Both host content that are against our content policy and have had issues with
users from those sites entering our community crossposting content that violates
our content policy. We are discussing defederating other instances as well.
There is discussion of lemmit.online being defederated because it pretty much
exclusively scrapes reddit content and reposts it, and some content creators
have expressed discomfort. If there’s other instances that might be worth
considering defederating from, just post and it’ll be added to the current
discussion. and before anyone brings it up, lemmygrad defederated with us. This
isn’t a dictatorship but I ask that you please behave in the comment section and
at least try to understand why we are defederating.
It’s a shame too because about 1/4 of the subs on lewd loli were from there (I think that’s how it works).
With all these defederations, have you guys considered making a SFW version of burggit (maybe burggit.social?) that can stay federated with everything, and moving the SFW communities there? Then this instance could be “loli containment”, so to speak, still accessible from the SFW instance.
Also, from the post on lemmyNSFW, it sounds like people from here were crossposting loli stuff to there? You’d probably have to really commit to the “obey the rules when on other instances” rule.
Even if we did do that, people would defederate us just in general, it’d also almost certainly be seen as us bending or breaking on our stances, by doing this we’re essentially saying that they have power over us.
If they have power over us, we are no more friendly to free speech and expression than they let us be. We will not bend or break on our policies. If it wasn’t for the loli’s they’d defederate us for other reasons, we’re not going to be pressured into ruling with a golden hammer and sickle like other instances do.
Not to mention, it would split up our own communities between 2 separate instances and put more work on us by having 2 instances to maintain instead of one. That’s extra manpower and resources we’d have to dedicate, resources we just don’t have and for an end goal that we have no desire to achieve (and is realistically unachievable).
Lemmy NSFW was loli friendly until the change in leadership as of today, posting lolis on their instance was not against the rules, so there’s nothing to punish.
If you don’t want the extra workload, that’s totally fair. You’re under no obligation to go out of your way here. However, if you’re just pessimistic about the odds of success, I’d urge you to contact the admins of the defederated instances and ask. Alternatively, I’d be willing to inquire on your behalf if you’d like.
I know the jurisdictional legality of loli is a concern, plus not wanting it to end up in All. Those would both be addressed by not federating with .moe directly. The other usual concerns about free speech instances are already addressed by your rules. The other admins may not even be aware of what the rules are here.
I think there is a general desire to keep the fediverse mostly connected, and that at least some admins would refederate once they know that you’re reasonable and that their concerns have been addressed.
I appreciate your optimism, but it is not worth the extra manpower and financial burden it would put upon us to run 2 instances. As it stands, we run Burggit entirely out of our own pockets, and the costs to just continue running it are only growing. I also do not have the time to moderate another instance, which would (in my opinion) not be worth the effort that would need to be put into it. So, even if the idea is 100% flawless and would be executed and work perfectly. It would not be worth it to me or @Burger@burggit.moe to put on the substantial burden in making such an instance, maintaining it and moving our SFW communities over to it. That’s just a huge ask.
It’s unfortunately not pessimism on Mastodon/Pleroma/Akkoma there’s kind of 2 sides of the fediverse there. Instances which have a focus on speech, expression or some other variation of the sorts (much like Burggit). And the safe spaces which are closer to Beehaw and others. If you as an instance so much as federate with the “problematic” instances, you’re immediately defederated. There’s even a thing called “fediblock” which allows people to basically tattle on other instances for wrong think and have everyone in the fediblock network automagically defederate them.
I have a feeling they’d defederate us regardless of if we made a SFW version of the site or not. It’s easily doable, but these guys clearly have Reddit brain and anyone loosely associated with any movement or stance needs to be ultra double triple permabanned with no recourse or talking it out.
To add, I’ve been seeing instances defederating or threatening to defederate from each other for the most silly reasons. I think we’re dealing with former tumblr users in terms of fragility if I’m being perfectly honest.
My best advice is to sit tight and ride out the reddit expansion. Nations will rise and fall in the next month or two, and there’s no punishment for hanging out here in the meantime.
It’s already done actually hahah, I have downloaded like 5 lemmy apps. Liftoff has a universal version where you can browse basically everything. If you can interact with it with any of your accounts, it’s seamless as if you had one account, if you can’t because none of your accounts can touch it, then it’s read-only.
Allegedly Lemmy is going to be allowing people to subscribe to “topics” which I imagine would be like multi-sub feeds across instances, which would be very helpful.
important note: this is something my wife heard and has no evidence to back up. 😝
I don’t see why Burggit specifically would have to do this. I was planning to jump to an inconspicuous unrelated instance that federates both Burggit and the “correct” parts of the Lemmyverse. You could still do this if you want to participate in both.
I’m putting my plan on ice for a bit because:
Cross-instance subscription seemed a bit buggy in general - mainly anything posted before I subscribed was missing comments & votes if it showed up at all. If you wait a bit for your feed to have new content, it’s all pretty correct from what I’ve seen so it is still quite usable. I just got a bit lazy about subscribing to new Burggit communities as they crop up, so I’ll either wait for bugfixes, or mass-subscribe in one go.
