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Fediverse @lemmy.world rglullis @communick.news

Proposal to create a collective to own the topic-based Lemmy instances

raphael.lullis.net When information is cheap, attention is expensive · Raphael Lullis
When information is cheap, attention is expensive · Raphael Lullis

I have a number of Lemmy instances meant for discussion groups around specific topics. They are not being as used as I expected/hoped. I would like to set them up in a way that they can be owned by a consortium of different admins so that they are collectively owned. My only requirement: these instances should remain closed for registrations and used only to create communities.

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94 comments

  • I personally am not a huge fan of this idea. Instances are at the end of the day communities of their own in a way. One community may want to discuss a topic in one way and another community may want to discuss it in another way. This seems to be a way to centralize all discussion around a topic in one community, but we should rather go for decentralized communities.

    But hey that's just my opinion, if others like it, go for it.

    • You are running an instance that is geared to serve people of an specific region. And I agree that they kind stay between the two extremes of the "group-focused" and "people-focused" instances.

      The idea of topic-based instances are for the cases where the culture is more-or-less universal, but it doesn't mean that they should be absolute. So, if you want to talk about Apple stuff in general, [email protected] would make more sense, but if you are trying to reach a group of Apple users in your area, then you can have a community on your local instance as well.

      • for the cases where the culture is more-or-less universal

        When is this ever true? The idea of a "universal culture" is exactly what I mean with this encouraging centralization. Even a specific community (subreddit) on a centralized service like Reddit will have a specific culture that is not in line with any "universal culture" (it's likely to be skewed towards whatever culture exists in western english-speaking countries, just to mention an example).

  • Community collections should be a thing. Something like /cc/Technology could pull in lemmy.world/ other instances and collections of communities. It makes it easier if one instance dies, an instance de-federates itself, or just wanting to consolidate all the different /c/Technology communities across instances.

    It would also be nice if communities had the option to vote on their admins once in a while. Having individuals lord over different communities is a problem in reddit.

  • I think this sounds like a good idea. A problem when starting a community is that one wants to find a stable home; it might make sense to set up camp at, say, hardware.watch, but without knowing who operates it it might feel more uncertain than lemmy.world.

    And then, as a result, if lemmy.world ever disappears or has problems, it'll take way too many communities with it.

    If these topic-specific instances had some sort of collective ownership, I guess we could more effectively guarantee for their continued survival, and it might be more tempting for existing communities to move over there.

    I'd be interested in hearing the thoughts of some admins - would [email protected] be interested in moving to [email protected], given the right organization?

    And a piece of constructive feedback: Vague community names like [email protected] is probably less likely to attract attention than something specific like [email protected] - when searching for a community, people look up the community name rather than the domain.

    • I'd be interested in hearing the thoughts of some admins - would [email protected] be interested in moving to [email protected], given the right organization?

      I'm not the main mod of [email protected] so it's really not my decision to make, but moving the community to a domain with the word soccer in it is a tough pill to swallow. As silly as it may sound, there's a lot of people that don't like having football referred to as soccer.

      Moving away from lemmy.world and their annoying VPN restrictions would be nice though.

      • moving the community to a domain with the word soccer in it is a tough pill to swallow. As silly as it may sound, there’s a lot of people that don’t like having football referred to as soccer.

        Sounds silly indeed, but I agree (https://feddit.org/comment/2048090 )

      • I had a feeling that would be an issue!

        On the one hand, football@soccer would be a good compromise.

        On the other, we're right, the Americans are wrong. Simple as that. So I sympathise with the lack of willingness to compromise on the matter.

      • Feel free to register a football domain. I will host it for you, free of charge.

    • Yeah, I realized the issue with "main" as the name after the second time I wanted to post something and realized that the domain name is not used in the search field. I'll suck it up and just create a new community.

  • New users to lemmy usually aren't going to join communities if they can't register there. And people who are really invested in a topic will want to have that domain for their account. You're cutting off a lot of the users that would grow your communities.

