I meant that choosing to implement the algorithm to refer to a singular instance is a step towards rather than away from “centralization”. Other algorithms could be envisioned such as pulling from all instances that are federated with the newly created instance - although I don’t know the ordering of steps so that specific solution may not be viable, so I only meant it as a (possibly very bad) illustration of such a concept that would implement a more decentralized ideal.

Nutomic is not in my blocklists - I may not agree with the devs philosophies but I do highly respect them nonetheless (I realize that may not always come across well), for offering their software as FOSS rather than keeping it private. I did block all users from lemmy.ml though, as the VAST majority of the time those comments just waste my time so while that throws out good replies sometimes, I find the balance highly worthwhile, personally. If it were possible to make an exemption to that, I would have done so specifically for Nutomic.

Anyway this is excellent news!! Sorta. It now being configurable, I will stop spreading this as misinformation, particularly against the lemmy.ml instance being authoritarian, and I thank you both for your correction in this matter.

That said, at a quick glance it does still look like the way to replace it is to use a different instance’s community listing? (lemmy.world, lemmy.zip, whatever) Which is still a trend towards “centralization” - even if configurable now as to which source of bias the instance admins chooses?

I agree that it is entirely fair that Lemmy sourcecode development is slow (possibly the constraints of language choice, and/or funding concerns, etc.), and so Lemmy instance admins must make do with things that can be changed more readily while awaiting more difficult solutions to be implemented, with lower prioritization.

So overall still not an ideal situation, but I thank Nutomic and you for pointing out that it is a LOT better now than the earlier choice to hard-code lemmy.ml specifically into the codebase.

The original point here was that:

The Fediverse doesn’t work like that.

The sentence prior to that was:

Effectively centralising information.

And I pointed to an area in the (planned future release of the) sourcecode that did in fact centralize information. You even agreed:

Lemmy.ml is the source of the initial list, true.

I never said that this is the death knell or whatever of the entire project, just that it is a step towards, rather than away from, centralization. Which again, you agreed on.

And imho it is not a good step, i.e. the direction that it is aiming towards is not a good goal to have for the Fediverse. Feel free to prove us all wrong by fixing the code and then getting the devs to agree to use your fix rather than continue to use lemmy.ml as the singular source aka central authority. They might agree actually, though it still did not make the step that I am talking about now a “good” one. Any step towards centralization is a bad one imho, especially when that centralization is put right into the sourcecode (as opposed to e.g. an external, 3rd-party website run by people who could be trusted to be more unbiased, and by unbiased I mean that lemmy.ml is VERY biased towards certain viewpoints, so NOT that, or another alternative could be to gather community listings from all federated instances and then combine them together, rather than have one “master” list to rule them all).

The key words here are “allowed to be acknowledged as existing”

Begging your pardon, but that is not what I said. You included my actual phrase in your quote even:

allowed to be acknowledged as existing to new instances

(emphasis now added) I am not sure why you think we are disagreeing here, when it seems we are in perfect accord. e.g. in your words, it:

is a problem—but it only affects discoverability when browsing for popular communities, and instance admins can (and should) turn that off.

Yes, that, exactly. It only affects new instances, not existing ones, it is only discoverability, not acting as a blocker to actually bring in those communities, and yet it is something that admins need to be aware of now and turn off. Almost like the instance admins cannot trust that the code will run according to their principles, without some modifications.

I concede that my phrasing sounds entirely different when you leave out the “to new instances”… but that is precisely why I put that wording in there?

Anyway, getting back to the - ahem - central point (pun intended), the aspect under discussion here is that centralization gives admins & mods too much power, whereas defederation places that power into the hands of the people.

I’ve seen this in the mod logs where someone has a relatively innocuous comment removed just because the mod disagrees with them, then they are suddenly banned from both that community and 10 or 12 other communities. All run by the same moderator.

