Why do alternative facts always gotta show up uninvited to the party? 🥳

TIL, 255 is the new 1.

Aka -1 >> 1 : TRUE

The linked post explains:

A Lemmy.World user informed us about an instance we are federated with that was hosting very illegal content a while back. This was a result of an attack more than a year ago, and said content federated to many other instances, which made local copies of the material. Unfortunately, when this material was taken down at the source, that action did not federate to all linked instances, meaning that there are still some instances showing this material.

Once we were made aware of this, we realized that this was likely not the only occurrence, so we started looking for other instances where this content may also still exist. We have identified more than 50 affected instances and already reached out to many of them to inform them about this content to have it taken down.

It seems that it is quite difficult for instance admins to do things like permanently remove posts locally which have already been removed by a mod somewhere else. Ironically, by intentionally making it difficult to access, its inaccessibility afterwards makes it difficult to… uh… access, e.g. to delete it, very much a design flaw.

Are you sure that you don’t already know it by heart?

So… ‘tangential’ then? :-P

They are not - he X/cancelled it.:-P

The Mbin software federates with both Lemmy and Mastodon at once. The Interstellar app works for it (+ also PieFed, though the latter does not currently federate with Mastodon, only Lemmy and itself). The largest Mbin instance iirc is fedia.io. By default you see the “Threads” content shared with Lemmy, but clicking the top left icon and then choosing “Microblog” will show content from Mastodon.

The terminology can be quite confusing, especially on Mbin compared to Lemmy - e.g. Lemmy-style “Communities” on Mbin are called “Magazines”. The sharing between Lemmy, Mbin Threads/Magazines, and PieFed is called the “Threadiverse”, while the sharing between Mastodon and Mbin Microblog/People does not have a unique name iirc (though I don’t use Mbin or any Mastodon or Microblogging so apologies if I am incorrect here), so it just uses the wider name “Fediverse”, which also includes the Threadiverse inside of it as well. A wiki is in progress, looking for contributors. That community !fediverse@piefed.social has a ton of great reading material, as too does !Fediverse@lemmy.world.

Why is it always that guy!?:-P

Isn’t ActivityPub extremely network intensive though? If all you wanted was a single user subscribing to a handful of communities then Lemmy would be inexpensive but to pull from a lot of communities I thought people have said that it can cost a bit of money, time, etc. Also defending against attacks such as CSAM.

Maybe make a distinction then between running a “tiny personal instance with only a few niche community subscriptions” vs. a small instance, either with multiple users or even just one person subscribing to many communities, if that cost would start to become more prohibitive?

Yes and moreover, feeds work at the community level, not individual posts. Which is a step in the right direction but you may want finer-grain control. Filters may offer more what you are looking for in that case.

I did not mention previously but PieFed also allows you to block all users from a user-specified instance, without requiring admin approval to perform full defederation. It is not perfect but it is very good and e.g. I use it to block Lemmy.ml, which saves me a lot of headaches as most of the worst, most argumentative and unfriendly (and batshit insane) comments I’ve seen come from there. Lemmy’s instance filter is horribly misnamed - it would have much better been called a community muting, as it blocks communities from that insurance but the users remain free to troll you in communities located in other instances, leaving replies, triggering notifications, etc.

The Lemmy apps Sync and Connect can also block all users from an instance.

Edit: also check out !bestoflemmy@lemmy.world - it uses cross-posts to build up a curated listing of “good” posts by some metric. Conversely, the entire instance of beehaw.org works the opposite by extensive manual curation efforts to remove “bad” content by other metrics.

I can think of 3 easy ways to do it off the top of my head… all using PieFed. (1) Straight-up filtering of keywords, which allows All, None, or Some; (2) user customizable and shareable Feeds, so someone creates a good collection and everyone benefits; (3) the entire model of browsing content using PieFed is different: by offering more than simply Subscribed vs. All, you can do something like not subscribe to any political or news communities (i.e. have your cake), so that it doesn’t show up in your Subscribed feed, but then when you want to read that content, it is a click away in the News and Politics Feed (or another similar one of your choice made by you or other users; i.e. eat your cake too).

Using Lemmy though, no not really (not “trivially” I mean). Search for people using ad blocking filters, possibly Ublock. Maybe an app would help? But I don’t know which ones and kinda doubt it - I haven’t seen such a thing in Voyager or Thunder or Interstellar, etc. Development of the Lemmy codebase, in the highly difficult Rust language, is super slow. Basically if you want something like this, you’d have to code it yourself.

A workaround could be to make several Lemmy alts - one for each type of content you would want to include in your Subscribed feed. Like one could be only uplifting news. Most of the time you’d be looking at the same older content though… without being able to widen your view that would allow bringing in of new content.

Edit: I did think of another way: you could run your own Lemmy instance, and use a bot to curate the content however you wish.

Or again, PieFed already has multiple forms of it.

