I'm not saying they are or aren't. I'm simply saying that we all know the big media companies go after people at the drop of a hat. They recently tried to get reddit to expose the identities of people discussing piracy over there. To their credit reddit told them no and defended themselves legally. And that's the issue. The media companies can accuse anyone of anything if it even slightly smells like piracy and the target has to legally defend themselves. This is fine if you're a multibillion valued company. Not so fine if you're just some guy who just wanted to run a Lemmy instance out of his own pocket.

Might be worth remembering here that Lemmy instances, including .world are hosted by regular people. Not massive multinational companies worth billions who can engage the best legal talent around.

If Hollywood comes after a Lemmy instance, Holywood have a huge legal team and endless money. The Lemmy instance has some guy. They could quite literally destroy a persons life. With that in mind, I don't blame any instance owners for erring on the side of taking a stance that won't put them in the legal firing line.

Yeah, try to be neither of those parents.

OP: Please try and support instance admins and Lemmy devs

Sync fans in the comments: Yes, I bought Sync and love it

I think people are forgetting that Reddit didn't start off with communities (subs), they came later. Reddit got big the same way all sites that don't have a built in audience (e.g. Threads users basically being Insta users) - time and commitment.

Lemmy is not going to be as big as Reddit for a long, long time. Everyone has fallen into this habit of thinking all Reddit mods are power crazy egomaniacs and some are, no doubt, but the good subs on Reddit required dedicated time and effort to build up. Curating, introducing and constantly readjusting rules and expectations and at some point a good sub reaches a tipping point and it's popular.

All this will take time with Lemmy. Community mods will need to be as dedicated as Reddit mods were. And, as a side issue, this commitment to making and keeping a community great is what spez and his idiot gremlins have just thrown away. It's not about user numbers for Reddit, it's now a priority for them to get mods who are willing and able to put in the amount of work the mods they just alienated had. Subreddit engagement stats are mostly going down take a look at the number of posts and the number of comments for r/askreddit, it's a steady decline.

Lemmy might not ever get as big as Reddit but it will grow if mods stay committed and users keep posting and commenting. If that happens, that same tipping point will come.

It's an OK article but would've liked Max to be a little kinder in terms of an explanation as to why both Lemmy and KBin are at the state they're currently in.

Six weeks ago, the two dev teams (and for KBin that was one person) were writing code for barely used platforms. Now all of a sudden, the code they're writing is catering to over a million people across hundreds of instances. This is Alpha software so of course some tools and documentation are missing. These two dev teams have been in fire-fighting mode for the last few weeks I expect. There's no large dev teams here, no billionaire backers able to throw money at an issue.

The article was good overall but it would've been better if there'd been an explanation offered as to how they're being developed and why some features are not in place yet.

Signal have already said they will withdraw completely from the UK, as have WhatsApp, Session and a few others.

I think you underestimate the deep stupidity and tech-ignorance of our politicians, coupled with their burning desire to know everything that we do. This is a set of people who think hidden == illegal.

Capitalism has led us to believe the only true value of something is financial. Education shouldn't just be about positioning you for a good career. We've substituted human morals for religious dogma. We need David Lynch to do one more season of Twin Peaks.

Call your friend a cunt in America: people lose their shit.

Call your friend a cunt in the UK or Aussieland: Everyone laughs.

Culture is sometimes a very nuanced thing.

Lemmy is a piece of software. Lemmy software is a link aggregator - same as reddit.

So you’re signed up to a server that's installed an instance (a copy) of the Lemmy software. Other servers also run the Lemmy software making them also instances of Lemmy. As well as you being able to talk to users in Communities (think subreddits) on the lemmy.world server, you can talk to users in Communities on other Lemmy instances. For example, lemmy.ml, feddit.de etc etc

KBin is also link aggregator software, just like Lemmy and Reddit. Same things apply there, same software on multiple servers, all able to talk with each other.

Mastodon software is a microblogging service - same as Twitter (and Threads). Just like instances of Lemmy, instances of Mastodon can talk to each other. So a user on mastodon.world can talk to (for example) a user on kolektiva.social which is also running the Mastodon software.

There’s also Pixelfed (Instagram), PeerTube (YouTube), Friendica (Facebook), Plume (WordPress) and a large variety of others.

Now, as well as all these different types of software (Lemmy, Mastodon, KBin, PixelFed etc) being able to talk to other instances of the same software on other servers, because they are all underpinned by a single method of passing information called ActivityPub, each type of software can also talk to each other - so you as a Lemmy user can also see posts and comments from a user on a server running an instance of Mastodon (or Plume, or PixedlFed, or...you get the idea). All these things are loosely joined together making a joined (federated) universe - the fediverse.

I understand a lot of the arguments made and in reality you're right, if they want our data, they'll get it.

However, I also think that making it as difficult and therefore expensive as possible for them is a legitimate way to respond and make it clear to them that they are here on sufferance and not welcome. That might be seen as immature and pointless and maybe that's so, but I do think it's important to defederate from Threads to demonstrate our collective unwillingness to become their commodity.