As much as I love Lemmy, it’s just honestly not ready for another big influx yet. The 0.19 update broke so much, it really brought home how precarious this whole thing still is. Those of us who are here either a) kind of enjoy the jank because it feels like an adventure b) were morally outraged enough to make a stand against Reddit or c) both.
I have a very small amount of influence in the niche community of fibre crafts and especially cross stitch. Would I be able to explain Lemmy to my audience in a way that made sense and that they might even want to try out? Absolutely. Would I actually do that until it’s a bit more stable? Absolutely not, apart from a couple of specific individuals that I’m already working on.
Trying to force people to join platform B when platform A is already serving their needs makes no sense. You need to find the people who are dissatisfied, the people that would actually benefit from trying something new, and then make sure they’re aware of the option.
Don’t get me wrong through, I do encourage people to learn about and dip their toes into the Fediverse in general. Just last week I convinced a wave of fibre crafters (often older ladies who have barely ever ventured outside of Facebook) to try out Mastodon and Pixelfed and some of them have really taken to it! Alt text and content warnings and everything! One or two fellow YouTubers are even setting up PeerTube channels to bring over more crafting content.
Why did I tell them to join Mastodon over Lemmy? I’m literally moderator of !knitting and !lemmy_stitch so surely it’s in my best interests to bring them over here?
No. I know the demographic, I know what they’re annoyed about with big social media, and I thought Mastodon / Pixelfed were the best replacements for them.
As much as we would all love to see Lemmy become huge, you have to meet people where they’re at. If Lemmy is genuinely the best choice for everyone who is currently in /r/adelaide or whatever, then brilliant, your strategy makes sense. But if it’s not actually in their best interests, if they’re just going to be annoyed by things breaking and not see enough value to make it worthwhile, then there’s no point doing it just because you wish Lemmy was bigger.
Maybe the moral of this story is that the real strategy you want to be looking at is getting tiny niche influencers on side! 😄
I kind of agree that Lemmy is still too rough around the edges. Sublinks, piefed.social and Mbin seem to progress fast, hopefully one of those can emerge as a better alternative
I keep seeing mentions of this piefed thing but don’t actually know what it is, better do some research before a curious knitter asks me and my illusion of expertise is shattered!
But yeah, we’ll see. I have no particular horse in the race of which underlying software is running things, but as soon as one of them is a valuable option for my crafty friends they’ll certainly hear all about it.
That’s just my Lemmy subscription feed but with extra AI “art” lol. But thanks, always interesting to learn about the up-and-comers. I wonder if we’ll end up in an endless forking situation like with Misskey 🍿
There is no link summarizing the whole thing, but if you browse the meta communities of a few instances and look for threads in December, you should see people complaining about federation being broken.
One good example is !europe that wasn’t federated for a few weeks
I don’t get the problem. It’s just syncing public information back and forth. I mean, the information is fully public for anyone to access. If you mind who accesses it, you shouldn’t make it public.
You only have the option if it’s your instance that you’re having defederated. You cannot prevent anyone from:
Spinning up a new instance then federating with you, then bridging the content from there to the defederated instance.
Simply using a web-scraper and a bot to post your stuff on another instance.
The second part is basically what is happening here.
Importantly, I feel people misunderstand on a fundamental level what it means to post things openly on the internet. Your only way to prevent this is simply to not post to a site that people can access freely and without a process through which you are vetting them for whether you trust them. As in: Just like IRL when you decide whether to tell things to friends or acquaintences or well, not.
But, on the web, you not only cannot prevent someone taking your public data and copying it over to wherever they so desire, you don’t even know since they could be posting it in a place that you in turn have no access to so you cannot see it there.
Copying data through a protocol that purports to be integrated with the network frames that copying as a part of that network. If it was acquired through a bridge that does not respect federation then it is dishonestly coopting the legitimacy of the fediverse. Screenshots or copy-pastes won’t have the same appearance of integration and will be intuitively understood by the reader as being lifted from another context. This happens all the time and we’re very familiar with it. If copying data were all this was about, this solution should be sufficient.
It brings fediverse users into direct contact with non-federated networks in a way that they have not consented to. The ability to post directly back & forth exposes people to the kinds of discussions that we had previously moderated out of our networks. Defederation is an important tool for limiting the access bad actors have to our discussions, and accepting a situation where we can no longer defederate neuters that tool.
This isn’t just about “information wants to be free”. This is about keeping the door closed to the bigots, and forcing them to come onto our territory if they want to talk to us, so we can kick them out the moment they show their asses.
EDIT:
Spinning up a new instance then federating with you, then bridging the content from there to the defederated instance.
This is exactly part of the problem with a bridge that doesn’t rely on federation. With threads, we could just defederate and forget about it. With a bridge like this, we’re playing whackamole with every anonymous instance that bluesky spins up, which they can do easily faster than we can detect them.
