[HN Gopher] Lemmy Release v0.14.0: Federation with Mastodon and ...
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       Lemmy Release v0.14.0: Federation with Mastodon and Pleroma
        
       Author : agluszak
       Score  : 100 points
       Date   : 2021-11-18 14:49 UTC (8 hours ago)
        
 (HTM) web link (lemmy.ml)
 (TXT) w3m dump (lemmy.ml)
        
       | dang wrote:
       | Previous related threads:
       | 
       |  _Lemmy - A link aggregator for the fediverse_ -
       | https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28453165 - Sept 2021 (213
       | comments)
       | 
       |  _Lemmy a federated, open-source and privacy alternative to
       | Reddit_ - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24393689 - Sept
       | 2020 (9 comments)
       | 
       |  _Lemmy, an open-source federated Reddit alternative, gets
       | funding for development_ -
       | https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23664067 - June 2020 (634
       | comments)
       | 
       |  _AMA about Lemmy, an open source, Federated alternative to
       | Reddit_ - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23389622 - June
       | 2020 (4 comments)
       | 
       |  _Lemmy: Federated Alternative to Reddit in Rust_ -
       | https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19686972 - April 2019 (99
       | comments)
        
       | agluszak wrote:
       | I am 100% excited by the Fediverse and 0% excited by the
       | Metaverse. Finally we're getting a way out of the walled
       | garden/silo model of social networks pushed by commercial
       | platforms like Facebook, Twitter and Reddit.
        
         | kzrdude wrote:
         | The fediverse seems to barely be growing and have no chance of
         | mainstream adoption. Maybe that's fine, that's just going to
         | mean it's a more exclusive internet.
        
           | solarkraft wrote:
           | So far I enjoy this exclusive internet. So many more cool
           | people, so much less shitty commercialization and user-
           | hostility.
           | 
           | Of course it's not 100% ready for everyone yet, but I don't
           | think it's very far. Like the early internet, it's currently
           | full of early adopters and still a little awkward to use. I
           | don't think it will stay that way forever.
        
           | dane-pgp wrote:
           | Barely growing? I don't know which stats you're looking at,
           | but the Fediverse Observer charts[0] show that the number of
           | users, servers, and posts have all doubled since the start of
           | 2020.
           | 
           | [0] https://fediverse.observer/stats
        
             | wiz21c wrote:
             | 4500000 users ! that's a lot. I thought that kind of stuff
             | was for a niche. Looks much more promising all of a suddend
             | ! thx for sharing.
        
           | agluszak wrote:
           | > barely be growing and have no chance of mainstream adoption
           | I guess someone could have said that about ARPANET in
           | 1970s... ;)
        
           | BeFlatXIII wrote:
           | I am totally fine with the outcome of an exclusive internet
           | that's exclusive due to a lack of interest rather than
           | exclusive by dedicated gatekeeping.
        
       | wonks wrote:
       | If Lemmy's voting system is incompatible with Mastodon & Pleroma,
       | then does that also mean that reshares and Favorites from
       | Mastodon or Pleroma won't count as upvotes in Lemmy?
        
         | sudosysgen wrote:
         | Imo they shouldn't count anyways.
        
           | [deleted]
        
       | olah_1 wrote:
       | The federation seems confusing even for someone that understands
       | activity pub.
       | 
       | Did we ever stop to ask if we _should_? Or did we only ask if we
       | _could_?
        
         | jlkuester7 wrote:
         | Uhhh I mean I guess it depends on your goals, but for social
         | media services as generic as Mastodon/Lemmy, federation seems
         | like an obvious advantage in terms of increased "social
         | connection" as opposed to siloed communities that cannot talk
         | to each other.
        
         | rakoo wrote:
         | I think the federation in fediverse went on wrong tracks. What
         | I want is a single identity and be able to use it everywhere,
         | whether the "where" provides me with a photo sharing service or
         | a blogging service. What we have instead is a photo sharing
         | service where I'm registered and a blogging service where I'm
         | also registered but with a different identity, and we try to
         | make the two fit into one another but it doesn't really match.
        
           | bronlund wrote:
           | What he said!
        
       | mhd wrote:
       | Wasn't lemmy also a vi clone?
        
       | mianos wrote:
       | I have no idea what Lemmy is aside from a vi clone. I eventually
       | found a link to a post "What is Lemmy" and it says: "Recently
       | there seems to be some of misunderstanding what the lemmy.ml
       | instance is about, especially from newer users". I still don't
       | know.
        
