copygirl

Shonk.

On Mastodon, when you follow another user on another instance, your instance will send a request to the other, to be notified of new posts made by that user, as well as posts they’ve boosted. When such a new post arrives, a copy will be created on your instance so it can be displayed without nagging the original instance again for the post’s content and such.

Lemmy is similar of course, since it uses the same underlying protocol (ActivityPub). Think of communities as “special users”. Whenever someone creates a post or reply, the community will boost it, so it ends up on every instance where a user has subscribed to that community.

This part I’m not entirely sure on but I believe it’s how things work: The other way to send messages around other than subscription is obviously to send messages directly. In ActivityPub there’s a field that specifies the recipients of a message. When such a message is created, it is pushed to the instances of the recipients. On Lemmy, the recipient is the community you’re posting to. On Mastodon, the recipients are filled with all the users that you @-mention in the contents of the message. So for a Mastodon user to post to Lemmy, they have to mention the community, which is why you see some posts that contain the community’s handle.

Because you can’t follow / subscribe to users on Lemmy, the posts of Mastodon users that don’t involve Lemmy never end up being “federated”, meaning Lemmy instances don’t get notified of these posts, so they don’t end up being “copied”. This is the same on Mastodon by the way. Unless your instance sends out a request to fetch posts from an unknown user, it doesn’t know about their posts, since nobody so far has cared about them.

This makes sense because if you were to try and store all the content from the fediverse you would need a LOT of storage for little gain. Similarly it would be bad to never store the content and always fetch it, because that would generate a bunch of additional traffic, which especially small instances would suffer from.

To summarize: Lemmy doesn’t display Mastodon posts because it doesn’t have a mechanism to subscribe to those users.

Surely you know more than the lawyers Dolphin got help from.

How long have you been part of the fediverse? (A term which tends to not be capitalized, by the way. *nerd snort*) It’s not about you getting to interact with every instance using just one account. It’s about putting the power into the hands of ordinary people. Including the power to associate or disassociate with certain people, communities, and content. That includes an admin’s ability to go “I see you’re not sufficiently moderating your instance. We will defederate until you’ve taken steps to ensure your instance sufficiently moderates with common-sense rules.”. Whether that is due to some content policies or to block an instance from which a ton of spam originates.

Just how with email a provider can choose to block or automatically mark-as-spam any email coming from a server they don’t trust, for example because it’s a known source of spam. It’s actually how a lot of the internet works. And it works as long as well-intentioned people are in positions to make such decisions. And if a server or service goes rogue, they get the equivalent of defederated.

Incorrect. I’m fine with instances that host a variety of content. Including stuff I don’t want to see.

However, I’m allowed to join an instance whose admins take a stance against bigotry for example, and therefore take better care that such content isn’t allowed to freely go through their instance. That way I and a thousand of other users don’t need to all block the content they don’t like manually. It’s my instance admin’s choice, and my choice to go with their instance.

This was perhaps a bad example. Though there’s the possibility of posts not being marked for NSFW that should be (and the instance not enforcing such), and ones that are mostly harmless but still labelled as NSFW for one reason or another. One person’s NSFW is not the same as another person’s NSFW. Feel free to replace the example rule with something else.

If you want your freedom – whatever that means to you – you go to an instance that represents those values. Admins that run their own instance get to decide how they moderate that instance. And that includes blocking (or defederating) whole instances, communities, or individual users. You don’t have to sign up to one that does something you don’t like.

Besides, you don’t seem to understand the importance of moderation. If it wasn’t for the ability to defederate, we’d have tons of fake instances with fake users creating fake posts. Not to mention people going out of their way to make others feel miserable. Do they have the right to spew their hatred? I have my opinion, but it doesn’t matter. I happen to also have the right to join an instance that has a policy to take care of that stuff so I can browse for things that actually interest me.

Allow the admins of the instance to enforce their rules?

Say you have an instance with a “no-NSFW” rule, for people who don’t want to randomly come across NSFW communities. Their admins could take care of the curating of rule-breaking NSFW communities without having to resort to defederating from the entire instance. This doesn’t have to be an outright block but just a filter that could prevent the community to show up in “All”.

Falling in love? In this economy?

The best Mastodon instance is the one that aligns with your interests and values the most.

• Are you interested in tech? There’s a couple of tech-focused instances.
• Are you some flavor of LGBTQ+? Some instances do a better job at keeping out bad actors, and you can be around like-minded people.
• Are you interested in gaming? Movies? Art? Writing? Game development? Home improvement? Gardening? Activism? Memes? News?
• Maybe you’re interested in stuff happening in your country or local area?