Instance blocking works on:

1. PieFed
2. the Lemmy apps Sync and Connect
3. instance admins who can choose to defederate
4. someone willing to go deep and make a custom web browser filter (presumably like Ublock Origin I would guess)

Nothing else works.

PieFed is trying a bunch of new stuff that even Reddit does not have, enabling the democratization of moderation by putting more power into the hands of individual users (e.g. mods don’t have to be as aggressive as removing many posts with keywords when users who want such can set their own preferences via the built-in keyword filtering, which enables All, Some, and None).

Lemmy to me looks more like a straight attempt to copy, although the modlog is a great addition - unfortunately in the absence of notifications of a moderation event, lack of modmail, and presence of an obscured moderator name, Lemmy has somehow become even more authoritian than Reddit.🤷😳

Though with a MUCH more friendly userbase, and most admins, and ofc lack of profit incentive which all by its lonesome helps a ton.

Bc he’s just that chill, obviously! 😁

I used to think it was that, but now I realize that it’s not “just” communication.

Like Lemmy for instance is somehow more authoritian than Reddit itself - not for an instance admin but for the end user I mean. While there is a modlog, there is no modmail, no notification about an event such as removal of someone’s post, no ability to even know who to DM to ask for clarification or appeal (the modlog used to say more, but nowadays simply says “mod”), and on Lemmy.ml people are routinely banned from communities that they have never even so much as heard of, for making a comment in some other community, and importantly, for violation of an entirely unwritten rule (that while the instance is e.g. pro-genocide when done by certain nations, any negative portrayal of an action done by other nations is not allowed). The latter, especially when the end user receives no notification of it happening, sounds an awful lot like shadowbanning to me.

Instance admins are free, mods can be depending upon the graces of their admins, but end users… are given whatever freedoms the admins allow. Just like Reddit, except less content, and no modmail. No amount of merely explaining this to people who tried Lemmy, got bullied (stories abound in r/RedditAlternatives), and went back, is going to convince them to try again. The tools themselves just don’t live up to the hype that people have already tried promising, and the development moves at a snail’s pace.

Though PieFed gives me more hope.

(it was implied 😜)

Perhaps especially after this.

Not just that, but “Reuters and CNBC reported it” as well. It snowballed from X to mainstream news then back to X again and back to people talking in “reputable” news again, again and again.

At this point I’m wondering just how much if any that mainstream for-profit media is any better than X at reporting anything at all.

I am currently at 100% of the people that I’ve told about Lemmy irl actively chiding me for having mentioned it to them. It doesn’t help that (1) Lemmy.ml is the #1 Lemmy instance in a Google search, and (2) that instance uses Local rather than All when you don’t have an account. If someone told me to consider joining Lemmy.ml, and that first couple of pages of content were all that I saw - especially just before any election in a Western nation - well then now I understand their reaction perfectly, as it is the correct one!?!?

Conversely, PieFed has a number of features that Lemmy lacks, one being the ability to actually block all users from an instance (rather than merely mute communities but not actual users on it - leaving them free to troll you in other communities, reply to your comments, trigger notifications, downvote your content, etc.). Since blocking lemmy.ml, I have had zero regrets, and enjoy interacting with Lemmy communities much better:-).

The real biggest problem that Lemmy has is lack of users and overall dearth of niche content - which ofc wraps back around to why would someone willing come here to be bullied just for being a mainstream centrist or even “leftist” by USA standards (Reddit is based in and its largest userbase is from the USA)?

Bullying is why Lemmy will never grow. That, and how the tools are somehow even more authoritian than Reddit - i.e. there is a modlog but no modmail, nor notification of a moderation event, instead the modlog simply says that a “mod” did something, if you go to the trouble to find out why nobody bothered to respond. And worse, on Lemmy.ml you’ll find yourself banned from communities that you’ve never so much as heard of, citing having broken a rule that seems not written down anywhere. The lack of transparency is very reminiscent of the spez.

Fortunately, PieFed and Mbin offer non-Lemmy options to the Threadiverse.:-)

That’s great!

I was just talking with an admin of Lemmy.zip who automatically puts up a community muting of HB for new users joining that instance, but not going so far as to defederate from it. So… that surely helps a little bit? Except when Hexbears brigade a community located on a different instance.

But the example I gave of a mod throwing out death threats to users involves lemmy.ml rather than Hexbear. Both instances are problematic in that regard, ML mostly for the admins and the mods that they choose to protect, while HB the subset of users that go outside of the instance to engage in trolling. In both, it is also entirely possible to have completely sane and normal conversations on the instance itself, which muddies the waters a bit, though the presence of sanity on occasion does not negate the presence of insanity on others.

And I was thinking of editing my comment but instead I’ll put it here, your own posts such as https://www.reddit.com/r/RedditAlternatives/comments/1fmuk7o/post_to_address_the_usual_criticism_about_lemmy/ most definitely covers both the strong benefits as well as strong criticisms of using Lemmy, as well as solid solutions to the latter problems.