this post was submitted on 14 Jun 2023

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Let's talk about disadvantages of Lemmy (lemmy.world)

submitted 2 years ago* (last edited 2 years ago) by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

47 comments fedilink hide all child comments

First of all I am super happy that such alternative exists but it's far from perfect due to many reasons and this is why I think it's not ready yet to absorb the influx of reddit users because many of them will just bounce off when they realize it.

My biggest gripes so far:

Users are unable to block whole instances hence you either need to register with instance that already blocks unwanted instances (which is not perfect because it might block also those that you don't want to be blocked) or you need to block manually every single community there or you will be exposed to lemmygrad or other tankie instances. That's so basic feature I can't find any logical reasons that was not a thing since day 1.
Lemmy is one of the least privacy friendly (unless you just use throwaways and disposable mail like you should) service I have ever stumbled upon and while it’s partially due to how federation works it’s just a fact that even reddit did that better because it was way easier to nuke your account and all traces (including nicknames in deleted comments, which is not a case on lemmy).
There is no possibility to migrate or backup your subscribed/favorited stuff or even move it to another instance (which somehow is possible on Mastodon), so you basically have to trust that your instance won’t disappear overnight. Obviously any site can disappear, centralized or not but there are bigger chances that some random Joe will decide to close instance without saying anything than reddit closing down overnight without letting you copy your stuff. That’s even more annyoing if you consider that instance admin can restrict you from viewing instances they don’t like, hence you would need to create account on another instance and resubscribe to anything manually which is far from perfect.

What are your views on that for the time being?

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[–] [email protected] 26 points 2 years ago (2 children)

The first and third are just features that will almost certainly come eventually. No worries.

The second strikes me as a really strange expection for public social media. Social media is inherently not at all private. These are all public comments and posts intended for everyone in the world to read. If you have something you don't want to be public, any social media is the last place to post it.

[–] [email protected] 20 points 2 years ago (2 children)

To be clear, we're talking about the ability to easily hide one's own past comments from the public record.

I think that comes up as a "privacy feature" because people want to be able to "clean up" their image after changing their worldview, growing up, or getting into a riskier life situation.

For instance, imagine a person who's a schoolteacher in Florida today, who did a drag performance when they were in college; and (back then) proudly published videos of that performance online. That person might want to remove records of that performance from their easily-searchable online history; because their position as a Florida schoolteacher exposes them to threats of violence & discrimination that they didn't fear when they were in college.

But yeah, that sort of feature isn't easily compatible with federation, because federation means that your published words are automatically replicated to servers under lots of different people's control. There is no single central historical record that can be easily censored.

[–] [email protected] 11 points 2 years ago (1 children)

Also if someone got doxxed.

[–] [email protected] 6 points 2 years ago

Yep.

And it's easy to say "well, the problem isn't the online forum keeping the drag video up, the problem is Florida fascists doing violence & discrimination" but it's the schoolteacher who receives that problem, not the online forum.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 2 years ago (1 children)

I never thought of the right to be forgotten aspart of the right to privacy. They always seemed separate.

But technically federating a deletion shouldn't be more complicated than federating an addition. It would make sense to have the option when deleting an account to nuke all posts as well. It might not be perfect if an instance is defederated in between, but it should be pretty good.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 2 years ago

But technically federating a deletion shouldn’t be more complicated than federating an addition.

Of the elder federated services, Usenet supports "cancel" and "supersede" messages, intended to allow a user to retract a post. But the authentication was crap in the '90s, leading to a problem with forged cancel messages, which were readily abused by bad folks. So news server admins had to figure out under what conditions to process a cancel.

Also, instances can go offline and come back later. I haven't read the code yet, but I'd be surprised if rejoining the federation reliably backfills all the deletions that have ever happened.

[–] [email protected] 11 points 2 years ago (1 children)

Humans have an inherent right to be forgotten/right to erasure barring certain exceptions, such as celebrity or public office or notoriety. As such, you should be able to scrub as much of your data and comments as possible. It's definitely something that will need to be solved in federation eventually.

[–] [email protected] 5 points 2 years ago

Yah. I wasn't thinking of that as "privacy", it's kind of separate, but I can see related. But federating a delete shouldn't be much more complicated than federating an add or edit. Mostly only an issue if an instance is defederated in between.

[–] [email protected] 17 points 2 years ago (1 children)

Users are unable to block whole instances

Sounds like a good feature, though not exactly a 'disadvantage', without a comparison. Is the comparison Mastodon? Reddit?

Lemmy is one of the least privacy friendly service I have ever stumbled upon

Could you expand on this? Is it just the deletion problem?

