Cross posting this here for visibility as it’s easy to not see the edit. They are adding thoughts and resources to the post as they evolve so maybe keep an eye out for future edits.

I think the questions they have are very reasonable & they have welcomed cis people to discuss on the post (but not elsewhere on the subreddit)

I’m new to Lemmy and doing what I can. Long time member of the subreddit. Maybe some of you all are better than me at discussing these topics with them?

Thank you all for your help so far 🫶

  • NOT_RICK@lemmy.worldEnglish
    27·
    1 day ago

    Here’s hiddenstill’s main concerns. It sounds like they’re open to considering Lemmy, but they definitely need some reassurance

    • Can Lemmy can scale to the size required if trans content was banned on reddit.

    • I couldn’t find much information on Lemmy’s moderation tools. Currently this sub attracts a lot of hate and chasers, which moderation easily takes care of. In the past the have been excessive amounts, but reddit has cracked down on it, and provides tools to limit it (not very good ones). Lemmy would be unusable without this.

    • Lemmy works by sharing data across multiple instances (computers) and it appears there seem to be privacy concerns about the amount of data on users that is shared.

    • What is to stop the owners of the instance shutting it down, or the data being lost for any other reason? Although not a corporate it makes no difference. There would be a massive loss of knowledge and history.

    @ada@lemmy.blahaj.zone, don’t feel the need to reply or reach out to hiddenstill if you’re not comfortable with it, but I thought you may be the best person to speak to many of these concerns

    • Ada@lemmy.blahaj.zoneEnglish
      24·
      12 hours ago

      I’m road tripping around New Zealand at the moment, so I can’t reply in depth just yet, but I’ve been talking to @supakaity about the possibility of spinning up another lemmy instance that is allow list only. We could allow list blahaj.zone, and other safe instances, and host sensitive communities there. It would mean our users still had access to the fediverse at large, but that the sensitive communities were insulated from trolls and bigots.

      I’ll address the rest of the post in more detail later today when we’re not on the road

      • cabbage@piefed.socialEnglish
        11·
        1 day ago

        If this works out it could really demonstrate the strength of decentralized social media. Thank you so much for considering taking on this challenge, and good luck!

        I really hope it will work. It sounds to me like it should.

      • bayesianbandit@lemmy.blahaj.zoneOPEnglish
        5·
        1 day ago

        Okay that’s rad. I’d been privately thinking of something similar to that myself but I’m new to the fediverse and didn’t know whether it was possible. If it’s like what I’m thinking you’re suggesting that would solve a HUGE issue in our community for balancing visibility (to help others and give information) with privacy (to support each other and avoid bigots). Centralized social media/messaging platforms have never prioritized this need in their design so we are always switching between apps to fulfill either function.

        • Ada@lemmy.blahaj.zoneEnglish
          10·
          12 hours ago

          So, broadly, what I’m thinking is two instances. One is public facing, (ie blahaj). Any communities hosted there would be visible to and usable by anyone on the fediverse.

          And then a private instance. It would only be visible to users on hand selected instances.

          People generally wouldn’t create user accounts on the private instance, and instead would access communities on those instances through user accounts hosted on the allow listed public instances. For super sensitive stuff, folks could host user accounts on the private instance, but those user accounts would not be able to access most fediverse content.

          • bayesianbandit@lemmy.blahaj.zoneOPEnglish
            6·
            1 day ago

            Yes this was basically exactly what I was thinking! It’s very reassuring to hear that could be possible in the real world and not just in my head :D

    • Ada@lemmy.blahaj.zoneEnglish
      13·
      12 hours ago

      Can Lemmy can scale to the size required if trans content was banned on reddit.

      Yes. A Lemmy insurance doesn’t federate all content to all users. It federates only a single copy of any content to each instance that has users that subscribe to that content, and those instances put it on the timeline of their members that subscribe to it.

      The federation design can handle a lot more traffic than the trans community on reddit can generate.

      I couldn’t find much information on Lemmy’s moderation tools.

      It’s better and worse than reddits tools. There are more active mods and admins that have less tolerance for bigotry, meaning that bigots get stomped on more reliably than on reddit. But creating new accounts is easy and locking down communities isn’t as granular as it is on reddit.

      Federation also allows an admin to restrict access to other instances that don’t deal with trolls, or even to operate on a allow list basis. We’re thinking of spinning up an allow list only instance to insulate sensitive groups from the wider fediverse, whilst allowing our members to access it.

      Lemmy works by sharing data across multiple instances (computers) and it appears there seem to be privacy concerns about the amount of data on users that is shared.

