The relief when I open up Lemmy or Mastodon. It feels like coming home to an experience I didn't realise I was missing. Lemmy has grown enough now that I can look at my feed throughout the day and there will be interesting posts, all with engaging comments and conversations. It's like the internet I grew up on, only better: it's ran by the people, for the people.

Obviously, that doesn't mean the fedi isn't plagued with issues. But it feels fundamentally more culturally healthy than whatever the fuck is going on in big corpo social media.

I recommended the Fediverse to Brennan Kenneth Brown (the creator and developer of fanfiction.lol: https://fanfiction.lol/, which is an alternative to Ao3, but that uses the same OTW software: https://github.com/otwcode/otwarchive/).

And he told me to go ahead and implement, as well as create a pull request.

The issue is: I know almost NOTHING about the technical side of The Fediverse (lol).

fanfiction.lol Codeberg: https://codeberg.org/brennanbrown/fanfiction.lol

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.ml/post/54754370

This might be a somewhat unusual post, but I’ve made a pledge to myself to financially support Fediverse creators whose content I enjoy and I’d like to make an attempt to inspire others to do the same.

I want to make it very clear that the amount you donate does not matter! It’s not a competition.

I make small donations (~1-5$/mo) to some of my favourites because I plan on supporting them indefinitely which is usually better than one-time donations. This unfortunately also means that it will require multiple people to work well, but if we can build a reputation for the Fediverse as a place where people are likely to support your work then it would naturally become more appealing to post here.

I use Liberapay whenever I can because it lets me choose how much I want to donate and how frequent which makes this easy to manage.

You can of course experiment with the conditions (e.g: type of creators), the donation amount or donation frequency. Use what works for you, and again, what matters is that you support someone, not the amount!

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.ca/post/73100852

Our analysis contributes to ongoing debates on digital platforms, in particular from an institutional perspective, in the following ways. First, research on platforms has established a critical distinction between the organization of the platform host organization and the organization of the ‘crowd’ - the users who interact in digital action spaces (e.g., Ametowobla and Kirchner, 2023; Bauer and Gegenhuber, 2015; Dolata and Schrape, 2023). However, less attention has been paid to how certain features of platform organization such as centralized algorithmic control, data extraction mechanisms, and proprietary governance structures (e.g., Stark and Pais, 2020; Van Dijck, Poell, and De Waal, 2018) shape the public arena. Given that, in the case of social media platforms, the crowd comprises a large part of society, we demonstrate how the selective appropriation of institutional logics in the governance of platforms simultaneously subverts these logics in the public sphere.

Second, we highlight that these effects reflect strategic choices rather than technological inevitability, because platforms rhetorically appeal to the logics of the market, the corporation and the community to gain legitimacy (Meyer and Rowan, 1977), while diverging from these logics in the actual practices in which they create, regulate and monetize digital marketplaces. As an outlook, we point to alternative forms of platform organization more in line with liberal, democratic principles - while indicating a need to reform democratic societies away from a market towards a commons-based orientation (e.g. Etzioni, 2000, Etzioni, 2009). Social media platforms structured around decentralization rather than centralized control could lead to different dynamics in the public sphere and foster logics diversity (Almandoz and Thornton, 2025), granting communities more autonomy over content curation and moderation standards, enabling democratic deliberation rather than polarization, and allowing for distributed governance rather than proprietary control. In this sense, social media platforms and contestation around their governance constitute non-neutral battlegrounds where societal logics collide, are challenged, and can be transformed - in different directions.

The digital transformation can be seen as “the combined effects of several digital innovations bringing about novel actors (and actor constellations), structures, practices, values, and beliefs that change, threaten, replace or complement existing rules of the game within organizations and fields” (Hinings, Gegenhuber, and Greenwood, 2018: 53). Digital platforms can be seen as a constitutive feature of late digital society, and terms such as platform economy (Kenney and Zysman, 2016) or platform capitalism (Srnicek, 2017; Staab, 2019) indicate a broader societal and economic transformation associated with the spread of platform organizations. In a platform-mediated society, economic as well as social processes are shaped by globally operating platform companies such as Amazon, Apple, Google, Meta, or Microsoft, leading to the commodification of both private and public exchanges (Dolata, 2019; Van Dijck et al., 2018). This development not only marks the endpoint of the ‘organization society’ that Pfeffer (1997) described in the introductory quote (Davis, 2016), but undermines democratic principles because an algorithmically governed social order creates new participation possibilities, while restricting participation in decision-making (Stalder, 2016). Users on most platforms have limited to no control over the conditions under which they work (e.g., Maric, Schuessler, and Thäter, 2025).