There is no possibility to migrate or backup your subscribed/favorited stuff or even move it to another instance (which somehow is possible on Mastodon),

This took a while to get on Mastodon. Remember, the data's not necessarily stored in a usable format (users don't want a load of postgres in their download), and the devs need to be sure that nobody else's data will accidentally get in there.

[–] [email protected] 9 points 2 years ago (1 children)

Sounds like a good feature, though not exactly a ‘disadvantage’, without a comparison. Is the comparison Mastodon? Reddit?

This is definitely a disadvantage in comparison to Mastodon imo. For example, there's no reason for a general-purpose instance to defederate from lemmynsfw.com, but it would be nice if I could browse all and not have it be half porn without hiding all nsfw posts in general.

[–] [email protected] 6 points 2 years ago

The features sound good, and judging by Lemmy, I imagine they're coming, depending on how much free time the devs have.

there’s no reason for a general-purpose instance to defederate from lemmynsfw.com

This one's trickier. The mods have mentioned both moderation and legal difficulties with nsfw instances. If something illegal's posted, then whoever has the server would (verifiably) have a copy of that image and has been (verifiably) distributing it. Reddit probably managed to skirt these issues by a) being early, when the world was new, and laws were weak, and b) having the money for a legal team.

I wouldn't want to be an admin trying to answer legal questions.

[–] [email protected] 14 points 2 years ago* (last edited 2 years ago)

blocking instances: There is an issue on github, https://github.com/LemmyNet/lemmy/issues/2397
privacy: yeah that's one downside, can't argue with that
migrating: a few issues on github
- https://github.com/LemmyNet/lemmy/issues/506
- https://github.com/LemmyNet/lemmy/issues/3040

I want to add that the federation stuff is not seamless yet, at least not for my instance, it tends to have bursts of posts... When someone subs to a new instance I also get huge bursts in the New sorting rather than having them sorted by time

[–] [email protected] 13 points 2 years ago

Users are unable to block whole instances

Much needed.

Keep in mind Lemmy is version 0 point 17. Blocking individual communities has seemingly been prioritized and I agree. I've not seen a single instance exclusively filled with communities I've felt I needed avoid, but every single instance has a few communities I'd want to block if it got federated to my home server.

There is no possibility to migrate or backup your subscribed/favorited stuff or even move it to another instance

Also much needed.

Keep in mind Lemmy is vers... Well, you know how it goes. I'm somewhat expecting both instance blocking and user migration to be sorted out down the line or by forks.

[–] [email protected] 11 points 2 years ago (2 children)

In my limited experience over the past couple of days, I have not found myself wanting to block entire instances. What I did instead was subscribe to communities of interest to me and set my profile to show only those. It's interesting that people seem to get very worked up over which instances are evil…or something? At the end of the day, they're just servers right? Or am I missing something? I wouldn't make my home at a disreputable instance, but would still subscribe to a community if it has a good vibe. Is this a mistake?

The subscribing process itself does seem rather awkward. Why there can't simply be a subscribe button and you have to do that whole search for !community@wherever dance is unclear to me.

[–] [email protected] 5 points 2 years ago

More to the point, it is open source and running it involves different instances. If the original programmers become too problematic, it will get forked. Plenty of people run their own instances and could block the .ml instance if they want. That's the intended nature of being open like it is.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 2 years ago

I get your point and I usually do it the same way, however it's way easier to discover new and cool communities you didn't know before when you browse all instances. That's where having ability to ban lemmygrad and some other NSFW instances would help a lot. It should be user who decides.

[–] [email protected] 9 points 2 years ago (2 children)

I'm staying here but I think we need to to make an ongoing campaign to use our reddit accounts to spread the word about Lemmy. The vast majority of redditors are still unaware of our existence. So I'm basically leaving my 10 year account up and only commenting to politely let people know about lemmy and how to join. It's sad because so many people have only been on reddit for a few years or (gasp) less than a year and are naively accepting reddits bullshit because they don't understand how much better things could be, and were once upon a time.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 2 years ago

Knock knock!
Would you like to hear about our lord and savior, The Great Lemming? (He jumped off cliff for our sins.)

[–] [email protected] 2 points 2 years ago (1 children)

It's better to spread the word of "Federation" aka the "Fediverse" Lemmy/Kbin and whatever else comes into this format.

The real beauty is how well these systems can interop with Calckey/Misskey/Pleroma/Mastodon and PixelFed amongst Tumblr and Mozilla showing up.

Lemmy is just one thing - but the awesomeness is the variety and interopability.

[–] [email protected] 0 points 2 years ago

People on all those other cool platforms can spread the word about them. I'm just on Lemmy for now so that's what I know about.

[–] [email protected] 6 points 2 years ago

Lemmy needs the option to block mirroring of content of NSFW instances seperate from the users participating in them. I need a second account now because my lemmynsfw is blocked from feddit.de for that. It is a bit of a clusterfuck.

