They are still separate communities. Users following only A will not see the posts from C. Users following both A and C will everything.

Sorry, but this will be a bit too technical…

The thing is that Lemmy (at least, others probably do the same) don’t treat the Linked Data as the canonical representation, they work by translating every message with an as:Activity to their own internal representation in the database (with separate tables for Posts, Comments and PrivateMessages).

This means that all it takes for a Lemmy instance to treat a post as “new” comment is to produce an “as:Announce” attributed to the “follower” community, and then all instances will process it as a new post/comment/vote.

One of the things that I’m experimenting with is to have “communities that can follow communities”. So, if community A follows community B, then it can re-post anything that has happened on Community B.

If you do it “properly”, it doesn’t even need to be a lot of data duplication because the “follower” community would just be creating Announce activities.

The only thing that is making me hold out on this experiment is because I am 100% sure that some people will see their posts on a community they never interacted on and they will panic on the grounds of “mah privacy” or something silly like that.

The north star goal is to make this app give the user the feel of being officially supported by the platforms it reads from

This is the exact opposite of what I’m working on. My idea is to embrace “Protocols, not platforms” and treat all the different places are sources of content (like RSS) but with the added two-way interactivity that is enabled by ActivityPub and Linked Data.

So of course the UI will need to adapt: threaded discussion forums would be presented in a different way in relation to long form blog feeds. But luckily this is already part of the benefits from Linked Data. A Lemmy post is presented in the Fediverse as https://www.w3.org/ns/activitystreams#Page, and each response is a https://www.w3.org/ns/activitystreams#note, while a blog entry from WriteFreely is a https://www.w3.org/ns/activitystreams#Article and an video from PeerTube is a https://www.w3.org/ns/activitystreams#Video… this information about the object type should be enough for us to figure out the best way to handle the UI.

what would you want to see on this app?

Believe it or not, I would like to have a read-only view of the Big Tech feeds. Instagram, TikTok, YouTube, Reddit, Twitter, Facebook posts from your friends, all of that crap. Like what GrayJay is doing. The idea though would be not to interact with it, but to have a way to people to ease their way out into the open alternatives.

Seeing the instance as infrastructure is what I want to see more of

Yes, exactly! A good manager to me is the one that is just focused on solving the problems that are on the way of the rest of the team.

Host them on your instance, then.

Hummm, gladly?

I’m running more than 15 instances for communities. I was running alien.top which at one point hosted 600k accounts with more than 2M posts + comments, a lot of them being sent to the topic-specific instances. I’m constantly reminding people that the instances are there, and that I can create communities for anyone that need it.

I just checked the first two pages (…) No Twitter thread, no Mastodon thread.

Cherry-picking data points is not the way to make an argument. That just makes you seem clueless and/or biased.

If you really want to refute my statement, you’ll need to take a look at all submissions in the past two years and compare the number of posts to twitter vs the number of posts to any Mastodon instance.

I didn’t see a “call for more action” in that comment.

We have someone that wants to post more content and who is being told “don’t do that. things here are slow. It’s more than enough to have only 5 posts a day, more than that and you are spamming” and I am saying “No, it’s not enough. We should be encouraging to have people posting more, not less.”

Of course they are, the same way the vast majority of microblog users are still on Twitter compared to Mastodon.

I gave a very specific example to illustrate where Mastodon had become more relevant than Twitter. Again: it’s not about absolute numbers.

I reply when I see absolutes such as “all communities on Lemmy are dead”, "all mods are bad ", “all communities are about politics”

1. I didn’t make any of these statements
2. There is a big difference between “sweeping generalizations” and “categorically correct statements”. The former are the statements you give as examples, but the latter can apply to the absolute majority of cases, even if someone has a data point (“the exception that proves the rule”) in the contrary.

It paints the platform in a bad light

Why would you think that?

The original argument was “Communities don’t need a lot of posting to survive here”, and my response is basically saying “we should strive for more than surviving”.

It seems like that instead of focusing on the part where I am calling for more action, you decided to focus on what you perceive as criticism and you try to attack that as soon as possible.

Stop using absolute statements and I’ll stop replying

It feels like your problem is not with the “absolute statements”, but that you are doing your best to reject reality.

It doesn’t matter if the number is 100% or 99% or 92.376%, what matters is that it has been two years since the Reddit boycott and we still do not have a good example of a thriving community here. We had many attempts (the /r/selfhosted people, the /r/blind), but they are by and large still on Reddit. Can you at least agree to that?

Oh, wow. Thank you for a very good example for self-selection bias!

Seriously, though: why is it that you feel this intense urge to dismiss any and everything I am saying? Don’t you think that is a little bit sad that all you can do is this mindless pontification?

However, is giving your credit card or bank transfer information to a website

You are not giving your payment information to the website. You’d be giving to a payment processor, which has to go through all the regulatory oversight. So, yes, I trust Stripe to handle my payment information more than I’d ever trust any random instance admin with my email.

It’s still open for registrations. The instance is not just for me.

I did already. The solution is to charge a small payment from every user. I’ve been saying that for everyone that cares to hear since 2022.

mods and admins only give lip service to dealing with bots

“You get what you pay for.”, evidence #103.

What makes you think that captchas are effective against spammers signing up to the service?

You don’t need 5 posts a day for a community to survive here

“Surving” != “Thriving”.

A couple of years ago, I noticed that the front page of HackerNews was consistently getting links from Mastodon posts. That was interesting because it showed that at least one significant part of the tech conversation had moved away from Twitter and into the Fediverse.

No such thing has happened for Lemmy. There is no particular community which is thriving. There is no example of subreddit community that had successfully boycotted Reddit and transplanted here. We have the usual handful of posters, each one trying to maintain their communities “alive”, but that is far from its true potential.

What’s stopping spammers/scammers/bots to do the same thing?

My instance does not require email validation and so far I have zero spammers or bots. There is one thing I am doing different than everyone else. Can you guess what it is?

I’ve noticed you tend to always assume the worst before even trying to give the benefit of the doubt.

There are very legitimate reasons to not want to give your email to any random website that asks. They can be hacked, the instance might be a front for some data aggregator, etc. And if your response is “just use a masking service” or “just use a disposable email address”, then what is the point of validating the email address in the first place?

Admins add email verification because this is one extra layer of protection against automated bots, but this is far from a guarantee they are protected. It might help them to give some paper trail in case someone does something nasty on their servers, but the best they can do is take an (easy to create) email address and report to the authorities along with the IP address.

Compare with an instance that only accepts paying members:

• no bot or spammer will be interested in paying a few dollars per month to send messages
• if some spammer is stupid enough to sign up to the service and sends clear spam, then we point the ToS to them, kick them out and they will be left without any money
• we have a much stronger paper trail (credit card payments, bank transfers) in case some user does something nasty.

https://communick.news/ fits all you requirements regarding users - only paying members can join, so the instance is pretty much guaranteed to be protected from spammers and bots.

Regarding your communities: I really rather keep a strict separation between “instances for communities” and “instances for groups”. The topic-specific instances I am running are meant for specific niches, but perhaps I can find one domain that can be used for more “generic” subjects. Would you be interested in that?

I did the demo for CareerCupid and the AP toolkit. AMA.