Digital platforms are commonly defined as technology-enabled infrastructures operated by host organizations to facilitate the exchange between providers and consumers of goods, services, or knowledge (Gawer, 2010). It is important to distinguish the platform host organization - typically a rather small, formal organization often embedded in multinational technology companies - from structures and practices of platform organizing, which shape the dynamics of market, crowd or community transactions (Bauer and Gegenhuber, 2015; Kirchner and Schuessler, 2019; Langner and Seidel, 2015). Dolata and Schrape (2023) hence distinguish the platform-operating companies from the technologically mediated social action space that is typically referred to as the ‘platform’ (similarly Ametowobla and Kirchner, 2023). While initially narratives about sharing, autonomy, flexibility, openness, fluidity, and peer production accompanied the rise of the platform organization, dominant narratives now emphasize data extraction and processing, algorithmic governance, surveillance, social stratification (Fourcade, 2021; Healy, Nicholson, and Pekarek, 2017; Zuboff, 2018) as well as platform domination, power, centralization and control (Seemann, 2021; Kenney, Bearson, and Zysman, 2021; Schuessler, Attwood-Charles, Kirchner, and Schor, 2021). Platform governance is often described as ‘hybrid’, because it uses market, corporation and community mechanisms to coordinate crowds via a digital infrastructure (e.g. Kornberger, 2016; Zhang et al., 2024).

...

Our study contributes to ongoing debates on digital platforms and institutional logics in several ways. First, by shifting our analysis from gig work platforms operating on a national or field-level to globally operating social media platforms, we show how platforms' hybrid use of institutional logics (Frenken et al., 2020; Grabher and K¨onig, 2020; Watkins and Stark, 2018; Zhang et al., 2025) has repercussions for the public sphere. Hence, we support critical analyses of platforms' regulatory power (e.g. Lehdonvirta, 2022), complementing these analyses with an organization-theoretical perspective that shows how the governance of the platform host or- ganization extends to the ways in which platforms organize crowds, yielding them significant power to play with and undermine societal-level institutional logics given their influence over the public sphere.

Second, we respond to recent calls for using the institutional logics framework to understand current challenges to the liberal- capitalist, democratic institutional order (Lounsbury and Wang, 2020), revealing the role played by certain kinds of platforms in undermining its institutional pillars. While symbolically adopting the rhetoric of the logic of the market, the corporation and the community to gain legitimacy (Meyer and Rowan, 1977), large, centralized and profit-driven social media platforms decompose the means and ends of these logics in the specific ways in which they create, regulate and monetize markets (Yan et al., 2021), thereby redefining not just the composition of dominant logics in society, but also their meanings and associated practices (Schildt and Kodeih, 2025). Arguably, platforms' strategic and subversive use of institutional logics is possible and impactful because users lack situated interaction possibilities in digital spaces. Such interactions are an important source of resistance to a manipulative use of institutional logics, because they allow detecting and acting upon a lack of coherence in logics (Zilber, 2024).

Two months ago, I made this post:

https://lemmy.world/post/50855395

In this community, about potentially either "colonizing", or forking Squidgeworld Archive (alternative to the fanfiction site ao3).

https://squidgeworld.org/

Apparently, ao3 has recently shut-down for 2-4 weeks:

https://www.404media.co/archive-of-our-own-ao3-down-maintenance/

https://nerdist.com/article/ao3-archive-of-our-own-down-for-two-to-four-weeks/

My question is: Should we consider potentially making a Fediverse alternative to Ao3 / SqWA?

If you head over to the Squidgeworld Archive website, it states that over 2,300+ ao3 users have already migrated over to SqWA from ao3.

(Now it's over 12,000+ in the last 20 hours ALONE.)

