Which instances did you try? I want to check if it was the background radiation of USpol inherent to most online communities you’re sick of (which there really isn’t a solution beyond keeping up with the newest buzzwords to add to your filters for from what I can tell) or the dot-social/kolektiva/twitter-like “my political happenings are too important for a content warning and must be boosted to everyone’s eyes 24/7” variety of USpol (which there is a ton of in Lemmy as well but i don’t think most people are ready for that debate yet)

The second one can be ameliorated a little by picking a smaller, sillier instance (hint: the weirder the domain, the better) and not following The Same Large Accounts Everyone Does.

In fact, I would advise against Mastodon the software altogether and instead point you towards instances of Akkoma or one of the not-Japanese Misskey forks such as Sharkey, Firefish, or Iceshrimp. The vibes of most instances I’ve seen seem to be cozier, and the Bubble timeline (called Recommended Timeline by some software) helps with discovering people to follow beyond the said Large Accounts.

epic megapost

nah, there are plenty of truth wannabes (freeze peach bigotry safe havens) that actively federate. just look at literally any competent server’s blocked instances list and you’ll see a few examples. there’s a reason why nobody* runs completely open federation

*: aside from people who’re friendly with that crowd ofc

Mastodon feels like a fucking funeral.

You’re clearly nowhere near the good parts, then.

In my experience, once when you find your way into the correct circles the microblog-verse makes the “shitposting” of Lemmy look like r/memes. I do agree that discoverability could be better though, it took me 4-5 months before I got the hang of it. And now I barely check Lemmy despite my Lemmy account being older than my earliest microblog account (under this name, anyway).

One important thing is that your instance matters quite a bit more than here. Starting on a large general purpose instance (especially if it’s mastodon.social) and just following Large Accounts and Nobody Else like most people recommend for some reason is just setting yourself up for disappointment. Instead, get on a smaller interest-specific instance (rule of thumb: the weirder the domain the better your experience will be!) and follow the local timeline (and on good software, the bubble/recommended timelines). And post stuff/interact with people. Don’t be that one person that does nothing but boost news bots and occasionally butt into replies of people asking rhetorical questions they already know the answer for.

(Perhaps Lemmy is better at news or whatever, I wouldn’t know as I block all news communities I can find – I just don’t see the point as all the discussion around most news ends up predictable, unproductive (not that internet communities necessarily need to be “productive”), and unnecessarily angry)

Also in a world with usable™ Misskey forks and Akkoma I think the limitations of Mastodon the software are really starting to show, and I urge anyone who’s been disappointed in Mastodon to try other microblog software. (Quotes are already a thing if you know where to look! So are emoji reactions, because people have more emotions than :star:)

Everyone complaining about only getting cringy content is really telling on themselves here lol

even in the deepest, darkest, secret-est parts of my soul i have no interest in any content (a) in Arabic and (b) of imams. i can’t even understand a word of Arabic and am not religious, yet apparently that was the most up to date profile tiktok had on me the last time i tried it out. (which was the 3rd time or so) and i even made an account and signed in.

the politics bullshit and lame facebook-grade memes were the “best” it could muster. as in, the only things i understood.

maybe it works better in an english speaking and not-religious-asf country.

idk why but i never got tiktok. the all-powerful mystical algorithm that hijacks your brain just didn’t work on me. it’s all politics bullshit and lame facebook memes.

hell, the fedi (both lemmy and the microblog-verse) has “wasted” more of my lifespan overall than tiktok.

fixed that part, words are hard

The thing I’m trying to say is that “having an API” does not matter in the long term if the API does not expose the functionality needed to use it properly.

And TBF if someone joined Lemmy only because it had an API and nothing else then they’re gonna be in for a very rude awakening sooner or later as the troubles of federation that previous (mostly microblogging) platforms have encountered and attempted to solve (not to mention novel problems due to the community oriented nature of Lemmy) start to show up.

This is only going to get worse, and throwing “more API” into the fire won’t fix any of the important problems at hand.

Picking a fedi server software is just picking how much (and what kind of) jank you’re willing to tolerate. The features are always secondary.

I don’t think an API is the thing that matters here. There are quite a lot of things you can’t hack on with a client alone and actually needs server side support to function (actual moderation tooling is a prime example)

Also most APIs aren’t “designed” per se and just expose the internal representations of the projects they’re of. A “common” API would either be too “wide” enough to be unusable (hello, ActivityPub C2S) or would severely limit experimentation and innovation (good luck on building microblogs in the Lemmy API) without having so many extensions that essentially end up being a third, completely different API.

Everyone wants a fork. Nobody wants to be the fork.

We need a small group of motivated and skilled developers to get together and decide “we’re doing this”, and actually go beyond announcing an empty Git repo. (i.e. actually have some usable code to show for)

Dealing with a codebase as janky and large as Lemmy is unfortunately beyond my skillset, otherwise I’d love to get involved myself.

The wording in the parent comment also seems to imply the Fediverse is just Lemmy/kbin, which is a weird self-centric take I see here (i.e. on Lemmy) a lot.