[–] [email protected] 6 points 2 years ago (2 children)

My view is that you shouldn't shit on the devs while at the same time demanding they do more free labor for you. Lemmy is free, the ppl working on it don't get paid, like it's not a faceless corporation that exploits workers and runs ads. That's the whole point. Maybe contribute in some way instead?

[–] [email protected] 3 points 2 years ago

Well, yeah you shouldn't shit on them for not having gotten to features you want yet, but it's also okay to talk about how important and crucial some features are. And yes, I agree that the best solution is to lend them a hand in building the features you want! I know Rust pretty well and would love to help out tbh, but I have a serious disability that makes extended focus on cognitive tasks very difficult and deleterious, so all I can really do rn is cheer other people on.

Also I've heard the main two Lemmy devs are actually being paid to work on it, which isn't surprising to me as a lot of software companies will pay their employees to work on open source projects. So it isn't totally free labor.

[–] [email protected] -1 points 2 years ago

I just contributed with sharing my opinion on crucial features that would help with getting more people onboard. I have no information if they are paid or not (not really my business) but that doesn't change anything as it's just my opinion on a service that's accessible for everyone. Don't be offended on someone's behalf.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 2 years ago

A lot of UI bugs in the web interface - constantly refreshing post feeds, posts changing when you're commenting, momentarily showing you logged in as someone else, long delays in comments and votes being applied, wasted side space on the built-in themes, etc.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 2 years ago

These are all reasonable feature request! I've heard that devs are working on instance banning and migrating communities between instances, but it was second hand.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 2 years ago (1 children)

Is it just because of some ad-blocker I have, or does specll checking not work in Lemmy?

If it's the latter, I'd love that addition for our clusmsier counterparts.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 2 years ago

Spell-checking is a browser feature. It shouldn't have anything to do with the website you're using.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 2 years ago

I agree that those are the three really big flaws that need to be fixed ASAP. Especially one and three. Without those, the federated/decentralized nature of Lemmy is hamstrung. With them, it becomes much more powerful. We need to get the devs on these flaws before Lemmy blows up more than it already has, everything else can wait imo

[–] [email protected] 1 points 2 years ago

Lemmy is one of the least privacy friendly (unless you just use throwaways and disposable mail like you should) service I have ever stumbled upon and while it’s partially due to how federation works it’s just a fact that even reddit did that better because it was way easier to nuke your account and all traces (including nicknames in deleted comments, which is not a case on lemmy).

What do you mean by this

[–] [email protected] 1 points 2 years ago

100% agree with those points. The whole fediverse has still those things to figure out. In Mastodon account migration is not really there, AFAIK you can basically make a copy of your followers and link your old account to the new one, but your posts and data get stuck in the old account.

The fediverse is still in beta and I'm sure developers would tackle those issues sooner or latter.

[–] [email protected] 0 points 2 years ago (2 children)

Ok, cool! Made a thing called sleepmusic AKA Zzzz... I don't know how we do this shit. Like we used to put /r/thething.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 2 years ago* (last edited 2 years ago)

Do you mean like this? [email protected]

When I type that in the search I can find your community

[–] [email protected] 2 points 2 years ago (1 children)

For a link, use /c/[email protected] as the link URL: like so. This link will work for people on any instance.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 2 years ago (1 children)

I tried your link but get an error community_not_found.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 2 years ago* (last edited 2 years ago)

the link is correct, but the current limitation is that if your particular instance has not yet federated with the linked instance, it;s not a huge issue between large instances and popular communities as they sync pretty quickly, but on smaller instances you will get a 404.

In that case, you either need to wait for more people to connect, or manually enter the full URL into the search bar of your instance to force it to be synced, sometimes it takes a minute.

This is something being discussed on github as it is a weakness of the federated approach, it can be solved by having the instance check first, then instead of showing a 404, it would say please wait then refresh once federated.

[–] [email protected] -2 points 2 years ago* (last edited 2 years ago) (3 children)

Developed by tankies :(

[–] [email protected] 7 points 2 years ago

yep, but it's free and open source so they don't have any real power, if they try to lock it down and censor opinion, it would just be forked and life will go on as normal. Also the influx of attention and the competition from the kbin project have led to a huge number of new contributors to the codebase, so it's a pretty fair and democratic project in that regard.

Normal people will just tend towards instances that block federation with extremist communities so I don't see it as a problem.

If it were developed by alt-righters instead they probably wouldn't have made it open source, that's commie stuff lol.

[–] [email protected] 6 points 2 years ago

People say this as if free and open-source software isn't a 95% leftist concept in the first place. You should be glad that the devs aren't capitalists—it means they won't be chasing revenue like Reddit.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 2 years ago

Let them cook.

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