Just imagine how many people could potentially be brought into the Fediverse, if there were a working federated alternative version of ao3 / SqWA.

Or if Fediverse users, instead of creating an alternative, instead commited to "colonising" SqWA, instead.

Federated social platforms like Mastodon and Bluesky are growing alternatives to centralized social media. Their moderation actions cross servers, lists and labelers in ways users cannot easily see. When something visibly changes, users turn to public forums like Reddit to ask why. We read these discussions as folk theories of federated moderation: accounts users build from observation and discussion with each other. We pair manual qualitative coding with LLM-assisted labeling using Gemma 4 (for extending the analysis across a larger set) to map how users explain moderation across five federated-platform subreddits. Two cases stand out: defederation on Mastodon, where users settle on a few recurring reasons, and list propagation on Bluesky, where users report being mass-blocked via a stranger’s subscription list. We close with two design changes that would surface these explanations on the platform itself rather than on Reddit.

Federated social media has grown noticeably over the past few years. Mastodon and Bluesky are the most visible cases, alongside Lemmy as a Reddit alternative, with millions of accounts either migrating from centralized platforms or signing up directly [6]. Unlike centralized platforms, federated platforms divide moderation work across many independent instances and, on Bluesky, across user-subscribed lists and labelers. This division makes moderation outcomes harder for ordinary users to see: an account can be defederated by a server its owner has never heard of, or added to a block list curated by someone they have never spoken to. A new Mastodon user usually does not know which other servers their instance has cut ties with. A new Bluesky user often does not know which labelers their app trusts by default, or that a stranger curating a list can add their account and quietly lower their reach. When something visibly breaks (an account goes dark, replies fail to land), people often take the question to Reddit. The answers that come back vary, from accurate to confidently wrong.

...

The contrast between the two cases also shows that folk theories of federation are not generic. The dimensions users reach for in each case track what their protocol makes visible to them. On Mastodon they reach for the admin and the question of how far admin power extends, because the admin is the named human role in their experience of the platform. On Bluesky they reach for the list curator and the mechanics of subscription, because lists and labelers are the named user-side mechanism the protocol exposes. Where prior folk-theory work has studied a single algorithm that users cannot see [5, 7], we look at two architectures that are equally invisible from the outside but lead users to ask different questions. This protocol-shaped variation is what makes the federated setting useful for extending folk-theory work beyond centralized platforms.

...

One might ask whether good in-product documentation removes the need for a venue like Reddit. We think not: much of what users explain is exactly what a single platform cannot narrate, a defederation decided by another server, or a block inherited from a stranger’s list, and even for its own actions, the threads do what documentation cannot, letting users compare protocols, correct each other in real time (our D4 subset), and read an event through people who have met it before. In-product explanations would give this cooperative reading a starting point, not replace it.

Our population is not federated-platform users in general but a self-selected slice: people engaged enough with fediverse governance to write about it in public. Unlike the users caught off guard by feed curation in Eslami et al. [7], ours had already chosen to explain moderation policy, so they are more technically literate than a median Mastodon or Bluesky user and their folk theories likely sit closer to the actual protocol mechanism. Our claims are thus about fediverse-engaged Redditors, not federated-platform users at large; native conversations on Bluesky, Mastodon, Discord and GitHub are likewise out of reach here. Reddit threads show public reasoning, not private experience and not the ground truth of what the platform did. Our claims concern how users describe federated moderation, not platform behavior we tested directly. The next step is to widen the sample with a held-out audit and to extend the codebook to a third protocol family (e.g., Nostr) so the two-case story can be tested against a setting we have not yet read.

Meanwhile on reddit.

To get a project featured on the subreddit, developers now need to show it has been actively maintained for at least a year, has an established community, and has at least three contributors, give or take. Student projects such as note-taking apps and PDF viewers aren't welcome either, and developers can no longer use the subreddit to find people willing to help maintain their software.

That creates a chicken-and-egg problem for independent developers, who apparently need an established community before they can use an open source forum to find one. Even projects with no AI involvement could fall foul of the rules. One Reddit user pointed out that their nine-year-old project, which has more than 300 GitHub stars and dozens of resolved issues, would no longer qualify because they're its sole contributor.

