Recommend that new users join geographically local instances
Fediverse
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There is perennial discussion about what fediverse servers (Lemmy or otherwise) to recommend to new users. I have a proposal, perhaps not very original but I haven't seen it made often.
Let's just recommend that newbies pick an instance that is located close to them geographically. That's to say: their country, their region, or (ideally) their town.
Some context. Personally, I am not totally sold on social media, federated or otherwise. The evidence is now pretty clear that it causes major social harms. One way it does this is by fuelling polarization around hot-button national and international debates, at the expense of local issues. Reviving democracy is going to mean boosting communities at a local level. This could be a small way to do that.
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There is perennial discussion about what fediverse servers (Lemmy or otherwise) to recommend to new users. I have a proposal, perhaps not very original but I haven't seen it made often.
Let's just recommend that newbies pick an instance that is located close to them geographically. That's to say: their country, their region, or (ideally) their town.
Some context. Personally, I am not totally sold on social media, federated or otherwise. The evidence is now pretty clear that it causes major social harms. One way it does this is by fuelling polarization around hot-button national and international debates, at the expense of local issues. Reviving democracy is going to mean boosting communities at a local level. This could be a small way to do that.
Yes, and no. If you want to run specific community types - it might be better to be on a more 'general' or topical instance rather than a community geographically relevant to your country.
Moreover, some national instances don't have Piefed equivalents yet.
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There is perennial discussion about what fediverse servers (Lemmy or otherwise) to recommend to new users. I have a proposal, perhaps not very original but I haven't seen it made often.
Let's just recommend that newbies pick an instance that is located close to them geographically. That's to say: their country, their region, or (ideally) their town.
Some context. Personally, I am not totally sold on social media, federated or otherwise. The evidence is now pretty clear that it causes major social harms. One way it does this is by fuelling polarization around hot-button national and international debates, at the expense of local issues. Reviving democracy is going to mean boosting communities at a local level. This could be a small way to do that.
Many (maybe most) non-anglophones are already doing that ...
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There is perennial discussion about what fediverse servers (Lemmy or otherwise) to recommend to new users. I have a proposal, perhaps not very original but I haven't seen it made often.
Let's just recommend that newbies pick an instance that is located close to them geographically. That's to say: their country, their region, or (ideally) their town.
Some context. Personally, I am not totally sold on social media, federated or otherwise. The evidence is now pretty clear that it causes major social harms. One way it does this is by fuelling polarization around hot-button national and international debates, at the expense of local issues. Reviving democracy is going to mean boosting communities at a local level. This could be a small way to do that.
There currently aren't many of those.
Due to the rate of federation being limited by latency, instances have actually been re-locating to mostly Europe, so they can more easily keep up with each other.
Basically, every federated event needs to propagate, but the next one can't be sent out before the last one is received and an aknowledgement comes back.
That means a higher latency makes an instance federate at a lower rate, causing it to fall behind. Eventually, some instances were having activity from .world show up with days of delay due to being on the other side of the world.
But since your point is mostly ideological/cultural, that doesn't really matter. You're talking about identity, not infrastructure.
Which kinda defeats your point. Geography doesn't matter. You can set up a finnish community on a swedish instance and vice versa.
And I'm not sure what you mean by "reviving democracy".
The fediverse is explicitly NOT democratic. It's run by a large group of benevolent dictators (admins and mods) who maintain the environment they and the users of their respective instances and communities desire.
They are kept in line not by votes, but by the fact that any one of them can be defederated by the rest, and they can all be supplanted by any one user with the desire to set up their own instance or community.
The reason Lemmy doesn't have local communities, is not structural. It's size.
There are some finnish communities that can just barely be considered active. But if you further divided that down to cities, you'd have maybe one post a year.
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There is perennial discussion about what fediverse servers (Lemmy or otherwise) to recommend to new users. I have a proposal, perhaps not very original but I haven't seen it made often.
Let's just recommend that newbies pick an instance that is located close to them geographically. That's to say: their country, their region, or (ideally) their town.
Some context. Personally, I am not totally sold on social media, federated or otherwise. The evidence is now pretty clear that it causes major social harms. One way it does this is by fuelling polarization around hot-button national and international debates, at the expense of local issues. Reviving democracy is going to mean boosting communities at a local level. This could be a small way to do that.
