Recommend that new users join geographically local instances
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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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Now this is a good reason to move a community to a different region.
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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.
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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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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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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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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.
-
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.
-
It's frustrating to see the largest instance recommended all the time since it's rather heavy on censorship
