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Fediverse @lemmy.world Jupiter Rowland @sh.itjust.works

No dedicated community/magazine for Fediverse memes?

I've noticed that there isn't a single Lemmy community, Mbin magazine etc. for Fediverse memes.

Is that because 99.9% of the Threadiverse came directly from Reddit, almost all Lemmy communities and *bin magazines are outposts of subreddits, and Reddit doesn't meme the Fediverse because hardly anyone on Reddit knows the Fediverse in the first place?

Is it, in addition, because especially Lemmy is too detached from the rest of the Fediverse to know what's memeable and to really understand memes about the Fediverse outside Lemmy?

Or is it simply because Fediverse memes go into other, more general communites/magazines where they simply drown in the flood of other threads?

I mean, I barely see any memes about the Fediverse anywhere on Mastodon. That may be either because your typical Mastodonian is not cut from meme-maker wood, or your typical Mastodonian doesn't know enough about the Fediverse beyond Mastodon, or next to nobody hashtags their meme posts. so they're impossible to find.

And so I thought that this is more common in the Threadiverse, seeing as how meme-happy Reddit is.

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  • to be fair there isn't that much about the fedi in general that you can meme about. the closes you can get are in jokes but:

    a) lemmy doesnt have them because this place is uncreative and only serves as a dumping ground from memes from other places when they aren't bickering about politics
    b) in jokes of different parts of fedi do not translate well just because they share a protocol, given the extremely little overlap on people here
    c) they're not really "fediverse memes" just because they happened in the fediverse, are they

    • Oh you could absolutely meme about the protocol itself and the way it is implemented. lots of potential there.

      • most people on lemmy do not understand the tradeoffs both activitypub and it's implementors do, as evidenced by this exact community we're in. these memes wouldn't gain any traction even if they were funny to their intended audience (which i have doubts on if it's possible to do but idk i'm not creative enough)

    • There is still some material

      • the latest vegan vs LW drama (as a subtopic, Rooki getting unpopular)
      • the media bias fact checker backlash
      • obvious trolls trying to get in while they stand out due to the low population
      • Sublinks coming out soon™
      • Ongoing beef with Reddit
      • Regular beefs between communities (e.g. [email protected] vs [email protected] )
      • Lemmy.ml admins powertripping when someone criticizes the CCP
      • Piefed almost on-par with Lemmy while being developed by a single person in a year
      • US people taking over entire communities because why not ([email protected] being only US politics while the main LW admins are EU citizens)

      • Here's some stuff that I'd meme about:

        • Mastodon users thinking the Fediverse is only Mastodon
        • Lemmy users thinking the Threadiverse is only Lemmy
        • Mastodon users thinking the Fediverse started with Mastodon
        • Mastodon being ridiculously underpowered in comparison to just about everything else, particularly Hubzilla and (streams)
        • Mastodon users wishing Mastodon (or, better yet, "the Fediverse") had certain features which are readily available just about everywhere outside of Mastodon
        • Mobile apps built against only Mastodon
        • Fediverse tools built against only Mastodon
        • Pleroma being lightweight
        • Mastodon's culture which Mastodon users are trying to force upon the rest of the Fediverse
        • Forkey antics such as "Speak as cat"
        • Forkeys in general
        • Forkeys inspired by Blåhaj vs Mastodon's mastodon plushie
        • Mastodon users still uploading videos to YouTube and not to PeerTube
        • Hubzilla's UI
        • Sharkey's infamously bad Mastodon API implementation
        • Friendica federating with everything, especially juxtaposed with some Mastodon users not wanting to federate with anything that isn't vanilla Mastodon
        • Hubzilla's ability to host Web pages
        • Nomadic identity
        • Bluesky's AT protocol seeming like a cheap knock-off of the Zot and Nomad protocols in parts
        • Self-proclaimed Fediverse experts who actually barely know anything about Mastodon and don't know anything about the rest of the Fediverse
        • Character limits
        • Threads perhaps wanting to EEE the Fediverse vs Mastodon actively trying to EEE the Fediverse right now
        • Mastodon's poster-side content warnings set in stone in what they want to be the Fediverse culture vs Friendica's, Hubzilla's, (streams)' and Forte's automated, reader-side content warnings which have been around for longer
        • Generally, the Fediverse being older than Mastodon
        • Lemmy only barely federating with everything else
        • /kbin essentially being dead
        • Permissions on Hubzilla and (streams)
        • "Conversations" on Mastodon vs conversations on Friendica, Hubzilla and (streams)
        • Certain points in the Fediverse history

