I thought communities synced over instances so if an instance goes down, communities are still accessible. Is this not true?

This is not true. ActivityPub (the protocol Lemmy instances use to speak with one-another) does not intend to be a redundant, distributed datastore. There are a few reasons for this. One is practical. It needs to be affordable to start a new instance. If the requirements for starting a new instance entail mirroring significant parts of the fediverse (a network of over 2 million users and 22,000 instances) it would be impossible for anybody to do it unless they were Google/Facebook.

Another has to do with trust. A community has a home. That home is chosen (ideally) because the admins can be trusted. That instance is the universal source of truth for that community. If communities didn’t live on a specific instance, they would be vulnerable to various forms of hijacking. The home instance has the final say on who has permission to comment, and who has permission to perform moderator actions. None of these actions could be trusted if they weren’t cleared by the home instance first. Third party servers perform basic validataion against the currently known ban list / mod list / etc, but this could easily be spoofed by malicious instances.

When an instance goes down, it is kind of similar to a netsplit on IRC. A queue of outgoing messages build up on your instance, which can be seen on your instance. Queues of messages queue up on other instances, which can be seen on other instances, but they won’t be synchronized until the destination instance returns (this depends specifically on which inbox the messages are directed towards - I’m not particularly familliar with the specific implementation in Lemmy).

Finally (though not really), ActivityPub isn’t designed to be a broadcasting protocol. In the case of Lemmy, and other Reddit-like clones, it effectively acts as such, but it is intended only to send messages to the places they belong. If you post a message and the subscribers to that message only exist on 3 servers, that message ONLY gets sent to those three servers, even though there are thousands of servers in the network (at least, this is how it is supposed to work in theory).

I might have some details wrong here. I’m more familiar with how Mastodon works (and how it fails) at this point after troubleshooting various problems on my instance.

You should be aware that the people over at Raddle have a massive grudge against Lemmy and they post shit like this all the time.

It is true. You can host an image somewhere (i.e. actually run the web server) paste a link to it, and if anybody clicks on it they will show up in your web server’s access log. Typically this will include an IP address and a user agent string (indicating OS, browser version, etc.). To mitigate this, Lemmy would need store copies of any media which gets linked here and serve those instead of allowing hot-links. Mastodon does this, but for the same reason it requires hundreds of gigabytes of storage to run a small instance.

I feel like PeerTube hasn’t broken through yet in the way Mastodon has, and Lemmy is kind-of broaching on. Mastodon itself is heavy for what it does. I need 8GB of RAM, >600GB of storage, and 2 CPU cores to run a 100 person instance. Lemmy is leaner (as well as some microblog style alternatives to Mastodon like Misskey / Pleroma). Peertube, on the other hand, can only get so lean. Hosting video content is orders of magnitude more intensive than hosting a text-based message board. It is much more costly to do this, and to compete with platforms like YouTube, it is not sufficient for just spin up a single instance. You also need to work out CDNs, caching, load balancing, etc.

Like Jack said, I’d just find an instance you vibe with and post stuff there, but it will take a lot of resources to grow the network as a whole.

Step one: Post

Post cool / funny / poignant shit which isn’t just pictures of your lunch. Lunchposters are the bottom of the barrel. At least post pictures of your cat. Same goes for Free Software. Free Software is great, but when you’re joining a Free Software social network, you don’t want to be the millionth guy posting about ArchLinux or Emacs every day. This is the quickest path of turning free social networks into ham radio (which is also great), where a bunch of boomers get on the radio and talk to each other about their radios.

Step two: Network

Find cool people. This is more difficult without an AlGoRiThM, but try out different hashtags (which you can also follow), dive into the local/federated feeds and try to find one or two people to follow at a time.

Step three: Engage

If you have a good bit or meme (or insight, even) that’s relevant, engage. Don’t be a reply-guy though. Don’t fall into the trap of just showing up in the mentions of the same 5 people every day. Never stop posting your own shit, even if it gets little engagement initially. No one will follow you when they are guaranteed to see your dogshit posts below the person they actually care about anyway. Follow back the people who follow you. When one of your posts really takes off and gets a lot of likes, look for the people who scrolled your profile and liked the shit you actually care about instead of whatever random meme that you got trending. Those people are your most powerful allies.

