OpenStars

Yup, as said already, exactly like that.

Most social media these days is a single system / platform, like Facebook or Reddit. Federated media is rather like email where whichever service you send it from (Gmail, Hotmail, Yahoo, etc.), the recipient receives it and you don't need to care about exactly how.

I feel that analogy is overly simplistic, and leaves people baffled as to what defederation means. So instead I like the idea that federation is akin to ships (pirate or free trade) passing messages around - some captains have beef with other captains and refuse to talk with them, but otherwise you have access to the entire network of all messages.

It does get slightly more complicated when you rise up above the forum-based "Threadiverse" (Lemmy, PieFed, Mbin, and arguably flarum and nodeBB) to discuss the wider ActivityPub-based "Fediverse" - those entirely different platforms can pass messages between them, but it is not always so easy or straightforward, e.g. Mastodon is based on people whereas the Threadiverse is centered around "communities" (on Reddit these were called subreddits), so for someone on Mastodon to talk to someone on Lemmy (or PieFed) they would have to jump through several hoops to make it happen (although Mbin eases that process). That's basically the end of my knowledge there bc I don't use Mastodon but I hope that helps to have gone that far at least.

Getting back to the ship analogy, you personally could, in theory, have your own ship, which you could use either privately, or share with a few friends, or even open it up to the public. That "machine" that you use, that "server", in Fediverse terminology is called an "instance". And it will have "admins" who run it, as well as "moderators" who run the communities on it. Also, it will need to pick which variety of software to run, so like there are Lemmy instances, and PieFed instances, and Mbin instances, etc. Sometimes the same admins run multiple of them, e.g. lemmy.world is by far the largest Lemmy instance, and now they have branched out to try out a PieFed instance as well called PieFed.world. It's the same people, possibly running on the same machine or at least you could imagine that, but a different software platform.

lemmy.dbzer0.com is a Lemmy instance, and one day that awesome admin dbzer0 (a real person, though surely that's not their irl name😂) may likewise make a PieFed instance, perhaps it will be called PieFed.dbzer0.com, or something, who knows.:-)

Regardless, the messages will get passed between them. Your choice of instance gives you a different experience bc you are picking a different captain of your boat - maybe you'll even decide to become one yourself - and then yes the software that is run on the instance greatly changes your method of access. e.g. PieFed has flairs (both user and post varieties) and polls, but since Lemmy lacks those, the only way to participate in such is to use that same software, i.e. to sign up on an instance that runs it (or maybe one day Lemmy will catch up and offer all 3 of those? I am sure that it will, but I sincerely doubt it will happen anytime "soon"). Here is an example of a post that uses a poll (and a couple of post flairs, and also hashtags too). Btw the sidebar of that community has some good resources to learn more about the Fediverse if you are interested. But that post itself is not able to be viewed on a Lemmy instance, since it uses a poll which Lemmy does not know how to handle.

And then defederation is a whole other thing. When one captain (admin) gets mad at another captain (admin) for just absolutely REFUSING to respect the rules that collectively were agreed upon - sending spam, harassment of users, trolling behaviors etc. - defederation can be a method of last resort to cut off all communication with them. It stops any messages from that point forward - for good or bad - which can cause confusion but I want to point out that the captain ("admin") is literally the owner of their personal ship (machine/"instance") and so has the right to do as they please with it. And all the more so if the instance is open to the public, in which case they arguably have the responsibility to protect their users from the trolling and harassment campaigns. "Free speech" is never free, someone must always bear the cost, of maintenance, of platforming it, and so on.

If you mean the "how is your day going so far" type of posts, I don't think those are meant to be deceptive so much as to generate engagement by placing the post into people's subscribed feeds.

But if you mean the same identical post, that's not great - perhaps you want to unsubscribe from communities that do or even allow such practices.

For Japanese speaking people there is Misskey - it is FOSS and uses ActivityPub.

Usually whenever I want to make a post, I think back to the comments I typically receive and think better of doing so, then don't.

I'm sure this is happening elsewhere too, e.g. on Reddit, though balanced by a much larger user base (and ofc bots doing a lot of the actual posting, and sometimes the commenting as well).

I probably should comment less often too:-). Really, touching grass and talking with people irl is much more fulfilling.

A LARGE fraction of these can easily be curated by noticing what instance they are on. Hexbear tends to hold trolls, and while not everyone on Lemmy.ml is insane, conversely the most batshit insane comments I've received on Lemmy kept coming from there (less so than lemmygrad.ml, but still very noticeable).

So rather than leave the Threadiverse behind, I just personally blocked those instances, and I'm much happier ever since (note you can't really do that using Lemmy software as the "instance block" feature is misnamed, only offering a "community mute", but PieFed and a very select number of rare apps can do it, or custom Ublock filtering).

Welcome! While you are still looking around, you may want to check out PieFed as well & e.g. https://piefed.zip/ . It offers tons of features that Lemmy lacks, like categories of communities, which are user customizable and shareable, flairs (both user and post), polls, combining together all cross-posts across all communities, etc. Check it out and prepare to just fall in love with it!:-)

Even better, while Lemmy is written in the Rust language and adds features at the timescale of multiple years (not joking here) whereas PieFed is written in Python and adds new stuff literally weekly. So the gap in feature sets, instead of ever closing, will only continue to widen over time.

Although if you are going to stay with Lemmy, you would be hard pressed to find a better one than what you are on now. Fortunately, you may not have to choose, if it opens up a PieFed instance by the same people (discussion).

Quality over quantity:-D

Yeah uh... THAT'S why. 🤯

I went through and tested all of the Themes available on piefed.social - PieFed, High Contrast, Hercules 1982, Irix - 1998, Card Shadow, Fxomt, Trans Pride, HLT-Fruits - calm and soothing, Forest, and Dillo (although this one doesn't even show a list of Communities at all), on my Firefox Android device, and then I went through and did it all again while requesting the Desktop version of the page. I always see those two "Skip to" links, although sometimes the actual Skip to wording itself is greyed out.

Then again, I do not see those on the actual Desktop (Firefox or Chrome), so it looks like they are mobile-only links.

I suggest that it does not matter at all how long the Communities listing is, if you can skip right past all of them down to the Topics section below.

So yeah, it looks like this menu needs a UX tweak specifically for Desktop users.

Are you using the web UI?

What I see is Feeds, then Communities, then Topics, which makes perfect sense to me, and there is a button to Skip (directly down) to either Communities (bypassing Feeds) or to Topics (bypassing both Feeds and Communities) - so you shouldn't need to scroll if you can see and use that link?

Accidentally posted to Political Memes first. Whoops!

I dunno... that kinda sounds like it works too?