The more I think about it, if I want Reddit-tier content I’d rather just get it off Reddit anyway. I personally have no recent beef with Reddit in the first place since I don’t use mobile, I just wanted to see if Lemmy ended up being a bit more free-spirited about loli. The answer has basically been “no”, which I guess I should’ve seen coming with how Mastodon developed. I do think the writing is on the wall for Reddit sometime after the IPO happens, but I have no reason to jump ship early.
As an aside, I find it deeply funny how many Reddit alternatives don’t allow NSFW in general, as if that wasn’t one of the largest draws in the first place. I have a feeling Reddit is going to be able to boil the frog that is their general userbase for a few years yet.
I think jumping ship early is worth it. There’s nothing worse than your subreddit being blasted into the shadow realm right before you move. It’s hard to gather everyone when the place you used to gather no longer exists.
I’m no moderator of anything, so I’ve no particular sentimental attachments nor sway. I’ll go where my peers go, which still seems to be Reddit even as the frog boils. If I had a true moral aversion to Reddit, I would have quit when they first cracked down on loli subs years ago. Quitting now just seems silly, when the entertaining shitshow has just begun as it were.
Also, I do like it here at Burggit over Reddit. It’s just everywhere else in the Lemmyverse that currently has me headscratching if I want to currently bother figuring out a bridge: the fact that big instances are creating rules even stricter than Reddit (like no NSFW) when they’re not even beholden to advertizers to do so, suggests to me they have an even greater concentration of morality police than you’d find on Reddit. So I’m adopting a lazy wait-and-see approach. Emphasis on lazy.
As a tangent, Reddit normally never comes up in conversation for me with friends, but the blackout finally changed that. They’ve been around long enough to know about old Reddit’s layout. None of them knew it was a thing that still exists. Only one of them used a non-official app (Apollo), and I wholly expect them to jump to the official app (or maybe whatever accessibility app I can fish up) over any Reddit alternative. As somewhat of a power user, it was a nice reminder at just how apathetic and non-power-user-y most of Reddit’s userbase is.
As an extra tangent, I think your 2hu stuff is in an uncommon position, as it’s somewhat inextricably linked to loli/“loli” content that Reddit actively opposes, in a way that most communities are not. I’m guessing that the blackout-related stuff was more of a convenient pretext to finally pull the trigger (and hopefully with a higher conversion rate) than it was the entire justification. And so I think your migration has a chance of being somewhat successful long-term, and way more successful than most migrations simply because there’s a community-inherent reason to do so. Most migrations I expect will or have already flopped as subs capitulate or reopen in some form. I fully expect this episode to be more of a “two minutes hate” than a “straw that broke the camel’s back” in the saga of Reddit’s downward spiral.
What I took away from when reddit cracked down on loli subs and people tried to move to voat was that not enough people cared to move to/stay on voat. Voat’s loli community ended up even smaller than the one on here. People saw that loli/jailbait/fatpeoplehate (maybe I’m misremembering) where the only ones to move over and it wasn’t them that time.
I fully expect NSFW to be removed from reddit before their IPO. It’s the way society is now that you can in theory have a bigger reach and userbase if you allow countries that have restrictive NSFW laws in by banning NSFW from your site.
I’m rallying the touhou nsfw community to move here ahead of the purge (which we all know is coming). I don’t have much time before the main /r/touhou community tries to replace us with /r/touhoe or something else that’s stupid (as a side note, they’ve always mismanaged their NSFW side, to the point of giving me a niche to live in).
There’s a few other hentai communities I can think of that could benefit from moving to burggit, but I expected most of them to move to LemmyNSFW. LemmyNSFW struck me as the only other instance that cared to focus on NSFW. The only thing I saw move over was the real life porn. Which isn’t interesting to me.
It’s true I could have probably ridden it out until the very end, but this entire situation stunk of a long game of “First they came for the socialists, and I did not speak out — Because I was not a socialist.”. I was ok to wait out the status quo, especially since they really hadn’t made any moves since banning loli (which was hell to moderate for years). But these recent events made me realize that they are not adverse at all at screwing over their entire community to make a small % of revenue increase. They came for 3rd party apps, and I decided enough was enough.
What finally sold me on the fediverse was the idea that its strength is in its stability, not its ability to quickly pick up users. It’s playing the long game; despite its own set of issues it’s much better protected against the kind of platform-killing social media company shenanigans that killed things like digg and are in the process of killing reddit and twitter. I think it’ll take a long time, but as people keep repeatedly experiencing the issues with traditional monolithic social media, a move towards more stable and open platforms is inevitable.
On a side note, it’s interesting which sort of communities migrated from reddit - the people who are fed up with Reddit enough to put the effort into learning a new platform is an odd intersection of groups.