    I don't mind the idea of a collective to handle a bunch of instances, but I feel like you're going about it the wrong way. When the same person make a bunch of instances about a variety of topics, it looks as if they aren't that invested in any specific community. From my experience, the most active communities start off with a few people who care almost obsessively about that topic.

    Also the idea that communities can be 'neutral ground' doesn't make sense to me. People will leave or join based on how the admins and mods run them, whether or not the users are hosted there. In some situations it might work out fine, but if anyone thinks it's caused by how you're running your sites, they may defederate from the whole collection.

    • aren’t going to join communities if they can’t register there.

      Why?! The whole point of federation is to let people join communities even when they don't have an account in the same server.

      the most active communities start off with a few people who care almost obsessively about that topic.

      There are two different, orthogonal issues here:

      1. people that are looking for a community in a niche interest, do not find it, and go back to Reddit.
      2. people that are in a big instance and create (or sometimes, recreate) a community for a popular topic. This happens quite often and not because they were not satisfied with the existing communities, but just because they could not find them.

      The idea of having topic-specific instances is an attempt to mitigate issue #2.

      People will leave or join based on how the admins and mods run them, whether or not the users are hosted there.

      Not my experience. A few examples:

      • No one complained about the mods from [email protected], yet I've witnessed endless discussions about moving away from lemmy.ml.
      • Beehaw defederated from LW, so this forced users of these instances to "choose" between the communities and/or create accounts on both of them if they wanted to keep following the whole conversation.
      • Personally, I do not want to join or participate extensively in communities that are on LW if we have a topic-specific instance for it. I know that I am not the only one.

      • Why?! The whole point of federation is to let people join communities even when they don't have an account in the same server.

        For people who've used lemmy or the rest of the fediverse yes, but most people don't know that yet. If someone shares a post from your site with their friends or a facebook group, they're not going to look into how lemmy works to sign up elsewhere.

        1. people that are looking for a community in a niche interest, do not find it, and go back to Reddit.
        2. people that are in a big instance and create (or sometimes, recreate) a community for a popular topic. This happens quite often and not because they were not satisfied with the existing communities, but just because they could not find them.

        The idea of having topic-specific instances is an attempt to mitigate issue #2.

        I'd prefer it if topic specific instances were more popular too. I just think that letting people making accounts tied to their favorite topics would get more people interested in joining them.

        I feel a technical solution like federation pulling in lists of communities with would help more with discoverability.

        Not my experience. A few examples:

        • No one complained about the mods from [email protected], yet I've witnessed endless discussions about moving away from lemmy.ml.

        I'm not sure how that goes against what I said. That's mostly people disliking the admins.

        • Beehaw defederated from LW, so this forced users of these instances to "choose" between the communities and/or create accounts on both of them if they wanted to keep following the whole conversation.

        Similar issues could happen even if users are separate from the communities. Beehaw could defederate your instances, and lemmy world could defederate programming dev or something, and people would need other accounts if they want to see everything.

        • Personally, I do not want to join or participate extensively in communities that are on LW if we have a topic-specific instance for it. I know that I am not the only one.

        Me too. I usually avoid lemmy world communities unless there isn't an active community elsewhere.

      • The whole point of federation is to let people join communities even when they don’t have an account in the same server.

        [citation needed], because it disagrees with the "whole point" I can find

  • I think there may be a challenge or challenges that you haven't pinned down yet. First is: what problem does this solve?

    Second is, how will people know that they are housed under the same roof, so to speak? A small instance dedicated to NBA basketball may be interesting, but if it seems disconnected then people would be wary. Small specialty instances can be shut down without warning for all sort if reasons.A consortium of instances may help with this issue, as long as it is immediately clear through common branding that they are part if the same group.

    Third is that different communities have different needs.

    • Also, if we assume that the entire idea is to have more than one admin, then what change does that actually include?

      You now have 3-4 people that can go and randomly delete the whole server instead of 1? Do you know that right now, only 1 person has the credentials to the admin account of whatever server you're talking about?

  • If a moderator is from a different instance, can they effectively moderate? So isn't it a problem if all moderators would be from different instances?

    I remember after the exodus community discovery in Lemmy was hard, and it made sense to create instances like these. But nowadays with Lemmy Explorer and with multiple community promo communities I think it's not really hard to find the topics you are interested in.

