No worries, I’m just trying to learn and looking for tools that can help me support the broader community as a fellow God.

For example, I’m still not sure I’ve got federation set up correctly because of some funniness around discovery. I think it might actually be the way lemmy.ml is set up.

Any tools that could help admin are just golden so keep cracking.

No luck using it for me.

Edit: Its telling me we’re not a lemmy instance, but obv I’m commenting here so federated.> Lemmy@lem

Edit 2: Also says lemmy.world is not a lemmy instance…

“Dam you live like this?”

You got me. I think that the approach of having to subscribe to a community on every federated instance means that discovery is kind-of broken. I get that it is ‘working as intended’ but I think that may have had unintended consequences.

The result has been monolithic communities which are all the ‘same’, and it ends up splitting interests across communities, which will inevitably slow growth, and prevent lemmy from being a true reddit killer (this is basic math of networks and how they function).

I know the developers are doing their best, but I think at a high level lemmy needs to be reconsidered. Instances should be focusing on some niche thing, like poland ball humor, or skiing, or woodworking, each with niche communities within them. For example “wintersports” might have communtieis for skiing, cross country skiing, maybe one for showing off your new skiis, etc… That way your ‘home’ is around your central interest. Then allow ‘all federation’ across all instances (if you want to).

This wouldn’t be so much a software change as a cultural change to how we approach making lemmy’s (aside from the discovery issue).

Yeah, this just makes it much more difficult for small, niche instances to grow. It focuses sign ups into monolith instances (since you don’t need to do discovery), which imo is pretty central to the issue reddit created in the first place.

Personally, I don’t think lemmys like lemmy.ml, or lemmy.world, or beehub.org should really exist. The community duplication and centralization of content is going to represent a real barrier to effectively replacing reddit (as a viable option). I think it makes a lot more sense to have smaller lemmys focused on niche topics (for example, lofi, or sound engineering, or gardening, or in my case, degenerate financial advise). Each lemmy might be composed of a few communities which are all on theme, but can be federated more broadly into the entire ecosystem, so that cool niche things can be found.

For this to function there has to be some kind of automated community discovery (like you mentioned with a crawler, which it sounds like what I’ll need to make for this to work.)

Already were seeing the issue that the centralization of users and content have created. All the drama lemmy.world and beehub.org have caused. Lemmy.ml crashing and struggling to serve content. Its all a result of centralization, which imo, is antithetical to the principal of the fediverse.

Yeah, I think this is going to be an issue/ something that the community is going to have to think about. It actually makes more sense for lemmy instances (like wallstreets.bet) to focus on particular subcultures/ types of communities, rather than being catch alls. This has a couple advantages in that you can replicate some of the structure of reddit (like having tagged posts), and it allows federation to focus on connecting to things that makes sense. This way resolves the duplicity issues.

Ok, so this at least gives me confidence that the issues I’m seeing around federation may not just be me. One issue I’m seeing is that I’m not confident my comments are appearing on other instances/ or that I’m seeing comments from other instances.

@fedora, do you see this comment?