For a start, regulations that force any system with 'quick tip' buttons of 15/20/etc % HAVE to have a No Tip option as well. Can't force your customers to type out 0.00.
Greenskye
joined 2 years ago
I was more referring about impacts of non-local users browsing communities on other instances. Which instance handles that load? If I browse lemmy.ml communities on my lemmy.world account am I impacting lemmy.world or lemmy.ml? What happens when all 35k lemmy.world users browse a lemmy.ml community because it's the most popular one? Does lemmy.ml need to support all their own users + any non-local visitors?
This is something I've thought about a lot, as I've reflected on my sometimes hypocritical feelings on the matter from when I've been affected by both sides of this issue.
A common example of the 1st amendment is that it allows you to stand out on the street corner at the town square and talk about your beliefs with anyone that will listen. Likewise you could create a newspaper or newsletter and the government wouldn't be allowed to interfere in your operations or refuse to deliver your mail or something. However, you weren't protected from people not listening, jeering at you or getting fired from your job because your boss disagreed.
All well and good. But when we look at this in the context of today's reality I feel like things start to fall apart a bit. Let's look first at the 'town square'. For many Americans there really isn't a town square anymore. Car-centric culture has eliminated publically-owned shared use spaces. There's regular complaints that modern life doesn't allow one to simply 'exist' anywhere without monetization (and therefore private property and 1st amendment exempt).
Next let's look at other methods of communication. Yes, mail still exists and is protected (at least with USPS), but zero digital methods of communication are likewise protected. Even if you do go ahead with setting up your own website or mail server, you will be reliant on a private company somewhere. Whether that is the datacenter hosting you, the ISP connecting you or the payment processor you use to keep yourself afloat any or all of those can take issue with your speech and shut you down with zero recourse. You would literally have to build your own bank, ISP, and data center and probably a lot more things in order to practice your 'right' of free speech.
So yes, you still have the right to stand on the street corner (and pointlessly yell at the cars driving by at 50 MPH hour) or send out a newspaper if you want. But I think it's worth asking ourselves if Americans still deserve at least a semblance of what those two examples used to imply. I personally believe that we need more publicly owned digital infrastructure (or at least heavy regulation on internet infrastructure such as payment processors and ISPs/data centers) so that our 1st amendment isn't eroded into obsolescence.
(And in case it matters, I've been both pro-censorship of hate speech and then upset at the non-stop attacks on NSFW content online. I've had a hard time working through those two takes on censorship internally)
Basically all link aggregation sites repost stuff from other sites. OC can be a fuzzy concept
Judging by the logic that 'TPA users a very small fraction of our users and therefore they don't matter to us' I really don't see why accessibility users wouldn't fall into that same camp. They just have to be more circumspect about it for PR reasons.
This definitely where we need something like a digital ADA law. You grow big enough and you have to support disabled users of your website.
I guess my question is that you can't really control if a community grows to be huge or not. You can control who can create an account your instance, but unless you defederate, what happens if 20 million accounts subscribe to a single community? How is that load handled? Does it just collapse the entire instance under it's weight? Or is the fediverse just inherently built to stifle community growth past a certain scale?
This is an area that needs big improvement. The home instance advantage is currently driving things towards centralization, directly counter to the goal of Lemmy. An end user needs to be able to easily see all the options available to them in their federation.
If that can't be improved quickly, then I'd suggest instance owners start to specialize on topics in order to better scale. Have a gaming hub, a lifestyle hub, a politics hub, etc.
I'm thinking when you hit subscribe, it presents a box of other communities that the community owner suggests as the same topic. Then I can also subscribe to those at the same time if I want.
If I run a D&D community I could suggest D&D 5E community as well and a TTRPG community too. Or also another D&D community from a different instance.
Less about structure and more about easing end user friction to get to content
I think I've mentioned this elsewhere, but a lot of these issues of structure I don't think need to be solved on content creator/admin side, but rather on the end user UI side. The fragmentation is good for the network as a whole, but as an end user, I want to group similar communities together into one. Let me bulk subscribe to cats, toebeans, kittens, etc. I'll do that action once. Then if one of those goes defunct, I won't really care. I also won't really care which community I'm posting to (except to ensure I'm following the rules), because ultimately most of the savvy users will be mass subscribed to topics as well.
This preserves control (I can opt out of toebeans if I don't like that community for some reason), while keeping the distributed nature. No one would truly 'own' the cat pics community as it would span across multiple instances and communities.
There was this neat, but totally unnecessary 'water cooled' mattress cover thing I stumbled on. It had a series of tubes they ran water through to keep your bed cool at night. Nifty little product. They also had an app and built in sensors for that sleep tracking stuff. Also neat and a nice value add.
Except that the app required a subscription and you could only adjust the temperature through the app. Oh and the subscription was $250/year. Talk about bullshit. You know they're already selling all the sleep tracking data and then they want you to rent the product forever on top of that??
I have little understanding of the technical details of Lemmy, but I'm having a hard time understanding how it can scale. How do you build something like /r/funny with 40 million subscribers when the biggest Lemmy instance seems to be suffering at 30k users?
As far as I can see while users can subscribe to communities on different instances, communities themselves are locked to a single instance. How could a multi million strong community grow here?
My understanding from the beehaw defed is that more surgical moderation tools just don't exist right now (and likely won't for awhile unless the two Lemmy devs get some major help). Admins only really have a singular nuclear option to deal with other instances that aren't able to tackle the bot problem.
Personally I don't see defederating as a bad thing. People and instances are working through who they want to be in their social network. The well managed servers will eventually rise to the top with the bot infested and draconian ones eventually falling into irrelevance.
As a user this will result in some growing pains since Lemmy currently doesn't offer a way to migrate your account. Personally I already have 3 Lemmy accounts. A good app front end that minimizes the friction from account switching would greatly help these growing pains.