I'm sure how the ecosystem of Lemmy will play out is that there are a handful, maybe 6 or 7, main instances that require funding and are simply massive with teams committed to them. Then you have the niche medium sized instances that are known for a particular community or two, such as an instance that is well known for its great vegetarian community or whatever. Then you'll have tiny instances that are used by irl friend groups, or for simply tech savvy people that want a home base instance that they can control.
We're already sort of set up like this, but less organized and smaller overall. Many instances have duplicates of the same communities right now which I think will slowly fade away as future updates make it easier to visit/search other instances.
I like this way of putting it. It’s like that post that was around a few days ago discussing lemmy as being “CEO-proof”.
It’s not really I guess, but if an instance got big and started being unfriendly/unreasonable to users they could just go to another instance and still be part of the federation.
If it gets too much they can just stop letting people join, can't they? I think for the beginning a little bit of centralizing will make stuff easier. For the long run it might be less desirable.
The upside is join-lemmy.org always puts the smaller but growing instances at the top to somewhat distribute the load for new users. Also there are new general purpose instances popping up, I quite like it and as long as there is no drama you can access most of the Fediverse from almost any instance.
I am happy to contribute! I think it's time for me to move on from Reddit. I am excited to help this platform grow and become something great - I just need to become less of a lurker.
Unfortunately I don't have much faith in this social network until the bot issue is addressed. There is a huge contingent of spambots just waiting for their moments here.
Spam bots or spam servers? Everyone is saying regulate signups for servers but anyone can spin up a Lemmy server and spam with thousands of accounts until they are defedarated. Then 5 minutes later do it again with a new server. It’s not hard to setup a Lemmy server.
I actually think this is a non-issue , sure it will be a pain for a while but the decentralized model will easily adapt to this IMO. Its not like reddit was immune from bots eh.
An example is how obviously you can spot the bad actors here. I do not think is will be any more challenging indeed I think it will be easier to counter
Yeah, a nice feature of federation is that real communities can adjust their sign-up processes to minimize bot sign-ups, and while determined botfarms can spin up their own servers, that leads to pretty much the least controversial use case for admins to block another server.
Mastodon's run into similar issues in the past with both bots and scrapers and typically no one has any issue with admins there defederating and entirely blocking those servers.
It'd be interesting to have metamagazines or something along the like. There's a lot of repeat mags out there that would benefit from an easy way to share/federate at a smaller scale than per-instance.
I'd like something in this vein to view multiple communities of the same topic at once (like folders/multi-reddits/etc.) too.
Another idea, if possible, might be to have Lemmy search for existing communities/magazines in linked instances as you're trying to make a community, similar to how it searches for already posted links, so that folks are given a heads up to those existing communities. If they want to go on to make their own local version then it's just up to them.
I don't think we have that many. The instances that were victims of bot attacks grew by more than 10k in less than a day. This instance's growth has been steady at 1k~2k per day with the captcha enabled.
The captcha seems to be protecting the bigger, older instances, it's all new instances that you've never heard of that randomly have 10k+ bot accounts.
If you scroll to the list of servers and sort by total users, you can see dozens of ghost servers with thousands of accounts and like 10 active users. Alternatively, leave it on the default sorting to see all of the servers that actually have activity.
Should be pretty easy to defederate those instances if the bots start causing problems.
It does seem a little out of balance. We should ask @[email protected] how/why they're personally reviewed 38,000 email-less sign up statements in under 7 days and who they think is populating his server (according to one of his posts from a week ago).
(not sure my tag syntax was correct.... maybe @[email protected] autolinking works?)
I mean, this just stinks of bots. This made it real easy to at least spot them. All those signups and not a single post? I agree with the notion of contacting the instance admin. They may be completely unaware that a swarm of bots signed up on the instance.
I ended up there/here thanks to a "guide for redditors" that suggested it as a good instance to start with. That particular guide was at the top of the Google results when researching lemmy.
Might have to test that one out yourself. Ofcourse you can subscribe to kbin.social communities from your lemmy.world instance but if you can actually add them that's another question. Let me know :P
For some reason, when I tried to sign up for another instance, it wouldn't send the confirmation emal or load when I tried to send it. I guess this is the only working instance that is easy to get to.
For me, it's because the password I entered didn't meet the minimum requirements. The instance signup page had some kind of issue with actually letting me know that was the problem, it just gave me the spinning pinwheel forever. I refreshed and tried changing the password to something more complex and it worked instantly
For some reason, I was able to bring the same name,, password, and everything here and it worked. That other server did want a rather complex password and both said the password was "medium" strength. The first one I tried did return me to the landing page as if it took, and said "email sent" without an email actually arriving. I'm guessing that it was just buggy.
The rapid Lemmy growth as a whole is certainly bot driven but lemmy.world addressed the bot issue already so the majority of new accounts are most likely organic.
I see why you would think that but server admin @ruud was quick to notice and actually closed signup for a short period while this was happening. And then after captcha was enabled the influx of bot users was halted.