I’ve slowly become familiar with lemmy and learned the things like blahajj is an ally of trans but hides downvotes and kbin shows how you vote to others etcetc. i don’t even know what hexbear is but hear it’s ideologically wonky.
Lots of Lemmy instances basically have some decent aspects, but then something about them is a total dealbreaker.
I’ve started looking at moderation histories when coming across content removed by moderators and am now able to distinguish instances where ideologies not aligned with their admins get censored. I first noticed it when checking why certain posts were removed on Lemmy.ml and had to research lemmy.ml to understand they purposely are a socialist communist niche community so they basically remove content they don’t want. I had a run in with a drama on Lemmy.world and curiously checked their mod log to realize that they actually quite often remove comments that don’t match their ideology (along with finding controversial historical actions of .world).
So after all this getting to know instances involved in lemmy, you know which one has no weird dealbreaker attributes that I know of? I just realized tonight which one it is…
sh.itjust.works
So cheers everyone.
Admins and Mods here you are doing great. Community, you are doing great too. grats on being the best instance
So how does that lemmy work? do I need a whole nother login for that? Some people mention lemm.ee would i need a new sign in for that as well?
This post was made on that instance. Federation is why you see it and can comment on it. You have access to see all of their posts and comments and can interact unless your instance .world in this case gets defederated from their instance. You do not need any new logins to participate with their instance. It will show up in your feed on w.e app you prefer to use. (Same goes for lemm.ee)
Defederation is essentially a block made of an entire instance. Sometimes it is done to prevent future issues, and sometimes it is done because idiological differences. An example of the first is threads being built into the fedeverse. It has so many users that it would effectively nudge out all smaller instances and eventually start putting ads back in and w.e they want to make money and do whatever they choose to manipulate the users. So many instances have pre-set their instances to not allow federation with threads when it eventually connects. The second example was ideology, which the user mentioned .hexbear. They are a group of people who are often misrepresented but have no problems with commenting death to America over and over again. Some of them are trolls, some are not, but in the end many instances defederated from them because they didn’t want to deal with all the issues and people bitching all the time. World is the largest instance by a good amount last I checked. (Probably to large ratio wise). You shouldn’t have issues there. When someone posts a comment on dbzero, it’ll show in your stuff.
Some other things instances vary on is, upvotes, downvotes, no votes, and perpetual scrolling. (Though many apps have that choice as well). Some people worry about mental impacts of perpetual scrolling so they limit it. Some instances don’t show the votes, and some only show the upvotes as they believe it helps promote discussion as opposed to just downvoting something you don’t like and moving on. This also makes situations where someone may not realize 184 people downvotes and 1 person upvoted and since they are new to a topic, may not be able to tell it may not be based on truth or agree with public opinion or what not.
The one thing people SHOULD realize. No matter what your instance shows you, upvotes, downvotes and by who ARE recorded and sent by Lemmy through federation as part of how it works. So when you upvotes a comment, there are people out there that know YOUR user name in specific upvotes that comment. They can see a list of every vote. This also goes for downvotes. Most every instance has turned this view off for users so people don’t get upset at someone and follows them around nagging them and what not. That said. The data still exists and is transferred through federation otherwise it cannot keep track of up/down votes, because otherwise it would just go up or down every time you hit the button it has to say “Freddy.world” has already voted.
So now if you don’t understand how scary that is yet. Just note that bad actors can spin up an instance, federate and know the username who up/downvoted say a post about Trump being a dictator. If you are not using a VPN at all times, your IP address is going to get caught up being tied to your account. So they have that account connected to your phone (and government will know the home address)
Have fun out there, but it’s always nice to understand how things work. (Upvoted a nude, I’m sure someone can create a database and log all of it fairly easily.).
thank you, i had a feeling there was some privacy issues with the openness of the network. I always thought reddit would do good to have multiple profiles allowed to a main account, so if you wanted to shitpost, or if you wanted to wankbank it, or discuss Friedman economics you would have profile to do that with. Of course big reddit would admin all that, but it would reduce in theory all the new accounts constantly being made alongside the bot accounts and reduce some of the throw away nature of accounts that accrue to much data over time thru the nature of commenting
Yeah, if they did the multiple profile thing, in the end all of the IP addresses would still link the profiles back to the same user (or household) on Reddit’s end, which we know they sell user data like many companies do. Many sites don’t intentionally grab the data but rather have to have the data for functionality. (Hope I’m not over explaining something you already know, just information in case people aren’t aware.). Essentially every machine while connected to the Internet is tied to an IP address. If I go to a webpage, say Google I am outwardly requesting the data from Google.com (or w.e the address is which also translates to an IP address). The data from that page is sent back from their website to my IP. When that is done it is logged as computers verify the packets are all sent/received for any errors. So say you search for a washer/dryer or pants. It knows what you wanted, and where it was sending that information. Now someone who sells those products wants to know who is looking for those products, so they will pay Google (or other companies) for that information and also want Google to push advertisements for their website who sells pants or home appliances that delivers or is local to your area. They know where you are locally because your IP is tied back to your City/Internet Service Provider. So marketing wise, that’s already a good enough geographical understanding of “they’ve got a Sears near them, send them our adverts” or no they don’t have a Sears near them, don’t waste our advertising budget on them specifically. (Maybe shipping costs are high to your area)
It’s all happening fluidly all the time in the background
I have lemm.ee as my backup for when aussie.zone is down
For use like that you do need another login, just go to https://lemm.ee/ and make a login
There are browser scripts to copy your subscriptions from one instance login to another
You only need one login to post on any instance, but I would recommend having multiple logins just in case the instance you picked (lemmy.world) shuts down for any reason. Your comment/post history is linked to your instance of choice.
A commonly mentioned comparison for how instances work is email. Let’s say that you have a Gmail account, for example. You can email people with a Yahoo email address, but you can only access your inbox by going to Gmail. Different instances basically function like how different email providers do. They have their own design and rules to follow, but anyone can communicate anyone.
You can communicate with either using your existing account as we are doing now.
If you prefer an instance’s rules or vibes you can choose to make one your home by making an account there, but otherwise we’re all federated and you can engage from whichever.
No you don’t need another login. It’s just that communities on that instance are more chill. You can find the same communities across different instances but the ones on certain instances will ban you for almost nothing.
Edit: forgot to mention you can only create a community of your own on the instance where your account is located.