If this open source system is told to pack its bags and leave, then yes, they can do it more covertly, but if they do that then they’re doing shady shit, and that can be exposed as the shady shit that it is. The point of protesting this is saying that we won’t allow this kind of entryism to openly exist on the network.
Instance can block bridge domain and it will not be federated
I was referring to the
Put the text #nobridge in your profile bio, refresh your profile on your user page, and Bridgy Fed will stop bridging your account. Or feel free to send me a request privately.
That's user level changes. You can still defed from the bridge. It actually makes this whole situation even more ridiculous. If you don't agree with who your instance federates with you fucking leave.
You can’t defederate from the bridge because it’s not going to be the only instance of the bridge. Anyone will be able to host an instance of the bridge server, just like anyone can host an instance of any fedi software. Sure, you can block brid.gy, but then you also have to block every other instance, too. On the mastodon instance I use, there are 45 blocked instances of Birdsite Live, a (now defunct, one way) Twitter bridge!
Opting out with a hashtag technically works, but there is a character limit in the mastodon bio. It also depends on all bridges agreeing to the same hashtag.
Opt-in just makes a lot more sense, imo. It avoids different instances hosting duplicate mirrors and it avoids anyone (on bsky or fedi!) from having their posts scraped and mirrored to a different network without their knowledge.
Does that mean every TV show broadcast over the air, every song on the radio, and every book in a public library is now “free” to pirate on the Internet because they were made publicly available? There’s a reason that social media companies include clauses in their EULA that posting content gives them (and only them unless otherwise noted) the right to reproduce that content.
Copyright has fair use provisions, and one could argue that a bridge that lets you public content on a different network is no different than providing a VCR-to-DVD service.
Well, go ahead and take a music video your favorite artist posted publicly on X and upload it to YouTube unaltered and see how far fair use gets you with the defense that the content was publicly available. 🤷
That’s is not the right analogy. No one is making the bridge and saying “I can take the content from person A on Lemmy and sell it on Bluesky”. they are just saying “Here is a copy of what Person A posted on Lemmy”.
In terms of copyright, why is it okay from someone on a different Mastodon server to relay content from a Lemmy server and even redistribute it (through, e.g, RSS readers), but it’s not okay for a bridge to redistribute it to a Bluesky server?
Those examples are all forms of linking back to the content which is still hosted by the original server in which it was posted. Effectively they are sharing links to the content over the content itself, because if the hosting server removes the content then it is no longer available through those other mediums. And yes there are caching mechanisms involved, but those fall to the personal use case because the cache is not made publicly available.
For these bridge services to work, they are creating and hosting duplicates of the content. That is the biggest difference. If BlueSky actually federated then they would not be rehosting the content either.
Lemmy’s federation model is that all posts and comments get replicated across all instances. If an instance goes down, the copied content still will live in my instance. It’s not just caching.
Take any media publicly uploaded by a major artist on X and repost it to YouTube unaltered. You should be able to defend any copyright strikes because of your “publicly available” argument, right?
Allowing public broadcast once doesn’t void the rights of the creator to control when and where that content gets broadcast again.
Again, false equivalence, and I don’t think you understood what @Crackhappy meant when they said it.
You are trying to equate the concept of whether you can do something with whether a civil lawsuit would rule that you are liable for damages for it.
Of course you can copy something someone uploaded to the internet. They made it publicly available, it’s trivial to copy. Disney or so might take you to court for it, and here we get to the crux of the matter: Assuming you were to post all your posts here under an “all rights reserved” license and the instance you’re doing that on confirm you in writing that they’ll comply with orders for data in case you need it for a lawsuit, you’d absolutely be able to go after someone creating a bridge copying your data to Threads in a civil lawsuit.
Are you going to do that over any comment you post here? Probably not, plus, honestly, good luck showing that you have been materially damaged by the copy.
But again, false equivalence. You can trivially copy anything on the web. Whether you are liable for it is a wholly different thing nobody was talking about.
It does indeed outside of the united IP holders of america.
In the free world, you can record any tv or radio program that is freely available for your personal consumption.
Welcome to the actual land of the free.
Edit: answering another comment of yours. You can absolutely repost the twitter, reddit and whatnot post of anyone. It is paywalled stuff that you are not allowed to share.
Does that mean every TV show broadcast over the air, every song on the radio, and every book in a public library is now “free” to pirate on the Internet because they were made publicly available?
The answer to that is yes, at least if you‘re not living in a corpo hellscape.
Thanks for elaborating. The obvious flaw in this logic is that even the most original thing brings both the platform and the writer the visibility. Assuming you‘re knowledgeable and technically correct, this would always be unenforceable because it is the whole purpose of the platform to retweet, cite and repost.
I‘m not too knowledgeable in IP law or the local US court proceedings but where I live, your EULA/TOS become null and void if you put the customer at a disadvantage. Having this damocles sword dangling above their heads would most likely not hold in court (retweet = visibility but technically against TOS)
I do kind of get where you’re coming from but I think you’re overstating the danger here.
