Them:

BuT wE sHoUlD bE fReE tO sAy WhAtEvEr We WaNt!

After you talk to them:

No... not like that!?

Future updates to Lemmy already plan to include labels for communities iirc, although I am not sure about if instance labels would be included at first or not. And even if those are applied by instance admins, for maximum friendliness it seems like it would be good to reach out to the very communities that they apply to while making those labels. e.g. going from lemm.ee to Hexbear could perhaps say "come here if you aren't afraid to get dunked on and we will argue deep points together, though be warned that people indoctrinated by Western socioeconomic capitalistic thought processes may be in for quite a difference of opinion!". Lemmy.ml could be "we support older-style Marxist–Leninist thinking, but note that we strongly enjoy making fun of the West, so beware ye who enter here - we will educate you properly!"

Instead, visiting Lemmy.ml says "A community of privacy and FOSS enthusiasts, run by Lemmy’s developers", followed by a link to "What is Lemmy.ml" which as you can see is broken, pointing to a post that appears to no longer exist.

Perhaps this is all hopelessly naive - but it could be tried before abandoning it? I have been known to throw a jab or three at the expense of my own home Western nation (USA) - though it definitely comes across differently when done externally, and also by people who very much seem to not be joking when they talk about literally murdering people. (I mean, I am aware that that never happens in Russia or China, where someone can fall out of a window, then shoot themselves in the back of the head, then fall down a flight of stairs, then shoot themselves in the back of the head again, then fall down another set of stairs, and finally out of a second window... but in any case, this vehemence seems directed at the peoples in the Western nations, and regardless of its degree of truthosity - a word I made up entirely just now but wish that I could use from now:-D - it scares away the normies for sure.)

Anyway there are only so many instances, and only so many communities, and most do not need such a warning, or possibly the instance ones could be automated as applying to all communities on that instance. So it's very doable. As compared to now where it is full federation vs. full defederation, offering literally nothing in-between (unless you have an app that can implement a block of all comments from users on a specified instance).

Btw PieFed tries to avoid the need for all of that by an automated system of its own, applied to each user evenly across the board - e.g. if you have more downvotes than upvotes, then an icon appears next to your name (this system seems able to be gamed though, especially wrt such ideological differences where many would upvote while many others would downvote, each side having different ideals about what is to be considered worthy).

Ah that makes sense then, why one highly technical person would recall (presumably correctly) that it used to work on Kbin, while another person submitted a request to add that feature for Mbin. It's nice to know that it is possible, even if not quite straightforward!:-)

I would strongly hope that the Mbin codebase is being worked on by more than just one person, who is also administering your instance. That was what caused the demise of both Kbin and Kbin.social with Ernst trying to "do it all" without letting others help. I would love to see that project succeed and provide a fully viable alternative to X and Reddit besides Mastodon and Lemmy:-).

Fair, but a lot of people have emotional issues that make that difficult, and running can be a fun activity. Bonus: it helps someone learn just exactly how much that "100 calories" is worth - by converting into a measurement system that they already know (time to burn it off), it can help to prioritize eating goals in the future.

Exercise also has many other benefits beyond weight control though, such as heart health, overall musculature, blood chemistry, and more. thin != healthy.

But if we are getting this deep into it, running in particular isn't the best... it's quite hard on the knees I hear. An elliptical machine or something involving the body core like calisthenics would be easier on the body and more effective at the same time. Then again, running sure is fun... :-D

Wait... there are non-bouncing shades!?!?

I have not reached out to ST.website, and anyway it seems besides the point b/c as of now they have caught up. And since all 3 of these instances were having the same issue at the same time, I would guess that it is just more of this same style of rate-limiting issues that we hear across many other instances. I did a bit digging and I see this pinned comment describing the issue occuring 5 months ago: https://startrek.website/post/10430719/9550923. The admins are aware, but until Lemmy.World updates to 0.19.6, what can they do about it really? But here at least you can see the answer directly from an admin about exactly this style of issue.