The moderator also imposed a minimum Reddit account age of one year and requires significant prior contributions. Anyone who attempts to post and then contacts the moderators seeking an exception risks being permanently banned and muted.

Any ideas?

We Distribute is teaming up with Bonfire to develop a new kind of social instance - one that elevates curation and discovery to promote all things Fediverse. It's a social instance, but also a discovery portal.

PyLova (Python+Pavlova) is a soft fork of PieFed, aimed at improving the user experience through UI overhauls, empowering users and admins with agency, improved administration and moderation functions, and general bug fixing.

New in V0.4.0

New & Improved

• Instance & Community Stats: Mods and admins get a stats page for their community, tracking total subscribers, new subscribers, votes, posts and comments over time.

Example

• Ban Appeals: Banned users can appeal a community ban with a written reason. Appeals federate to other PyLova instances as a queued notification, for other software (Lemmy, MBin) the head mod will receive a PM with the requet.
• Community Post Requirements: Mods can set rules for posting in their community, things such as requiring flair, specific keywords (Rule) in post titles, ban specific words in titles, and disallow post types.
• Notification Settings: Users can set what notification types they wish to receive.
• Markdown Editor Overhaul: New options for tables, strike-through, horizontal rules, headings and footnotes, alongside support for ruby annotations, inline hashtags and Mbin-style details/spoiler blocks.
• Markdown in Chats: Direct messages now use the full markdown editor and render formatting. Images are offered as a link, due to potential for misuse in unmoderated messages (i.e. tracking/doxxing).
• Modlog Suppression: Admins and staff can hide a modlog entry's reason from everyone else, which displays as " Reason suppressed by AdminName ". It is intended for use cases such as doxxing or harassment through modlog entries. This replaces the PieFed behaviour of outright hiding all modlog entries if not from a trusted instance.

Bug-Fixes & Misc

• Ranking Algorithm Rework : Scaled sorting now weighs communities by monthly active users instead of raw subscriber count.
• Unsaved Draft Warning : Closing a tab or hitting Ctrl-W with a part-written post or comment now asks for confirmation first.
• Chat Deduplication : Starting a chat with someone you have already messaged opens the existing conversation instead of creating a second thread.
• Lemmy/Mbin support for Multi-Image Posts : Extra images now render correctly on Lemmy instances that run an image proxy.
• Markdown Editor Fixes : The link and image buttons no longer prefill https:// or add a leading space, the cursor now lands inside the () ready for a paste, and the redundant quick/email link options are gone.
• Vote History: Users can now view their own upvote and downvote history, linked from a new activity card on the profile page alongside bookmarks and scheduled posts.
• Indented Code Blocks : A ``` inside a four-space indented block no longer breaks the rest of the comment.
• Animated Images: WebP, APNG, Gifs no longer resized in ways that strip the animation.
• Notifications : Expanded by default rather than collapsed.
• User Preview Card : Rebuilt to show flair, flags, pronouns and admin/staff badges, using thumbnails rather than full-size avatars.

If you’ve not played The Button before, it’s a very silly game where you press a button. Yes, really.

Ok, so there’s a little more to it than that, including factions, politics, an economy, and season-specific twists and turns.

You can also visit !thebutton@lemmy.zip for more details on it

I think I get an extra button press from this referral

When discussing Fediverse, you sometimes hear the idea that you shouldn't need different accounts for different platforms.
The "why can't I comment under Youtube video with my Twitter account".
In Fediverse it already works to some extent. You can comment under PeerTube video with your Mastodon account, and you can participate in Lemmy thread with your Mastodon account.
What is this functionality called? Does it have specific name?
It's probably not "single sign-on" and not "federation" from what I understand.
And to what extent is it implemented? Is there some way to participate in Lemmy thread with your PeerTube account?
Is there any progress being made on implementing the initial idea of using any Fediverse account with any other Fediverse platform?
What is the name for the problem of implementing or mapping the platform-specific functionality? As in, neither Mastodon nor PeerTube have the interface for upvoting and downvoting posts.
Wouldn't it be easiest to implement Fediverse-wide SSO (as in, log into Lemmy interface with your Mastodon account) instead of figuring out some funky mapping and patform interactions?

lemmy logo is a sad rat. Imo better design needed:

Ill start - propose your logo:

Cool Jezus lemmy:

Thinking lemmy:

Fun lemmy:

Jackedlemmy?

