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we need more users (discuss.tchncs.de)
submitted 10 months ago by to c/fediverse@lemmy.world
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I've been one of the people saying "we don't need more users. we need quality over quantity" and i was wrong.

the way it's going, lemmy needs active users who post content sothat the network stays relevant. networks like the fediverse benefit from network effects and that means that if we have more users, that improves the value and quality of the fediverse overall.

So please, everyone, when you can, make advertisement for the fediverse in your personal area. Go talk to friends, make attractive stickers and put them everywhere, stuff like that. We would all benefit from it.

edit: source for the graph

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[–] 10 points 10 months ago* (9 children)

Because Lemmy, to this day, doesn't do what Reddit does. Yes, the UI is similar, but there's two big downsides to Reddit. One that's important now, and one that's important later.

  • Lemmy is tiny. Like, really small. The Linus Tech Tips form and the Crackberry forum each have more users and more activity than all of Lemmy combined. That means, you can talk about general things of Lemmy, like e.g. US politics, but there aren't a lot of niche communities. On Reddit I can post a photo with some weird electronics component from the 60s and within minutes someone will post an answer identifying the component and telling me where to buy a replacement. On Lemmy, a corresponding community doesn't even exist.
  • Lemmy scales terribly. Every instance holds a copy of all data that was ever posted in any community that any user on that instance ever subscribed to. That has two very negative effects:
    • Storage requirements are insane. Since most traffic is in big communities and most users will subscribe to the big communities, most instances need to store a copy of almost all of Lemmy. If Lemmy were to ever get to the size of Reddit, every instance would have to store data in the order of magnitude of all of Reddit. Imagine small hobby admins having to host data in the region of Petabytes or Exabytes. Nobody can afford that.
    • Admin work is insane. Since every instance holds a full, independent copy and doesn't only cache, they are legally responsible for the content and have to moderate it. So if someone posts e.g. illegal pornography on one instance and it's federated to another instance, the admin of the second instance needs to delete it or face legal consequences. That means, instead of the mods or admins of the original community/instance being solely responsible for keeping their stuff clean, everyone is responsible for everything and the same work needs to be done hundreds of times, once per instance.

This horrible scalability means that right now instances are getting close to their limits (see e.g. lemm.ee closing down exactly due to these reasons).

Lemmy has 40-50k monthly active users. Reddit has 5.16 billion monthly active users, so about 100 000x. If everyone on Reddit were to move over to Lemmy, Lemmy would be done. Just one day of Reddit-level traffic would be enough to jam up the history of Lemmy content so much that nobody could ever afford hosting a Lemmy instance again.

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  • [–] 2 points 10 months ago (1 child)

    I don't know if you've convinced me to stay or go, but you've certainly convinced me of either or.

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  • [–] 1 point 10 months ago

    Wasn't trying to convince anyone of anything. Just offering a reality check.

    Lemmy vs Reddit is like this meme where the one side says "I hate you" and the other side says "Who are you?" (or was it "I don't even think of you", can't remember).

    Lemmy is cool. It being small has benefits and I like the political direction here much more than on Reddit. I like that most people I interact with on Lemmy genuinely are humans. On Reddit, that's much more difficult to be certain of.

    But Lemmy is not Reddit, it's not a Reddit alternative, it's not even a Reddit competitor. It's a nice little niche forum, a little anti-capitalist experiment, that kinda copied the UI and UX of old Reddit. That's totally fine and it's got it's value. Otherwise I wouldn't have >3000 comments on this platform.

    But it's a factor of 100 000x off of being on the radar of Spez and his crew.

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  • [–] 1 point 10 months ago* (6 children)

    Admin work is insane. Since every instance holds a full, independent copy and doesn’t only cache, they are legally responsible for the content and have to moderate it. So if someone posts e.g. illegal pornography on one instance and it’s federated to another instance, the admin of the second instance needs to delete it or face legal consequences. That means, instead of the mods or admins of the original community/instance being solely responsible for keeping their stuff clean, everyone is responsible for everything and the same work needs to be done hundreds of times, once per instance.

    Eh, if the original instance removes the CSAM - the ban and removal federates out to everywhere else, so this isn't always true.

    As for the scaling of Lemmy - absolutely, but it'll never get to Reddit sized levels. Down the line, the answer here would be for the federative structure to change so that an instance only hosts its own local content, and doesn't need duplicate content viewed from external instances.

    This horrible scalability means that right now instances are getting close to their limits (see e.g. lemm.ee closing down exactly due to these reasons).

    That's not why lemm.ee closed down. It wasn't financial.

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  • [–] 1 point 10 months ago (5 children)

    Eh, if the original instance removes the CSAM - the ban and removal federates out to everywhere else, so this isn’t always true.

    But if it doesn't, then other instances removing the content on their side doesn't federate. So you can either trust every instance that you federate with with your legal security, or you will have to moderate everything yourself as well, just in case someone missed something.

    Down the line, the answer here would be for the federative structure to change so that an instance only hosts its own local content, and doesn’t need duplicate content viewed from external instances.

    This would be extremely important, but I don't know if such a low level conceptual change can still be performed with a reasonable amount of work. Remember, for such a change you need to get every instance on board. That would be difficult now, and only more difficult later.

    Tbh, it would have been much smarter if the setup would be basically a bunch of independent phpBB-like boards with federated single-sign-on and an app that transparently connects you to whatever instance hosts the content you are looking at.