Yes Discuss.Online is very (hehe... may I say "blazingly"?:-P) fast - I first moved to it when ST.website was being pokey slow (~10 months ago) and I have enjoyed very much how smooth the experience is on it. Though it does federate with hexbear.net and lemmy.ml, so e.g. I get to see Cowbee responding to people discussing tankie behavior with the "just trust me bro, no I refuse to share my references instead why don't you hit me up in my DMs, hey why don't you share YOUR references hrm, no I've never asked anyone to hit me up in my DMs in my life bro whutyoutalkinabout?". As funny as it may be to watch, it does disturb me that "normies" as we are talking about in this post will be exposed to such, and have to learn first-hand what types of behaviors to expect from which servers that the admins of most instances will not defederate from.

ST.website at least defederated from hexbear, though discuss.online has not. I briefly considered mander.xyz cause that source of content seems amazing, but it defederates from almost nothing at all - not even lemmygrad.ml (there are only 2 entries in its block list: threads.net and burggit.moe - even exploding heads isn't listed there, wtf!?!?) Edit: though someone could eke out quite the existence there just browsing Local - that experience wouldn't offer any "news" and especially "politics", so that could be a strong plus for someone, but then you could switch between Global vs. Local at the press of a button, to expand or narrow one's preferred scope of input. Then again, it seems hyperfocused on the STEM fields, with very little of e.g. liberal arts (though not none, e.g. !natural_process_art@mander.xyz and !gan_art@mander.xyz, and yet those are not highly active).

Programming.dev has more than merely federation issues too. I don't know if they've modified their codebase or what, but e.g. community names containing spaces - or perhaps it was underscores - are having trouble as well.

And yes I know you made the meme, I was reminding you that I'm not making this up - there are definitely federation issues going on! Perhaps not right this very second (or maybe, from somewhere, I dunno?), but over the past year this intermittent issue has persisted, to varying degrees based in part on proximity and network latency between it vs. Lemmy.World, and perhaps on hardware and in particular network connection services of each instance.

Oh, and maybe this is where we were disconnecting: if you were talking "top 20", and I was mentioning ST.website and Discuss.Online and PieFed.social and programming.dev and aussie.zone, then (1) it still shows how it isn't PieFed.social's "fault", b/c this delay with Lemmy.World content happens to MANY (most?) small instances, but (2) for a recommendation to give to people, e.g. those still on Reddit, then yeah, I don't know of something better than lemm.ee. I was suggesting to think about adding lemmy.cafe to the recommendation list in spite of it not being in the top 20, in case some people might bend more towards wanting to avoid trolling behavior - tbf, this could be more of a recommendation for people on Mastodon than Reddit, at which point perhaps Mbin is a better fit anyway? Though at least some of those, like sopuli.xyz and lemmy.ca, do defederate from hexbear.net even if not from lemmy.ml, which is something.

Star Trek always had the best hats. Unless you were Michael Dorn and then the costume staff seemed to have a grudge against him or sumthin'.

Edit: bonus

Oh ahem Star Trek right...

My take-away here: sometimes diversity demands that we go beyond Star Trek for the sake of the joke? 🤣

I just said "Lemmy" and they went forward from there.

Helping people pick an instance is not as straight-forward task as many people claim. e.g. if you love programming, then perhaps programm.dev is right for you, except right now they are having enormous federation difficulties - e.g. https://programming.dev/post/20692281. They are far from the only ones doing so though - https://feddit.org/post/3524876 - and yet they do have more difficulties than most.

Any instance that is not Lemmy.World itself is going to suffer right now, until the deployment of 0.19.6 - https://github.com/LemmyNet/lemmy/pull/4623. And yet people piling on top of the already too-large pile of Lemmy.World will only make the future problems worse. This whole "federation" concept is still experimental, compared to a single-server model like Reddit had.

Blaze often tells people to go by default to lemm.ee. Which is one of the rare instances that defederates from none of hexbear.net, lemmy.ml, or even lemmygrad.ml. So if someone comes across this advice and follows it... BTW, Lemmy.cafe likewise defederates from almost nothing, except it DOES defederate from those big 3 (caveat: it seems run by only a single administrator, so is therefore far less stable than e.g. lemm.ee, and could disappear at any time - though there are so many other things about that instance that are so welcoming and friendly, and btw it is one of the very select few that are already running 0.19.6-beta! so a single admin yes, but one who seems VERY on the ball!).

But ultimately you are correct: they control the sourcecode, so it is YOU who are using THEIR platform - and they WILL do it THEIR way, regardless.