  • It seems kind of slimy.

    If you don't want the communities, stop squatting them. Having no users seems like just a way to keep costs down so you can hold onto more urls and is bad for the general ecosystem anyways.

    • It's amazing, there is always someone that will look at other people are doing and find the worst possible take.

      I decided to reach out to other admins precisely because I got tired of hearing "you are running all these instances by yourself, who guarantees that you are not going to do something nasty with them or disappear if you lose interest?", even though I'm running all these instances by myself, keeping them up to date, posting regularly on a good number of them, trying to get more people involved for over an year and (most importantly) outliving a bunch of "community-based instances" .

      Seriously, this crab mentality is the worst. What a disgrace.

  • I don't run any instances, but that does seem potentially like a pretty neat idea.

    I am really curious about the unexpected behaviors of your instance members though! What are they doing, just treating it as a general instance and not really engaging with the local theme?

    • Closed for registrations = no instance user accounts

      • I assumed, by "They are not being as used as I expected/hoped.", that the OP was implying, "- by the members of said instances". And that the closed-registration bit was part of the proposal, not the existing state of affairs. I didn't realize their instances were already closed-registration.

        Ah, I see. I misread a bit. I thought they were being used differently than expected, not less than expected.

    • I am not sure what "instance members" you are referring to, here.

      The topic-based instances are closed for registration, so there are no users there.

      If you are referring to the communick.news instance: it is only configured to have admins creating communities on it and the general instructions are to use https://fediverser.network as the place to discover communities.

  • Looks more like you are interested in more influence power, and control for yourself.

    What qualifies you to be in a leadership position that directly affects content control?

    Your instances are not being used the way you wanted, so you propose structural and organizational changes that, suprise, benefit your administrative influence from your instances.

    You're so focused on the details of your solution, you don't seem to be holding or acknowledging any objective perspectives.

    • benefit your administrative influence from your instances

      They are not going to be "my" instances.

      acknowledging any objective perspectives.

      Oh, I thought it was pretty clear: my objective with these instances have been to build the infrastructure necessary to get people out of Reddit. I want to gain from the growth of the network, where I expect to profit from getting customers on my hosting business.

      I don't need/want to make money out of these instances, I am just commoditizing the complements.

  • Why?

    That just locks communities off. Wh ich you could readily do before Lemmy, just host a forum. Discourse is a pretty damn cool software for it. Close registrations, close visibility, and allow users in on a per-user basis. That's also a lot how Tildes works, and I remember people here don't like that very much.

    • From your response, it seems that you did not read the blog post. The instances are still going to be connected to the Fediverse, the idea is just to keep user registration closed. Users from other instances will continue to be able to follow and interact with it.

      • Now it makes even less sense.

        So instead of one admin being able to take it all down we have multiple, and we also don't allow local users. But we have multiple admins, so these instances would be uniquely able to process very large numbers of users on account of having more than one admin? There's still the problem of course of how to handle someone being an admin on a technical level, and I don't see a solution to that. Could go and notarize shared ownership of a bare metal server I suppose?

        But still, what's the point? It doesn't improve anything, in fact it actively makes it worse. If you want communities to be resistant to server removal, you'd need a way to... federate the community. So that even if the original instance is gone, everyone keeps interacting with their local federated community-copy and these keep federating to each other (copy). As in, there's no original any more, but good luck keeping all of that consistent. 😅 In particular because that still doesn't solve the problem because now you got people able to either moderate each others copy (good luck with that power trip bonanza) and no central admin to remove the mods, or they cannot moderate each other, in which case good luck figured out how to block on a per-post basis depending on laws in your particular country getting the content federated over.

  • They are not being as used as I expected/hoped.

    Have you considered it's because of this?:

    My only requirement: these instances should remain closed for registrations and used only to create communities.

    I wouldn't run an instance that didn't allow users to sign up as it would impede growth and uptake.

    It also would have the interesting effect of pushing a lot of the load onto other instances, which doesn't seem true to the Fediverse spirit.

