I have seen many comments saying that lemmy.world sucks, and sh.itjust.works is good. I have seen that lemmy.world apparently has a very poor reputation among other instances. Why? After a quick look, sh.itjust.works doesn’t look much different to me. Can anyone explain?
Edit: many good replies. the conclusion I’m drawing is that for my purposes it doesn’t really matter. I appreciate everyone who responded
The two main reasons people attack LW is:
people who criticise it because it is by far the largest instance, and thereby means lemmy isn’t as decentralised as it could be, I think this is a fair point, because it has caused federation issues with for example aussie.zone in the past.
Tankies who get mad the average lemmy.world user does not share their admiration for China, Russia, North Korea, Stalin, and Mao. Thereby accusing the whole instance of being “libs” and “bigots”.
I’ll add 2 more that resonate with me:
Fwiw, LW seems ready to defederate from Threads at a moment’s notice (post), but atm it doesn’t matter since Threads isn’t federating with Lemmy anyway.
Though it’s still an excellent point to wonder why they haven’t done it preemptively, like pretty much every other instance I’ve heard of (even lemm.ee’s [blocked instance list[(https://lemm.ee/instances) that is shockingly short has that one). Perhaps bc the decision to defederate from any instance, and especially that one, has generated such negative feedback (as the post linked above mentions), they are hesitant to do anything at all, especially again while it does not matter right now.
The way they approached Threads is part of why I stuck with LW. Instance location doesn’t matter much to me and why would I go with an option that is more willing to take choice out of my hands?
Corporate or not, it should be my decision to interact with it. Unless it’s Nazis or some shit similar, I can block rather than rely on defederation and being told what to do.
Well, I hear that but at the same time the counterargument seems fairly strong. As I understand it (not being a mod of any communities here myself) apparently the mod tools suck pretty bad, especially across instance barriers. And in particular it is reportedly lacking standard filtering capabilities so that if Threads were ever federated with, the sheer VOLUME of content would quickly overwhelm the ability of the mods to keep up. Hence, if Threads were to join the Threadiverse, then Lemmy as it currently is now would have no chance but would cease to exist, almost instantly. And we would become an unmoderated playground.
I have no idea how Threads itself handles moderation, but at a guess, it wouldn’t (fully?) apply if people with Threads accounts were to comment on posts in Lemmy communities?
So Threads really is a special circumstance, not at all like federating with hexbear or exploding heads etc.
Even so, the admins do seem to be listening to the feedback of the users, rather than forcing that choice upon everyone, yeah:-).
Lemmy isn’t compatible with Threads.
No. Threads has no communities, Threads cannot post to Lemmy communities. That’s fearmongering.
Threads is already part of the Fediverse but on a per-account basis. It’s compatible with Mastodon and other Twitter-likes that use ActivityPub. Lemmy can’t read Threads posts, just as Lemmy can’t read random Mastodon posts, only the ones Mastodon users explicitly posted into Lemmy communities.
lemm.ee had a vote on threads. As to the short blocklist, it’s a combination of a liberal federation policy and sunaurus apparently taking the time to clean it up once in a while, other instances have instances on their blocklist which are long defunct.
Yes and I hope I did not come across as negative about lemm.ee’s policies - the “shocking” part to me is not having exploding heads (probably bc it’s defunct, yet most instances keep it there just in case it were to ever decide to resurrect itself, or another in its place using that domain name), and other decisions that are “unusual” (for the largest instances at least) are to not include hexbear.net or even lemmygrad.ml.
And even given all of that, it still has preemptively defederated from threads.net, which makes it all the more extremely unusual that Lemmy.World has not. Even so, as I mentioned, I get it, for those reasons stated.
Tangentially, I wonder why more communities are not housed on lemm.ee. The largest is a movies community with only a few thousand subscribers, and already the next largest is down to a singular comic (albeit a popular one). The next largest instance, sh.itjust.works, has 6 communities larger than the biggest one on lemm.ee. I guess it’s related to the whole centralization on Lemmy.World thing, but most instances slightly smaller have communities that are larger - lemmy.ca, feddit.org, lemmy.dbzer0.com, programming.dev, etc.
hexbear avoided defederation by having admins who are more reasonable than (a not small chunk of) its users, lemmygrad is generally keeping to itself. It’s certainly not because Sunaurus, an Estonian, would have a soft spot for Russian imperialism. We’re also federated with beehaw, btw, as in they’re not blocking us.
I don’t know why we have so few communities, either. If we had more there very well might be more defederation drama going on because the more communities, the more chance for people to misbehave. movies is a quite harmless community in that regard, imagine !ukraine@sopuli.xyz while being federated with hexbear or lemmygrad.
