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.
Any examples for that? Latency causing instances not being able to keep up with federation is new to me.
Here is one of the github issues on the problem.
Thanks! Didn’t know Lemmy doesn’t have something like an ingress queue
That issue being two years, I’m not sure what the current state of things is.
But servers did move towards EU to combat the problem, and haven’t moved back for what I know.
Issue was fixed several months ago, but yeah it was a problem for quite a while
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.
Afaik it is a specific implementation issue in Lemmy that causes this. Instances in Australia had problems catching up with lemmy.world because of that.
This has been solved 7 months ago: https://lemmy.dbzer0.com/post/42049808
It wasn’t just a problem. It was literally impossible for them to keep up.
Re-locating the server was the only option, as opposed to skipping events or shutting down until the problem was fixed.
Please do not condescend.
I know it doesn’t have to work that way, but for a time, it did.
Here is one of the github issues on the problem.
And yes. It led to instance relocations.
It was either don’t federate, and wait for an update with unknown eta, or move closer to the big instances.
Was not aware of the latency issue. But that’s something that can surely be overcome.Apparently it’s been fixed.By “reviving democracy” I mean just that. Democracy is in a bad way and it’s partly because of the changed information environment. The crisis of professional journalism has decimated local news. People don’t know their neighbors or what’s going on in their communities. This is not an original observation.
I haven’t checked. I may have been already.
As a support structure providing more open communication, the fediverse might help with that. It in itself is not, and is not supposed to be, democratic. It’s its own wierd mix of dictatorship with the option for the community at large to wrest control away from current leaders, should they want to.
As of now, preferring “going local” would hinder more than help with irl democracy. There just aren’t enough users. If you divided them you’d end up with a ton of tiny inactive communities, rather than a bigish pretty lively one.
And it’s not an either or. Or you can have big communities AND small local ones.
Smaller communities are also something that happens naturally, and is already happening naturally. The reddit exodus was the spark for a ton of new niches on lemmy hitting critical mass.
There is also plenty of non-english, more local activity already. You just might not be seeing it due to your language settings.
This was not my point. My point is that social media will always encourage “niches” (as you hint) and that it would be better for our politics if these overlapped with real-world communities than with, say, obscure hobbies (neutral politically) or political affiliation (the original sin of this new medium).
I don’t agree.
You present two things as if they are mutually exclusive, when they are not.
The very starting point of your argument seems to be that current niche communities can only exist at the expense of local geographic communities.
As such, you seem to suggest sacrificing existing communities in favor of hypothetical “better” communities based on physical proximity.
Such communities are useful in terms of political mobilization, but they aren’t very fun. People don’t bond over tax rates, they bond over tabletop rpgs, cats, music, movies, etc. And you can’t engage in those bonding activities in local communities until they themselves are big enough to contain such niches within them.
And all of these things can exist simultaneously. In fact I completely reject your view that niche online communities do more harm than good.
Boiled down, your view seems to equate to seeing a bunch of people having fun, and telling them to go do something useful, while completely dismissing that it doesn’t matter whether I learn empathy from my neighbor, or someone on the other side of the world.
What you’re asking for, IMO, is for the fediverse to work more like facebook and twitter, which HEAVILY bias their feeds towards local matters. The US would not have been so easy to turn into a xenophobic ball of angry people if their social media were MORE international.
TikTok is even worse about it. The one time I gave it a chance, it was 90% content local to me. But it was mindless trash. At worst, it was xenophobic rhetoric. Local, doesn’t mean meaningful, or good.
You saw it on reddit all the time, how people from the US often didn’t even realize they were talking to people across the world. Because it’s a foreign concept to them. Say what you will but it is the one corporate platform that doesn’t care where you are from. Everyone discussing something gets pooled into the same communities and threads, regardless of age, sex, or even timezone.
That is a good thing. We need more of that, not less. Because online and real-world communities DO overlap. But you seem to be asking them to match. That would isolate them, not empower them.
Online communities today are the one way that authentically bridges communities of people across the world. If online communities matched offline communities, why would I ever develop a desire to understand not just my neighbor, but also people across the world?
How would I ever go and find out for myself, how people across the world think and feel? Whether my government speaks true about the threats around us, or if there is more to it?
If you overlap a bunch of circles, they all become connected. If you match them, you get bubbles.
That is how corporate social media has been functioning for over a decade, and it needs to be stopped, not propagated. If we sort people into only one group (like where they are from), you isolate them.
But when you sort each person into least two groups or more, you connect everyone to everyone, by virtue of almost every group having members in common with every other group.
Seems to be a misunderstanding. My proposal concerns servers, not communities. It would do no more than responsibilize users (“your virtual home here has people who may be your neighbors”) and encourage them to join local communities where they might discuss local issues (rather than, say, US politics).
Corporate social media is only biased towards local if you count the whole USA as “local”. Again, seems to be a misunderstanding. In the US case “local” would mean state or town.
What’s the difference? Servers are communities.
There’s that false dichotomy again. I think what instance someone is on has very little effect on what content they engage with. And if it does, this change would be detrimental rather than beneficial.
We must be using different corporate social media. Of course facebook, twitter and tiktok show different content depending on every factor there is. The thing is, they wont confront you with people from your town that have a different opinion. They are tuned towards NOT changing whatever opinion you already have, unless you’re pre-disposed to going down dopamine-laced rabbit holes.
Meanwhile, the fediverse does confront people with differing opinions. That it doesn’t necessarily do so locally, is a feature, not a bug.
You’re an argumentative fellow! I’m still not sure exactly what it is you’re disagreeing with. My proposal is pretty boring and inoffensive. Everything’s in the post. But if you disagree, that’s fine.
No they’re not. Communities have “c/” in front of their name. I’m sure you know that already.
You’re confusing my use of the word community in its literal meaning, with its meaning as a term in the context of lemmy as a piece of software.
I do not think that sorting people online by where they are from would help.
In fact I think sorting people online by where they are from could even be harmful, and potentially dangerous.
That the change you would make is small, does not change my opinion that it would be for the worse, nor that your reasoning for wanting to make it, as I understand it, seems faulty.
The latency issue has been solved 7 months ago: https://lemmy.dbzer0.com/post/42049808