Honestly, brigading is still a valid thing that can exist here, but yes, people don’t realize that if a post gets popular on a popular federated instance, people who appear like ‘foreigners’ (for lack of better word) will jump in and flood it. It looks as if a brigade, but it’s entirely organic, non-malicious, unorganized and unprompted.

I’m not sure how to classify things like ‘dunk tank’ posts, where someone on an instance will say ‘lol look how dumb this post over there is’… it’s not really calling a raid but many people will go to the source comment and dogpile them. And sure, that’s just part of being a public website, but it’s a bit easier with federation to go over and interact, just like it is moving between subreddits on reddit.

In reality, it would be more like a series of lines on different topics weighted differently by an individuals priorities so no singular generic representation will ever be truly good enough.

In reality, there are no lines. And that’s exactly why I say, it’s not a step forward to add another vague idealist axis on top of a vague undefined idealist axis. Politics is not geometrical, there isn’t a concept of ordered values. The entire method of thinking is wrong, and that video helps explain what a more appropriate alternative model based on human history is like.

Adding an axis is just walking forward down a wrong path; a move in the wrong direction by suggesting the issue is about how much fidelity we have.

I believe that most of the things people do, or try to do, on reddit (and therefore reddit alternatives) just aren’t appropriate for how the site is structured. Reddit is a ‘link aggregator’, that’s what it was designed for. People post links to content.

So it’s no surprise that forums are a better option, structurally, for a ton of communities.

Politics is such a complex topic and any simple representation of it will lead to what would appear to be contradictions in a person’s beliefs.

Absolutely. And certainly with this kind of geometric modelling, with a spectrum or plane where these broad and complex concepts are ordered more-than or less-than others.

The political compass is a better representation

I disagree with even this. It’s not better, it’s equally inappropriate.

The political compass is adding an extra idealist axis to an undefined axis (the linked video explains this in more proper detail). It’s just digging further into a hole in an attempt to make it work, when the whole paradigm is wrong. And this is bad, because the compass model has rationalized that undefined, subjective linear spectrum. It helps delude people.

The unfortunate thing is that these show up as small emotes on hexbear.net, so the users generally don’t realize they’re huge disruptive images to others.

If one can get past the 20 most invasive, tactless, eternally-online members of Hexbear and Lemmygrad, they’re generally great places. Unfortunately, those people are the main ones getting attention and alienating people on other instances.

It’s disheartening whenever I see a legitimate chance to teach someone something and a Hex account just makes an absolute malicious shitpost that isn’t even worth calling a dunk. That, and a couple of highly-active users in particular who will consistently take the worst possible interpretation of a post and insist anyone who disagrees is a bad actor. Sankara would roll in his grave if he could see those post histories.

Me too. COME OUT YE BLACK AND TANS, COME OUT AND FIGHT ME LIKE A MAN.

I want it to succeed and become what reddit used to be.

I want it to exceed what reddit ever was. It’s tempting to look back at those days and want to remake it, but really, we can and should go further in making good communities. And with federation, in theory, it’s so much easier to have a small town booted up without it constantly feeling an inch from death, the death-struggle of almost all comfy communities that haven’t become popular.

eh, reddit leans left

The left-right spectrum isn’t a helpful model (Piped link) on an international forum. As you’ve seen in all the replies, people have very different ideas on what is left and what isn’t… there is actually no true definition. Many people will, for example, argue that liberalism is the status quo and therefore centrist since the advent of socialism/anti-capitalism and fascism. This is especially true outside of the Five Eyes countries (US, UK, AUS, etc.) where the political atmosphere is clearly different for historical and cultural reasons. On top of that, reddit is so huge that different communities have noticeably different leanings, so naturally someone will object when any generalization is made.

they both trend towards extreme levels of authoritarian dick sucking

Congratulations, you just pissed off all the anarchists lol

Like some of the top-ranking comments here are saying, that place has a very large proportion of people who were coming from the banned subreddits like The Donald, various straight-up hate communities, and typical alt-right groups. So naturally, alternatives that were founded by anarchists and socialists (raddle, lemmy.ml) were almost always disregarded there, possibly with the exception of the Wolfballs admin (I can’t remember too well if they got much attention with the ‘they’re not all like that’ line)

It’s always funny to me to see newer users complain about a lot of political (incl. FOSS) users in an inherently political project, which was picked by many precisely because its political values prevent the for-profit shittery that reddit.com has been doing for 15 years, and that alt-right social media alternatives frequently do whenever they get enough users. Yes, we’re going to voice our concerns when people show up at the door and want this to be just like reddit was, or bring over the uncritical mainstream ignorance we came over here to avoid.

As far as imageboards go, I believe lil b was the origin, not mere traction. KYM can hopefully confirm.

@nutomic@lemmy.ml It might be a good idea to default the Communities page to All instead of Local, to help push users into discovering other instances and promote them.

The replies already here have touched on the most important factors and why they matter (it’s open source under AGPL and it’s decentralised, the core devs are ideologically anti-capitalist so they won’t go public or sell out to advertisers, the users are the primary stakeholders)

But they haven’t mentioned an issue with this question: we are a community. What could WE do to about becoming the next Reddit after a decade?

Most important? Get involved. Acknowledge that volunteering and donations are powerful! The best thing you can do is to help the devs, whether it be coding, translation, documentation, web design, or the many other things that help this place thrive. I see all these posts saying “Lemmy should make onboarding easier!” as if approximately two people are there to do all the work.

I’d say it’s a mindset of coming from sites where you don’t have the power and the only path for things to happen is complaining to the higher-ups. Being open source and community-driven are things new users need to understand. We may well be their first experience on a non-for-profit social media platform, where we don’t have a designated full-time tech-support team, or a professional dev team of dozens.

I’m no expert, but my understanding of the AGPL license of Lemmy code is that any modification is legally required to display the modification’s source code prominently online. So if I’m not mistaken then they can’t close source the code, so long as the devs are willing to threaten legal action (like Mastodon vs. Truth Social)

Thanks for linking that post, that’s the evidence I wanted for them being a far-right instance.

Can you tell us where the instance is fascist and doesn’t merely contain fascists and bigots? For one, their sidebar rules contradict fascism. [note: TheAnonymouseJoker gave convincing evidence, see link in reply]

They’re both shitty, but they will behave differently so it’s important to distinguish if you want to make these claims.

why would they federate

To grow in numbers, to spread ideas, free advertising, to take advantage of non-political communities their users might want to visit, all kinds of reasons. Did you know wolfballs and lemmy.ml federated for a long time? Sure, neither is fascist but it’s an example of highly-conflicting communities federating properly.

I’d like to suggest editing this post title to match the post, about subscribing to Mastodon hashtags or instances.

There is already some “interop with other fediverse platforms” possible, such as Friendica conversations and post rating and what appears to be an early work-in-progress channel viewing/subscription for PeerTube.

I think this idea makes sense for a link aggregator site such as Lemmy and I wouldn’t be surprised if it were already a future goal for the project.