What finally sold me on the fediverse was the idea that its strength is in its stability,
Is it? I don’t see how this fundamentally differs all that much from hosting a forum back in the day. Let’s say an instance admin throws in the towel because of expenses/IRL/whatever, it doesn’t seem like the process has changed much from users being forced to migrate forums way back when. Maybe there will eventually be tooling to make the process decidedly better, but it feels overeager to count chickens before they hatch.
I think it’ll take a long time, but as people keep repeatedly experiencing the issues with traditional monolithic social media, a move towards more stable and open platforms is inevitable.
Huge disagree here. A new sucker is born every minute, so the average user can put up with way more bullshit than expected simply because it’s not the same contiguous user. Likewise, newer generations have modern social media as their ground truth, so things arguably aren’t even bad from their typical perspective.
I also think federated FOSS-ish stuff is basically incongruous with reaching mainstream - for one, where would the money come from? The huge social media giants can afford to pay the hosting costs associated with reaching a massive audience, but I don’t see the overall Lemmyverse matching that in donations. And if we start considering advertizing too, are we really on a different trajectory than usual? Likewise, I think there’s something for economies of scale available to the big players that I don’t think really work as well under a federated system, like CDNs. I think you’ll find getting content in your eyeballs a few ms faster with every tap matters a lot more to most users than whatever ideological fulfillment one might get out of using Lemmy. Even outside of CDNs, I think federation’s occasional slowness is a huge detractor for being a realistic competitor to whatever social media counterpart they’re styled after that tends to get elephant-in-the-room’d.
On a side note, it’s interesting which sort of communities migrated from reddit - the people who are fed up with Reddit enough to put the effort into learning a new platform is an odd intersection of groups.
Much agreed, I’d say “divas” is a good encapsulation of the overall group - it’s just that we’re divas over such a wide array of things. It’ll be interesting to see the lay of the land as things settle.
Hmm, I see what you’re saying - call me optimistic but I still think the fediverse will keep growing from here. I started writing a point-by-point rebuttal but it started feeling kind of silly with how theoretical this all is, so I’d just like to clarify my perspective:
Traditional social media, being led by a single body whose goal is not to make the best experience for the user, will eventually do something some group of people don’t like. It might be years until we see issues at the level of recent Twitter or Reddit stuff, but the combination of one-size-fits-all rules and aim of profit over people are a poor fit for a universal platform and make problems inevitable. If the fediverse can be a viable alternative for the average user, which I don’t think it’s a stretch to say is likely to happen after a few more years of development, mistakes made by big social media companies will send users over.
Federation means there isn’t a single point of failure; issues that would affect an entire platform are confined to an instance. If a user has a problem with their instance’s management, they only need to go to another one rather than a whole new platform with different UI, none of the same people, none of the same content. Though, tbf this is much less relevant on isolated instances like Burggit.
It’s also worth mentioning that in my personal experience, younger people in particular are slowly moving back towards a more personal and deliberately curated internet experience. Teen mental health especially is at an all time low, and while there are a multitude of contributing factors, we’re realizing that the typical doomscrolling social media experience constantly trying to feed itself to us certainly isn’t helping. I do believe we’re seeing the very beginnings of a larger cultural shift towards the small web and its philosophy - so applying this to the topic at hand, the things people value in a platform can change over time, and my impression is that the direction things are going is one that lines up with the fediverse.
I think there will always be reddit users who use it because they don’t know different, like facebook now. In my eyes Lemmy is already successful in providing cozy places to talk with like-minded folk, though in terms of pure popularity my prediction is that Lemmy and/or Kbin will be at least known by the average recreational internet user within five years, and have an active userbase, say, 25% the size of reddit’s within ten.
But who knows - maybe it’s a fad just for technical people that’ll slowly die out over the next few years, and traditional social media sites will clean up their act and bring everyone back. Only one way to find out haha. It’d be fun to look back on this a decade from now and see how close we were.
I do believe we’re seeing the very beginnings of a larger cultural shift towards the small web and its philosophy
I think that’s the crux of our different perspectives. I do agree that for federation and such to reach the mainstream it’s going to have to start with a cultural shift; I just can’t see that appreciably happening any time soon. I’ll be really happy to be wrong though.
If a user has a problem with their instance’s management, they only need to go to another one rather than a whole new platform with different UI, none of the same people, none of the same content.
But the old content and old users still live on the original instance: if you continue to participate has anything particularly changed? And if you don’t, is that really all that different from forum hopping?
edit: I suppose you also mean participating in communities spread across instances. That’s fair, but I do want to point to Lemmy’s current top-heaviness as to why I think that’s still a tad unrealistic. Also, as it stands instance hopping is definitely not painless. These are definitely tractable problems, but I do think it’ll be a couple years before I can reconsider my stance.