A lot of the broader fedi that has access to adequate moderation tooling are doing just fine and don’t seem too “ill-suited”. It’s really just Lemmy that’s like this.

I’m not entirely sure I’ll attempt joining “the new Beehaw” wherever it may set up shop (y’all are a bit too serious news-y for my liking, personally), but all the federated interactions I had with the folk from Beehaw had been quite positive, and it’s kinda sad to see y’all go. But I can definitely understand the reasons why, and I do have my own gripes with Lemmy (both the software and the unfortunate community it has picked up) as well.

those are custom emojis and for some godforsaken reason they’re implemented as inline markdown images and not as actual custom emojis the rest of the fedi had a standards extension/convention for years ago

Logic errors will be a more relevant issue with a web app (things like not setting your JSON Web Tokens to expire) and Rust won’t save you from that.

I’m sure there is some arcane feature of Rust that’d let you encode that in the type checker somehow. Yeah it’d be completely unreadable and unmaintainable but knowing the Rust community there’s probably someone mad enough to take a crack at it.

AFAIK the issues l.w et al are struggling with are to do with the database. The language you’re calling out to Postgres doesn’t really matter when it’s Postgres that’s taking a lifetime computing through your hell-query.

I don’t know much about Go (I should really take a closer look at it) but it’s definitely also a valid candidate. (Perhaps a bit too bare bones for my personal liking, but hey you can’t win em all)

A long-running web thing like Lemmy doesn’t need the processing benefits of native compilation, and can avoid memory vulnerabilities with a garbage collector. Most things it does are IO bound (receive data from other servers, send data to other servers, occasionally render some HTML, interact with a database…) so you’re really not benefiting from anything specific to Rust, but you are losing a significant amount of developer effort into things like working with the borrow checker or the infamously long compilation times that could instead go into implementing functionality.

You could make something just as performant as Lemmy is today with Python or JS (JS would particularly work well given the prevalance of JITs).

I’d been eyeing azorius.net lately considering it’s much smaller/younger than Lemmy and already federates (and might make an interesting foundation to build something out of before it grows too large, hint hint to anyone who actually knows Go) but I don’t have the Go experience to actually go through its code.

I’ve been experimenting with ActivityPub on my own time and I am kinda starting to understand why all AP projects end up being large messes. It’s spaghetti code all the way across the fedi.

Because now you have to maintain that fork. If it was as simple as pressing the little fork button on GitHub and importing a few PRs in than there’d already be several forks right now.

The Lemmy codebase is a beast that’s evolved over several years. Not everybody can just jump in and throw anything they want just because of how complex a system it is internally. (I learned that the hard way.)

Across the fediverse all the major successful forks have a motivating factor. Glitch social is maintained by the only other paid developer hired to work on Mastodon and acts as an unstable branch / “feature fast track” of sorts, Akkoma exists because upstream Pleroma has sided with the freeze-peach crowd too many times to count. Firefish and Iceshrimp had a whole… thing… (too much drama to explain) (oh and upstream Misskey is way too Japanese for western developers to contribute, including commit messages and code comments) What’s the motivation to start a Lemmy fork? And what’s the motivation to keep maintaining it?

I really want to see a Lemmy fork. Particularly one that attempts to prioritize instances as their own individual communities (rather than the Redditesque “instances as free horizontal scaling” view of the fedi a lot of people seem to have). Hell I might end up attempting to contribute a quality of life feature or two of my own if a viable fork were to exist. Yet there isn’t any.

So, I guess what I’m trying to say is, the only reason no fork exists is because nobody has stepped up to the challenge.

EDIT: And of course with ActivityPub in the mix you also have to consider how it will affect federation with other instances, and building consensus among other projects (not necessarily just Lemmy) regarding any extensions you might decide to add to the protocol (though you’d have much easier time implementing extensions from other projects if they solve your issue)

One of the biggest performance issues is the blur effect in the UI. Disable that from the settings and on my current laptop it goes from “visibly laggy” to “fairly usable, even if not as performant”.

But I do miss having the “fucking [insert slur here]” “kill yourself” “only a basement-dwelling loser would have this opinion” comments auto-hid because the average passing user disapproved of it and decided to express their disapproval via downvote, instead of coming across it myself semi-frequently and reporting it.

If Lemmy does introduce a sort of “instance-level global moderator” role separate from admin role, I can definitely imagine smaller, tighter knit instances (think your average gay catgirl Masto/Akkoma instance, not Beehaw or the instance I’m on for that matter) giving mod rights to a significant chunk of their members just so these kinds of situations happen less. Anyone who sees anything of that sort and has the mental energy could just remove it for the rest of their community.

Of course there is a potential for abuse in this style of moderation especially as an instance gets larger, but then one of the good parts about federation is that you don’t need a large instance to have access to the content. And unlike Mastodon you actually get access to the entire conversation including all the replies here even with a single user instance due to how communities are implemented.

(just in case this comment starts getting strange interactions it’s apparently broken the lemmy containment barrier and has reached the microblogging fedi 😰)