Not a great day for social media. Twitter down, Reddit has not 3rd party apps, Lemmy is being hugged to death by people bailing Reddit and Twitter.
I guess I’ll go outside.
this post was submitted on 01 Jul 2023
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Lemmy isn't hugged to death. The issue is that everyone is just heading to the same handful of instances.
I didn’t realize this until I started self-hosting my own instance, but if you don’t join one of the 3 large instances (beehaw, world, ml) then you miss out on a LOT of historical content. The way federation works is that it only pulls in new post/comments after someone on your instance subscribes to a community on another instance. So if you find a cool new community on another instance, you can subscribe to see any new posts and comments, but you won’t see any of the old content at all unless you manually search for the post/comment.
Long winded way of saying, the best user experience (content wise) is always going to be on the largest instances unless Lemmy/ActivityPub changes how content backfilling works.
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Maybe they should update the join-lemmy.org page to suggest joining smaller instances. They put popular instances at the top and presumably that’s what everyone wants to join.
Edit: and then randomize the list of smaller instances to further distribute the load.
Yes, that's most likely the cause.
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Here's the current usershare breakdown by instance, if anyone's curious:
Source: https://github.com/tgxn/lemmy-explorer/tree/main/frontend/public/data
Lemmy.world is getting a very big chunk, but other than that it actually seems fairly distributed.
I guess there has to be a lowest common denominator instance. Not at all a bad thing, it leaves the dedicated communities out of their inevitable implosion range which still having access.
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Really everyone always wants to be on the most popular "site" instance to ensure it will just not go away suddenly. After that they go for ones that give them a cool @ domain name. This is how email and Jabber/XMPP worked for years. Modern fediverse should be using some form of modern distributed identity, not 1965 email style identities.
Yes, I figured. My domain name is not as cool as "shitjustworks" or whatever. But I can say that my instance is gonna stay for as long as Lemmy as software is supported, no matter if there are many users or not. I strongly believe that FOSS and the Fediverse are the future and I want to give something to the community by hosting the instance.
I went through the evolution of email.. At first it was universities, then ISPs etc. Having your identity tied to them SUCKED every time you no longer qualified for an account, changed providers ETC. I was a hotmail user before Microsoft purchased it, and an early beta Gmail user.. While this is some centralisation these two identities have lasted decades, where AT THE TIME AOL was the (this is the biggest, never going away) option, now almost no one has an @AOL.com address.
Point being that no matter the current promise your instance could DIE if you get ill or can't afford to host it etc. The model is BAD. I have said it before and will say it again, Identity SHOULD NOT be tied to instances, AND it needs some form of bot and trust system built in.
I partially agree with you. But my plan is to hand over the entire thing should I fall ill or get tired of hosting and maintaining it.
But in the end, everything's gonna go away. Even Reddit, like all the platforms before it. That's just the way things work.
What would be better, though? Having a P2P-like system where everything is truly federated? Like... Everyone has all accounts and all content at all times? I don't know how this would work.
At this point in time, there are clear advantages to the current federated system, but there are also clear disadvantes, like what you're describing, as well as some other things, like the different rules and moderation techniques of instances, defederation, etc.
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Why don't instances create user caps (at least temporarily) to help spread the load? Seems wild to have unlimited sign-ups when instances max out typical hardware at a couple thousand users.
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It's just the fediverse. My timeline is nothing but hugs and love. :3
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The instance I'm on is working fine, I think the problem is people are gravitating towards the largest 2-3 instances.
This is true. I was having a lot of issues with lemmy.ml it's getting overwhelmed. I wish there was an easy way to carry over subscriptions between accounts.
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2023 has been historical for social media, so much changing so fast.
Lemmy is being hugged to death
There are worse ways to die. 😁
It’s coming from the Reddit apocalypse. You could call it “death by snoo’s news”.
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My choices now are
Mastodon
Lemmy
Kbin
Actually edit the novel
The "scraping" they are claiming may be coming from inside the house, so to speak, as it appears they are DDoSing themselves.