      Admins have access to the database for their instances, but that’s true of reddit too. The difference is lemmy admins aren’t selling that data off. And some instances (like blahaj) don’t require an email address to register, and allow the use of VPNs. Privacy is best achieved by not providing identifying data in the first place and many instances work to enable that option.

      What is to stop the owners of the instance shutting it down, or the data being lost for any other reason?

      Nothing. That’s the biggest issue IMO. Content that federates will still be available on the instances it has federated to, but even then, the loss of the hosting instance makes it hard to coordinate a replacement.

      I have hope that as the fediverse matures, this will improve and user and community mobility will protect against this.

      The only thing I can say here is that it’s less an issue than the possibility of reddit just banning a sub, because at least most of the content is recoverable on lemmy.

      • HiddenStill@lemmy.blahaj.zoneEnglish
        4·
        5 hours ago

        the loss of the hosting instance makes it hard to coordinate a replacement

        I’m interested in this as its basically the issue that we’re potentially facing on reddit. There’s a lot of trans sites that have died over the years, or in the cases of Susans lost years of data.

        I had thought that Federation meant the communities were duplicated across instances providing redundancy, but it sounds like that’s not correct. Am I correct in thinking if the instance dies then there’s no real way to rebuild the community as it was before?

        What actually happens?

        I just signed up here and it appears my account is tied to this instance. If this instance is lost then my account is lost? I can make accounts on other instances, but there’s nothing tying them together?

        The federation design can handle a lot more traffic than the trans community on reddit can generate.

        Can a single instance handle a community of 100k members? Can this one? What’s the limit?

        There are more active mods and admins that have less tolerance for bigotry, meaning that bigots get stomped on more reliably than on reddit.

        There’s an incredible amount of hate and chasers on reddit, and if you had to rely on manual moderation I don’t think anyone could cope. You may not be seeing it here because Lemmy is smaller, not as well know, and appears to be a bit harder to use and keeps out the idiots. The sub moderation is part of it, with lots of automated filtering (which is why the people from Lemmy were having trouble posting in the sub), but the site also keeps them suppressed. When it didn’t it was really bad.

        • Ada@lemmy.blahaj.zoneEnglish
          1·
          47 minutes ago

          What actually happens?

          If the instance hosting a community goes down permanently, then all of the content of that community will still be available on remote instances that federated with the lost instance. So you won’t lose old content. However, with the loss of the home instance, broadly speaking, the community is “frozen” and no new content can be generated.

          The same is true of user accounts.

          There is work to bring account mobility and the like to the fediverse, but if it happens, its a long way off, so you can’t really plan on it happening any time soon.

          So, it’s better than reddit, in so far as you don’t risk a complete loss of content like you do if reddit bans a community, but despite the content being available, it is still single point sensitive.

          However, as it stands today, there aren’t really any alternatives that let you get away from that risk. Reddit, the fediverse, forums (self hosted or otherwise), they all carry the risk of going down and taking the community with them. The fediverse though at least means the content can be saved.

          Can a single instance handle a community of 100k members? Can this one? What’s the limit?

          Lemmy.world has nearly twice that many users. It’s the largest lemmy instance, and has hefty hardware requirements, but it’s entirely manageable, especially if you’re using crowd funding etc to cover costs.

          We’ve hosted 196, one of the busiest lemmy communities (and an image based community at that) without any problems, with plenty of room to scale up if needed.

          You may not be seeing it here because Lemmy is smaller, not as well know, and appears to be a bit harder to use and keeps out the idiots.

          Yes and no. I used to moderate reddit subs, so I know how they could be. Lemmy is different though. Its mod tools are less mature, but it does have the option of 3rd party mod bots to help. More importantly though, federation itself solves a lot of the problems. Every instance has admins, which means that admins are more active and attentive when their users are causing problems, or when spam waves arrive. And instances that don’t deal with spam or bigots can just be defederated, so their users can’t access the communities at all.

          Which is to say, the moderation tools on lemmy aren’t as mature, but lemmy itself mitigates a lot of that, and so it ends up being good enough for the most part.

          However, the instance we’re spinning up will be “allow list”, which means it will be very selective about which lemmy instances it federates with, which in turn means that the only users will see content there in the first place are queer focused instances that take moderation seriously, and that will further reduce the reliance on the mod tools themselves

        • leaf@lemmy.blahaj.zoneEnglish
          1·
          2 hours ago

          Can a single instance handle a community of 100k members? Can this one? What’s the limit?

          The theoretical limit depends on the server hardware behind the instance.

