this post was submitted on 14 Oct 2023
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To The Fediverse

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The fediverse is a collection of community-owned, ad-free, decentralised, and privacy-centric social networks.

Each fediverse instance is managed by a human admin. You can find fediverse instances dedicated to art, music, technology, culture, or politics.

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Tactic needed to counter all communities living on lemmy.world and get more of the threadiverse into the free world (lemmy.dbzer0.com)
submitted 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) by diyrebel@lemmy.dbzer0.com to c/fediverse
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LemmyWorld is a terrible place for communities to exist. Rationale:

  • Lemmy World is centralized by disproportionately high user count
  • Lemmy World is centralized by #Cloudflare
  • Lemmy World is exclusive because Cloudflare is exclusive

It’s antithetical to the #decentralized #fediverse for one node to be positioned so centrally and revolting that it all happens on the network of a privacy-offender (CF). If #Lemmy World were to go down, a huge number of communities would go with it.

So what’s the solution?

Individual action protocol:

  1. Never post an original thread to #LemmyWorld. Find a free world non-Cloudflare decentralized instance to start new threads. Create a new community if needed. (there are no search tools advanced enough to have a general Cloudflare filter, but #lemmyverse.net is useful because it supports manually filtering out select nodes like LW)
  2. Wait for some engagement, ideally responses.
  3. Cross-post to the relevant Lemmy World community (if user poaching is needed).

This gets some exposure to the content while also tipping off readers of the LW community of alternative venues. LW readers are lazy pragmatists so they will naturally reply in the LW thread rather than the original thread. Hence step 2. If an LW user wants to interact with another responder they must do so on the more free venue. Step 3 can be omitted in situations where the free-world community is populated well enough. If /everything/ gets cross-posted to LW then there is no incentive for people to leave LW.

Better ideas? Would this work as a collective movement?

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[–] FireTower@lemmy.world 4 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (1 children)

I think the important thing is to first understand why lemmy.world is popular. IMO it's because it's a good general purpose instance that has a fair balance of defederation vs federation. Not saying there's not other solid general purposes instances but having .world in the name really conveys that better than most of them. It's an easy instance to default to.

So maybe if you make instances going forwards make it clear what your's is actually for in the name, in a way outsiders can appreciate.

[–] diyrebel@lemmy.dbzer0.com -1 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

IMO it’s because it’s a good general purpose instance that has a fair balance of defederation vs federation.

It is not a “fair balance”. There is no balance. Lemmy World would have to defederate from all instances and even then there would be no balance. Lemmy World is most extreme degree of centralization possible within the framework of the technology (which fails to sufficiently resist centralization).

Moving communities off Lemmy World so LW is just a user farm would approach some balance -- and this is something a free world movement could do.

Not saying there’s not other solid general purposes

Lemmy World is not just home to communities without a relevant special purpose, it also poaches communities that match the special purpose instances. E.g. !cybersecurity@infosec.pub is a cybersec community that is on an instance devoted to infosec. Yet there exists !cybersecurity@lemmy.world.

So maybe if you make instances going forwards make it clear what your’s is actually for in the name, in a way outsiders can appreciate.

As the cybersec case demonstrate, it’s insufficient to merely have the clarity in naming and purpose that you suggest.