It's frustrating to see the largest instance recommended all the time since it's rather heavy on censorship
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There currently aren't many of those.
Due to the rate of federation being limited by latency, instances have actually been re-locating to mostly Europe, so they can more easily keep up with each other.
Basically, every federated event needs to propagate, but the next one can't be sent out before the last one is received and an aknowledgement comes back.
That means a higher latency makes an instance federate at a lower rate, causing it to fall behind. Eventually, some instances were having activity from .world show up with days of delay due to being on the other side of the world.
But since your point is mostly ideological/cultural, that doesn't really matter. You're talking about identity, not infrastructure.
Which kinda defeats your point. Geography doesn't matter. You can set up a finnish community on a swedish instance and vice versa.
And I'm not sure what you mean by "reviving democracy".
The fediverse is explicitly NOT democratic. It's run by a large group of benevolent dictators (admins and mods) who maintain the environment they and the users of their respective instances and communities desire.
They are kept in line not by votes, but by the fact that any one of them can be defederated by the rest, and they can all be supplanted by any one user with the desire to set up their own instance or community.
The reason Lemmy doesn't have local communities, is not structural. It's size.
There are some finnish communities that can just barely be considered active. But if you further divided that down to cities, you'd have maybe one post a year.
Due to the rate of federation being limited by latency, instances have actually been re-locating to mostly Europe, so they can more easily keep up with each other.
Any examples for that? Latency causing instances not being able to keep up with federation is new to me.
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Many (maybe most) non-anglophones are already doing that ...
Agreed. And it's not a zero-sum game.
The fact I'm on english speaking fediverse doesn't mean I'm not on the finnish speaking fediverse.
And what instance I'm on has absolutely no bearing on which one I spend my time.
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There currently aren't many of those.
Due to the rate of federation being limited by latency, instances have actually been re-locating to mostly Europe, so they can more easily keep up with each other.
Basically, every federated event needs to propagate, but the next one can't be sent out before the last one is received and an aknowledgement comes back.
That means a higher latency makes an instance federate at a lower rate, causing it to fall behind. Eventually, some instances were having activity from .world show up with days of delay due to being on the other side of the world.
But since your point is mostly ideological/cultural, that doesn't really matter. You're talking about identity, not infrastructure.
Which kinda defeats your point. Geography doesn't matter. You can set up a finnish community on a swedish instance and vice versa.
And I'm not sure what you mean by "reviving democracy".
The fediverse is explicitly NOT democratic. It's run by a large group of benevolent dictators (admins and mods) who maintain the environment they and the users of their respective instances and communities desire.
They are kept in line not by votes, but by the fact that any one of them can be defederated by the rest, and they can all be supplanted by any one user with the desire to set up their own instance or community.
The reason Lemmy doesn't have local communities, is not structural. It's size.
There are some finnish communities that can just barely be considered active. But if you further divided that down to cities, you'd have maybe one post a year.
I'm sorry, this is not how federation works, and if it were truly as limited as "one activity at a time", moving a community to an entirely different continent is a fantastically short sighted idea.
Moving geographically closer to something else is important if you need real-time savings (e.g. high frequency trading, scientific research). ActivityPub is an asynchronous communications protocol built upon technology with decent if occasionally dubious reliability. Doing something this drastic to shave off ~100ms is not correct.
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It's frustrating to see the largest instance recommended all the time since it's rather heavy on censorship
To counter my own argument, that's partly because that instance is less likely to go away or suffer downtime than one run by a single person and with 10 active users. It's partly why I signed up to it (also because nobody was telling me to do otherwise).
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There is perennial discussion about what fediverse servers (Lemmy or otherwise) to recommend to new users. I have a proposal, perhaps not very original but I haven't seen it made often.
Let's just recommend that newbies pick an instance that is located close to them geographically. That's to say: their country, their region, or (ideally) their town.
Some context. Personally, I am not totally sold on social media, federated or otherwise. The evidence is now pretty clear that it causes major social harms. One way it does this is by fuelling polarization around hot-button national and international debates, at the expense of local issues. Reviving democracy is going to mean boosting communities at a local level. This could be a small way to do that.