    That’s not why lemm.ee closed down. It wasn’t financial.

    No, it was specifically because of the moderation issue: https://lemmy.ca/post/45390962

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  • [–] 1 point 10 months ago (4 children)

    But if it doesn’t, then other instances removing the content on their side doesn’t federate. So you can either trust every instance that you federate with with your legal security, or you will have to moderate everything yourself as well, just in case someone missed something.

    Sure, you're right there - but an instance that kept having problems with removing CSAM would find itself defederated.

    This would be extremely important, but I don’t know if such a low level conceptual change can still be performed with a reasonable amount of work. Remember, for such a change you need to get every instance on board. That would be difficult now, and only more difficult later.

    Well it would be built in from Lemmy or Piefed. The devs would have to spearhead it. But were the load ever to get to that point, I suspect that would be the obvious move.

    No, it was specifically because of the moderation issue: https://lemmy.ca/post/45390962

    Yes, so not financial. You seemed to be implying it was financial.

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  • [–] 1 point 10 months ago (3 children)

    Sure, you’re right there - but an instance that kept having problems with removing CSAM would find itself defederated.

    Depends... Imagine it also contains some of the most relevant communities and defederating would mean you lose users. That's not such an easy decision any more. Also, at that point hosting would likely be so expensive that for-profit instances would emerge, and for those defederating an important community wouldn't be such an easy choice either.

    But it's not only CSAM. For example, there's illegal speech in quite a few parts of the world. In Germany, for example, a lot of nazi-related stuff is illegal. In russia or china some regime-critical speech is illegal. I wouldn't be too surprised if the US also joins this club sometime in the near future.

    Actually, if you are a non US citizen and you and you want to travel to the USA, it's already troublesome if you are hosting a website with anti-Trump content.

    That kind of stuff is unlikely to be deleted on the original instance if that instance isn't hosted in the same country.

    Yes, so not financial. You seemed to be implying it was financial.

    Sorry if that came across. I said lemm.ee was shutdown because of the scaling issue. I could have been more clear with that I meant the moderation scaling issues.

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  • [–] 1 point 10 months ago (2 children)

    Depends… Imagine it also contains some of the most relevant communities and defederating would mean you lose users. That’s not such an easy decision any more. Also, at that point hosting would likely be so expensive that for-profit instances would emerge, and for those defederating an important community wouldn’t be such an easy choice either.

    I don't think that would save it, to be honest.

    People would just clone the communities on other instances and rebuild.

    I suspect eventually lemmy/piefed federation will not be automatic, but subject to approval.

    But it’s not only CSAM. For example, there’s illegal speech in quite a few parts of the world. In Germany, for example, a lot of nazi-related stuff is illegal. In russia or china some regime-critical speech is illegal. I wouldn’t be too surprised if the US also joins this club sometime in the near future.

    No-one cares what Russia or China thinks here. Germany? I mean, sure, but this is also a complication for any regulatory bodies trying to police social media sites. As "Lemmy" or "Piefed", as you know, are not singular entities.

    Sorry if that came across. I said lemm.ee was shutdown because of the scaling issue. I could have been more clear with that I meant the moderation scaling issues.

    Yeah, in part because they had a "no defederation" policy which came to bite them back.

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  • [–] 1 point 10 months ago* (1 child)

    No-one cares what Russia or China thinks here. Germany? I mean, sure, but this is also a complication for any regulatory bodies trying to police social media sites. As "Lemmy" or "Piefed", as you know, are not singular entities.

    People living in Russia or China might care.

    UK might be much more difficult, btw. They now ban all porn without identity checks. So if you host a lemmy/piefed instance that's accessible in the UK you will need to delete all adult content that makes it to your instance, if you don't want to violate UK law.

    People would just clone the communities on other instances and rebuild.

    Cloning communities isn't quite that easy. Were you present when feddit.de went down? Their communities didn't vanish. The replications are still up on all other instances, and you can still post there. There's no indication to a casual user that the instance hosting the communities is down and thus federation doesn't work. To the users it just looks like participation dropped like a rock with no obvious reason.

    The communities were cloned onto a new instance (IIRC feddit.org) but even up to now, people keep posting to the old now-unfederated communities.

    Btw: that's another quite critical issue: Lemmy lacks any and all migration tools. Can't migrate an instance to a new URL, can't migrate users or communities to other instances. All you can do is scrap all you had and start fresh.

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  • [–] 1 point 10 months ago

    People living in Russia or China might care.

    I mean, okay, but they likely use VPNs to start with. There's already heavily oppressive laws there. The point is Russia and China have no power to threaten Fediverse owners here.

    UK might be much more difficult, btw. They now ban all porn without identity checks. So if you host a lemmy/piefed instance that’s accessible in the UK you will need to delete all adult content that makes it to your instance, if you don’t want to violate UK law.

    I am from the UK. And lemmy.zip has geoblocked the UK because of this (the owner is from the UK). But no other instances has done anything so far.

    Cloning communities isn’t quite that easy. Were you present when feddit.de went down? Their communities didn’t vanish. The replications are still up on all other instances, and you can still post there. There’s no indication to a casual user that the instance hosting the communities is down and thus federation doesn’t work. To the users it just looks like participation dropped like a rock with no obvious reason.

    Keep in mind that Piefed actually has community migration now. There are moves being made here.

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