Spaceman Spiff

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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: June 14th, 2023

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  • The NSFW stuff was/is a bit more complicated than it might appear on the surface. A lot of instances do not allow NSFW. No judgement, it is what it is. But people on those instances could sub to NSFW communities elsewhere, primarily LemmyNSFW. Less so now, but for a while it was common for those posts/communities to not be tagged NSFW, which caused them to show up on All for people that didn’t want to see it.

    Then there was the question about types of NSFW content. Even people that enjoy your standard porn categories had lines they didn’t want crossed in their feed. Specifically animated/cgi CSAM and scat. The former is illegal in some jurisdictions, and caused a different instance (name withheld) to be widely defederated. The latter was more of an issue with limited tools, but the result was the same- either LemmyNSFW blocks that (at least until better tools are available), or they also get cut off.



  • Tildes is just too small. The obvious explanation for growth is all of the Fledditors (Rexit? I like Lemmygrants, but that really only covers people who came to Lemmy) looking for an alternative. People wanted a drop-in replacement for what they already had. Tildes didn’t even have enough of a seed in their biggest subs, let alone their (very few) niche groups. Same for Raddle, Squabbles, etc. The only subs that made a significant migration to those are the ones that packed up, locked the doors, and left a forwarding address to anyone left - Similar to what r/piracy did, except that went to Lemmy (complete with instructions to ignore the federation questions)

    As for Kbin, I think the bigger factor is coverage. As soon as anyone started mentioning people leaving for greener pastures, Lemmy was always the first thing mentioned. Kbin was always a second-place alternative, along with a few others. Since Kbin has the same confusion about federation as Lemmy, it didn’t pick up a lot of people that bailed on the first choice.

    Not that it matters much anymore, since Kbin is well-federated with Lemmy



  • They certainly could, but using something off the shelf saves development time and costs. Not only did someone else already do the base work, but they are fixing bugs and adding features as an ongoing task. And that all happens free, without Meta spending a dime. Meta only needs to add their customizations.

    There’s been plenty of speculation on why they want to federate, which is much less clear. It could be an attempt to get around EU antitrust (etc) laws. It could be an attempt to usurp Mastodon as the primary destination for Twitter refugees. It could be an attempt to slurp up the data from people that refuse to give it to Meta. But this is all just speculation, and it’s unlikely that they will honestly reveal their reasoning.





  • The nature of All is that it’s, well, all of what other users (on your instance) are discussing. Just like you could see when certain types of users were active on Reddit from r/All, or when a major event happened, so is the case here.

    There are a few things you can do about it though - First, you can switch to your subscribed communities. You won’t see all of the randomness, but it should be limited to your areas of interest.

    Second, you can block the major communities you want to avoid, most notably this one.

    Third, and this is the hardest one, you can get a bunch of other, unrelated discussions started. That way, people aren’t discussing this. But I swear to God, if I see one more post about the fucking beans…

    I suppose you could try another instance, or mass subscribing to new communities, but I suspect this is going to be the big topic for a while across the Lemmyverse.


  • Clients, no. We have no way (currently) to individually block an instance, nor would it be effective in preventing this problem. Threads users, as a whole, need to be blocked from the Fediverse, so that Threads is not viewed as a way to interact with Mastodon users.

    Our particular instances can defederate from Meta, which would stop certain issues - but not the EEE concerns that are usually brought up. It has to be a widespread block.



  • If any instance becomes large enough to have an undue influence, which Meta would likely have, then they effectively control the entire ecosystem. At that point, it effectively stops being decentralized (See: The 51% Attack, although this wouldn’t happen at a certain number/ratio). When it becomes convenient to them, they can pull the plug, and destroy the rest of the ecosystem that isn’t theirs.

    It’s exactly what happened with XMPP and Google Talk.