Rottcodd

This behaviour makes you and by extension mbin seem like a bunch of unhinged petty drama queens.

Personally, there’s already absolutely no way I’m ever going to use mbin, no matter what, just because these people nauseate me.

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I prefer a much simpler solution: the threadiverse remains decentralized, with all that that entails, and all of the people who can’t cope with that leave.

Right, but of course if you don’t subscribe to it (and nobody else does) then it doesn’t.

So, for instance, if you go in through an account on a narrowly specialized instance, you’re potentially not going to see a lot of the communities from other instances at all, even on their All, just because nobody’s bothered to subscribe to them. And you’ll likely see highly specialized communities that fit well with that instance that you might not see anywhere else.

The smaller the instance is, the more likely that is.

I have accounts on a couple of small instances on which I haven’t even bothered to subscribe to anything, since their All already matches what I want frim the instsnce.

Right, which on a side note is most of why I have accounts on a number of different instances and regularly switch between them - because each instance is at least subtly different, since they each have different userbases, and thus somewhat different sets of subscribed and thus federated communities.

It’s less efficient than a centralized forum would be, but efficiency isn’t the only or even the highest priority. Decentralization is the explicit point of the fediverse, and to the degree that that requires sacrificing some measure of efficiency, that’s just the way it goes.

The goal was to build a system that would be robust and relatively seamless while remaining decentralized. That’s more or less what they’ve done. There’s a fair amount of fine tuning and tweaking left to be done, and actively being done, but the basic system is what it is because it best balances all of the goals.

As already noted, on all of them.

The easy way to grasp how it works:

When you, on instance.alpha, view a community on instance.beta, you aren’t actually on community@instance.beta. You’re actually on an entirely separate copy - community@instance.beta@instance.alpha. That’s the community you’re reading and posting to and upvoting/downvoting in. Meanwhile, people on other instances are each on their own locally hosted copies of the same community.

The lemmy software (or kbin or mastodon or whatever) then periodically syncs up all the local copies of community@instance.beta, so you all end up looking at (more or less) the same content, even though it’s actually a bunch of technically separate communities.

This isn’t science - it’s propaganda.

Ah. Yes - I agree entirely.

I sure as hell hope it doesn’t become mainstream - I don’t think there’s ever been a single thing that’s benefitted over the long-term from mainstream popularity.

I understand that you don’t want to be seen as gatekeeping, but I don’t share that aversion. I overtly want the fediverse to remain somewhat confusing and opaque, and specifically so that dumb and/or impatient and/or lazy people will stay away. I think that every single person who gets confused and frustrated here and goes back to Reddit or Twitter is a net gain for the fediverse.

I want an echo chamber of users with empathy

Really?

I would think then that at the very least, you wouldn’t be such an asshole.

You don’t need a mod or a bot to do it for you. You can go find communities on other instances and subscribe to them, and that all by itself gets them added to the All feed on your home instance.

Or you could just register an account on a different instance that slready has more stuff on it, like lemmy.world.

Hell no.

How does that “help” their feed? What possible benefit could there be in using a bot to subscribe willy-nilly to every community out there, no matter how shitty it is?

I mean - if some instance owner wants to do that, that’s their choice, and I guess there are people out there who would like the resulting instance filled to the brim with every bit of garbage that exists anywhere in the fediverse, so it’s safe to assume that somebody will do it sooner or later. Personally, I think the idea is repulsive though.

Maybe I wasn’t clear enough in that other post - I think that the fact that each instance has a different “All” depending on what the members there have subscribed to is a good thing. It means that different instances have different feels, and over time, as they get more established, that’s going to be even more the case.

So for instance, a notably tech-oriented instance is going to end up displaying pretty much every tech-oriented community on the fediverse on its All because somebody on the instance will have subscribed to it, pretty much no matter what it is, AND at the same time, all of the stuff nobody’s interested in just won’t be there at all, because nobody bothered to subscribe to it in the first place.

Granted that that’s not going to appeal to people who want to be flooded with every bit of garbage on the entire fediverse when they click All, but they can just go away and sign up with some other instance that gives them what they want. Which I’m sure is exactly what the people who sought out a tech-oriented instance in the first place would prefer anyway.