What makes me a little less hopeful is Mastodon’s greater maturity with the same instance top-heaviness and block list sharing from the top. I get why it’s necessary, but the net result is that peoples’ content is still decided from on-high with arguably even less public accountability. I just seriously don’t see the value-add from Joe Schmo’s perspective in exchange for grappling with extra complexity and I think that’s evidenced by Mastodon’s slump past the initial Twitter acquisition outrage.
Nonetheless, things are arguably still in the early stages so the only real answer is “wait and see” of course.
If you’re talking about an exodus on a community level, we’ve had plenty of intra-Reddit examples of splinter communities forming in opposition to moderation incidents on the main subreddit. They tend to not gain traction - most users are extremely apathetic. And I don’t necessarily mean that in a bad way, it just means most people still have the perspective to (at least unconsciously) realize that the specifics of this social media stuff barely matters at the end of the day. But it does mean they tend to take the dumbest, least effort option when it comes to these matters, which I’d say played a big part at how we arrived at the current social media landscape in the first place.
and traditional social media sites will clean up their act and bring everyone back
To clarify, I don’t quite hold this expectation. I fully expect Reddit to become irrelevant over the next few years. I just expect whatever to replace it will be another Reddit in the same way Reddit ended up becoming another Digg.
So it’s less “clean up” so much as I expect new companies with new platforms to do the same dog & pony show as usual. Maybe it was just my neck of the woods, but by far the most linked alternative in subreddit blackout messages was to sister Discord communities, even though that’s ideologically empty in the long run.
It’d be fun to look back on this a decade from now
Much agreed.
One facet that I’ll concede makes me a lot less confident in my own expectations is the geopolitical one. While I’m sure every country would like to maximize its ability to spy on its citizens and beyond, curbing US hegemony in online communications might be a win unto itself. But then the Fourteen Eyes alliance exists, so I really have no clue what the net pull of the situation is. I just hope something spicy leaks at some point.
I fully expect NSFW to be removed from reddit before their IPO. It’s the way society is now that you can in theory have a bigger reach and userbase if you allow countries that have restrictive NSFW laws in by banning NSFW from your site.
That’s a possibility. I don’t disagree with your take, but I feel it’s not greedy enough.
I don’t use mobile, but I believe blanket NSFW subs are still accessible from the official app while getting canned on anything third party that still remains (accessibility apps?) and mobile web pages. The insistent funneling to their app makes me think they’re taking steps to monetize viewing NSFW rather than remove it; probably as something like a show of force to investor on how they’ve “successfully” monetized both the advertizer friendly and unfriendly segments of their platform.
Matching up more with what you said, I also think they’ll at some point make a blanket SFW designation for subs like the current blanket NSFW one, and then bully subs into opting into it (or splitting into one of each). I expect having a stronger SFW/NSFW split will make selling SFW reddit even easier to advertizers, and if they’re able to make the two legally distinct enough, to those restrictive countries you mentioned. This all feels like too much to foist on the community before the IPO, so I expect it’ll be billed as a potential avenue for Reddit’s “growth”. After the IPO, I do expect something along these lines to happen as things start to spiral the drain faster.
It’s true I could have probably ridden it out until the very end, but this entire situation stunk of a long game of
Oh no criticism here. I think it was a very pragmatic time for any loli-tangential community to jump ship and ride the “current event” wave to (hopefully) better conversion numbers. I just have serious doubts of the staying power of any community that isn’t intrinsically obligated to move off Reddit, at least currently. So I’m sticking with Reddit over the, uh, Burggit-less section of Lemmy, if for nothing else the morbid curiosity of watching things deteriorate in the subs I read.
I don’t have much time before the main /r/touhou community tries to replace us with /r/touhoe or something else that’s stupid (as a side note, they’ve always mismanaged their NSFW side, to the point of giving me a niche to live in).
Interesting! I never really paid much attention to the Touhou subs, but now that you mention it - having someone loli friendly or even just loli neutral still in a moderation position for a NSFW sub is not something I’d expect this many years into the loli purge. I salute you.
the fact that big instances are creating rules even stricter than Reddit (like no NSFW) when they’re not even beholden to advertizers to do so, suggests to me they have an even greater concentration of morality police than you’d find on Reddit.
I think it’s more that they don’t want to deal with the legal issues that come with hosting porn. Not that there aren’t any morality police types, but most of the sentiment that I’ve seen has been pretty pro-NSFW.
I’ve seen that mentioned before, but I don’t quite buy it. If it’s the actual act of hosting porn, I would expect there to be compromises since this forum style stems from just being a link aggregator anyway. If it’s to avoid running into minors-related laws, I have yet to run into any age questions for any instance signups, so I really have to question how genuinely these sorts of issues are being tackled.
I’ll be happy to believe it when I see it, but until then that just seems like excuses to make their position more palatable until people just accept the status quo.
