I’d object and probably complain and it’d get your instance blacklisted. I’d support all community migrations being made publicly known - so you can see the timestamps and paper trail of a community.

But this isn’t quite the way that community migration would work here - it’s not quite the same thing. You would be attempting to give the impression I am actively contributing to a community I’m not - whereas I’m talking about moving a community from instance A to B. The community for all intents and purpose is the same.

If I posted actively to a community I do not own or moderate and they moved server and thus took my posts there with them, I wouldn’t really object to that.

Well currently an admin could easily intervene and stop a migration by removing the community mods, to be fair.

For example, now that I am working on an AP server, I can take all your posts on [email protected] and mirror them on [email protected]. I could also avoid sending notifications to you, so you’d be aware of this only if you visited the site directly. How would you feel about that?

I mean you could just copy my posts anyway manually, if you were so inclined. There wouldn’t be much I could do about it no matter how you did it.

I don’t think an admin of a server would think that if a community sets up there and operates there that they “own” it, to be honest.

Also, currently, it would only duplicate the content and change how it appears from a Piefed instance.

I do. I care very much about identity and authenticity in the Fediverse. A server that can take posts done in one group and publish as their own is as unreliable as a server who puts fake posts impersonating a popular user.

Then we’re at an impasse. But communities becoming completely modular and movable solves the problems you speak of. That’s the answer.

again, why you are talking about Lemmy only? Mastodon instances from all sizes go down every other week.

Because I don’t really care or know that much about Mastodon.

First, I think that community migration implementation from PieFed has very bad implications. It is literally rewriting history.

I don’t really care about that. If the idea of communities being effectively modular becomes an accepted standard, then no-one will blink an eye at their posts on a prior community being redirected after the fact to another instance.

Second, if we want to make the Fediverse something really accessible, it needs to be a lot more reliable. Yeah, when we are a few thousand people it’s easy to coordinate the migration of a few dozen communities. But if we are talking about millions or billions of people, we can not afford to have constant failures.

We don’t have constant failures though? What are you referring to here? Lemm.ee crashed out due to owner/admins burnout. That’s the only major one i can think of.

fixed, hopefully

I don’t see near enough people on lemmy, or look at enough profiles to notice this. And I don’t agree that most accounts state their location in their biography.

Sorry, I’m thinking strictly in terms of Reddit vs. Lemmy/Piefed/adjacent networks because they are essentially Reddit alternatives that function the same. I don’t really know much about Mastodon or other alternative networks, nor can I speak on their health - but the lemmyverse (including new piefed instances) seem to be fine overall.

This is a strawman: I’m saying “We should not have to rely on open registration instances and hope that the admins get enough funds to keep going”, which is not the same as “all instances should be paywalled”.

If Piefed (or Lemmy) brings in effective community migration where an entire community can be lifted from one instance to another, then I am not bothered by future lemm.ee scenarios happening. Communities can become nomadic, and that’s fine.

Again, it’s not just about reddit. Also, it’s about having places where politics are not such a proeminent part of the discussion. E.g, Threads got a lot of their initial momentum by avoiding politics and getting sports journalists to post about NBA and football.

That’s on people needing to do that. You don’t need to convince me of that. I’m doing it with music and TV. People have to be the change they want to see. But there’s not really anything anyone can do about that with regards to how the audience here interact, or how much interest they have in things outside of politics.

There is nothing stopping them, but there is no one here that wants them to come:

People don’t really respond well to advertisements and influencers on Reddit either, for context.

Scroll around for a bit on the federated timeline of your preferred Mastodon instance, tell me how long it takes for someone to display an anti-business sentiment.

So here do you just mean “people tend to be democratic socialists/communists/anarchists”?

There is no one coordinated movement to get creators on YouTube and tell them “hey, if you start putting your videos on PeerTube we will contribute to your Patreon”.

Oh, well I don’t know enough about Peertubes success here. I don’t really use that.

The majority view on “how to best fund the Fediverse” is “set up donations”. Whenever I bring up “I think it’s more fair if everyone paid just a little bit, this is why my instance is only for paying members”, I am immediately treated as an evil capitalist pig.

Oh for goodness sake. I simply don’t believe that a paywalled system as you imagine could ever even approach Reddits numbers, or even Blueskys.

Do you think that Fediverse is a good representation of the overall political spectrum?

Not really. So? Neither are major reddit subreddits in many cases.

“Normies”? How?

What’s stopping small businesses and influencers from setting up support communities to try and boost their profile?

What reporters?

Anyone who is not 100% aligned with their political mindset

Does this, by the way, not depend on the instance?

For the reasons above. It’s not that they are “afraid of growth”, but the general culture on the Fediverse is reactionary and averse to change. Making it more universally appealing would mean bringing different people, and this is what they are afraid of.

What changes are people afraid of? What “different people” is the Fediverse afraid of?

Why didn’t they go to Mastodon? (hint: some of them did in 2022)

No idea.

Or perhaps there will be some other platform that is not so afraid of growth like Lemmy is, and people will go there, just like people went to Bluesky instead of going to Mastodon?

Yeah, there might be. But it’d have to be pretty similar to Reddit. I don’t know of any right now.

I don’t know how you think the fediverse is somehow afraid of growth though.

The Bluesky surge happened after a massive global election result and a massive grievance from progressives/leftists over Musk and how Twitter has become. Indeed, if you think lemmy is politically partisan - then Bluesky is no different.

The Reddit -> Lemmy surge happened because of some poor Reddit admin decisions. The scale of the events were on different levels.

When the next fuckup from Big Tech comes around, do you think that people will think about going to Mastodon/Lemmy/PieFed, or they will just look at Bluesky?

It would depend on the site origin of the fuckup. If Reddit fucks up, as a reaction - Lemmy would get many new users.

You initially made the Bluesky comparison. And to be clear, by “Lemmy” I did mean the wider Fediverse.

In any case, Bluesky itself is also flatlining and declining anyway.

I mean Bluesky had 1 million registered users in September 2023, and 3 million in February 2024. It clearly had a higher base level footprint than Lemmy has ever had.

Tbf Idk what you imagine Lemmy can somehow do to entice new people

When do you think Bluesky started? It was already a known place by many before the 2024 US election, and was founded by the ex-Twitter co-founder. The people behind it were several orders of magnitude more well known.

How are you noticing that you’re specifically seeing less interaction from UK people?

Eh, its purpose was mostly to get Irving against Lumon.

Really? Not heard that take before. Which one? Burt and Irving?