         | input_sh wrote:
         | I don't blame you, but you're looking at the wrong place:
         | https://join-lemmy.org/
         | 
         | In short, it's a decentralized reddit in the same way Mastodon
         | is a decentralized Twitter.
         | 
         | Lemmy.ml is a main server running it.
        
       | HMH wrote:
       | > Hardcoded slur filter removed
       | 
       | Nice, IMO this shouldn't have been there in the first place,
       | considering its inflexibility and obvious bias to what the devs
       | consider slurs.
        
         | Lambdanaut wrote:
         | Finally I can start working on Lemmy again without feeling a
         | moral weight in my gut.
         | 
         | Great move on the part of the creators of Lemmy. I know this
         | was a hard thing for them to do, because I know how much they
         | were opposed to removing the filter, but I think this will be a
         | very good thing for Lemmy in the future.
        
         | rndmind wrote:
         | What do you mean, inflexibility? The regex is right there for a
         | server admin to edit or disable, that's as flexible as it gets
         | hah..
        
           | wraptile wrote:
           | That means you have to build from source which kinda goes
           | against the spirit of a decentralized network.
        
             | nightpool wrote:
             | Updating the source code of your software goes agains the
             | spirit of a decentralized network? How? The whole _point_
             | of decentralized networks is that people with different
             | source code /implementations can communicate with each
             | other.
        
               | andrewzah wrote:
               | Because it reduces the operators of said networks to
               | people who know how to build rust/etc projects from
               | source. That is limiting and off putting.
        
               | all2 wrote:
               | Sounds like a business opportunity.
               | 
               | Federated software vendor: we do the dirty work so you
               | can start a new instance with one click.
        
               | tedunangst wrote:
               | Does that one click also edit the source code?
        
               | all2 wrote:
               | I suppose users could apply patches and alter
               | configurations? Caveat Emptor: we do not offer customer
               | support for altered source/configs.
        
               | andrewzah wrote:
               | There are services like that for Mastodon [0]. But a
               | provider that lets you host from a choice of e.g.
               | mastodon, pleroma, lemmy etc would be interesting.
               | 
               | [0]: https://masto.host/
        
               | coldacid wrote:
               | Masto.host is run by one of those people who put
               | inflexible ideology ahead of the wants and needs of their
               | users. That is ever a concern when having a third party
               | set up and manage everything for you.
        
               | rndmind wrote:
               | That's true, compiling rust is harsh, but we're are
               | talking about server admins and sysadmins here, I have
               | faith that sysadmins will know how to compile and deploy
               | rust.
               | 
               | TIL the Lemmy Server code is written in rust, hell yeah
        
               | BeFlatXIII wrote:
               | Do you want your sysadmin to be someone who provably
               | can't build from source?
        
               | nightpool wrote:
               | Yes. That's what the word "operator" means. You need to
               | operate the software that the network depends on, or
               | trust someone who does. You see this a lot of time in the
               | Bitcoin/cryptocurrency community as well, where node
               | operators complain about the changes "forced onto them"
               | by developers. Ultimately, it's a labor problem--if
               | someone else is writing your code for you, and you don't
               | know how to modify it, you're at the mercy of their
               | decisions.
        
         | encryptluks2 wrote:
         | This is good news. It does appear that the major Lemmy
         | instances are ran by leftist groups politically and that most
         | of their development comes from the left, which is their own
         | right. I do wonder though if they will take actions at some
         | point to try to censor instances that may disagree with them
         | politically, whether it takes actions to simply disable
         | federation with them or other actions in the software itself.
        
           | mattbk1 wrote:
           | An instance of Lemmy is free to federate (or not) with other
           | instances on the Fediverse. Each instance can have its own
           | code of conduct. Seems good for everyone.
        
         | ratww wrote:
         | Slur filters are a clbuttic mistake.
        
         | seany wrote:
         | I've never really understood why more of this kind of thing
         | isn't optional in the _client_ to start with. There's this
         | weird "I'll control everything" default with some of these
         | projects thats just baffling; given the seeming point of
         | distributed/federated systems.
        
           | ruined wrote:
           | it was a shortcut to cull the lowest effort 4chan-style spam
           | until moderation tools were implemented. the functionality is
           | still there, in fact it's more configurable now
           | 
           | they did it because social media can't get off the ground if
           | it's full of useless garbage. would you read hn if all the
           | comments were just the same word over and over?
        
             | esyir wrote:
             | Eh, from what I know, it was very much ideological, at
             | least that's what I heard from people I knew working with
             | it.
             | 
             | To quote the dev on this himself:
             | 
             | >And putting it in a DB table means someone could very
             | easily remove it by deleting every row of that table, which
             | isn't good. I want to make it very difficult for racist
             | trolls to use the most updated version of Lemmy.
        