Until and unless more people switch to Mbin, PieFed, or eventually Sublinks. Admiral Patrick who developed Tesseract for dubvee.org and who has blocked lemmy.ml users has pledged to switch to Sublinks whenever it will come out. In the meantime you can view a demo, but I haven't heard of any developments for it for like half a year. So I switched to PieFed, and am posting several bug reports to help make it better. I advise people to check all of these options out just to see what's out there, though definitely more is yet to come due to the hard work from these very helpful developers!

And credit where it's due: Dessalines is helping in his own way, to reduce people's dependency upon Reddit, and offering that codebase completely free of charge - that's not nothing. Though administering a server instance is an entirely different skillset... and if we want to see the Fediverse grow rather than shrink with time, I think that better fences are going to be necessary (or mere labels would be even better, except they seem to militantly refuse to do such - but could you imagine if "politically extremist" content had a label just like all the NSFW posts do? then we could all get along side-by-side in the same space).

Nobody enjoys being punched in the face, or to see their (or why not ANY?) nation mocked - especially normies who may have DEEP knowledge of their subject matter, yet happen to not use Arch Linux btw, or may not be actual full-on communists (yet?).

We are far too unwelcoming to normies currently. Many people on Reddit reporting coming here to check it out only to not enjoy it and remain there.

100% of every single person that I've ever told about Lemmy irl gives me grief about how politically extremist it is. Like not just "no thank you, if you don't mind" but "FUCK NO, WHY WOULD YOU SHOW ME THIS!?". I mean, I'm no lover of capitalism but... if we want normies, we have to make this place more palatable. The likes of Facebook, X, and Reddit are grandfathered into the public consciousness - like it or not, convincing someone to come here is basically meaning to leave there, if only for part of each day (which Mbin is strongly helping with, by also conjoining Mastodon with Lemmy).

As an experiment, go to Lemmy.ml and sort by Local. The very top post is currently this one: https://lemmy.ml/post/21925926. This does not make me feel welcomed, being a citizen of the USA. Mind you, I get that there is a certain degree of "Truthiness" to it - especially if you ignore all of the thousands of years of history that predated the very "discovery" of this Western-most continent (even by Leif Erickson) - but true or not, it turns people away. An admin account even specifically decries people not liking it:

Judging by the downvotes, a lot of Lemmitors have no idea how the world works. Just living in the Marvel Cinematic Universe—must be nice.

So, this post isn't going to be removed anytime soon, although beware of downvoting it - you might be kicked out of all communities that exist on that instance, including those you've never so much as heard of existing (yes that's a real thing, see MANY cases described in MANY communities across the Fediverse, e.g. !yepowertrippinbastards@lemmy.dbzer0.com).

Note I did not cherry pick that example. That is literally the first post that I saw. Every time I do this, I can always find such an example in <10 seconds and half of that is going to Lemmy.ml in the first place.

I mentioned Mbin as being one potential solution. Sublinks is another (but in the meantime there's Tesseract on dubvee.org if you like that). I switched to PieFed myself, though there are quite a large number of issues with it (e.g. zero new posts from all the super cool Star Trek memes made in the last 3 days from https://piefed.social/c/tenforward@lemmy.world are showing up here - tho tbf this is far from the only instance that is struggling to catch up to updates with Lemmy.World). If you want to remain tied to the actual Lemmy codebase there's lemmy.cafe and quokk.au that defederates from hexbear.net and lemmy.ml (the former also defederated from Lemmygrad.ml). But so long as people keep joining e.g. lemmy.world or lemm.ee, they are going to have to discover how those instances are by themselves. Except they won't, and based on my experience, instead they leave - and then blame me for even having mentioned Lemmy to them in the first place.

We are fooling ourselves, to think that we can have our cake and eat it too. If you make fun of someone - e.g. people in the West including in USA, UK, Germany or other EU nation, etc. - then why would those very same people want to join in despite the "joke"? It's really not that hard to understand: we either make the Fediverse more welcoming to normies, or we give up hoping that they will come in spite of everything. And based on the MAU (monthly active users) stats, this is basically peak Lemmy right now without much chance to grow further - and if anything we're declining. I mean, I'm writing this to you from a non-Lemmy sourcecode-based instance right now.

But how expensive is obesity?

Those shoes are damn worth it!