this post was submitted on 07 Jun 2023
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Asklemmy
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It's taking me a bit to grasp the practical use of the "federated" thing.
It seems like there aren't a lot of tutorial-type instructions on the web of how to use it. Like a YouTube video.
I would be nice if a good number of redditors would join for activity to flourish.
Be the change you want to see! This is an open source project, not a for-profit company, so that kind of thing is down to us.
If you have any questions, I'm happy to answer. I may be new to Lemmy (5 days old user), but I've been following the fediverse for a while, and I get a lot of what's happening here at a UI & technical level.
In terms of making a youtube video, I've never made one before, maybe somebody reading this can make a decent video covering the basics?
Edit: Thought I might as well answer the first part, practical use of "federated" thing. Spez is an asshole, right? Well, what if you could just block Spez's server and just keep on chugging, and lose absolutely nothing? Maybe you're on Spez's server. Easy, just move to a different Spez-free server and everything just works exactly the same. The federation gives protection against bad-actor admins.
The logical next question is ok, we can protect against greedy power-hungry assholes, but what about bad actors? What if a new instance starts, let's call it nazi.st, and they are arguing with everybody and start fights? Simple. If everybody on an instance is being assholes, egged on by asshole admins, then your instance can just block them. Famously, Truth Social is just another Mastodon instance. They've been blocked by every single other Mastodon server and now they're just shouting at themselves.
Thanks for explaing this, as someone new to this whole thing coming for reddit, it is a bit of an adjustment. Does this not come with the problem of sort of diluting the same topic out in different places. Like say the different servers all have a "technology" instance, and they all have a post about Apollo shutting down right now. Then you will have many different discussions going on in separate places about that. Is that correctly understood?
So, there's 2 separate issues colliding here:
Nobody atm knows what the hell they're doing, what their instance will eventually become, what communities will die or survive. Beehaw (your server) is the best situated for this. They tightly control the new communities made, and will only make a new one if absolutely necessary. There's gonna be a lot of single user communities in a week. People simply don't get that you can't just create a super niche community of /c/PeopleWhoPlayMySuperSpecificHouseruleSystemBasedOnGURPSv1987 and summon users from the void.
/r/Tech, /r/Technology, /r/Computing, and /r/TechNews. Which of these is the "real" technology subreddit? Should we close down the other three? Some amount of dispersion is natural and normal. A user can just subscribe to all of them if they really want. Reddit is far more fragmented than you might realize.
Thank you so much for your reply. It makes sense and I agree with you. I guess in the end the community on an arbitrary instance might win out as the main one for each niche hobby, so that most talk will happen there, with others as alternatives. I'm really looking forward to the experience of getting used to this and getting it up and running.
I think a good example are the /r/gaming and /r/games subreddits.
/r/gaming is a default subreddit so it has a lot of traffic from users (37 million) of all different backgrounds that may not mesh nicely with the actual hardcore gaming community.
/r/games is not a default, users (3 million) need to seek it out. It generally is more civil and encourages good discussions.
Something like this can be done where !gaming@lemmy.ml could have a different user base and feel than !gaming@beehaw.org , or even !gaming@feddit.de which could be specific to the German gaming community.
How do you think niche communities will succeed? Will they be more successful in more populated servers? Like should a Monster Hunter community be made in a server dedicated to gaming? Hoping this makes sense, I'm still trying to understand how it all works.
There's no rulebook, it depends on how the community wants to do it.
Take my thinking here with an EXTREME grain of salt. This is just me, and how this place would work in an ideal scenario in my head. I have no control over what people want to do, how they want to structure their own instances, anything like that. With all that pre-amble out of the way:
An instance should contain people that are generally on the same page. Maybe one instance is more techy, another more social activists, another more art & literature, and we've already seen that language-specific regional instances are doing well. They should maintain enough diversity that they don't become echo chambers or cliquey. They all have their own rules, and enforce them on their own users and visitors to their communities.
The communities on a particular instance should play to the strengths of their users. The communities should reflect the general vibe of the users. Users will, naturally, have more interests than their instance provides for and pull in stuff from other instances. In a sense, your instance and the communities in it are your home street, where you know most of the active users, and the others are the big city, where you go to get things you can't on your street.
Thanks for this, it actually helped a lot! I think I'm finally starting to figure things out lol. I do really like this idea though, as I think it'll lead to a lot less friction in various communities than Reddit had, where fighting in the comments was just commonplace. Either way I'm excited to see how things progress!
And thank you again, I really appreciate it!
No problem, happy to help. Oh, and just to reinforce the whole instances as home street, I already have some expectations & stereotypes about beehaw users: Goody two-shoes, but great to talk to :P
Feel free to shoot me any more questions. I'm feeling very contemplative, although that might just be the beer talking.