Almost! At the time of this post, lemmy.world has a whopping 25733 users and is growing fast.
Since my last post yesterday, it has added 4000 new users, making it the clear second-largest lemmy instance out there. Also quickly catching up to lemmy.ml's 36000 (not taking new signups).
beehaw.org (3rd largest) sits at 12500 users, partly because of more restrictive registration requirements.
Source: https://lemmy.fediverse.observer/list
Exciting to see all this growth!
Except BeeHaw as defederated lemmy.world - which is a shame. Step in the wrong direction IMO. That's going to be a huge problem because now if you're a BeeHaw member you no longer see anything lemmy.world related - you're suddenly, overnight, cut off from thousands of people and posts.
Having these larger instances owned by 1 person like they all are now is a shame, but unavoidable at the beginning I suppose. One of them gets bitter and you have thousands defederated. I guess over time as things splinter up more it may get better.
I'll likely just spin up my own instance so I can federate with everyone and never be dropped (at least from my side).
For what it's worth, beehaw.org is run by 4 admins and a number of mods. They also hope the defederation is temporary until better moderation tools are available: https://beehaw.org/post/567170.
We'll see if they really mean that, but others have said that lemmy moderation tools are still limited compared to mastodon's, for example.
It's a shame that beehaw had to use a "nuke" because other moderation tools weren't available, but I think it makes for a great natural experiment in the early fediverse. Beehaw wants to build an instance with higher community standards, as is their right. Will defederation of lemmy.world and sh.itjust.works lead to fewer sign-ups at beehaw? Will members leave? Will they just make accounts at other instances and keep their beehaw account? Will this help spread membership to smaller instances? It should be interesting.
isn't it the best to use another instance than beehive, lemmy.world and sh.itjust.works in that case? you will still have access to all other communities. Been thinking of creating another account on feddit, since it is probably too local to get on beehives shitlist and other instances might be reluctant to just block out a whole country community
Haha, yeah I'm just sitting here at programming.dev like okay โ๏ธ๐๐
that nutscrape gif really takes me back. I miss the 90s when all of the internet felt like Lemmy does today
[blink]Are you sure?[\blink]
Yeah, I was looking for a profile picture to upload. I found this in my pictures folder. No idea where I got it from. Probably just downloaded it because I thought it looked cool. I'm surprised it is animated in browsers.
After I uploaded it I did notice the feeling of the early internet. I was born in 1991 so I wasn't really using the internet back then but I imagine this might be what it felt like to an extent. :)
Probably the integration of modding tools like AutoMod would be heaps handy here, it could automatically flag potentially troublesome posts and help cut back on spam / bad actors.
From memory Reddit uses automod and so does twitch / discord. Though I'm not sure if they actively let you integrate with it directly on third party sites
There is an advantage that Lemmy's backend is entirely an API with a detached frontend. There are already API wrappers for Rust and Typescript that are officially supported, so I'm sure it's only a matter of time before someone writes a robust automod that can be implemented for communities that desire one.
I have a bit of interest in doing it, but I know nothing about the API itself, so I'm not sure how easy it would be to grab every new thing submitted to a community or instance for moderation.
Yeah I'm also interested in seeing how all of these sites work and looking at ways I can help improve it. The whole positing process / propagation process seems pretty complex though so I'll probably let the more familiar devs work on it for now.
From what I understand though, each admin (for example kbin.social) is maintaining a fork of their project so they could implement automod on their own local content, but that wouldn't stop propagated content (e.g from Lemmy) coming in that's spam.
Seems like the issue might need to be fixed on a site by site basis.
I think I would be helpful for instances to have more control over federation than turning on or of for there instances. Ideally I think giving lemmy.world and sh.itjust.works read only access to Beehaw would have been the best option while we wait for better moderation tools. Until those options exist though they didn't really have much other choice.
I'm hoping we'll see no code online hosting options one day, would make single user instances a lot easier.
I was on Beehaw up until they announced the defederation, switch here straight after.
It seems beehaw doesn't have enough mod power to deal with the current influx of trolls, I don't agree with what they did but I do understand why they did it.
I'm thinking about self-hosting an instance, but I'm not clear if these bigger instances would block me because I'm some little unknown server. Would they have to manually give me access to interact (federate?) with them if I self-host? Or would I automatically be able to post on their server?
Think they would have to defederate manually, I've seen people running instances with only themselves as members with no complaints
Yeah, defederation is not the answer. We are few and we need to stick together. That's the whole point of the fediverse after all, many connected together.
This is why you choose not to have an account on beehaw or lemmy.world and still interact with both. Picking and lemmey instance to live on should be taking everyone some time until you see how the they function. You can even host your own lemmy instance.
The problem is when you've already been participating and growing your sub list on a lemmy.world account and then beehaw pulls this shit. Suddenly half my subs are taken away without warning.
I kinda understand beehaws stance. Lemmy.world is very lightly moderated right now, allowing a huge influx of problems, questionable posts, NSFW in wrong sections, tons of racism and bigotry flowing out the walls. Maybe if more people get that shit under control they will reconsider.
They've been primarily targeting minority communities, not just dumping shit into random posts.
We do need better tools don't get me wrong! That said... Admining for some bigger communities I have had a total of 3 reports, only needed to act on 1. Banned 1 person, from a small asexual community I run for bigotry but outside of that... It has been pretty quiet. Not to down play it beehaw probably deal with a lot of shitty people too. Especially in the bigger LGBT+ community.
There are some really toxic instances out there, but as far as they go. I don't think Lemmy.World is anything worse than what you see in Reddit on a good day.
I feel pretty sure they even said it was temporary.