If we look at how toxic and racist the local city groups are on Reddit or Facebook, I'm not sure this is a good model. If I'm a black trans woman living in a small town in Mississippi, my local instance might not even be a safe place, for me.
Similarly, I would encourage blind folks to join us at rblind.com rather than a local instance, because a local instance might not take our needs into account: many have captchas, some use inaccessible themes, etc. At rblind.com you can be sure that we won't deploy an update or configuration change that will break accessibility, because the server admins and moderators are all blind ourselves. But the beauty of federation means that you can talk to everyone else on other instances, so being part of a particular identity group doesn't limit you to just talking to other members of that group.
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There is perennial discussion about what fediverse servers (Lemmy or otherwise) to recommend to new users. I have a proposal, perhaps not very original but I haven't seen it made often.
Let's just recommend that newbies pick an instance that is located close to them geographically. That's to say: their country, their region, or (ideally) their town.
Some context. Personally, I am not totally sold on social media, federated or otherwise. The evidence is now pretty clear that it causes major social harms. One way it does this is by fuelling polarization around hot-button national and international debates, at the expense of local issues. Reviving democracy is going to mean boosting communities at a local level. This could be a small way to do that.
As a US-based person, just no. It is not desirable to host anything here or to trust any US-based service for a number of reasons.
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As a US-based person, just no. It is not desirable to host anything here or to trust any US-based service for a number of reasons.
Now this is a good reason to move a community to a different region.
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It looks like some issues may arise if/when an instance's domain name changes. Is there any way we can change federation so that we don't need to rely on such a central point of failure?
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@hendrik@palaver.p3x.de fwiw NodeBB ended up being such a joy to author things in that we switched away from WordPress to NodeBB as our blog. We just blog on our forum.
Now, conflicts of interest are important... I wrote NodeBB, so I am obviously pretty biased :laughing: !
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Unless you are on a frantic hurry to make this change, I might be able to help. You'll need to migrate to Wagtail, and I have done some work on integration with Wagtail and the Fediverse via the Django ActivityPub Toolkit. But if you do consider this, you'd have to keep in mind that the ActivityPub side of things would be a ongoing experiment.
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No matter what plugin you find that supposedly will do the job, in my experience it is always a PITA that ends up involving a lot of programming.
I had a good experience with jekyll's wordpress->jekyll import tool. But see below.
I would go for a database-less static site generator like Hugo
Graybeard here, so it's probably just braindamage specific to me, but I've found ruby dependency setup and troubleshooting to be extremely frustrating. Hard for me to wrap my head around.
When jekyll is actually dead (right now it is "only mostly dead") I'll change to something that does not require ruby (eleventy?) or just go back to the nineties and do something barebones with gtml or whatever. Already playing with the latter.
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Yes. I'm not very educated on the Worpress side of things... Kinda necessary, though, to keep compatibility with the Fediverse AND the No-AI people in my opinion. I mean the Fediverse is kind of the place for people to go if they don't want algorithms and bots to dominate the place?!
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Our first priority will be to migrate the site as fluently as possible to whatever CMS we transition to. Archiving it as HTML and starting from scratch with a new platform — that's a last ditch effort, I think.
[Edit: I tried to cover the WP fork subject here]
Hugo as a longterm solution isn't going to float with some of our users, I'm afraid. I can vividly imagine somebody turning the old site into a single "Hello world!" page given that kind of permissions.
We will need strictly limited access for contributors, and a clear, friendly input field for text...
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maybe go for a combination of them
This is a very practical solution... until somebody (I suspect me) has to maintain three or more installs instead of one 🙂 But you're right, this could very well be a way to solve the "one size fits none" conundrum.
As for using a WP fork — the point about the ActivityPub plugin breaking compatibility with ClassicPress makes me wary of this approach. And AFAICT ClassicPress is one of the more reliable WP forks out there? In the long term, I mean.
I'm fine with switching my personal browsers if/when one or the other FF fork turns to the dark side, but I wouldn't want to hop this site between different WP forks the same way...
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Thanks for the suggestions! I realise preserving URLs is perhaps the tallest order here, and that we may have to set up redirection to the new ones.
Failing that, archiving (a static version of) the site could definitely be an option. Considering the long history of the site though, our first choice is continuity over an abrupt break.