Lemmy.ml is extremely famous on the Threadiverse - dare I say, infamous? - for doing precisely this. And now those same developers are increasing the trend towards centralization by baking right into the code something that will increase the trend towards centralization even further. Not by an enormous leap of course, but step by little step is precisely how such things have always gone? I never said the word “catastrophically”, just that it was a step that I felt like was in the wrong direction.

i.e. “The Fediverse doesn’t work like that” is a statement that encourages complacency, as if it never happens here. It does, albeit to a MUCH smaller degree than on Reddit or Digg. If the statement had said “The Fediverse does not do that to nearly the same degree”, then I would agreed, but I took issue with the binary logic of exclusively only yes vs. no, and pointed to where the answer is not quite “entirely no / never” here on the Fediverse too. “we all can easily fall prey to authoritarianism, unless we fight against it.”

You can do whatever you please? I already included a link to a conversation between the Lemmy developers, who are also the instance admins of lemmy.ml, and the admins of another instance, where the Lemmy developers responded so they are already aware.

I would like to do as I please too, therefore I shared some knowledge in response to the wording of “The Fediverse doesn’t work like that”, pointing to an occasion that I know where the Fediverse very much does work like that, sometimes. After that… somehow the goalposts kept getting shifted.

Being aware of the practices going on inside of the codebase seems like something that we agree on. As for an actual solution… go ahead and make a fork if you want then, or perhaps provide a fully-coded solution and see if they will replace their code with yours - for me I’ve switched to PieFed.

That suggests .ml has the ability to prevent communities from being acknowledged at all by other instances

I don’t know if there is an English language issue here (understandable if there were), but that is literally not what I said. I added “to new instances”, which precludes the possibility of interpreting what my words here to somehow mean “communities from being acknowledged at all by other instances” - the latter wording itself seemingly implying existing instances, which runs completely counter to new ones.

Anyway, it is not a blocker as you are saying (that I said), but a discovery impediment, wherein lemmy.ml acts as the central authoritarian decider for what listing of communities is presented to new instance admins upon first starting up a lemmy instance.

And while you can turn that feature off, then Lemmy has to limp along without that leg to stand upon. Yes you could replace it entirely too, but once you start replacing code are you really running “Lemmy” anymore, or like a de-authoritarianized version of it? Basically a decentralized fork? At which point such an action would go along with my latter wording “unless we fight against it”.

So my point was basically that there are centralization trends going on inside the Lemmy code, which I pointed out. A similar event occurred several years ago where lemmy.ml decided that certain swear words were inappropriate, and hard-coded those filters. When asked to remove them, they said:

If you dont like it, fork it. Stop bothering us about it

- Nutomic

But then later recanted after a huge outcry. It makes sense that lemmy.ml makes the Lemmy codebase to suit their own needs, and only considers the desires & needs of the wider world outside of that as secondary. My point though is that that is what is going on… “unless we fight against it”.

If lemmy.ml chooses not to federate with an instance, then those communities would not be in the listing, hence a veto power?

In full fairness, it is fairly easy to add a new community after the new instance is spun up, which is why I said “what communities are allowed to be acknowledged as existing to new instances”, i.e. using that built-in source without additional efforts to go against that trend.

This change increases the level of “centralization” towards using “lemmy.ml as the source of truth for that”. Trends towards centralization go against the spirit of a decentralized system, imho. Federation takes on a whole new meaning when it is interpreted not as individual rights but as a means to propagate the content authorized to exist in a central source… exactly as the OP topic covers, where community names must adhere to Reddit’s mandates.

Isn’t that ironic (don’t you think)? To be saying that about Digg that came prior to Reddit! (Although I don’t know about wallstreetbets in particular)

Reddit is most certainly the asshole of the internet

… hrm, so what does that make X? Would that be the colon, or the already eXcreted eXcrement?

The Fediverse doesn’t work like that

Maybe Mastodon does not, but Lemmy, in particular lemmy.ml, works more like that than you realize. e.g. a change is soon going to give lemmy.ml veto power in what communities are allowed to be acknowledged as existing to new instances, which is baked right into the code and there is no way to change it. A third-party listing could have been used instead but… no, this is rather much more on-brand for the Lemmy developers to have chosen.