You get likes (and discovery) from making insightful replies, but you will only get follows if you are posting interesting stuff of your own.

Here’s one perspective: https://runyourown.social/

Personally, I run a Mastodon+Hometown server for around 100 people and it costs me about $30/mo. It costs me more to fill my car’s gas tank. I could maybe start a patron or something, but at this stage, it is not even necessary.

About 3 years ago, I was a member of r/ChapoTrapHouse, which got banned from Reddit. The day after this happened, we had over 10,000 people sitting in a lifeboat Discord “server.” Within the community, we had the experience and willpower to take Lemmy, kick the tires, make a couple adjustments which were necessary for our community, and make sure we weren’t doing malpractice by hosting it. This all happened before Federation had been implemented in Lemmy.

Maintaining the fork was labor intensive, and a lot of the original developers burned out. We couldn’t afford wages for development (the site still only exists due to volunteers), but the hosting costs were easily covered by user donations.

You need a tenant union. There may be tenant unions active in your area which you can contact for advice, or even support. Beware of retaliation though. This is something which needs to be thought about carefully and approached strategically. In this regard, it is no different from unionizing a workplace.

If the corporation is renting 500+ units, that means they are ripping off 500+ working class families / individuals. If those 500+ tenants organize to the degree where they can collectively withhold their rent, they’ve got the landlords by the balls. Individual action can only go so far.

I’ll start off by saying, I am going to quote-reply a bunch of things from your comment. Don’t take it like I’m trying to be a debate bro and own you online. I actually think your comment is quite constructive.

Something like 6 million people died in the Holocaust and there is plenty of evidence to show that.

Six million Jews. This figure excludes the Roma, LGBT, Neurodivergant, Communists, Anarchists, partisans, and prisoners of war. The total figure lands somewhere around 10-11 million, at least according to the US Holocaust Museum.

But consider a world where you canno make an academic or scientific inquiry into a topic because “the issue has been resolved”. What kind of world is that? He was defending a researcher who did an analysis into the Holocaust and came up with significantly different figures.

In abstract, I completely agree with this, but we live in a world where the reactionaries have more money than God to churn out this sort of self-serving analysis, and debate subjects which ought to be settled. We live in a world where government and think tank employees get paid to spend eight hours a day revising history on Wikipedia while volunteers and academics have to worry about keeping a roof over their heads. We live in a world where we’re still debating the right to abortion in the year 2023.

As such, I am much more interested learning the lessons of the triumphs and shortcomings of the masses of people who fought against this evil than I am about debating whether it was really even evil to begin with.

To repeat myself, I have never heard about this take from Chomsky, and I’d be interested to learn about it in detail. I assume it is actually benign because there are a significant amount of people who criticize Chomsky from the left and I have never heard them mention this.

So we bring it back to the Lemmy devs. The article I read (I didn’t read them all) was an analysis of the death toll of the Mao period and claims the figures were inflated. Does someone posting a link to this or otherwise sharing it make them a “genocide denier” and a “CCP tankie”?

In general, I think the Western audience knows absolutely nothing about this history. This is not limited to the layman Redditor, but large swaths of academia and the fourth estate as well. It would be fascinating to see what answers you’d get if you asked a random Washington Post or Wall Street Journal reporter to explain what happened in the Great Leap Forward or the Cultural Revolution with no notes. This is the standard I choose to hold the developers against. I am pretty sure Dessalines has the history pinned down much more accurately than the average American propagandist.

break

In general, I agree. The parameters of discussion on the big social networks are very heavily controlled. The largest communities on Reddit, like r/Politics, r/WorldNews etc. are extremely single-minded. Some places like r/AskHistorians tend to be a bit better.

wumao

My point exactly. Nobody can possibly disagree with US State Department line unless they are getting paid. Typical Reddit conspiracy thinking.

