this post was submitted on 21 Jun 2025
1 points (100.0% liked)
Fedigrow
337 readers
13 users here now
To discuss how to grow and manage communities / magazines on Lemmy, Mbin, Piefed and Sublinks
Resources:
- https://lemmy-federate.com/ to federate your community to a lot of instances
- [email protected] to organize overall fediverse growth
- [email protected] to keep tabs on where new users might come from :)
- [email protected]
- [email protected]
- https://lemvotes.org/
Megathreads:
- How (and when) to consolidate communities? (A guide)
- Where to request inactive or unmoderated communities? (A list)
Rules:
- Be respectful
- No bigotry
founded 1 month ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
A bot account would be a good idea, so that someone can separate @[email protected] the actual human account vs. the automatic ones, if they wanted to block those. Democracy is based on choices so providing more choices helps increase freedom.
I mean sure, except there is no automation lmao it's all done manually by human hands
It doesn't matter: I am speaking of acting in full friendliness to the recipient. Right now someone (such as OP) has the choice either to block you or not block you, whereas having those reposts be done via a separate account opens up a new possibility to not block you the human, but do block those reposts. Of course, it would be your call but I thought I would offer the suggestion as something to ponder:-).
Or maybe the time for all of this is over - as you said somewhere here recently, lemmy.ml is dying off now, unlike when you started, so perhaps the Threadiverse is past the need for this effort to spread things around? I would go so far as to say that if the rest of the Threadiverse cannot survive without posts from lemmy.ml, then that does not bode well for our future? At some point - and perhaps we are there already, it being now 2 years since the Rexodus - we need to either sink or swim on our own?
Edit: fwiw, I personally blocked literally all users from lemmy.ml 9 months ago - going so far as to move to PieFed where I could actually accomplish that aim - and I have enjoyed the Threadiverse much better since then! :-) We'll be fine then, methinks.
Maybe, I'll ponder it, maybe experiment a bit. But I have not achieved my goals yet, so it's too early to end it out right
Just blocking .ml on an individual basis, while good for individuals to not see their crap, doesn't really fix the problem. The continued spread of misinformation and attempts to enforce the narrative as "truth" by making it appear as though there's no dissent about it (on .ml).
This is harming the overall growth of the Threadiverse IMHO. New users come, aren't aware they need to block .ml and miss the threads talking about it, and then get scared off when inevitably they start going on one of their rants about how NK isn't a dictatorship. Or maybe they never come back after commenting in support of Ukraine or something (Which they continue to push the Russia narrative is being entirely run by "Nazis" and Russia was justified to invade), get dunked on and then catch a ban for it.
Russia has been talked about for having mis/disinformation campaigns for the purpose of furthering their goals for at least a decade now. We should not be a party to allowing that to spread. And I see a crap ton of various untrustworthy news sites they pass off as highly credible and will viciously defend it and censor anyone who calls it out.
Thank you for your efforts on behalf of the Fediverse. I am not sure if they are the best way to go or not (neither am I saying that I have any better ideas:-P), but at the very least I want to applaud your enthusiasm.
A year and a half ago when Kbin.social went down, I bounced around from StarTrek.Website to Discuss.Online before finally settling on PieFed.social. In that migration I found that my chief abhorrence - and what nearly caused me to leave Lemmy entirely (and ultimately did, come to think of it, in the sense that I left "Lemmy" to come to PieFed, while remaining on the Threadiverse) was not lemmy.ml, but rather hexbear.net and lemmygrad.ml. Those two were WAAAAY worse.
But I get your point: lemmy.ml in some ways is worse not because it is as "in your face" as those other two, but since it appears more "normal", at first glance, and therefore is more insidious. And it is not the only one: you know about midwest.social as well, surely.
That said, it was hexbear and lemmygrad that almost caused me to nope out and surely does similarly for others as well. So I petitioned for discuss.online to defederate from the former (it already had the latter), and I included lemmy.ml in that as well but that part was declined, and now Blaze can recommend discuss.online especially to an American audience, which is what makes up the bulk of those on Reddit, to try to make Lemmy more enticing to come over here to.