So it is not a binary “Reddit is authoritarian whereas the Fediverse is not”, but rather we all can easily fall prey to authoritarianism, unless we fight against it.

But also when they would ban someone, they would do so from every single community on their instance, including ones that you’ve never even heard of.

And then never bother to so much as tell you about your being banned.

And also deny you the ability to appeal or ask questions - e.g. Reddit has both a modmail and the ability to continue discourse directly in a post that has been removed from a community listing. Which as a former mod I would use to communicate rejection reasons and sometimes we’d go back and forth for days talking about the subject further, e.g. ways that the newcommer could modify it as to not piss off the old hands in the community (e.g. NSFW is allowed but must be properly labeled or some such).

Oh, and soon a change is going to give lemmy.ml veto power on what communities are allowed to be suggested to new instances - and being baked right into the code so there is no way to change that - rather than use a third-party listing. Edit: this proposed change has already been walked back, and while still using a centralized source for that information, at least makes it configurable by the new instance admin rather than hard-coding lemmy.ml as the singular authority (except as the default option).

I find it highly ironic that in some ways Lemmy, in particular .ml, is more authoritarian than even Reddit.

Inaccurate - the solution is obviously to just not use Windows:-P (/s, unless you know, maybe…?)

I would also have shared any solutions I was aware of using Lemmy, except that after using it for 3 years, I know of very little that can be done about it. Just to be on the safe side though, I will note that you could theoretically use the Subscribed feed rather than All? That will show exclusively content that you have subscribed to, hence zero furry memes (unless they somehow wormed their way into the wrong community, in which case feel free to report them).

Fwiw I did not downvote you here: sharing your experiences is very relevant to this conversation. That said, we are just trying to help you find what you are looking for, and your comment does include inaccurate information.

e.g. out of the top 15 communities on PieFed.social only 3 have memes and the rest are much more information dense. Also viewing PieFed.social without an account, I see only a single meme in the top 15 posts shown by default. Also it’s chief developer shares your distaste for “low information content” posts and has several tools in place to help limit them, like the ability to filter not only communities one by one but also by any keywords contained within them, e.g. “memes”. Thus even if you used a 3rd party app, you would still have this automated filter in place. This is because PieFed is not merely another Lemmy instance but an entire reimplementation (from scratch) of the ActivityPub Protocol, i.e. it is software.

But I am not trying to shill it to you anymore, just wanting to correct your statements. I hope you find what you are looking for. Note that it will take some effort on your part to understand the reasons why things happen and what aspects of the tools that you choose to use are under your control - e.g. you could move to an instance that defederates from meme content? (I do not know of any, but in theory you could, or perhaps start up your own if nothing else.)

Have a good day.

Try PieFed. The reason you keep seeing furry content on Lemmy is that you are forced into browsing “All” in order to see some new content, but then you don’t like some of the new content that you see.

On PieFed with categories of communities (instance-defined Topic areas and user Feeds that are user-customizeable and shareable) you can have your cake (have a tight Subscribed feed, e.g. without being subscribed to any politics communities if you wanted) but then also eat it too (news & politics content is but a click away, or movies & TV).

Combining together comments across all cross-posts also helps a lot with community discovery. I haven’t searched by All in a long time, unless I just felt nostalgic and wanted to, but there is no longer any need with this new model.

Moderation reports are currently not federated (well they are in PieFed, but not in Lemmy) - at some point that will be added, but for all this time after the Rexodus this has been true. This lack of federation has hindered the growth of the Threadiverse.

The issue does get murky - especially when people use the same account both for their bot posting and also for their human interactions, rather than separating the two.

We scare normal, non-techie people away. The Threadiverse in general and Lemmy in particular is very lacking in moderation capabilities, especially by not federating mod reports across instances (PieFed does that, but Lemmy does not).

There are barely any places that defederate from lemmy.ml, including PieFed.ca that you are on. Thankfully PieFed allows us to block all users from an instance, but new users will have to discover on their own that they even should do this, and until then will be exposed to all of their comments and posts.

Same. I almost left Lemmy, until PieFed allowed another option.