Porn hoster here. Frankly, the people who say it’s hard to host porn are people who are either running their instance like a business or are retarded. True, a lot of hosting companies don’t let you host adult content at all, but it’s not very hard to find providers who are more than happy to host legal adult content. I even made a list of some of these providers reviewing their policies: https://crippled.media/free-speech-vps-providers-put-to-the-test
And while all the providers I was focusing on were those who accepted Crypto (because going about it anonymously is the best way to go in my opinion.), some of the providers on the list do accept normie payments like credit card. BuyVM for example, is a porn and loli friendly host which hosts a lot of controversial websites that you may have heard of, such as AllTheFallen.
The truth of the matter is people just don’t care to look, I’m not even convinced it’s about money, since most of the lemmy instances hosted are hosted on ridiculously overpriced hardware from companies like AWS and DigitalOcean.
The main issues are that you need to actually find a decent provider with reasonable terms, and you have to avoid using services like Cloudflare, which will absolutely skull fuck you if they get a chance.
In my humble opinion, the people talking about legal issues are;
A. people who have not done any research and are just repeating what they have heard others say.
B. They are just too scared to be the ones to provide a platform
C. They don’t want to provide the platform, but they also want to have plausible deniability and say they “can’t” provide it instead of the truth which is that they won’t provide it.
With all these defederations, have you guys considered making a SFW version of burggit (maybe burggit.social?) that can stay federated with everything, and moving the SFW communities there? Then this instance could be “loli containment”, so to speak, still accessible from the SFW instance.
Also, from the post on lemmyNSFW, it sounds like people from here were crossposting loli stuff to there? You’d probably have to really commit to the “obey the rules when on other instances” rule.
Even if we did do that, people would defederate us just in general, it’d also almost certainly be seen as us bending or breaking on our stances, by doing this we’re essentially saying that they have power over us.
If they have power over us, we are no more friendly to free speech and expression than they let us be. We will not bend or break on our policies. If it wasn’t for the loli’s they’d defederate us for other reasons, we’re not going to be pressured into ruling with a golden hammer and sickle like other instances do.
Not to mention, it would split up our own communities between 2 separate instances and put more work on us by having 2 instances to maintain instead of one. That’s extra manpower and resources we’d have to dedicate, resources we just don’t have and for an end goal that we have no desire to achieve (and is realistically unachievable).
Lemmy NSFW was loli friendly until the change in leadership as of today, posting lolis on their instance was not against the rules, so there’s nothing to punish.
Hope this helps to address your concerns.
If you don’t want the extra workload, that’s totally fair. You’re under no obligation to go out of your way here. However, if you’re just pessimistic about the odds of success, I’d urge you to contact the admins of the defederated instances and ask. Alternatively, I’d be willing to inquire on your behalf if you’d like.
I know the jurisdictional legality of loli is a concern, plus not wanting it to end up in All. Those would both be addressed by not federating with .moe directly. The other usual concerns about free speech instances are already addressed by your rules. The other admins may not even be aware of what the rules are here.
I think there is a general desire to keep the fediverse mostly connected, and that at least some admins would refederate once they know that you’re reasonable and that their concerns have been addressed.
I appreciate your optimism, but it is not worth the extra manpower and financial burden it would put upon us to run 2 instances. As it stands, we run Burggit entirely out of our own pockets, and the costs to just continue running it are only growing. I also do not have the time to moderate another instance, which would (in my opinion) not be worth the effort that would need to be put into it. So, even if the idea is 100% flawless and would be executed and work perfectly. It would not be worth it to me or @Burger@burggit.moe to put on the substantial burden in making such an instance, maintaining it and moving our SFW communities over to it. That’s just a huge ask.
It’s unfortunately not pessimism on Mastodon/Pleroma/Akkoma there’s kind of 2 sides of the fediverse there. Instances which have a focus on speech, expression or some other variation of the sorts (much like Burggit). And the safe spaces which are closer to Beehaw and others. If you as an instance so much as federate with the “problematic” instances, you’re immediately defederated. There’s even a thing called “fediblock” which allows people to basically tattle on other instances for wrong think and have everyone in the fediblock network automagically defederate them.
Alright, fair enough
I have a feeling they’d defederate us regardless of if we made a SFW version of the site or not. It’s easily doable, but these guys clearly have Reddit brain and anyone loosely associated with any movement or stance needs to be ultra double triple permabanned with no recourse or talking it out.
To add, I’ve been seeing instances defederating or threatening to defederate from each other for the most silly reasons. I think we’re dealing with former tumblr users in terms of fragility if I’m being perfectly honest.
My best advice is to sit tight and ride out the reddit expansion. Nations will rise and fall in the next month or two, and there’s no punishment for hanging out here in the meantime.
To add to this, I bet someone will eventually make a lemmy aggregator that combines communities in separate instances into one.
It’s already done actually hahah, I have downloaded like 5 lemmy apps. Liftoff has a universal version where you can browse basically everything. If you can interact with it with any of your accounts, it’s seamless as if you had one account, if you can’t because none of your accounts can touch it, then it’s read-only.
