Kichae

Thank you!

It doesn't take that many people to create an active forum. It takes even fewer to make for an active sub-forum. And it's so easy to pull in content from elsewhere here if you want to discuss it with your little group.

The push towards centralizing Lemmy has always seemed like an artifact of people not actually wanting to leave Reddit, but drawing a line in the sand anyway.

Tankies are people who play apologetics for authoritarian dictators who have claimed to be socialist or communist, and who will often excuse any action in opposition to "the west".

More formally, they're the cathartic branch of Marxist-Leninists (MLs). Lemmy's a small space, and it's a place that many MLs landed after bouncing off of Reddit, and the core developers count themselves as MLs.

The flagship Lemmy server is lemmy.ml, but the Tankie trolls have their own server, lemmygrad.ml where they go and be all 4chan-like.

You should understand the rules of the places you are posting to, yes.

This is why "let's pretend this is centralized social media and ignore the fact that we're all on different websites" is a bad idea, actually. You don't get to parachute into someone else's house and expect the rules of your own home apply.

Yes, perhaps. But I suspect that still distracts from the fact that we're trying to sell an illusion with the fediverse, and I personally believe that that is a mistake. So many issues people voice about their experience here come from the design of everything emulating Big Social, and Big Social is centralized.

Aping the design language of centralized social media and then trying to get anyone other than enthusiasts on board is never going to work.

One of the ways we do this is by referring to "Mastodon" and "Lemmy" as if they are places you can go to, websites you can use. This is why I chose phpBB as my reference point. I've used WordPress and Joomla in the past, with less impact. We don't and have never spoken about phpBB as a singular location. You would respond to someone suggesting you "use phpBB" with, at the very least, a confused look. Or, if you didn't know what it is, you'd ask them "what is that?" and they'd tell you "forum software", revealing that their request of you was absurd. "Get an email address" is, at the very least, something that isn't a nonsensical request. Websites demand it of us all of the time.

Mastodon servers are separate entities, too. The fact that they communicate with each other doesn't change that, and the persistent desire that folks here have to imagine otherwise is a hurdle to adoption.

The mental model is of a central space that instances grant or bar access to, but that's simply not how the technology actually works. Too much effort has gone into trying to make ActivityPub-enabled websites look like something they're not (centralized social media), while totally ignoring what they are: small forums and microblogs that have optional access to other forums and microblogs.

Mastodon is web server software. "Mastodon" doesn't exist. It's an illusion. And the fact that everyone keeps trying to sell this illusion is exactly why there are all of these broken expectations and hurdles.

The server selection problem goes away if people stop treating their hosting website as an after thought or dumb terminal. People really have to stop promoting web server software as if it's a platform, and start finding reasons to recommend actual websites to people.

Ain't nobody ever recommended phpBB to anyone who wasn't looking to host a forum.

You have misread their comment and understood it backwards. AP's saying people on Mastodon are engaging in Lemmy discussions.

There is no way to follow Mastodon users from Lemmy. Lemmy simply does not work that way.

You could spin one up this evening if you wanted. Or go use catodon.social.

That's not the point. The point is, there are reasons Mastodon is being rejected, just like there are reasons you seemingly cannot pay people to use a Misskey-based or Hubzilla-based website.

It's not where the people are going, and the public or semi-public figures are going to follow the people.

So, think through how this looks in the long run. Hell, just think about what this prioritizes.

You have five communities covering the same topic. There's, what? 500? 1000? 2000 people active in them? Enough that there is a steady stream of posts and comments in all of them. They're all housed on separate websites, and those websites maybe have different goals and different rules. So, people start lumping them together in aggregate feeds.

What does that look like? In practice, how do users treat this?

They treat it as if they're all one community. As if they're all in one place. All managed by one cohesive set of rules (or, realistically, most people treat all spaces as if none of them have rules, and then put up a stink when they're met with the consequences of this).

Then, they start expecting to not see duplicates. So, which community's posts do they see when there are multiples? Oh, that's easy: all of them! They will start expecting comments to be merged. So, now you have people treating all of the communities not only as if they're interchangeable, but as if they're all one.

This is a backdoor to not just homogenization, but to quiet hostile takeovers of smaller communities by larger ones. All because users are too damn entitled to just pick one that most closely meets their needs and contribute to it.

We don't need meta-communities. We need people to get over their fucking FOMO.

Why switch to Mastodon when there is Misskey?

Why use Misskey when there is Hubzilla?

That would require people actually recommending specific websites, and all people seem to want to do is circle jerk about "lemmy", as if it's a tangible place and not a website engine