vaguerant

Here's the graph, as posted by CloudFlare CEO Matthew Prince:

Twitter DNS rankings over time, Jan-Jul 2023

If nobody has ever subscribed to a foreign instance's community/magazine before, it won't show up on your home instance. Currently, the best way to pull it into your local instance is to copy its web address on the other site into your local search.

e.g. If you wanted to pull in kbin.social's AskKbin from lemmy.world you'd find its URL, https://kbin.social/m/AskKbin, and paste that address into your home instance's search box. As long as somebody has done this once, AskKbin will now show up in regular community lists, searches, etc.

Get us a photo of the popsicle stick skyscraper before it burns down.

Lemmy communities are "groups" in ActivityPub parlance, and groups do exist on the microblogging platforms. Using Mastodon as an example for now, a Masto user could find the group equivalent to a Lemmy community and make a post and/or comment there and it would show up on lemmy.world and anybody else who federates with that Masto instance. In reality, the groups experience is kind of terrible and a poor interface to these thread-style communities, and you lose all kinds of features like the recency/score sorting algorithm, the ability to downvote things, etc.

It would take a true masochist to post to lemmy.world from Mastodon, which is why you almost never see it. I've seen one Mastodon user in my time on the threadiverse so far. Most people who are already on the microblogging side of the fediverse have just chosen to register a separate account on a threadiverse instance so they can have an actual usable interface rather than stuffing a link aggregator through a blog-shaped hole.

Groups don't even exist on Threads currently. Maybe they will by the time they implement ActivityPub, but they may not consider that to be a core goal as a microblogging, Twitter-style platform which has no obvious use for them. This would currently make Threads an even worse interface to the threadiverse (kind of ironic) than Mastodon, which I can't stress enough is already awful. You would just have to search for individual posts by browsing somewhere like lemmy.world directly, copying and pasting the URLs into the Threads app or web site to populate the conversation in their interface in order to reply to the posts and comments there.

In short, using Lemmy via Threads is probably going to be such a nightmare that only turbo-nerds will try to do it, and turbo-nerds are more likely to realize "This is awful and I should just go join Lemmy or kbin or something," than persist with that hassle long-term. Now, kbin users have more justification to be concerned about how Threads will impact their communities, because kbin supports microblogging directly--in corporate terms, it's like if Reddit and Twitter combined into one site that you could tab between on the fly. This means kbin users will be more likely to see Threads content and vice versa.

The other problem here is that I don't think a lot of people actually know how defederation works. There's lots of takes like "I don't want Meta to get my data, so we have to defederate." But defederating stops you from receiving their content, not the other way around. Once Threads actually is federating, defederating it will stop people seeing posts from Threads users. That has its own merits, but it doesn't protect your data in any way. If you don't want corporate entities to access your online posts, either send them via some private end-to-end encrypted system where only you and the direct recipients can see them, or don't post them online at all. The Internet is on the Internet.

Now, a bit more of an explanation on what defederation is: while the decentralized nature complicates things (since different servers will have different defederation lists), defederation is closer to a Reddit shadow-ban than whatever it is people are imagining. If literally everybody defederated Meta/Threads, they would still see our content, but from their (Threads users') perspective, it would just seem like we're all giving them the silent treatment, because we never respond to their posts or comments.

"Maybe the worst bluff I've ever seen." - Michael Bluth

Yeah, they can vote and reply and all of that and others who remain federated will see their interactions, but you or any other server who defederates them won't.

Yeah, my understanding is that defederation prevents any incoming communication, so you won't see any posts or comments that come from lemmy.bullshit, however users from lemmy.bullshit will still see all of your comments and posts from lemmy.world unless they choose to defederate you back.

Now, this is odd. Perhaps it's a bug in Lemmy? I'm reading this post on kbin (here's the link to it on kbin.social, you can look without an account) and @Some_Emo_Chick's original post has the link just fine, it's the header link as you'd expect. If I go over to lemmy.world and view the same post, the header link instead points to a webp thumbnail from the article, hosted on lemmy.world itself. This seems to mean that the correct link was posted, since it's what we got on kbin, but Lemmy fumbled somewhere and replaced it with the thumbnail.

Isn't that privacy more illusory than actual? You're not surfacing the web pages which show the votes, but the protocol is openly sharing that info and anybody can still see what your instance's users have voted on just by looking at them from a different instance. I'm not going to out anybody, but it was trivial for me to find that thread here on kbin.social and see exactly who upvoted it, including a kglitch.social user.

Does EarthBound count? It's sort of a sci-fi fantasy story which mostly takes place in a contemporary western setting (most of the game occurs in Eagleland, America filtered via Japan). There's ancient evils, pay phones, psychic powers, a cafe, a bunch of zombies and a multi-level mall. Not all of the game is urban, with suburban, rural, swamp and alien areas, but there's several cities to explore.

Yeah, the front page is working just fine, what's not as good is going to a specific community for a subject you're interested in which currently has 1-3 posts and zero replies.