Allegedly Lemmy is going to be allowing people to subscribe to “topics” which I imagine would be like multi-sub feeds across instances, which would be very helpful.
important note: this is something my wife heard and has no evidence to back up. 😝
Was going to reply with us saying we’re not going to do it, but @Disabled@burggit.moe already expressed our thoughts in a more eloquent fashion.
yeah me. i wasn’t aware “persons under the age of 18” rule included drawings. i have no clue why they left it vague like that.
The board of directors of pregnant lolis is going to chew you out for that
deleted by creator
i am banned. i think it was just another straw because lemmynsfw was already talking about defederating from burggit beforehand
Eh. It was going to happen sooner or later.
I don’t see why Burggit specifically would have to do this. I was planning to jump to an inconspicuous unrelated instance that federates both Burggit and the “correct” parts of the Lemmyverse. You could still do this if you want to participate in both.
I’m putting my plan on ice for a bit because:
As an aside, I find it deeply funny how many Reddit alternatives don’t allow NSFW in general, as if that wasn’t one of the largest draws in the first place. I have a feeling Reddit is going to be able to boil the frog that is their general userbase for a few years yet.
I think jumping ship early is worth it. There’s nothing worse than your subreddit being blasted into the shadow realm right before you move. It’s hard to gather everyone when the place you used to gather no longer exists.
I’m no moderator of anything, so I’ve no particular sentimental attachments nor sway. I’ll go where my peers go, which still seems to be Reddit even as the frog boils. If I had a true moral aversion to Reddit, I would have quit when they first cracked down on loli subs years ago. Quitting now just seems silly, when the entertaining shitshow has just begun as it were.
Also, I do like it here at Burggit over Reddit. It’s just everywhere else in the Lemmyverse that currently has me headscratching if I want to currently bother figuring out a bridge: the fact that big instances are creating rules even stricter than Reddit (like no NSFW) when they’re not even beholden to advertizers to do so, suggests to me they have an even greater concentration of morality police than you’d find on Reddit. So I’m adopting a lazy wait-and-see approach. Emphasis on lazy.
As a tangent, Reddit normally never comes up in conversation for me with friends, but the blackout finally changed that. They’ve been around long enough to know about old Reddit’s layout. None of them knew it was a thing that still exists. Only one of them used a non-official app (Apollo), and I wholly expect them to jump to the official app (or maybe whatever accessibility app I can fish up) over any Reddit alternative. As somewhat of a power user, it was a nice reminder at just how apathetic and non-power-user-y most of Reddit’s userbase is.
As an extra tangent, I think your 2hu stuff is in an uncommon position, as it’s somewhat inextricably linked to loli/“loli” content that Reddit actively opposes, in a way that most communities are not. I’m guessing that the blackout-related stuff was more of a convenient pretext to finally pull the trigger (and hopefully with a higher conversion rate) than it was the entire justification. And so I think your migration has a chance of being somewhat successful long-term, and way more successful than most migrations simply because there’s a community-inherent reason to do so. Most migrations I expect will or have already flopped as subs capitulate or reopen in some form. I fully expect this episode to be more of a “two minutes hate” than a “straw that broke the camel’s back” in the saga of Reddit’s downward spiral.
What I took away from when reddit cracked down on loli subs and people tried to move to voat was that not enough people cared to move to/stay on voat. Voat’s loli community ended up even smaller than the one on here. People saw that loli/jailbait/fatpeoplehate (maybe I’m misremembering) where the only ones to move over and it wasn’t them that time.
I fully expect NSFW to be removed from reddit before their IPO. It’s the way society is now that you can in theory have a bigger reach and userbase if you allow countries that have restrictive NSFW laws in by banning NSFW from your site.
I’m rallying the touhou nsfw community to move here ahead of the purge (which we all know is coming). I don’t have much time before the main /r/touhou community tries to replace us with /r/touhoe or something else that’s stupid (as a side note, they’ve always mismanaged their NSFW side, to the point of giving me a niche to live in).
There’s a few other hentai communities I can think of that could benefit from moving to burggit, but I expected most of them to move to LemmyNSFW. LemmyNSFW struck me as the only other instance that cared to focus on NSFW. The only thing I saw move over was the real life porn. Which isn’t interesting to me.
It’s true I could have probably ridden it out until the very end, but this entire situation stunk of a long game of “First they came for the socialists, and I did not speak out — Because I was not a socialist.”. I was ok to wait out the status quo, especially since they really hadn’t made any moves since banning loli (which was hell to moderate for years). But these recent events made me realize that they are not adverse at all at screwing over their entire community to make a small % of revenue increase. They came for 3rd party apps, and I decided enough was enough.
What finally sold me on the fediverse was the idea that its strength is in its stability, not its ability to quickly pick up users. It’s playing the long game; despite its own set of issues it’s much better protected against the kind of platform-killing social media company shenanigans that killed things like digg and are in the process of killing reddit and twitter. I think it’ll take a long time, but as people keep repeatedly experiencing the issues with traditional monolithic social media, a move towards more stable and open platforms is inevitable.