          There’s an incredible amount of hate and chasers on reddit, and if you had to rely on manual moderation I don’t think anyone could cope. You may not be seeing it here because Lemmy is smaller, not as well know, and appears to be a bit harder to use and keeps out the idiots. The sub moderation is part of it, with lots of automated filtering (which is why the people from Lemmy were having trouble posting in the sub), but the site also keeps them suppressed. When it didn’t it was really bad.

          The admins of Blahaj.Zone are strict with those kinds of messed up individuals. Lemmy instances often defederate from the troll farms like Hexbear for example. It’s a lot harder for trolls and chasers to organize in this bloc of instances for example as the mods/admins are very on top of things. They use the tool fediseer to check out if an instance is trustworthy enough for their users/communities to interact with ours.

          I agree with you that the moderating tools on Lemmy could be better but as more people switch to this platform the higher the demand would be for developers to upgrade the tools to be more robust. They have come a long way from 2023.

          When Reddit killed almost all the third-party apps a lot of moderating and accessibility features were forever lost due to the company’s decision to charge outrageous fees for api access but not only that but they adamantly refused to work with developers who extended an hand to work out a deal within the new limits.

    • A_Union_of_Kobolds@lemmy.worldEnglish
      8·
      1 day ago

      What’s to stop any other site from going down? That’s a concern with literally every part of the internet. Either host a decentralized node or accept your fate, what’s even the argument there

      I’m curious about the sharing of user data across instances, that could be a very valid reason for folks to be reluctant. But afaik it’s just surface-level user data that’s self-provided, same as anything else with a login.

      • NOT_RICK@lemmy.worldEnglish
        4·
        1 day ago

        Yeah for the second point you bring up, I’m not sure how that would be substantially different than the stuff that Reddit collects. They do a ton of fingerprinting to find ban evaders to my knowledge. All that info is just one subpoena away. At least there are fediverse instances outside US jurisdiction.

        • A_Union_of_Kobolds@lemmy.worldEnglish
          6·
          1 day ago

          Exactly.

          The biggest disadvantage to lemmy is just the size of the community. Reddit is established. People are there.

          Pretty much every criticism people have of lemmy is worse under reddit.

          • Rentlar@lemmy.caEnglish
            3·
            24 hours ago

            Yep, my effective downtime is zero because when lemmy.ca goes down I use one of my two alts to browse the rest of the fediverse, and if one of the popular ones happens to go down then I just browse locally more. It only sucked a bit when a big piece of Canadian news happened (PM Trudeau resigning) and there was an unscheduled outage due to shitty OVH hardware and support. Thankfully our admins migrated off that server.

            In contrast, when I remember Reddit was 500-ing all you could do is sit, refresh and wait.

          • Lvxferre [he/him]@mander.xyzEnglish
            6·
            1 day ago

            I did ;_; I completely forgot how Reddit works in this regard. I hope that HiddenStill can still see it as a mod.

            In case they don’t, I’ll copypaste the content here:

            I don’t claim to have “expert knowledge” on Lemmy, but I was discussing the topic there with one of the users of this sub (hi bayesianbandit!), and I’ve been in Lemmy for long enough (2021) to know a few things about it.

            Can Lemmy can scale to the size required if trans content was banned on reddit.

            Lemmy as a network can scale indefinitely. Even if a specific instance is reaching its limit, people can create new instances to split the load.

            So the problem is mostly if the “transgender surgeries instance” would be able to handle the load, and how much it would cost. Accordingly to this link, “the 10 biggest Lemmy servers still only have hosting costs of $50-$300/mo”.

            I couldn’t find much information on Lemmy’s moderation tools. Currently this sub attracts a lot of hate and chasers, which moderation easily takes care of. In the past the have been excessive amounts, but reddit has cracked down on it, and provides tools to limit it (not very good ones). Lemmy would be unusable without this.

            The official mod tools are awful and only suited for small communities. However larger instances developed a few third party mod tools to alleviate the burden, including an AutoMod of sorts.

            Lemmy also allows something called “defederation”, where users from one instance cannot interact with users from another instance. The nearest of that in Reddit would be if you were able to prevent all users who posted in a subreddit to post in yours. That helps wonders to keep haters at bay.

            Lemmy works by sharing data across multiple instances (computers) and it appears there seem to be privacy concerns about the amount of data on users that is shared. / What is to stop the owners of the instance shutting it down, or the data being lost for any other reason? Although not a corporate it makes no difference. There would be a massive loss of knowledge and history.

            The main concern is that data shared with one instance pops up in other instances, due to the federation. That’s both a liability and a feature - because if the original instance goes down, the data is still preserved in the other instances.