I thought communities synced over instances so if an instance goes down, communities are still accessible. Is this not true?

This is not true. ActivityPub (the protocol Lemmy instances use to speak with one-another) does not intend to be a redundant, distributed datastore. There are a few reasons for this. One is practical. It needs to be affordable to start a new instance. If the requirements for starting a new instance entail mirroring significant parts of the fediverse (a network of over 2 million users and 22,000 instances) it would be impossible for anybody to do it unless they were Google/Facebook.

Another has to do with trust. A community has a home. That home is chosen (ideally) because the admins can be trusted. That instance is the universal source of truth for that community. If communities didn’t live on a specific instance, they would be vulnerable to various forms of hijacking. The home instance has the final say on who has permission to comment, and who has permission to perform moderator actions. None of these actions could be trusted if they weren’t cleared by the home instance first. Third party servers perform basic validataion against the currently known ban list / mod list / etc, but this could easily be spoofed by malicious instances.

When an instance goes down, it is kind of similar to a netsplit on IRC. A queue of outgoing messages build up on your instance, which can be seen on your instance. Queues of messages queue up on other instances, which can be seen on other instances, but they won’t be synchronized until the destination instance returns (this depends specifically on which inbox the messages are directed towards - I’m not particularly familliar with the specific implementation in Lemmy).

Finally (though not really), ActivityPub isn’t designed to be a broadcasting protocol. In the case of Lemmy, and other Reddit-like clones, it effectively acts as such, but it is intended only to send messages to the places they belong. If you post a message and the subscribers to that message only exist on 3 servers, that message ONLY gets sent to those three servers, even though there are thousands of servers in the network (at least, this is how it is supposed to work in theory).

I might have some details wrong here. I’m more familiar with how Mastodon works (and how it fails) at this point after troubleshooting various problems on my instance.

Liberalism has an actual definition, and it is not the colloquial definition used in mass-media to refer to “the left half of what is acceptable.”

Liberalism is an idealist (another word which has a very specific definition) political philosophy which champions private property, constitutionalism, republicanism, rule of law, and free trade. It has a philosophical canon, flowing through writers like Locke, Montesquieu, Mirabeau, Rousseau, Paine, etc. Further economic works, like Smith’s “Wealth of Nations,” are built on this philosophical underpinning.

Marxists are materialists. This is in contrast with the idealism of Liberals. While Liberals believe ideas are the force which drives change in the material world, Marxists understand that ideas are just a reflection of the material conditions they emerge from.

Liberals find themselves banging their heads against the walls of the institutions time and time again, because from their perspective, these institutions are just a reflection of ideas, and as long as the justification for an institution on paper is sound, there is no reason to think it cannot be reformed. An institution like the US Congress, or the Executive Branch is never at fault. It is simply a good institution simply being run by bad people. Marxists (and Anarchists) reject this quite simply, by looking at the material incentives involved, and the long ghastly history surrounding these institutions.

“Combating liberalism” does not mean being a piece of shit to anybody to the right of Bernie Sanders or Jeromy Corbin. There is a genuine struggle to ensure the new crop of social media platforms don’t simply end up defending the legitimacy of the established institutions at the expense of genuine radicals who find themselves at odds with the actual longstanding policy and practices of these institutions. To avoid situations like when mastodon.lol banned CODEPINK, a prominent anti-war organization, for being “Tankies.” This is Liberalism, and it should be combated.

For the love of god, listen to some Citations Needed and stop self-congratilating your media literacy because some fucking dork with a website tells you the New York Times and Washington Post aren’t biased.

Removed by mod

You should be aware that the people over at Raddle have a massive grudge against Lemmy and they post shit like this all the time.

It is true. You can host an image somewhere (i.e. actually run the web server) paste a link to it, and if anybody clicks on it they will show up in your web server’s access log. Typically this will include an IP address and a user agent string (indicating OS, browser version, etc.). To mitigate this, Lemmy would need store copies of any media which gets linked here and serve those instead of allowing hot-links. Mastodon does this, but for the same reason it requires hundreds of gigabytes of storage to run a small instance.

I feel like PeerTube hasn’t broken through yet in the way Mastodon has, and Lemmy is kind-of broaching on. Mastodon itself is heavy for what it does. I need 8GB of RAM, >600GB of storage, and 2 CPU cores to run a 100 person instance. Lemmy is leaner (as well as some microblog style alternatives to Mastodon like Misskey / Pleroma). Peertube, on the other hand, can only get so lean. Hosting video content is orders of magnitude more intensive than hosting a text-based message board. It is much more costly to do this, and to compete with platforms like YouTube, it is not sufficient for just spin up a single instance. You also need to work out CDNs, caching, load balancing, etc.

Like Jack said, I’d just find an instance you vibe with and post stuff there, but it will take a lot of resources to grow the network as a whole.

If some fuckstick from Nebraska asked me to snitch on my users for something which isn’t a crime in my state, I would simply tell them to fuck themselves, go ahead, and try to have me extradited. If my instance were bordering on a trillion dollars market cap, I’d hire a fucking lawyer.

The lack of “Lemmy etiquette” is basically the whole point of the project. There is no general rule. There are places for shitposting, there are places for serious discussion. The civility fetishists get their corner, the people who enjoy replying to bigots with pigpoopballs.jpg get their corner. There is a niche for everybody - and if there isn’t - you can start one without being completely isolated from the rest of the network (at least, initially).

The situation on Reddit was absurd. The “Reddiquette” rules were generally okay, but very open to subjective enforcement. I spent many years on Reddit. I browsed a lot of different communities on there. But if one person on a community I browse makes a post saying “look what this asshole is saying” on another community I browse, and I go there an make an insightful comment, I am now “brigading.” If somebody wants to politely debate whether trans people have a right to exist, or whether or not we should send the homeless to concentration camps, and I tell them to fuck themselves, I am being “uncivil.”

Communities need mods and admins who have their back, not mods who become cops for the admins who become cops for the board of directors who only care about increasing KPIs and profit. The coolest thing that can happen on the Fediverse is landing in a place where the admins will eat a block or two to defend the integrity of their communities. This is something which is simply impossible on Reddit.

The developers are communists. One of them maintains a collection of essays explaining their beliefs. There is a lot of drama and controversy swirling around. A lot of people putting words in each other’s mouths. If you want a straight answer, I would go straight to the source. The fact that you’re hearing third-hand that they’re white supremacists and nazis clearly illustrates how distorting the rumor mill is.

Have fun putting words in people’s mouths and spreading rumors on Reddit.

If you ask a liberal what “tankie” means you will get a response that sounds a lot like if you ask a conservative what “woke” means. The two main developers are communists, trying to collectivize social media. It is very shocking. 🙄 They develop the software transparently, out in the open, along with many other contributors. They also operate lemmy.ml, the very first Lemmy instance. Dessalines has a collection of essays he’s written on Github. If you are concerned about his beliefs, I would go straight to the source rather then taking third hand rumors on face value. As for the rest of the network, each instance (such as lemmy.world) is operated independently. The whole point of federation is to decentralize control over the network.

Some Fediverse platforms (e.g. Mastodon) allow you to migrate your account from one server to another. By doing this, you keep your account details, post history, subscriptions, etc. and your followers get redirected to your new account. Lemmy does not currently support this, but it may someday.