    • Well, surely, but this constraint is there by design. The point of these users is not to attract users, but to have thematic communities that can be followed by users elsewhere on the Fediverse.

      • I think this makes a lot of sense. We don't want the instance hosting, say, football communities to be defederated anywhere on account of its users behaving poorly. In general there's just no reasons to have the users in the same place as the community.

  • ITT: People who don't understand IAM or how to build a healthy federated structure. There should be identity services and instances just to host content separately. This way a spammer from a service won't de-federate content from everyone else and there could be easier moderation splitting the task between users and the comms.

    lol I think you are right about this. You'll never get these lemmitors to see it i guess.

  • I think this idea is good. I remember seeing those domain names last year. At the time it seemed muddy and uncomfortable to me, since there was a whole scheme of Reddit ghost accounts posting, while I understood there were good intentions behind it, mirrored posts were flooding users' All feed to the point I started blocking a bunch of subs, and many admins defederated.

    If we can promote the community first approach where the domain is the space for discussion to be held and stored, with users connecting from across the Fediverse, this would be excellent, a good alternative to massive centralized Lemmy servers. Collective ownership would ensure preservation of content if one or more go offline.

  • Objection! Hehe... No, wait. Really, I see a problem...

    If registration are closed, mods would be exclusively from outside. And, since reports are not federated, this communities would be prone to difficulties for moderation. Unless reports are correctly federated, I don't think this is a good idea. And, even if you were to open registrations only for mods, we would have only moved the inconvenience to this (who wants to have so many accounts, really?)

    There's also the problem with centralization of domain names under you. I don't know you, and perhaps you're well intended.. So, it's fine for the most part, let's just assume that's okay. Now, what happens if you had an accident or decided to go live in a farm? Without domain name renewals, etc. all communities would be in trouble. There's centralization in the shape of a single point of failure.

    I can't see this happening even if the domain names are cool.

    And, leaving disadvantages aside. What's the point on this? Can you name any advantage?? I agree that it would be more ordered and I like that. But it's quite subjective, and hardly anything huge to really break the inertia or status quo of things as they're now...

    Thanks for the intentions. Let's focus on some new ideas, they'll come...

    • If registration are closed, mods would be exclusively from outside. And, since reports are not federated, this communities would be prone to difficulties for moderation. Unless reports are correctly federated, I don’t think this is a good idea.

      It wouldn't be that difficult to write a little bot that can keep track of each moderator is on each community, and make the report on the instance of the moderator directly.

      centralization of domain names under you.

      The idea is to have the domains under the control of this collective.

      Can you name any advantage??

      • Less concerns about political fights among "user" instances affecting communication among communities
      • Less tribalism regarding "what community is the canonical one". Users and admins are of course completely free to create their own communities, but for the majority at large they could just look at the topic-based instance and think "ok, that one will be a good entry point".
      • Less load on all servers. LW has a good chunk of the most active communities, so all activity from other users end up going through that. More instances with cleaner separation => better load balancing.
      • Easier content discovery: no matter if users go to a small or big instance, they can be pointed to the different servers to browse according to their interests.

      hardly anything huge to really break the inertia or status quo of things as they’re now…

      As it is right now, yes. But I am working for a potential future where we can migrate 10, 20, 50 times more users than we already have. Consider that I am also working on a tool to help people migrate from Reddit and in making some modifications on the Voyager app to integrate automatic migration from Reddit to Lemmy. If the gates finally open, this will be very much needed.

  • I was the only one who could create communities on them.

    Typically the only one who can create magazines/communities are local users of the instance. With registration closed, that means only you (or the new instance owner) would be able to do this.

    Though one can get around this with some bot magic ( lemmit.online had a magazine that was dedicated to new sub/magazine requests - once someone made the request, the bot would create and own the magazine but add the requestor as the moderator )

    Do you intend to have open magazine creation on these instances or would that still be restricted to the owners of the consortium?

    • My idea would be to have a community request functionality. I am halfway there with fediverser. People can request communities to be created in a given instance, but it still missing the part where members can provide the data (name, description, icon, logo, etc).

94 comments