I think lemm.ee is just… generic? It’s a place where you can have an account and see practically the whole fediverse, attracting a lot of people who just want to participate, not found communities. feddit.org has the whole German community plus the canonical Europe one, lemmy.ca is Canadian, programming.dev is very very techy, dbzero anarchist+pirate.
Honestly I think the hexbear situation may need to be revisited based on recent observations where among other things an instance admin lied to another instance admin. Even lemmygrad.ml had this to say about it:
Personally I want every single diversity of opinion to be able to be shared… so long as it is offered in good faith. Which HB is demonstrably not doing, even to admins of other instances. (That said, I don’t always want to see it all of the time either - like porn, it would be good to be able to turn it off if I don’t want it flooding my feed 100% of the time? Which after defederation, that is what I have bc you don’t need an account just to lurk on content from an instance.) Ofc that’s up to you all on lemm.ee to decide for yourselves, not us as outsiders, I was just offering my personal opinion since we were discussing it and it’s good to be upfront with my biases:-).
I don’t know as much about lemmygrad.ml tbh - that whole defederation issue predates me, although on StarTrek.website I did make the mistake of replying to a comment in a post that I found while browsing All that made me wish that I had never heard of the place. It might have been something along the lines of saying that at least Biden had lowered gasoline prices which helped poorer people and thereby that aided getting Democrats into the USA Senate during the midterms, and how while nowhere near enough it at least was a strategic move that wasn’t “nothing”… but whatever I said, the response I got was EXACTLY like when I accidentally did the same to a comment in ChapoTrapHouse@hexbear.net - I got an enormous FLOOD of responses filling up by Notifications for WEEKS and WEEKS afterwards. I did not feel like I fully consented to that level of vitriol and hate in return for what I intended as at least an attempt to better understand a complex situation.
Anyway if full defederation is the only way to prevent such content from showing up in every new person’s feed, then so be it. Although I actually would rather have an opt-in system based on proper labeling than a “hard defederate”, it’s just that such is not made available to us by the developers of the codebase (although PieFed has it, yet the flagship instance PieFed.social has defederated from those two instances already). So since the only options allowed are full defederation vs. help spread all of their content without offering any warning to new users, and not only content but their echo chamber fueled hatred and vitriol towards any opinion that is less extreme than theirs… then defederation it is that seems the best course of action moving forwards, imho.
And perhaps that is what keeps people from putting communities onto lemmy.ee? Knowing full well that the hexbears and lemmygrads will be able to brigade it? If so, it’s fine for lemm.ee to remain as a general instance - again it’s up to you all who are on it to decide what you want for yourselves - I was just curious to think about the potential reasons why. Also I think it’s great to have at least one instance in the Fediverse that is that way, and it would be a loss if it were to change. Then again, hexbear admins lying to admins of another instance… at that point the argument put forth that at least the admins were better behaved than the average user seems no longer true, and that the instance might not be trustworthy any longer in the future? Reaching out in full friendliness is awesome! But not in the face of such bad faith behaviors in return.
I agree on the rest - about people wanting to be more consumers and less contributers, in large part (from what I hear) due to the current state of the moderation tools that apparently are quite poor, and all the more so across different instances, which in lemm.ee’s case would be exaggerated since to keep up the standards of a community the mod would have to remove content from hexbears.
Just to precise, it’s still the case
Lemmy.world has kind of awful moderation, which means people who are trolls or bad actors have lived here for a very long time despite multiple reports. It was only recently that Linkerbaan (the most notorious one of all) was banned, and it took a thread complaining about bans in !yepowertrippinbastards@lemmy.dbzer0.com and dbzer0 admins messaging them to get their attention.
There are other people here like that which never receive permanent bans for consistently horrible behavior. It’s not great, and while I don’t agree with Beehaw’s decision to defederate over it I do think that things could be better. It does degrade user experience to have known trolls and assholes running wild and only getting a slap on the wrist when they do something horrible.
Maybe people shouldn’t overflow the moderation pipe with reports then just because posts are idiotic. There’s the downvote button for that. I’m just a guy with a full-time job and personal life who on occasion may get ill with a cold or so. So when I log onto Lemmy on PC and I see a dozen of reports having popped up about posts being reported as being “in bad faith”, posts that may be genuinely idiotic but not containing any personal attacks / racism /…, I’m already checking out. Not every idiotic posts needs moderator intervention. Sometimes a minus 25 score is enough. So when there are a dozen of reports about merely idiotic posts, I might miss a genuinely intervention-worthy one.