After that, I sorta just gave up on Lemmy. They control the sourcecode, they control everything, it is not merely just solely their personal instance but the entire framework: Lemmy is somehow more authoritarian than even Reddit was - at least Reddit would notify you when content was removed, and offer the ability to respond via modmail, plus keep the post up (merely removing it from the community "feed", yet still the page remains accessible to someone who has the URL) so as not to delete all of the myriad other conversations that happened, having been spawned initially from the OP but taking on new life of their own. Lemmy will never catch up to this - in contrast it seems hell-bent on moving in the exact opposite direction, removing the names of mods (so now you cannot even DM them) and instead merely saying "mod", plus when content is removed the message says "try again later". Seriously, WTF!? How can "trying again at a later time" help someone find a post that they made, that got deleted and then virtually all traces that it ever even so much as existed at some point in the past are simply... gone, like it never was in the first place?!
When spez did such things, we left Reddit over it. However, when the lemmy.ml devs do them... we suck it up, and we take it. Because there are no better options, we tell ourselves, and we don't want to make our own.
Fortunately, not everyone thinks like that: Mbin has been going strong even after Ernst had all his personal problems and abandoned Kbin, Mbin took up the charge. And Sublinks got a heavy start as well (though similarly to Ernst, the main dev had personal irl issues that got in the way of finishing it). And now PieFed is not merely a heavy start but has surpassed Lemmy, and even Reddit in a number of ways - it needs some polish, sure, but it's no longer simply a "heavy start", it's a fully functioning viable Lemmy / Reddit alternative.
I give up hope on Lemmy ever doing anything to fix its major structural issues; and I now transfer those hopes to PieFed. Which solves the even more major problem of using the Lemmy sourcecode... but does not solve the problem of disinformation being spread on the Threadiverse.
Like I did in making a petition to defederate hexbear from Discuss.Online, perhaps you would like to petition PieFed.social to defederate Lemmy.ml? Lemmy.World never will, and likely discuss.online and all the others too, because of the software considerations - although PieFed.World might? (it has not yet: I still see lemmy.ml communities listed on it) You would be a good person to list out the references and make a cogent argument for the need to do so? [email protected] might be the best place to send it.
Anyway, things are improving, slowly, over time. :-)
Chicken-and-egg problem
Thanks, yea I know my solutions are far from perfect, but its the best I could come up with from what a "regular user" could do.
Lemmy's source code problem is a multifaceted issue. Some of it, I'm sure is done intentionally like how blocks barely function as a mute (Remember when Xitter threatened to downgrade their proper blocking to essentially what Lemmy has now? People were up in arms over it, but dessalines does it and not much more the murmurs about it) or like you said how the modlog doesn't display the mod/admin who did it anymore (though it's still available on certain UIs, like photon.lemmy.world/modlog so it's still leagues better than what Reddit has)
But then some of it, like removed posts pointlessly linking in the modlog to something that won't and will never pull up, not sure if it was done with ill intent or just a bug. After all, Rust is a fairly difficult language which leads to slow development and not a whole lot of open source devs focusing on it.
But then, that's the crux of the issue isn't it, because of their politics and behaviors nobody can be really sure whats just a bug or flaw that just hasn't been dealt with yet or done with malicious intent to benefit their own political goals
In any case, Lemmy is going to be an albatross around the Thrediverse for years, for as long as there's continued wide federation with the Triad. I think the wider Fediverse will be mostly fine because Mastodon et all will be unique enough to the average user.
But I want to see the Threadiverse grow to take on Reddit one day. And to do that we need to take care of the Tankie problem
Oh don't worry, I've got things cooking, I just don't have unlimited time to dedicate to it. But things are in the pipeline rest assured :)
Reddit trying to “take care” of its “tankie problem” is why they created the threadiverse in the first place.
