The Quuuuuill

It would benefit a social cause that is near and dear to his heart: making Mark Zuckerberg extremely wealthy

That wasn’t how it worked at first. Back when I first joined Reddit you could be made moderator of a sub by another user without confirmation

He was the moderator of a sub called “jailbait” for a long time. What’s less clear is if that was something he did on purpose or if someone else assigned him as a mod as a prank assuming he wouldn’t notice

People complain about mastodons lack of algorithms a lot. Its part of how misskey, ice shrimp, and catodon came to be

I just pick the fastest three working libreddit instances once pinged by libredirect

I’d be more likely to recommend you install a plugin like libredirect and use an alternative frontend to Reddit like libreddit. Get visibility into posts, spread your load across three alternative front end instances to avoid rate limiting, starve reddit of the tracking data they’re trying to direct people to their preferred front end for

Sure! So, you cannot log in to any server using the same identity. For better and for worse, your identity is attached to a server (or more accurately, a server is attached to your identity) so your login will only work with one server. As far as how we can both see each other’s stuff, that answer likes within the ActivityPub specification. I haven’t read fully into the spec, but the executive summary is that your server just displays information it has cached, and that other servers send it information to cache.

When you look at any feed, comment section, or thread, you are looking at an aggregated presentation of content from many servers that your server sends and receives messages to. As such, your feed is a reflection of both the content you have expressed an interest in by subscribing to it or clicking into it, but also the moderation style of the admin of the instance attached to your identity. As such, it is important to distinguish that it is factually inaccurate to say that which server you join when you sign up doesn’t matter.

Finding a server that is run the way you would want a server to be run will not be an instant process. The first step is to read the documents that an instance you’ve found has socialized. Do the rules sound good? The second step is to look at the local feed on that instance. Are you interested in the posts? Do any of them raise red flags? The third step is to sign up for the instance and try it out. Does it feel good to be there?

Obviously, since we’re already having this conversation, you’ve signed up for lemmy.ml. No matter how rigorous your vetting process, you still did enough to say you were interested in what was going on there, even if you didn’t fully understand it. Imagine if someone’s first impression of Lemmy was slrpnk.net. It would look like there isn’t that much activity, and all of it is about ecology and climate change. Meanwhile, you went to lemmy.ml and didn’t notice anything off. Done. That was a step.

So now. That final step after you’ve signed up for an instance where you decide if you’re going to stick around. This is where you pay attention to if there are consistent moderation issues with the instance you are on. To describe my personal experience, slrpnk.net is the third instance I’ve signed up for. The first instance I signed up for was on beehaw.org, and that remains my primary account. But about 3 weeks ago, Beehaw decided to defederate from a pair of large instances because they didn’t have the capacity to moderate the onslaught of content coming from those instances. I was subscribed to a few communities on those instances. I had been enjoying content coming from them. Most of the users weren’t problematic. So, I figured I’d set up a secondary account on another instance to view the content I was missing out on. I would just do my own blocking of content I would rather not see, since Lemmy and KBin provide better blocking tools than Reddit ever did.

That secondary account quickly ran into problems as the moderators from that instance let too much slide, by far. This is where the other part of deciding if you want to stay on an instance comes into play. I noticed in my time on that secondary instance a pattern of liking what people from slrpnk.net had to say about things (as well as disliking what people from exploding-heads had to say). I decided I wanted to be on an instance where I wasn’t constantly blocking content from one instance because it was already defederated. When I saw slrpnk.net was in fact defederated from exploding-heads, I knew it was a good landing place since I already felt a spirit of agreement with their userbase, so I joined.

I hope that clears things up. As much as possible, I want to reduce how intimidating all of this can seem. I’ve been interested in the fediverse for a long time. It’s only recently really gotten a way to interact with it that both has enough people on it to seem worthwhile AND matches the ways I like interacting with the internet (on forums). I realize it can look a little odd for someone with young accounts (@[email protected], @[email protected] , and @[email protected] are all me) to speak at length about these topics. I first signed up for a mastodon instance in 2016, and I had many of the same questions and confusion you did. I want to give people a more comfortable on ramp than I had.

Does all of that help?

Reddit is indeed not a federation capable platform. It is purely centralized. Lemmy and Kbin are both part of the Fediverse using the ActivityPub protocol, along with other social media platforms such as (but not limited to) mastodon, pelorma, calckey, misskey, and pixelfed. Exploding-Heads is, indeed, an instance separate from the instance you’re on (lemmy.ml) or the one I’m on (slrpnk.net)

Let’s start with federation. Federation is a concept where in two socially enabled sites can send eachother updates about hosted content so that users of one site can see content from the other without leaving their preferred site. Defederation is when a site elects to no longer send or receive updates to another site. The fediverse is a vast topology of many sites that use a shared protocol to federate with eachother

Also it looks like lemmy.world (your home instance) has elected to defederate from exploding heads. They’re becoming an interesting sociological study as I noticed a pattern early on of them having a lot of chud-y types, but it seems like the admin staff at lemmy.world is not interested in being an instance that tolerates that kind of behavior (which I realize now, looking at the code of conduct on mastodon.world, should have been expected eventually to become the norm). This gives me high hopes for Beehaw and lemmy.world being refederated with eachother sooner rather than later. Lemmy.world is probably still fighting an uphill battle with how rudimentary moderation tools are on this platform, but it warms my soul to see

Lemmygrad is a pro-authoritarian socialist instance

As far as instances that don’t federate with exploding heads, there’s sopuli.xyz, beehaw.org, slrpnk.net, and Lemmy.dbzer0.com

The first two are general purpose instances. Sopuli is kinda the most traditionally run instance. Its actively moderated, but its unlikely to defederate from an instance just because its big and moderating traffic from it is more than they can handle. Beehaw DOES defederate from instances that generate more traffic than they can manage. This is where my primary account is because the moderation style of “make the community a pleasant place to be regardless of the popularity of other instances’ popularity” is definitively my speed.

Slrpnk and dbzer0 are focused instances. Slrpnk is focused on ecological friendliness, sustainability, and making the physical world a more survivable space. They describe themselves as not trying to create a Utopian (impossibly idealistic) society, but rather a eutopian (acheivably idealistic) society. Dbzer0 is focused on digital anarchism. The slogan on their instance admin’s website alludes to the 90s slogan “You wouldn’t download a car” by effectively saying “yes I would, and I intend to.” I would say their mission is also eutopian in nature, but less focused on making our physical world more sustainable, but instead on the idea that the world would be more diverse and interesting if we put everything, and I mean EVERYTHING into the public domain. I’m not 100% sure I agree, but I definitively respect the ethos and the dedication to it. I guess what I’m saying is check it out, here them out, they’re not harmful or abusive. They’re filled with convictions, and I’d probably enjoy hanging out with them

Theyre basically the_Donald: fediverse edition. They troll, raid, and generally cause problems across the threadiverse in the name of promoting their authoritarian world view

If I understand correctly, it effectively runs your instance in whitelist mode instead of blacklist mode. To federate with another instance you have to explicitly list it as something you’d like to interact with, as opposed to what most people here are used to, where an instance federates by default, and you have to blacklist instances you want to defederate