The lack of “Lemmy etiquette” is basically the whole point of the project. There is no general rule. There are places for shitposting, there are places for serious discussion. The civility fetishists get their corner, the people who enjoy replying to bigots with pigpoopballs.jpg get their corner. There is a niche for everybody - and if there isn’t - you can start one without being completely isolated from the rest of the network (at least, initially).

The situation on Reddit was absurd. The “Reddiquette” rules were generally okay, but very open to subjective enforcement. I spent many years on Reddit. I browsed a lot of different communities on there. But if one person on a community I browse makes a post saying “look what this asshole is saying” on another community I browse, and I go there an make an insightful comment, I am now “brigading.” If somebody wants to politely debate whether trans people have a right to exist, or whether or not we should send the homeless to concentration camps, and I tell them to fuck themselves, I am being “uncivil.”

Communities need mods and admins who have their back, not mods who become cops for the admins who become cops for the board of directors who only care about increasing KPIs and profit. The coolest thing that can happen on the Fediverse is landing in a place where the admins will eat a block or two to defend the integrity of their communities. This is something which is simply impossible on Reddit.

Noam Chomsky is generally pretty smart, but he has some blinders. I am actually shocked to hear he would entertain this, as a Jew who was in his teenage years during the Holocaust. Was he doing the bone-headed ACLU “Even Nazis deserve the right to free speech” thing? If this is his position, I actually disagree with him.

The thing about the Holocaust is that there is a rigorous consensus that it took place, and that it was the worst atrocity in modern history. This is supported by anthropological evidence (the physical sites and artifacts where the exterminations took place), meticulous records recorded both by the perpetrators and the victims, the oral history of its survivors and their offspring. There are many well known people alive today who can name relatives who perished in the Shoah (Bernie Sanders and Norman Finkelstein, off the top of my head). My father met Eli Wiesel personally when he was in the hospital receiving medical treatment.

This is a very different case from the kind of academically discredited lies we see originating from the “Black Book of Communism,” which starts out by counting all the Axis KIA as victims of Communist brutality, and which ignores the now-available information revealed by the opening of the Soviet archives 30 years ago. If you apply the logic these people use for the Chinese Revolution to the US Civil War, you would come away with the conclusion that Abraham Lincoln murdered one million Americans and that the abolition of slavery was one of the greatest mistakes in history.

Marxism is supposed to be the eminent critique of all which exists, but the typical dork from Reddit who knows nothing at all about Chinese history except for Tank Man and thinks 1.4 billion people are just brainwashed subservient lemmings who need a white savior to come fix their country isn’t the person I care to talk to about it.

Generally positive, with caveats. Lemmy’s early adopters were driven by an understanding that Reddit was not a viable platform for self organization, free discussion and association. We knew this day would eventually come.

The current wave of bans and hostile takeovers occurring on Reddit is nothing new for the radicals. We watched them suppress the Blue Leaks, we watched them shut down r/CTH in the middle of the George Floyd uprising, we watched them coup r/PresidentialRaceMemes, we watched them purge r/GenZhou, a community focused specifically on revolutionary theory.

Reddit has demonstrated time and time again that it is happy to serve as an instrument of counterinsurgency. This comes as no surprise, with an Atlantic Council alum heading their content moderation policy.

As one of the most astroturfed social media platforms on the Internet, Redditors bring a lot of those problems here. They tend to behave like they are the smartest people in the room, just because there are a lot of them. They like calling other websites echo chambers, when they hail from the biggest echo chamber on the English speaking net. The conspiracies I’ve seen them spread about the Lemmy devs and contributors have been absolutely wild.

I think time will heal most of them.

Firefox

let them fight

The developers are communists. One of them maintains a collection of essays explaining their beliefs. There is a lot of drama and controversy swirling around. A lot of people putting words in each other’s mouths. If you want a straight answer, I would go straight to the source. The fact that you’re hearing third-hand that they’re white supremacists and nazis clearly illustrates how distorting the rumor mill is.