        Granted, I guess almost all of this will fly even over most c/Fediverse users' heads due to how detached Lemmy is from the rest of the Fediverse. But I don't really expect that many more Mastodon users to understand it, and those who do may be offended. Oh well.

      • Yes I think memes can only arise when your community has enough lore and stories that people love to tell again and again. Eventually this will be the case here too !

      • What's up with the android beef? I hadn't heard about that one 😅

      • id argue none of those are fun topics you can joke about but "memes as a form of outrage" (aside from, like, two) which is already a problem (see all the political memes on any of the meme communities for countless examples) we do not need to encourage imo

        • Let's give it a try

        • Variation

          spoiler

          • Well that is just like... your opinion man. Also i think that utopia looks kinda shit like dubai but with flying taxis.

            World made it easy for tons of people to onboard onto lemmy. If there were no instances that made it easy for all the reddit refugees to find a home, it would be a lot emptier here imo. And of course people create communities on their instance.

            I think it is a good thing that lemmy.world is huge, in my non programmer mind, it will prepare lemmy better for the next wave of new users, maybe that will be the time to onboard them onto different instances.

            Thanks for all the memes though!

            • Also i think that utopia looks kinda shit like dubai but with flying taxis.

              Agreed

              Well that is just like… your opinion man

              There are two main issues with centralization on LW:

              A detailed thread on [email protected] that discusses the issue: https://lemmy.world/post/14728407

              World made it easy for tons of people to onboard onto lemmy.

              Agreed, and as I always say, I think they do a quite good job overall. At the same time, it would be better if communities could move away from LW as well, for reasons stated above

              • To point 1, like i said, next wave the user load should spread out over more instances, that would be nice if that could happen.

                Point 2, i feel like these are just growing pains and it's not only a bad thing that these issues become visible now, these issues sure must be adressed if the lemmyverse grows bigger.

                And yeah it would be nice if communities would be completely transferable in the future, i hope there is no technical impossibility here and it just takes time for this to happen.

                • To point 1, like i said, next wave the user load should spread out over more instances, that would be nice if that could happen.

                  The issue is that new joiners are probably going to move to LW, as most of the users and communities are there, and they might not completely get how federation works. So then LW would become even more centralized, in a chicken and egg way.

                  That's why I'm advocating for moving communities now, then the whole thing is more balanced.

                  Point 2, i feel like these are just growing pains and it’s not only a bad thing that these issues become visible now, these issues sure must be adressed if the lemmyverse grows bigger.

                  That would be ideal, but Lemmy development usually takes time, and we should always be ready to have an influx of new users. Solving the issue ourselves has a higher and faster change of success than wait for the devs to update it, release it and then wait for all instances to upgrade.

                  Talking about upgrades, LW plans to skip 0.19.5 as their upgrades are always so impactful due to their size and the centralization of communities there, preventing a third of the Lemmy users to use new features.

                  And yeah it would be nice if communities would be completely transferable in the future, i hope there is no technical impossibility here and it just takes time for this to happen.

                  Communities can already be migrated at the moment. I moved [email protected] to [email protected], left a pinned post on the old one, locked it, and everyone moved to the new one smoothly (we even have more activity now than back then).