On a side note, it’s interesting which sort of communities migrated from reddit - the people who are fed up with Reddit enough to put the effort into learning a new platform is an odd intersection of groups.
Is it? I don’t see how this fundamentally differs all that much from hosting a forum back in the day. Let’s say an instance admin throws in the towel because of expenses/IRL/whatever, it doesn’t seem like the process has changed much from users being forced to migrate forums way back when. Maybe there will eventually be tooling to make the process decidedly better, but it feels overeager to count chickens before they hatch.
Huge disagree here. A new sucker is born every minute, so the average user can put up with way more bullshit than expected simply because it’s not the same contiguous user. Likewise, newer generations have modern social media as their ground truth, so things arguably aren’t even bad from their typical perspective.
I also think federated FOSS-ish stuff is basically incongruous with reaching mainstream - for one, where would the money come from? The huge social media giants can afford to pay the hosting costs associated with reaching a massive audience, but I don’t see the overall Lemmyverse matching that in donations. And if we start considering advertizing too, are we really on a different trajectory than usual? Likewise, I think there’s something for economies of scale available to the big players that I don’t think really work as well under a federated system, like CDNs. I think you’ll find getting content in your eyeballs a few ms faster with every tap matters a lot more to most users than whatever ideological fulfillment one might get out of using Lemmy. Even outside of CDNs, I think federation’s occasional slowness is a huge detractor for being a realistic competitor to whatever social media counterpart they’re styled after that tends to get elephant-in-the-room’d.
Much agreed, I’d say “divas” is a good encapsulation of the overall group - it’s just that we’re divas over such a wide array of things. It’ll be interesting to see the lay of the land as things settle.
Hmm, I see what you’re saying - call me optimistic but I still think the fediverse will keep growing from here. I started writing a point-by-point rebuttal but it started feeling kind of silly with how theoretical this all is, so I’d just like to clarify my perspective:
Traditional social media, being led by a single body whose goal is not to make the best experience for the user, will eventually do something some group of people don’t like. It might be years until we see issues at the level of recent Twitter or Reddit stuff, but the combination of one-size-fits-all rules and aim of profit over people are a poor fit for a universal platform and make problems inevitable. If the fediverse can be a viable alternative for the average user, which I don’t think it’s a stretch to say is likely to happen after a few more years of development, mistakes made by big social media companies will send users over.
Federation means there isn’t a single point of failure; issues that would affect an entire platform are confined to an instance. If a user has a problem with their instance’s management, they only need to go to another one rather than a whole new platform with different UI, none of the same people, none of the same content. Though, tbf this is much less relevant on isolated instances like Burggit.
It’s also worth mentioning that in my personal experience, younger people in particular are slowly moving back towards a more personal and deliberately curated internet experience. Teen mental health especially is at an all time low, and while there are a multitude of contributing factors, we’re realizing that the typical doomscrolling social media experience constantly trying to feed itself to us certainly isn’t helping. I do believe we’re seeing the very beginnings of a larger cultural shift towards the small web and its philosophy - so applying this to the topic at hand, the things people value in a platform can change over time, and my impression is that the direction things are going is one that lines up with the fediverse.
I think there will always be reddit users who use it because they don’t know different, like facebook now. In my eyes Lemmy is already successful in providing cozy places to talk with like-minded folk, though in terms of pure popularity my prediction is that Lemmy and/or Kbin will be at least known by the average recreational internet user within five years, and have an active userbase, say, 25% the size of reddit’s within ten.
But who knows - maybe it’s a fad just for technical people that’ll slowly die out over the next few years, and traditional social media sites will clean up their act and bring everyone back. Only one way to find out haha. It’d be fun to look back on this a decade from now and see how close we were.
I think that’s the crux of our different perspectives. I do agree that for federation and such to reach the mainstream it’s going to have to start with a cultural shift; I just can’t see that appreciably happening any time soon. I’ll be really happy to be wrong though.
But the old content and old users still live on the original instance: if you continue to participate has anything particularly changed? And if you don’t, is that really all that different from forum hopping?
edit: I suppose you also mean participating in communities spread across instances. That’s fair, but I do want to point to Lemmy’s current top-heaviness as to why I think that’s still a tad unrealistic. Also, as it stands instance hopping is definitely not painless. These are definitely tractable problems, but I do think it’ll be a couple years before I can reconsider my stance.
What makes me a little less hopeful is Mastodon’s greater maturity with the same instance top-heaviness and block list sharing from the top. I get why it’s necessary, but the net result is that peoples’ content is still decided from on-high with arguably even less public accountability. I just seriously don’t see the value-add from Joe Schmo’s perspective in exchange for grappling with extra complexity and I think that’s evidenced by Mastodon’s slump past the initial Twitter acquisition outrage.