               | throwaway894345 wrote:
               | Honestly it's always seemed to me that this kind of anti-
               | racism always _drives_ more racism than it eliminates--
               | people don 't like being told what not to do/say and buck
               | accordingly. In particular, left-wing identity politics
               | _especially in our institutions_ seems to me to be
               | driving many people toward right-wing identity politics,
               | which causes left-wing people in turn to feel as though
               | we need to commit our institutions more strongly toward
               | identity politics, precipitating the cycle.
               | 
               | Personally, I think any kind of identity politics is
               | abhorrent, but I think those of us who are united in our
               | opposition to right-wing identity politics should
               | recognize that its driver is institutionalized left-wing
               | identity politics and work to de-institutionalize.
               | However, cynically I suspect people on both sides
               | actually like the conflict (addicted to outrage, etc) and
               | are quite happy with the cycle.
               | 
               | That said, as always, my hope is with the next generation
               | --specifically that they'll see the vices of the previous
               | generation and turn from them.
        
               | true_religion wrote:
               | I don't think so.
               | 
               | It's hard to believe someone becomes racists merely from
               | hearing that racism is banned.
               | 
               | The issue of hating billions of people is too serious to
               | develop as a form of devil's advocacy.
               | 
               | As for the issue of identity politics, I think that's
               | another discussion entirely.
        
               | throwaway894345 wrote:
               | > It's hard to believe someone becomes racists merely
               | from hearing that racism is banned.
               | 
               | Narrowly, I agree, but we all know that there's a lot of
               | ideological baggage associated with "racism" as a term
               | and specifically how it's brandied about and by whom. At
               | this point, how you talk about racism signals a side in a
               | culture war in which "both sides" are illiberal--and of
               | course the inconvenient liberal center whose existence
               | threatens both sides' dichotomous narratives ("yeah we're
               | illiberal, but those guys are _even more illiberal_ ").
               | 
               | > The issue of hating billions of people is too serious
               | to develop as a form of devil's advocacy.
               | 
               | Not in America where racism is incessantly used as a
               | political football by the left and the right (for
               | example, left wing Twitter has been doing its best to
               | racialize the Rittenhouse saga despite that all parties
               | were white; similarly right).
               | 
               | > As for the issue of identity politics, I think that's
               | another discussion entirely.
               | 
               | As previously mentioned, it's deeply intertwined with how
               | we talk about "racism".
        
             | andrewzah wrote:
             | I don't really think HN would have taken off if there were
             | such heavy handed approaches to moderation in the first
             | place. Further, I don't believe a lack of this filter would
             | result in "the same word over and over". What?
             | 
             | One of the things that makes F/OSS great is user freedom.
             | Why would I want to use F/OSS from someone that had such
             | "my way or the highway" opinions about subjective things
             | like how to handle people using bad words?
             | 
             | Edit: wording
        
               | agplisntfoss wrote:
               | Lemmy and Mastodon are AGPL-licensed, which means if you
               | modify server side code this counts as "distribution" and
               | you must publish the code for your service based on these
               | projects.
               | 
               | Agree or disagree about whether or not that's good, fine,
               | and it is open source software, but it is not libre
               | software. They're OSS, not F/OSS.
               | 
               | Pleroma is MIT licensed.
        
               | jlkuester7 wrote:
               | > One of the things that makes F/OSS great is user
               | freedom.
               | 
               | I don't think you are talking about the same kind of
               | freedom. FLOSS freedom is the ability to view and edit
               | the source code. Just because the source code does not do
               | what you want does not mean you are not free to fork the
               | project and change the behavior for yourself...
        
               | andrewzah wrote:
               | I would argue that just because the source code is
               | available, that doesn't mean the project is in the spirit
               | of free software or respects users.
               | 
               | Imagine if curl just refused to download specific
               | websites. Or if golang refused to compile code at all if
               | it detected certain words in comments.
               | 
               | Sure, yeah, these would be still free software given that
               | the source code is available to edit to one's liking. But
               | it's really not in the spirit of free software & user
               | freedom to impose arbitrary things like this. The free
               | software / open source landscape would be incredibly
               | irritating to work with in general if this sort of
               | hostile attitude to downstream users prevailed.
        
           | rakoo wrote:
           | Interestingly that's how Aether (https://getaether.net/)
           | works: mods don't control rooms unilaterally, they are voted
           | in. If you don't agree with what a mod did, you can disregard
           | whatever action they took. _All_ content is available
           | locally, you only apply the filter you want.
           | 
           | I've never used Aether but I find that way of working very
           | refreshing.
        
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