Why? When you’re looking for new content, and new people to follow, the local and federated timelines of your instance are a good way to do so. Your home timeline includes all the people and hashtags you followed yourself, and their boosts. The local timeline includes all the posts and boosts of everyone on your instance. The federated timeline has all the content that everyone on your instance is following. (Of course you can always follow anyone you like, but I’m making a point about ease of discovering content relevant to you here.)

For this reason, just joining a big, general-purpose is less useful, since you’re just going to get a hodge-podge of random things in these timelines. Perhaps you don’t mind, but I feel like it’s good to point out this feature of the fediverse, as some people might not know, or realize this is a thing.

How? Okay, of course this is silly to recommend without giving you some way to look for these instances. There’s a couple of directories that allow you to search for them. Looking for some briefly came up with https://instances.social/, https://mastodon.help/instances and https://mastodonservers.net/. Also note you can migrate your account from one instance to another, taking your followed content and even followers with you.

It’s a lot more legally dubious for them if you defederate. If your instance willingly connects and shares data out of their own volition, it’s like that instance giving permission. If an instance blocks communication via the ActivityPub protocol outright, what are the legal grounds for Meta/Facebook to be able to freely access that information? Even if it’s posted publicly to view.

As an example. I can have my own website and post some info there, write articles, have contact information. People can view it. Companies can index this information and make it available to search. But I’m guessing it’s not legal (or at least less so) to be collecting that information to process and sell. Companies can do that so easily because you agree to it in their terms of service.

(But hey, IANAL.)

It’s still refreshing to see how many subreddits ended up joining the blackout. Over 8000 joined, including some big ones, and (as of posting) 6800 are still either private or restricted.

Whether or not it’s a good change is likely mostly subjective. I’m guessing Discord made the switch to be more in line with other mainstream social media platforms, and to reduce confusion.

Personally, I kind of like the old way more. It means there could be 10000 different people with basically the same name. Other than paying for a specific number, there is no issue with a person grabbing a handle and then it not being available to anyone else. Otherwise, eventually, a lot of handles will be used up, maybe even dead, so people have to come up with increasingly creative ways to get a unique handle – or just settle on adding some numbers to the end.

I’d even go a step further myself and remove handles completely. Just use a random unique identifier, like a hash or GUID for the user – which a lot of platforms do under the hood anyway, since you can change your handle in many of them – and use invite codes, QR codes or similar to add friends. We don’t need this username / handle rotting that just gets worse over time.

Netcode, gun feel, balancing, map design, sound design, … all things that a present in co-op shooters as well. Don’t get me wrong, I agree with what you’re saying, but I feel like you have misunderstood what I was trying to communicate. (Which might be my fault.)

And yes, there are things that are unique (or more critical) to PvP shooters, but my point was: It’s overall less work, for developers and artists, to just have players fight each other over and over again, than to create content for players to cooperatively enjoy.

I did want to mention that, but left it out to keep my comment short. Yes, game development is very difficult and complex. Getting anything working out there is a huge accomplishment for everyone involved.

I have a feeling many companies found that the ratio of work (and thus investment) involved compared to the potential profit generated, especially with predatory MTX added to everything nowadays, means it’s pretty much a no-brainer to them to create PvP games rather than co-op ones.

Creating interesting gameplay systems and keeping things fresh for players is (I’d say) undoubtedly more difficult than just plotting players against one another. On top of that, Netcode and balancing aren’t non-existent in co-op games.

Just take a look at the cancelled Blizzard MMO project “Titan”, which was partially repurposed to become Overwatch.

Not hating on people who like and enjoy PvP games, but to me it feels like it’s a good way for a developer to make a game that doesn’t actually have that much substance. Lacking content? Nothing to actually do in the game? NPCs are difficult to make interesting to fight? Just have players shoot each other. It’s basically content that creates itself, not to mention (if you have good matchmaking) the difficulty ramps up naturally without you having to write better enemy AI.

I just want to fight stuff alongside other people, rather than potentially making another person’s day just a little worse because I shot them before they shot me, you know? Is that too much to ask?

Have you read the article?

“A significant number of subreddits shifting to private caused some expected stability issues, and we’ve been working on resolving the anticipated issue,” spokesperson Tim Rathschmidt tells The Verge.