Nonetheless, things are arguably still in the early stages so the only real answer is “wait and see” of course.
If you’re talking about an exodus on a community level, we’ve had plenty of intra-Reddit examples of splinter communities forming in opposition to moderation incidents on the main subreddit. They tend to not gain traction - most users are extremely apathetic. And I don’t necessarily mean that in a bad way, it just means most people still have the perspective to (at least unconsciously) realize that the specifics of this social media stuff barely matters at the end of the day. But it does mean they tend to take the dumbest, least effort option when it comes to these matters, which I’d say played a big part at how we arrived at the current social media landscape in the first place.
To clarify, I don’t quite hold this expectation. I fully expect Reddit to become irrelevant over the next few years. I just expect whatever to replace it will be another Reddit in the same way Reddit ended up becoming another Digg.
So it’s less “clean up” so much as I expect new companies with new platforms to do the same dog & pony show as usual. Maybe it was just my neck of the woods, but by far the most linked alternative in subreddit blackout messages was to sister Discord communities, even though that’s ideologically empty in the long run.
Much agreed.
One facet that I’ll concede makes me a lot less confident in my own expectations is the geopolitical one. While I’m sure every country would like to maximize its ability to spy on its citizens and beyond, curbing US hegemony in online communications might be a win unto itself. But then the Fourteen Eyes alliance exists, so I really have no clue what the net pull of the situation is. I just hope something spicy leaks at some point.
That’s a possibility. I don’t disagree with your take, but I feel it’s not greedy enough.
I don’t use mobile, but I believe blanket NSFW subs are still accessible from the official app while getting canned on anything third party that still remains (accessibility apps?) and mobile web pages. The insistent funneling to their app makes me think they’re taking steps to monetize viewing NSFW rather than remove it; probably as something like a show of force to investor on how they’ve “successfully” monetized both the advertizer friendly and unfriendly segments of their platform.
Matching up more with what you said, I also think they’ll at some point make a blanket SFW designation for subs like the current blanket NSFW one, and then bully subs into opting into it (or splitting into one of each). I expect having a stronger SFW/NSFW split will make selling SFW reddit even easier to advertizers, and if they’re able to make the two legally distinct enough, to those restrictive countries you mentioned. This all feels like too much to foist on the community before the IPO, so I expect it’ll be billed as a potential avenue for Reddit’s “growth”. After the IPO, I do expect something along these lines to happen as things start to spiral the drain faster.
Oh no criticism here. I think it was a very pragmatic time for any loli-tangential community to jump ship and ride the “current event” wave to (hopefully) better conversion numbers. I just have serious doubts of the staying power of any community that isn’t intrinsically obligated to move off Reddit, at least currently. So I’m sticking with Reddit over the, uh, Burggit-less section of Lemmy, if for nothing else the morbid curiosity of watching things deteriorate in the subs I read.
Interesting! I never really paid much attention to the Touhou subs, but now that you mention it - having someone loli friendly or even just loli neutral still in a moderation position for a NSFW sub is not something I’d expect this many years into the loli purge. I salute you.
I think it’s more that they don’t want to deal with the legal issues that come with hosting porn. Not that there aren’t any morality police types, but most of the sentiment that I’ve seen has been pretty pro-NSFW.
I’ve seen that mentioned before, but I don’t quite buy it. If it’s the actual act of hosting porn, I would expect there to be compromises since this forum style stems from just being a link aggregator anyway. If it’s to avoid running into minors-related laws, I have yet to run into any age questions for any instance signups, so I really have to question how genuinely these sorts of issues are being tackled.
I’ll be happy to believe it when I see it, but until then that just seems like excuses to make their position more palatable until people just accept the status quo.
Porn hoster here. Frankly, the people who say it’s hard to host porn are people who are either running their instance like a business or are retarded. True, a lot of hosting companies don’t let you host adult content at all, but it’s not very hard to find providers who are more than happy to host legal adult content. I even made a list of some of these providers reviewing their policies: https://crippled.media/free-speech-vps-providers-put-to-the-test
And while all the providers I was focusing on were those who accepted Crypto (because going about it anonymously is the best way to go in my opinion.), some of the providers on the list do accept normie payments like credit card. BuyVM for example, is a porn and loli friendly host which hosts a lot of controversial websites that you may have heard of, such as AllTheFallen.
The truth of the matter is people just don’t care to look, I’m not even convinced it’s about money, since most of the lemmy instances hosted are hosted on ridiculously overpriced hardware from companies like AWS and DigitalOcean.
The main issues are that you need to actually find a decent provider with reasonable terms, and you have to avoid using services like Cloudflare, which will absolutely skull fuck you if they get a chance.
In my humble opinion, the people talking about legal issues are;
A. people who have not done any research and are just repeating what they have heard others say.
B. They are just too scared to be the ones to provide a platform
C. They don’t want to provide the platform, but they also want to have plausible deniability and say they “can’t” provide it instead of the truth which is that they won’t provide it.