Draconic_NEO

That's great, hopefully Lemmy can support something like that soon. I know the devs said following tags is out of the question but I don't think that means content shouldn't have tags.

I think that Lemmy would benefit from a tag system, one that allows both adding tags to communities but also to posts, the upshot is that these could be handled like hashtags on other federated platforms like Mastodon. Lemmy already does this with posts in a community, but it's just a hashtag of the community name, would be good if users could add their own tags.

They usually release a lot of bug fixes after a major update, and 0.19.6 had some nasty ones, mostly UI related. Which unfortunately wasn't entirely fixed in 0.19.7 but at least they're working on it.

I don't know how it is on mbin but on Lemmy the best thing to do is message the admins directly, and not bother reporting. This is because Lemmy's developers give way to much credit to the legitimacy of forum moderators and do not allow a way for reports to only be sent to administrators, meaning that community mods like these can easily dismiss reports before they are seen by admins. So best thing to do is message them directly at the current time.

Even with the Hashtag misuse that's not as bad as group spam, since people spamming groups can reach further than they otherwise would just spamming on their server. Which is why being able to moderate groups is important. Also with Guppe's system you can create any group you want without authorization, that's a problem because malicious people can create groups that aren't acceptable including ones with racist and illegal content and use it to distribute that across the network. I found a few of these without much digging and I quickly reported them to Mastodon.social and got them suspended but they're still there on the other servers.

The problem with Guppe is that it automatically federates all the post content unlike with hashtags which are just a marker. If someone spams in a hashtag n one server it's going to suck but unless people follow them it'll be limited to that server for the most part. With Guppe groups if they spam to them it gets boosted to all servers. It's not just a tag that gets cluttered, it forces the content into all the other instances by way of boosting.

Something I learned recently which should've been obvious but I guess I just never noticed it was that it seems that Guppe groups aren't moderated, like at all. This is concerning and problematic because it basically means they could become spam and hate vectors with only the admins of individual servers able to moderate the content. Compare that to the fact that Lemmy and mbin indeed can moderate communties, remove posts, and most importantly ban users from participating and stop the group from boosting them. That's as good a reason as any why one might want to use Lemmy or mbin to host groups on Mastodon instead of guppe.

Yeah I've heard the spam problems have gotten worse these days but I always knew people complained about that because many of the services just didn't moderate spam.

Yeah that is true, though in my experience from posting things from mastodon it's not as bad as one might think. While you generally should include a title sentence separate from the rest of the post if you don't it'll just use the first sentence you write as the title. The biggest problem with Microblog content in Lemmy is the community mention, since if that is in the same area as the title it'll look messed up. I think if enough people become aware of that it would help since they could just put the mention towards the bottom. Maybe even with group support mentioning the group will become not a thing anymore and will be replaced with native functionality to post to a group.

Even though some content will likely look out of place I don't think it'll cause much of an issue since it'll only intermingle in groups, content outside of groups will still be the same Mastodon content, and Lemmy communities will likely enforce proper posting etiquette for Mastodon users even if they don't do it in groups. For that reason I don't really see it becoming a serious problem.

What’s great about using it (while it lasts) is that it boosts content to a lot of instances across the fediverse, so you don’t need to be incredibly well connected in order to have reach. Otherwise, if you post microblog posts from Mbin, you risk yelling into a very tiny void.

Yeah that is an unfortunate side effect, I don't think guppe is fully immune to it though, its current communties have a lot of subscribers so content gets boosted very far, but if one created a new community it likely wouldn't get very far since for federation to work you need one subscriber per server or it doesn't show up. It's what services like Lemmy-federate aim to solve on Lemmy and mbin, it still takes effort to grow your communities/groups but it's easier if they're available on the most servers possible.

It'll be interesting to see how native group support in Mastodon is going to play out.

Yeah, I'm very excited for that feature. Hoping it comes out soon. Could help bridging the gap between Mastodon and Lemmy if Groups/Communities could also be hosted on Mastodon. That assumes Groups will work well or be compatible with Lemmy, I hope they do and they probably will in the end but I imagine there will be a rough in-between period where something doesn't work quite right and throws it off.

Heads up the project behind a.gup.pe is very much stagnated, and while it does still work, I wouldn't encourage people use it because it has federation issues with non-Mastodon software, and the fact that it could potentially go down anytime taking the groups with it, to be clear it's a risk with any service but since guppe hasn't gotten much attention for a while it's more of a risk since they might not be maintaining the site.

I don't deny that it's a cool service but it probably won't last. I'd recommend people use alternatives to host groups on Mastodon, like communites on Lemmy or mbin. Ultimately though they are the same thing activitypub wise, it's just a handle that is a group entity, rather than a user. Different services just interpret the data differently, Lemmy and mbin show a forum, Mastodon just shows boosts of user's posts (yes it is posts, not toots, toots is an outdated term).

Yeah kbin isn't coming back, and even if Ernest comes back and continues kbin he will not be considered the official project anymore, because mbin is further ahead and what everyone else is using.