                  I sometimes feel like some people in the LW staff are reluctant to close some of their communities, even if unmanaged, and that prevents communities on other instances from really getting popular.

                  • LW would become even more centralized, in a chicken and egg way

                    Maybe enough people will recommend different instances this time? I wanted to sign up at .ml originally, but they didn't accept anything, lots of people recommended world. I think it was also on top of the join-lemmy site and the shuffling came later but i might remember that wrong. I didn't want to join an instance with a country code and also not a niche instance dedicated to a topic that i am not all that interested in (computers, startrek, furries, lgbtq...).

                    Solving the issue ourselves

                    That issue is not being solved if nobody even realize it's there or is just being swept under the rug until it comes up with the next wave!?

                    Talking about upgrades, LW plans to skip 0.19.5 as their upgrades are always so impactful due to their size and the centralization of communities there, preventing a third of the Lemmy users to use new features.

                    All of us who are already on board can leave for a cutting edge instance. I think it's a good thing that they want to keep world stable and take their time.

                    Communities can already be migrated at the moment.

                    What, like automatically transfer subscribers (and hopefully posts at some point) etc? I thought everybody needs to be on board and then do it manually?

                    I sometimes feel like some people in the LW staff are reluctant to close some of their communities, even if unmanaged, and that prevents communities on other instances from really getting popular.

                    As they should be, not just delete some community because some user claimed it was dead and unmoderated (like i saw you do recently with a community which had an active user as admin ;). If they just deleted those communities i guess you'd go at them again with the power trip accusations.

                    • That issue is not being solved if nobody even realize it’s there or is just being swept under the rug until it comes up with the next wave!?

                      To me the biggest factor is some of the LW staff "name squatting" a topic rather than agreeing to redirect to active communities on the same topic.

                      All of us who are already on board can leave for a cutting edge instance. I think it’s a good thing that they want to keep world stable and take their time.

                      Most of the users are unaware of most of the features. I met a year-long user the other day who had no idea they could import / export their settings. Also, that release has been out for 2 months and a half, 54% of the instances use it (https://fedidb.org/software/lemmy/versions ), including 7 other instances of the top 10 (https://fedidb.org/software/lemmy )

                      What, like automatically transfer subscribers (and hopefully posts at some point) etc? I thought everybody needs to be on board and then do it manually?

                      No, to be honest having a look at the code I'm not sure we would ever get such a feature. Mastodon does not allow this kind of imports, and they are much more stable and mature than Lemmy. Maybe in 5, 10 years? So in the meantime, we can do it ourselves the way I described above.

                      As they should be, not just delete some community because some user claimed it was dead and unmoderated (like i saw you do recently with a community which had an active user as admin ;). If they just deleted those communities i guess you’d go at them again with the power trip accusations.

                      That's interesting you mention this, because

                      • I never asked anyone to delete any community
                      • I asked to get inactive communities locked, which the LW admins agreed with
                      • If the mod (and not the admin) of that community was that active, they should have unpinned the post saying "looking for mods" as the first post you see you their community (as we are talking, it's still there)
                      • In the end, even that mod agreed to lock that community up and redirect to another one ( https://feddit.org/post/2324020 )

                      I am never in favor of deleting any community, that's detrimental to the platform.

                      To add to that topic, I try to get people on Reddit to switch to Lemmy a lot (they are probably the biggest potential users we can get), and the first question they ask is "why are those communities empty? It looks like a ghost town".

                      Locking them down, and redirecting to active communities makes Lemmy look more appealing as a whole.

                      power trip accusations

                      Power tripping definitely happens, for a lot of mod / admins. It's sad, but sometimes it's the main driver to a healthier community / instance, as the meme stated above.

                      Damn, that's a lot of text 😄

        • Found on [email protected]

        • Let's try this here before it gets its own post somewhere.

          That is, I have a growing suspicion that even here in a community that specialises in the Fediverse, hardly anyone can relate to it, and out in the meme communities, nobody will even understand it.

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