone has been guided into picking an instance does the futher steps matter, like (2) picking a 3rd-party app (sigh… I guess to most Redditors, this is mandatory?), and (3) helping them sign up to discover new content (this PieFed excels at, at least at the software level even though many instances like PieFed.World do not take full advantage by fleshing out the Topic Areas). Though then comes (4) retaining people, which is where most of our exceedingly poor reputation seems to stem from, as people who jumped through all of the prior hurdles flee this toxic shithole, which simultaneously barely has any content and yet what content it does offer to people unfortunately turns people away due to how toxic it all is. I do think that Rimu had the right idea behind a lot of his social credit features - e.g. if someone is extremely often downvoted, by let’s say “like-minded” instances (however that might be defined - e.g. it could be anti-genocide, or it could even be the opposite of pro-genocide, or neutral, or whatever), then their account name begins to come with a warning ⚠️ label, so that people do not stumble into a conversation completely unawares. Not everyone wants this space to be even more like 4chan than it already is - some do, but mainstream normal folks have spoken, and they refuse to come here because it is already too much like it for their tastes.
People demand freedom. Which ultimately means some restrictions must be placed, so as to protect others, e.g. people must not be free to say whatever they want, even against the wishes of the recipients, or else we have no freedom here at all. Voat & nostr already proved that: even the spaces that reputedly values “free speech” the most ended up as wastelands where nobody wanted to venture into, due to having no freedom to not listen to such vitriol literally 100% of the time (without any recourse to block it even for a moment, except to flee entirely).
So now it’s a cache-22 where we won’t get more content without more people, who refuse to come here. And also they demand 3rd-party apps, whose devs look to me to be tired on working to support new features, especially for PieFed. PyLova might be the single best hope the entire Threadiverse has to grow. We’ll see what happens!
Yeah, I would say we are definitely at a “work-in-progress” level, with a ways to go.
I saw the post originally. Going back it looks like FiniteBanjo went to pick a fight. I’m not trying make any judgement on their comments, just that they appear, to me, to wanted to start an argument (“Well, not all of them. Some of them are a stain on this earth.”). Not surprised it was locked at that point.
My recollection and understanding of that situation was that it was an inferred threat, that, when confronted, was immediately rescinded and that admin stepped down due to their actions. So, I think, it’s a bit disingenuous to use that as a negative against them. To me, they responded appropriately when confronted with how their message was taken (clarification that’s not how it was intended and then stepping down from their position of authority).
I believe soon after the .world admins faked “evidence” that the anarchist admins were really fascists trying to sow discord or something (I don’t recall the exact allegation, but I remember the evidence being shown and confirmed to be fake). My recollection is Rimu backed the .world admins even after their evidence had been shown to be faked. I want to say that is when Rimu introduced the instance “silencing” feature, to reduce anarchist influence after his and the .world admins’ attempts to expel the anarchists with the faked evidence failed.
Decentralization. There doesn’t need to be, in my eyes.
On-boarding is a huge gap in my mind. From my view, we basically throw everyone in the deep-end and hope they learn to swim and aren’t too concerned with fixing the issue, because we all learned to swim, so why can’t they.
I could see an on-boarding that quickly explains the structure (like 2 sentences about decentralization/email-analogy and identifying a users name and instance. Then go into a quick questionnaire (for determining best host instance for them) about what kind of posts they want to see (one of those could be a quoted .ml account, to see if the new user wants to see “triad” content). From there some, basic filtering/block list yes/nos (block-list for spam accounts: yes/no, agentic accounts: yes/no, bot accounts: yes/no, etc.) and interested topics (software, cats, art, etc.). I think that would go a long way in helping get an easier and more welcoming environment (may only be fully possible via Pylova features at the moment (block-lists)).
That’s a good point I hadn’t thought of before. I’m not sure how an instance could keep a user informed without keeping a larger database of community and instance settings. Alternatively, sending that info for each load or interaction the user makes. The larger database sounds much more reasonable, but still daunting and not easily implemented and probably with a significant compute cost.
