cross-posted from: https://literature.cafe/post/641633

I was never extremely active on Mastodon until recently but I followed it’s development relatively closely from its infancy. And I will say that it’s really strange to watch lemmy face nearly identical issues that Mastodon did when it was in a similar development stages. (Though, some of the drama thus far have been essentially a speedrun of what mastodon went thru over a gradual amount of time.)

The fediverse as a whole is essentially a return to the Internets roots, and with that comes new problems that OG internet communities did not have to grapple with due to the changes the internet has faced in the past few years alone. When building communities, most large internet communities have been largely corporate since the rapid centralization of the internet of the mid 2000s. There is truly no blueprint for this, and the volunteers that are making these communities from scratch are going to make mistakes (as we have already witnessed more than once, even this week alone.)

A large issue that has resulted from the corporate centralization of the internet that is really hard to break from is the expectation of an extremely smooth streamlined experience on emerging platforms like lemmy from new users. And you aren’t going to get that in these early days. You just aren’t. Things are going to be messy, we are just getting our feet on the ground. And this results in a lot of frustration and just generally a feeling of walking on thin ice with a user base that has been largely built initially from the exodus of an already established platform. To many regular lemmy users there’s this expectation that tends to be “well, if other social media platforms can do it, why can’t we?” and to admins and those building these communities it can be frustrating and feel like the users are being entitled to things that just aren’t possible from volunteers at this time.

With recent drama and inter community issues, the honeymoon phase of this place is officially ending and how we move forward is entirely dependent on how we respond as a community as well as what people using this platform as a whole want from it. You get what you put in.

I don’t say this to discount the drama that lemmy has faced these past few weeks but if you honestly think that this place has been toxic so far, the early days of Mastodon would have seemed like pure hell in comparison. Early Mastodon drama was like, doxxings, entire instance admins quite literally being chasing off their own sites over petty nonsense, things like that. It was bad. Really bad. And despite the existence of fedidrama, that stuff has stabilized. Why? Because the community stabilized and gradually formed their own cultures and the community volunteers building communities learned from their mistakes. People moved to smaller communities and stopped being hostile to decentralization. The necessity of defederation was embraced by most who began to understand its importance.

Some of the biggest issues lemmy has right now aren’t easy to solve, but we have a blueprint to what solutions worked and what didn’t from Mastodon. There’s also the issue with lemmy having a generally different culture from Mastodon, and that’s OK. We want our own community identity, not the same as Reddit or Mastodon or Twitter. In many ways that is already being built as well.

Right now, the biggest thing is just sticking with this place and persevering the growing pains. It is so easy to get burnt out, and the Mastodon instances that got too big for the admins to actually deal with are clear examples of that. I know it’s easy to look at recent events and feel disappointment as well as feel that just generally the most toxic Redditors migrated over, but doing that is just giving up before we even began. If you used Mastodon in it’s early days, it fucking sucked so bad. We have a leg up here that it’s overall easier to navigate communities and discussions out of the box (and with the current development, it’s only going to get better.)

  • 0x0@social.rocketsfall.net
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    1 year ago

    I would like to see Lemmy used like PHPbb or vBulletin was back in the early 2000s - interest/hobby-specific instances designed to house a set of users with a few general discussion boards outside of the main topic to aid community-building. A lot of people seem very focused on joining instances that federate with as many instances as possible, but there’s a lot of value to be found in going the opposite direction, I feel.

    • QuazarOmega@lemy.lol
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      1 year ago

      Why do you think so? To achieve that topic-specifc community it’s not necessary to block out all the instances that don’t align with those interests, that’s what the local feed is all about no?

      To me being conservative with defederations allows potential users to avoid feeling stressed that if they choose the wrong house for their account they might eventually miss out on something, which means they’ll have to make a second account, which could face the same issue itself down the line.

      • Double_A
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        1 year ago

        Defederating from extremistic or spammy instances should not be hurting regular users.

        What I find annoying is when defederation happens because of individual communities on otherwise good instances. E.g. when that drama about shitjustworks started, because somebody created an empty The_Donald community there…

        • QuazarOmega@lemy.lol
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          1 year ago

          Defederating from extremistic or spammy instances

          If it was meant that way then yes, I agree

          when that drama about shitjustworks started

          What happened there?

          • Double_A
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            1 year ago

            Not much. Somebody created a community called The_Donald (which wasn’t even active) and the admin didn’t immediately delete it. Then people that hate Trump demanded that their instance defederate because of that.

      • Mikey (NeoVibe.app)@talk.neovibe.app
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        1 year ago

        Honestly focusing on UX would be a major boost for Lemmy. And when I say UX I don’t mean just the look of it… but the feel of it too. Making the experience smoother for users (and admins/mods).

      • HamSwagwich@showeq.com
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        1 year ago

        Anyone know of a vBulletin to Lemmy importer? I have a very old forum that dates back 20+ years that’s still active I would like to convert, but it’s not practical and I’m not going to lose that history or force the users to go elsewhere

    • Double_A
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      1 year ago

      That’s more or less the idea, just that you can use one account for all those forums. And sometimes interesting posts from other unknown forums show up in your main forum.