Okay, now THAT is fucking hilarious and if true, I'm living for it.
The "disconnect a random rack" approach to tech management.
NO WAY
HAHAHAH Musk you are a genius!!
I truly don't understand why people keep trying to use Twitter despite open and obvious changes designed to be hostile to users. Not to mention the reliability issues that continue to crop up as a result of axing nearly your entire engineering staff.
Some people can't figure out Mastodon, but I don't think enough of the people who can't figure out mastodon are realizing that nothing would be better than twitter. And I mean literally just not doing social media anymore would be a marked improvement over using twitter
I think most of them just don't even know about Mastadon. I didn't until after Reddit announced it's API changes and people started talking about Lemmy and the fediverse.
I just simply had heard about none of this.
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Imo, there was no greater news aggregator than 3rd party Twitter apps. I will miss them very much. A couple of my favorite sources are not on Mastodon (yet?) and the 3rd party apps aren't up to snuff yet. Hopefully we get there one day.
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sunk cost fallacy is a hell of a drug. it's also why a lot of people stay in bad relationships (friends/romantic/family/etc)
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I've been feeling a significant amount of sadness at the feeling like I've now fully lost the 2 places that were my havens for safety and community during the pandemic (Twitter and Reddit). I mostly disconnected a few weeks/months ago, but this weekend feels like the full, official breakup. I wonder if anyone/everyone else is feeling the same?
Yesterday felt to me like the day Web 2.0 died. It's actually rather awkward. Web 2.0 devolved into enshittification, Web 3.0 to many looks to be a scam from the outset, and that leaves us with the Fediverse as the most hopeful continuation of what we liked about Web 2.0. But what is the Fediverse? More of the same as Web 2.0? An entirely new thing? I've been coming to view the Fediverse as being Web 2.0.1. It's a bug fix. The corporations controlling Web 2.0 were the problem, not the idea of a more dynamic and interactive web. The solution isn't strictly speaking Peer 2 Peer solutions, as many people still want a curated and moderated space, so they're not dealing with a constant onslaught of dicks and nazis they didn't ask for (I'm sure someday the Peer 2 Peer networks will have a viable solution for that, but for now, they don't as far as I can tell). But a networked governance structure in which volunteers own the instances and the users have more choice in how their space is moderated seems like a major fix to what we were seeing before, and I think it's a major benefit for all of us
I've been really intrigued by the developments coming from the Web0 / small web train of thought. https://web0.small-web.org/
web0 is web3 without all the corporate right-libertarian Silicon Valley bullshit.
That's certainly one way to phrase it. In bright yellow highlighted text.
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Absolutely, and the coordination is deeply suspicious. Steve Huffman said he didn't want to be like Twitter, but then admitted in interview that he'd had several meetings with Elon. u/spez's nose is brown, and it smells musky.
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Totally. I was just thinking about how my very specific life circumstances mean that I'm otherwise distracted and handling it pretty well. But if I were in a rough patch right now this situation would be really, really, really hard. I hope the people in that situation are okay and finding new refuge in places like this ❤
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appareantly theyre agressively rate limiting: 300 posts per day for new accounts, 600 for unverified, 6000 for verified
I bet Elon is furiously Googling how to downgrade to a micro/free tier instance on AWS.
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I have to say the silver lining in all of this is that decentralized forms of community building are on the rise, and this is a good thing. I don't think it's healthy to centralize all data and power in the hands of private companies that can decide to, oh you know, kill api access etc.
I'm overdosing on schadenfreude right now.
Just went over to Twitter for the first time in a while, and everyone's bleating about wanting an invite to Bluesky.
Meanwhile, Mastodon's over there just working fine and doing what they want Twitter to do.
It's bizarre.
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What is happening to my internet?! ): It's all going downhill.
It's like having most of the content and communication being hosted by few corporations running on the faith of investors and struggling to realize the expected profits was a bad thing.
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It's time to abandon Twitter to the fascists and bots.
Some people cannot seem to even be able to login.
Rabbits
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