This isn’t surprising to me. Piefed has 20% of the users Lemmy has (and that increase to 20% is relatively recent) and developer generally want to get paid for their work (especially if they don’t have a main corporate job).
Yeah, definitely looks to be the brightest hope we have right now. Hopefully, they can keep up a sustainable pace and don’t burn out.
Agreed about FiniteBanjo but iirc that definitely was not the only one - and it makes sense that a mod would rather ban some singular individual (especially if only for a day or two) rather than lock an entire post over such. Reddit offers the ability to lock a particular thread within a post (including I believe replies underneath it?), but I forget if that is possible in Lemmy or not. The tools tend to be significantly more primitive here, even if not enshittified for reasons of profit, just shit instead for reasons of not enough effort put in as compared to a multi-million dollar corporation hiring full teams of dedicated programmers. And then add the constraints of requiring working within the ActivityPub Protocol to enact federation and it becomes clear how much more difficult this task is to not merely replace Reddit but expand beyond it.
Though the end users rarely seem to care about such things and instead simply want everything handed to them for free. That is what they were trained into becoming by an advertising driven model of the internet, and they see no reason to be anything else.
About the death threats; I never said that the threat was personal and direct. And actually I had forgotten about whatever accusations were faked or whatever, though that’s besides the point for my own topic here. Vague and unspecified death threats are still calls for literal violence and portrayals of a lawless mindset that encourages such. Which some of us here on the Threadiverse very much like, while others of us here are the opposite and merely tolerate it, but your average Redditor trends more towards having been groomed to enjoy the walled garden effect, or else has already been here. In any case I was pointing towards the death threats as evidence of disorder and fighting that leads away from stability, which in turn increases greatly the complexity of the Threadiverse that is mandatory to be understood prior to joining us here.
e.g. when/if the Flotilla defederates from Lemmy.world, that will impact a great many people. LW has >90% of the most active communities, and of the rest many have ended up via various migration effects on an instance that is a member of the Flotilla. New members will in virtually no way be guided into understanding any of this, leading to such posts as e.g. the recent one in Fediverse expressing absolute shock at having been banned from Lemmy.ml - as if that wasn’t a practically daily event here (or at least definitely would be if we had a sufficient populace to keep up that rate). We are fast falling into fragmentation, since we cannot maintain mutual respect. And especially if evidence really was being outright faked (I have no idea?), then all the more so.
I am not trying to suggest that such an action would signal the death knell for Lemmy, but the fact that it seemed imminent at one point and in fact is still high likely does not exactly signal health either, particularly in terms of a mindset of growth as opposed to mere existence.
I also am not opposed to decentralization, particularly since that’s already what we have now, but we should somewhere EXPLAIN this to new joiners. Although many years into this project, I haven’t really seen even the first steps towards such a thing. The PieFed instance selector came the closest to it and even sparked in me a hope that it would meet that need, but progress on that seems to have been abandoned and suggestions for PieFed to improve it have gone ignored for something like a year or so now. I doubt it will ever be carried forward, in that venue.
Agreed about the swimming pool illustration regarding onboarding, except it’s far worse than that even: we here all learned GENTLY as the waters slowly rise about us, so we each picked up a few new concepts as the years trickled (or sped?) past us. New joiners are being asked to suddenly learn all of it at once, and even worse than that besides, to do so prior to making an account. One example: if you visit Lemmy.ml without an account you will see a Local listing of posts, which I believe is the software default for all newly created instances. Potential new joiners are not shown what is possible from observing that instance, unless they poke around sufficiently enough to notice the All button and see federated content as well. Another example is that I know of no possible way to view an instance’s set of rules from within Voyager. That entire sidebar might as well not exist for people using Voyager, which unfortunately also seems the most likely scenario for a new joiner coming here from Reddit?
I don’t like questionaires, but something along the lines of the PieFed instance picker where the information is all laid out, filtering is possible based on it, and sentences explain the various choices possible would be a great way forward, if someone were willing to take up that project.