Right, but there are lots of ways around that.

There’s already been a fair amount of demand for some method to group communities by interest, so it’s essentially guaranteed that somebody is going to provide some way to do that, and likely multiple somebodies are going to figure out multiple ways.

Note that this is one of the advantages of having an account on a smaller and/or more focused instance or having multiple accounts.

All “Alls” are not the same. Actually, the “All” displayed on a given instance is everything local to that instance and everything from other instances to which someone on that instance has subscribed. So if nobody from that instance has subscribed to a particular community on another instance, then for all intents and purposes, it just doesn’t exist. Even on “All”.

Granted that it’s somewhat unlikely for an instance to not have someone somewhere along the way subscribe to some notably popular community, it is possible, and the smaller and more focused the instance is, the more likely it is.

There is no “we” that’s empowered to do anything on the fediverse, and that’s by design.

You, as an individual, are free to start or register with whatever instance(s) you want and start, engage with, subscribe to or block whatever communities you want. And all the other users here are exactly equally free to do any or all of those things.

It’s safe to assume that over time, activity will tend to concentrate in a few specific communities, and that most notable topics will come to have a dominant community. I think, snd self-evidently many others also think, that that’s something that should happen organically over time rather than being forcibly implemented by some authority. But more to the point, that’s something that only can happen organically and over time, since nobody has the authority to do it any other way.

Mm… you do have a point, but I would argue that the content is generally better at the very least to the degree that it’s actual people sincerely posting things rather than bots, shills and karma farmers spamming and/or astroturfing.

And yes - niche communities are extremely underpopulated here.

I don’t think the solution to that though is to aim for more generic “content” with the hope that it’ll lead to broad growth and that a byproduct of that will be to bring more people who happen to share your interests. The solution IMO is to get on the communities you want to see grow and start contributing stuff, right now. Even if you’re just posting to one person, keep at it, and pretty soon it’ll be two, then three, then…

Well… yes and no.

I’m not talking about any effect I think it might have on me, because yes - I can just avoid the instances favored by morons.

To belabor the analogy a bit more, it’s not quite accurate to say that they want this neat little cafe to be McDonalds - they want the entire town to be McDonalds. They want to be able to open up their door snd see nothing but McDonalds, stretching to the horizon in all directions.

That that literally can’t happen - that the decentralized nature of the ActivityPub means that the most anyone can ever do is turn instances into empty wastelands of brain-dead “content” one at a time - doesn’t make their viewpoint any less perplexing to me.

I agree completely.

I recently compared it to sitting in a comfortable little cafe that serves delicious food and looking around and saying, “Gee, I wish this was a McDonalds.”

It just doesn’t even begin to make sense to me.

And I’m with you - gatekeeping or no - anyone who wants Twitter or Reddit or Facebook content can already go to Twitter or Reddit or Facebook to get it, and that’s exactly what they should do.

There’s nothing “hidden” about the dangers of the fediverse. They’re there, and even obvious really, for anyone with the wit to see them.

It’s a funny thing really, because one of the recurring things I see people say about the fediverse is that it reminds them of the early days of the internet - just people sharing stuff with people, without this whole layer of corporate scumbags squatting over everything, trying to extract profit.

And another of the hallmarks of the early days of the internet was that it was commonly understood that the ONLY person who could protect your privacy was you, and that you accomplished that by not being a dumbass.

It’s really a very simple concept - if there’s information about yourself that you don’t want to be public property, YOU DON’T SHARE IT.

And if there’s information about yourself that you don’t want to be public property and you go ahead and share it anyway, well… you’re a dumbass.

But somewhere along the way - somewhere between those early days of which the fediverse is reminiscent and today - we moved into an era in which the standard way to interact with the internet is to be a dumbass and share virtually everything, then go “Waaahh! Somebody needs to protect my privacy!”

No - you just need to stop being a dumbass.

Yes - the fediverse, due to its decentralized structure, is and will likely continue to be a threat to dumbasses, because there is no central authority that can be meaningfully tasked with protecting them from the consequences of their own dumbass actions or sanctioned for not doing so.

And I wouldn’t have it any other way.