Variant 5

Variant 6:

As a point of comparison - current lemmy logo:

Making a post to test the new threadiverse community support on fedihood.social, the ActivityPub fediverse's new geocentric microblogging platform!I wonder if Markdown will work 🤔Attempted Markdown link: FediHood

So my understanding is that non-local communities receive interactions from other instances, then the host instance relays those interactions to all subscribed instances.

It's also my understanding that when an instance disables downvoting, it also doesn't relay downvotes onward.

So how do I see this?

This is the scenario:

1. A hexbear.net user posts to a hexbear.net community [downvotes disabled], which gets relayed to all subscribed instances like mine (thelemmy.club) and mander.xyz, etc.
2. A mander.xyz user sees it and downvotes it, which is sent to Hexbear
3. Hexbear receives the downvote and discards it (or at least, I always assumed so)

If it had been one of the local users of thelemmy.club I could understand seeing it, as it would be recorded in our local database. But how am I seeing a foreign downvote on a Hexbear community?

I logged in, answered one question, and now can't upvote, reply. Upon clearing cache and cookies, I can't log in on either browser.

When you choose a Lemmy home instance, you're trusting somebody else's infrastructure with your account, posts, comments, and uploaded media.

If that instance disappears without a usable backup or migration path, years of your contributions can disappear with it.

Yet when I look at most instances, I have absolutely no idea what I'm trusting.

Is this running on:

• A $5 VPS?
• A dedicated server with redundant storage?
• Someone's mini PC under their desk?
• AWS with costs that explode exponentially as traffic increases and hapless admin not realizing that just shutting it down as they never had a plan?
• A database with proper backups?
• A server with no backups at all?

I recently had an instance tell me my posting activity alone was becoming too expensive for them. Their solution was - just banning me and removing all my data. no im not kidding - thx https://lemmy.radio/.

That immediately makes me wonder: what are you running? (apparently it was aws micro or something and person clearly had no idea what they were doing)

If a few hundred posts can create a meaningful financial problem, is the instance massively undersized? Are you paying enterprise hyperscaler prices for workloads that could run cheaply on dedicated hardware? Is storage the problem? Bandwidth? Pictrs? Database load? Do you even have a plan my friends?

I don't know, because users are given almost zero infrastructure information.

I'm not asking admins to publish IP addresses, network diagrams, credentials, or anything security-sensitive.

Just put some basics in /about:

• Hosting: OVH / Hetzner / AWS / home-hosted / etc.
• Compute: 8 cores / 32 GB RAM
• Storage: 2 TB NVMe
• Backups: Daily, retained 30 days
• Media backups: Yes / No
• Off-site backups: Yes / No
• Approximate capacity: Small / Medium / Large
• Funding: Self-funded / donations / nonprofit / etc.

That tells me infinitely more about whether I'm comfortable making an instance my home.

• Have admin(s) ever hosted any production software before? First time?
• are there even backups?
• Is there even any plans for scalability? What if your traffic goes 4x? what about 20x? do you have a plan beyond banning me and removing everythig I ever posted?
  And honestly, backups matter to same tune as CPU model.

Federation gives us the freedom to choose our instance. Great.

But you can't make an informed choice when you have no idea whether your digital home is a properly backed-up server or a $5 VPS from a racknerd black friday sale held together with Docker Compose and prayers.

Is that the reason why all lemmy instances dont let you upload more than 5Mb media? probably.

If you cant afford hosting costs - holy fuck, just stop fucking saying "everyone welcome" if you then going to ban those same "welcomed" people after they post 10 image memes (thx https://sopuli.xyz/ and https://lemmy.zip/ and https://lemmy.radio/ and https://lemmy.ml/). no no - 👏you 👏 cant 👏 afford 👏 non-text 👏 users 👏, - instead you falsely accuse people of spamming and banning their accounts. No wonder lemmy is at 35k MAU. Hardware poor admins - you don't even know what spamming is, you shouldn't have kids users if you cant afford them, dont invite them in or just advertise your instances as text-only.