Your analogy doesn't work because nobody is talking about shutting their instances down or "taking them over" they are free to have their space and network with aligned instances.
But the rest of the network is also not obligated to federate with them and allow their misinformation to spread.
I think kuato meant how Lemmy was created due to those devs being kicked off of Reddit for being too toxic.
And unlike Lemmy, Reddit really was trying to cancel them, at least on their platform.
Fwiw I didn't want to cancel Lemmy.ml nor even want to defederate from it... at first. I only wished for it to label itself properly, as e.g. Beehaw has done. If it said like "we are a tankie instance and absolutely no criticism of Russia, China, or North Korea will be tolerated here, and we WILL ban you from communities that you've never even so much as heard of all across our entire instance if you ever do anything that we do not like". Beehaw has a message along those lines, and it is getting along just fine. However, it seems like it would limit the influence of that instance if they were to be honest about application of that label so... they refuse. And because of how they are tied to the sourcecode, UNLIKE Hexbear and lemmygrad, there are extraordinary few instance admins that will go against that.
I wish that I could praise the Lemmy devs for the good they have done, even while also criticizing them for the bad. However, the more that I learn the less ah... "compatible" with democratic principles their authoritarian actions seem to me.
I frequently encounter Kuato, that user is an ardent supporter/defender of the Triad lol
That's what it's all about, they want to spread their "message" and they take whatever steps needed to make their authoritarian "principles" hidden. Even their "What is Lemmy.ml" link in the side bar leads to a post that makes no mention of their politics, ideologies or the kind of content they truly allow. Just that it's a "niche" instance lol
I feel the same, it's hard to praise their good work, when there's just so much...bad vibes surrounding it.
Oh, makes sense - I did not look into it.
I frequently tell people looking for "leftist" instances to go to dbzero or slrpnk, those are genuinely awesome, as well as legit. But lemmy.ml, lemmygrad.ml, hexbear.net, and midwest.social, I dislike the disingenuous nature. Once someone starts off a conversation with a lie, you cannot trust anything else that follows. So they must think that we are absolute idiots that will literally never catch on, ever? Which tbf... they are probably right, in the sense of the common herd anyway, who does not pay attention to much outside of their narrow scope of interest.
What next bothers me then is that when people DO catch on, they then want to leave the Threadiverse, or else not join in the first place, so it's actively harmful. Although... what are you going to do about it? Indeed. For myself I placed my hopes in PieFed, and this last month has seen the first-fruits of that as so many communities chose to migrate here rather than still yet another Lemmy server. PieFed literally is not even fully finished being developed - e.g. there is no post preview option (there strangely is one for comments like this one that I am typing out here, but not first-level responses to a post, and not actual posts - although in the past I have seen those buttons, yet right now they are gone in those cases) - but people STILL chose it, over Lemmy.
And I am sure that you are well aware of the post from like a year ago on Lemmy.World that more than subtly hinted that they were ready to jump ship to Sublinks, when it became developed enough. Sadly it never did (the developer had a baby, and still excellently runs Discuss.Online but has no extra time to get it finished, so I sympathize:-D), but the desire for such remains very real.
And you are doing your part to help, so kudos for that!:-)
That's probably a bug, feel free to report it either on Codeberg or at least on [email protected]
Edit: https://codeberg.org/rimu/pyfedi/issues/532
Lemmy.cafe defederated just fine. The release announcements are made on the Lemmy blog too
I thought there was another technical reason besides that - perhaps the list of what communities exist across the Fediverse comes from there? I don't mean like a traditional post but something internal (tbh I don't really fully know what I'm talking about here, just "something" that if Lemmy.ml were defederated from, instance admins would have to build other means to retrieve. Which likely isn't all that hard.)
There's no such technical reason
Is also the only general instance of note to do so, I love it for it, but it doesn't make enough of a statement to the outside rep of the Threadiverse to make a damn for growth purposes. And I don't think the admin of .cafe has the resources to scale either, not like .world does so it's not like we can just massively dump newcomers to it either