Life is riddled with dangers. Cars that can kill you, diseases, angry humans, animals. The risk isn’t great - statistically speaking - but it’s never zero. I can relate to fear creeping into ones thoughts but we mustnt give into them.
Besides insane privilege, the only way to improve ones situation in this world is to take risks. As Youtube has flourished through copyright infringement before pulling up the ladder after themselves, we need to abolish the idea of the law abiding citizen. There is no good in following law, only morals. Obviously one should choose wisely which laws to ignore and do so in a smart way. We should also change them to benefit humanity, not mega corporations but that is a longer task.
In any case, I suggest we all give it a try and do what we think is best instead of letting fear govern our lives.
Should Mastodon-compatible clients have posts private-by-default on the UI?
This argument against bridges is beyond stupid. If you are posting on a public network, it’s more than reasonable to work with the expectation that your content will be visible outside of original channel.
How does it work exactly? From a quick look at the docs, it sounds like everything through the bridge would appear as coming from @web.brid.gy. Is that right? If so, that kind of mucks up the standard behavior of Lemmy. Lemmy allows both users and admins to block entire instances, so aggregating instances into one “mega-instance” effectively breaks that functionality. That’s not good from a UX perspective.
I tried searching for some bridges instances but didn’t have any luck. I guess I’m doing it wrong. Does anyone have a real example of something that works?
it sounds like everything through the bridge would appear as coming from @web.brid.gy.
Because this is the only current deployment of the bridge. The code is open source, if you want to host/run/manage your own bridge, you can do it.
That was the same issue that I had with fediverser and alien.top. Everyone got so obsessed with the bots from alien.top and caused so much drama that no admin would be interested in using it for the “login with reddit” functionality. If there was a few more other instances running the software, it would have been incredibly more helpful to get people to move away from Reddit while helping bootstrap the niche communities here (which are until today completely lacking in content and not attractive at all for the masses).
Doesn’t that mean we’d have a proliferation of duplicate content, if multiple bridges connect to the same external services?
I love this idea in theory, but I don’t think it makes sense in the context of Lemmy. Maybe it makes more sense in Mastodon? Or maybe I just misunderstand something.
They also assert that Bluesky doesn’t federate (it currently doesn’t, but the protocol is designed for federation!) when it’s clear that it now does.
I’m not surprised about the skepticism there though. These are just promises, and we all know that a for-profit entity will happily sacrifice any promies if it means they make more money that way. Also depending on how exactly that federation will work it might be practically useless as well.
There’s surprisingly little development power behind Bluesky, though, and its recent surge in popularity will no doubt have slowed down nice-to-haves like federation.
I just looked at their Github, and surprisingly Bluesky seems to have less total commits than Lemmy.
On the other hand, ATProto solves a lot of problems Mastodon has (no two servers showing the same list of replies, for one)
This is absolutely solvable with Activitypub, its just that Mastodon developers dont seem to care about it.
I mean, I’m all for options, and I’m glad there’s plenty of folks working to make sure there’s alternatives to a single way of doing things, but are still federated.
But, dude, you’re being a bit of a douche here. It’s whatever, as long as mods of this C/ don’t have a rule against it, but just from the casual user perspective, your post is douchey. Maybe that’s intentional, though I don’t think so, and I hope not. But there it is.
I just don’t get why it’s a big deal, kbin is a beta passion project and forking it is encouraged, why spend your time upset about someone’s project even if it’s chaotic?
At least hardly anyone on Lemmy believes the Fediverse was invented by Eugen Rochko in 2022 as a reaction upon Elon Musk's announcement to buy Twitter.
@fossilesque This is really neat! I really like being able to be on a completely different instance and commenting/favoriting from other federated instances.
Honestly, the mastodon obsession seems like a you problem. Talk about what you want on the fediverse. Maybe mastodon users see it, maybe they don't, who cares.
Maybe you've overlooked that, but: I'm mainly on Hubzilla, not on Lemmy.
By far most of my connections on Hubzilla are on Mastodon. This means that my posts show up on a) Mastodon users' personal timelines and b) the federated timelines of lots of Mastodon instances. This, in turn, means my content has to fulfill at least some of Mastodon's cultural standards.
Also, I'm one of the few non-Mastodon users who do care for their reach on Mastodon. That's because I'm probably one of the few Fediverse users to explain to Mastodon users the Fediverse outside of Mastodon. This is not the primary topic of my Hubzilla channel, but someone has to do that.
But if even more Mastodon users or entire Mastodon instances mute, block or shadow-block me for repeatedly flipping the bird at Mastodon's etiquette and being unabashedly ableist, this becomes impossible because my explanations can't reach their target audience anymore.
Even when I post about my primary topic, 3-D virtual worlds, I rely on being read on Mastodon. For it is there where the chances are the best for there being someone who is interested in that topic.
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