Hardware poor admins - stop inviting people. you have no capacity and only actively harming lemmy adoption.

There should be a list of such instances that should be inviting people at all.

Instance infrastructure shouldn't be a mystery.

If you're asking users to build years of history on your server, give them enough information to understand what they're building it on. You likely cant afford non-text users anyways.

why do neither fedidb.com or fediverse.observer have any results for noblogs.org? there is many that have been widely followed on the fediverse for a long time now. See @anne@noblogs.org or @anarchistfront@noblogs.org as examples.

I'm building a fanfiction archive and I was wondering whether I should add federation just to the forum or to the whole site and if I add it to the whole site whether or not ActivityPub would be a good fit, like is it possible using ActivityPub to share the load of hosting the files across different instances or is that something unrelated and it's only useful for typical social interactions?

PyLova (Python+Pavlova) is a soft fork of PieFed, aimed at improving the user experience through UI overhauls, empowering users and admins with agency, improved administration and moderation functions, and general bug fixing.

New in V0.3.2

New & Improved

• Muffle Users : Instead of outright blocking a user, you can now 'Muffle' them. This will place their content behind a spoiler. This functionality has also been extended to the filter system.
• Live Posts : Mods can designate a post as a Live Post. A Live Post will continuously update with new posts coming through will sorting by new. This is great for keeping track on currently happening events such as global news or sports.
• Reel View : This is a new way to browse the site, putting it into 'Reel' view shows one post per scroll. Cuts out the noise, allowing you to appreciate one post at a time.
• User Flags : Want to show off who you are? Add a flag next to your pronouns. These small flags can be set by instance admins, great show showing Pride Flags, Sports Teams, Nationalities, Political Ideologies, etc.
• Bookmark Organisation : Users can now sort their bookmarked posts and comments by folders.
• Admin Notes : Admins and Instance Moderators can share notes about users on their profile page, this can be handy in building a history of bad behaviour or sharing concerns.
• Account Oversight : Admins and Instance Moderators have greater ability to search through a users upvoted and downvoted content.
• New Theme : Nocturne Core @luminous5481@anarchist.nexus has wonderfully created a Sci-Fi inspired theme you can apply.

Bug-Fixes & Misc

• Lemmy/Mbin support for Multi-Image Posts : Multi-Image Posts will now add the extra images into the post body for users on Lemmy and Mbin so they don't have to miss out on your amazing content.
• Censorship Transparency : On the instance about page, there is now a one-stop location for viewing what sort of things are being censored by your instance.
• Options Menu : The menu has been updated with a more navigable UI in 3 Panel Mode.
• Reactions Only Mode : A small setting for instance admins to 'turn off' up and downvotes, letting posts only have emoji reactions. Note, emoji reacts do technically count as an upvote and this is more of a visual change in regards to user view.
• Trusted Instances Only Federation : Communities can already be set to local only, this feature allows communities to only be visible on those in your instances trusted list.
• Banned Users can now unsubscribe from a community, allowing them to remove it from their feed.
• Blocked/Unfederated Instances now show more information, such as allowing for reasons why it was removed.
• Poll Post Type teasers had a slight visual inconsistency, their icon should now align properly with every other post type.
• Flair, Tags, & Live Status all follow the same visual format. Also now visible on post teasers.
• General Performance Improvements.
• Code Refactoring to follow a more pythonic style guide and reduce McCabe complexity.

Believe it or not, the Fediverse has a pretty active and happening music scene. NHAM and RadioFreeFedi are collaborating to put together a music and culture live stream, for the Fediverse, by the Fediverse, and it’s all powered by PeerTube and Owncast.

The event is from August 26th @ 1900 UTC to August 28th @ 0100 UTC

I sent the requesting admin from Kbin.earth screenshots and example thread links in DM, and with his or her permission, am sharing the most relevant part of the exchange here for the devs /admins:

Maeve Compare: https://kbin.earth/m/comradeship@lemmygrad.ml vs https://lemmygrad.ml/ 1 week ago blued_gear I will take a closer look at the issue once I'm back from vacation. What I found in the server logs 'til yet was not very conclusive, except some errors coming from the Lemmy side (but I can't say if they are the real reason).

@dessalines@lemmy.ml