There are a few topics about which the Based Count admin team would like to hear your thoughts as our community, before we take action. Instad of making various different posts we decided to condensate them into a single big announcement, feel free to speak your mind on any of the following topics. We encourage all Based Count users to participate, but we also welcome feedback from users of other instances.
Lemmy update
Earlier today we have updated our instance to the new 0.19.0 version, recently released by the lemmy developers.
Because of a previously undetected bug in the code of Kaleidoscope, our custom frontend, we had to temporarily disable user flairs and replace our user interface with the latest version of the legacy lemmy-ui. Kaleidoscope and user flairs will be re-activated in the next few days, as soon as we can solve the current problem.
Furthermore, according to some feedback we have received from administrators of other instances, there might still be some bugs in the new Lemmy release and it’s possible that the server will feel a bit slower, due to some changes with how federation is handled. If you encounter any errors or issues, please use this thread to report them.
Threads.net
A few days ago, Meta’s threads.net app launched in the European Union. Simultaneously, they also started testing integration with the Fediverse through ActivityPub. This reignited old talks about whether smaller instances like ours should federate with them or not. It should be noted that threads is pursuing a closer integration with microblogging platforms like Mastodon, rather than link aggregators like Lemmy. Also, it appears that Threads posts will at first be read only to federated servers. In other words, the Fediverse will be able to read content from Threads, but not the other way around.
Arguments FOR federation
- More content
Arguments AGAINST federation
- Privacy NIGHTMARE (it’s literally Meta)
- Possible increased storage costs due to having to host additional content
- Risk of Meta pursuing an Embrace, Extend and Extinguish strategy, despite having denied such plans in the past.
We are currently defederated from threads.net due to privacy concerns, but we’d be open to reconsider this stance depending on community feedback.
Reddit reposting bots and alien.top
Another hot topic in the last few weeks was the alien.top instance and the Fediverser project. Its aim is pretty simple: creating digital bridges between Lemmy and Reddit to favour a migration of Reddit users to the Fediverse. This is mostly done by reposting Reddit posts to Lemmy lemmy communities through bots. An examples of this would be a bot reposting all content from r/PCM to our !pcm community.
Advantages
- This would solve the content drought that has caused many users to give up on Lemmy and move back to Reddit
Disadvantages
- Some percieve this as bot spam and have lamented the excessive amounts of bot posts in their feeds
Various instances have already defederated alien.top, including big players such as lemmy.world and feddit.de. What should our stance be? Would you like to see more posts in !pcm even if those posts were made by bots?
Alternative frontends
We would like to enrich our instance by adding support for different user interfaces. Because our current UI features some changes from the OG Lemmy UI, adopting new frontends would require quite a lot of work on our end, to ensure features such as our very own user flairs work seamlessly on the new design.
Because of this, for the time being only one other client would support our custom features. Vote to decide your favourite
- Photon or its improved Tesseract variant (these are the two most complete UIs out there)
- An old Reddit-like design
- Alexandrite
- The Apple-like Voyager
I just switched to the Voyager iOS client and am enjoying it. If they have a reasonable desktop client, I like that too.
Maybe you can make pull requests to get flares included in the iOS app too.
If they have a reasonable desktop client
It’s basically the design of an iOS app stretched to fit a desktop, looks quite ugly to me. But I personally dislike everything-Apple so I’m very biased about it.
Looking at their GitHub it appears to be written in React, similar to lemmy-ui (well lemmy-ui is InfernoJS, not React, but they are basically the same thing), so I could definitely fork it and add flairs. But I doubt they would merge it into their main app, we are the only instance using flairs and we are still very small.
hmm, yeah a big scaled up iPad UI isn’t going to be great on a desktop. It’s kinda optimized for touch input.
As an aside, since I switched to Voyager, I’ve noticed it has trouble staying logged in to this instance. Not sure if that’s a bug on your end or theirs, but it stays logged in to
programming.devpretty consistently, so something different going on over there.Are these problems recent? We’re on the most recent version of Lemmy, while programming.dev is still on 0.18.5. It’s possible that the app doesn’t fully support the newer version just yet.
Hmm, yeah I just recently switched to voyager from mlem; but I spoke too soon. Same thing happened with programming.dev, so must just be a Voyager thing.
I think I’d be cool with letting a bot repost content from the PCM subreddit to the PCM lemmy. One of the biggest hurdles, like you mentioned, is the content drought disincentivizing regular users, but also the meme creators who likely want to post where most of the audience is. If via bots our content was functionally similar to that of the subreddit, the PCM lemmy could be advertised as the same content but with better management (I mean the Reddit Admins, the PCM mods on there are chill). And that to me sounds like a good idea.
As far as front ends go, I think I’m satisfied with the dark mode I’m already using on browser, and Jerboa for mobile- occasional bugs aside. Though if I had to vote from the given selection, I’d probably go with Photon personally. I would even consider switching to it.
Thanks for the feedback. I still have some doubts about alien.top reposts, in particular regarding moderation and how it might affect user perception, but hearing different opinions is exactly why I decided to open this thread
The main reason I chose this instance over others is because it seemed like there wouldn’t be much defederation, so I would like to be federated with threads.net
Reddit repost bots seem fine to me, if it’s excessive I’ll probably just block the bot account.
I only use mobile so I can’t really comment on the third issue.
keeping defederation from threads is probably good, the general consensus seems to be they are only creating threads for the mentioned “embrace extend extinguish” goal… coin flip for the alien.top federation.
in my view a separate instance that federates with threads and alien that people repost to manually might be the best idea, if people want to interact with them - this would still enable communication, without it “infecting” the “real fediverse”
frontends seem unnecessary imo (or I am indifferent on the choice I guess)
Your separate instance idea is interesting but it’d would be way more work than we can afford, both on a human perspective as well as an economic one. Manual reposts are a no go, imo. What could happen would be applying some kinds of filtering to the content that gets mirrored from Reddit so that only the “best” gets in, though it’d be tough to figure what that would be.
Also it would require me to rewrite part of the Fediverser software (the program behind the reposting bots) and find a host for it, which again would mean hosting a second instance. Man, if only money grew on trees…
