Memes about the Fediverse.
Other relevant communities:
I am so confused. A "sub" used to refer, on the old place, as a "sub-reddit", but we do not have those here. Did you mean "community"?
(And as already covered, PieFed already has an implementation of this, so what is the "future" referring to there in that case?)
Repeating myself here, but the community migration tool on Piefed is somewhat incomplete. it only migrates posts and comments locally to the incoming instance its moving to. What is needed for proper community migration is the ability to all instances to recognise comment migration. And ideally, the automatic rerouting of all subscribers to the new community.
Effectively making communities modular. Much of this is outside Rimus power (due to the Fediverse still being most Lemmy, but one day... one day)
Upvoting bc relevance but I somewhat disagree. Many people left Reddit not just bc of ads or poor treatment of app devs but bc of issues regarding "ownership" of a record. If I say something, can Reddit train AI off of it, or make money off of it, without my consent (using Reddit automatically assumes consent, even retroactively).
So applying that same thinking process here, does anyone - not just Rimu but anyone - have the right to simply steal community content wholesale? And who would provide consent - just the current community mods? The past ones? Why wouldn't the commentors have the right to do or not do what they wish with their own comments? Setting aside how difficult it would be to even implement such a thing - like if someone agrees to migrate their comment, but they were replying to someone else, and included a quote from them, then is consent automatically granted for those words?
It is a tricky subject. Perhaps importing the content in read-only mode is the best that could be hoped for, preserving a historical snapshot bc it is too difficult to import something wholesale, especially if not merely every provider of posts but also every single person that ever commented in a community may not have an account on the recipient server - like even if they have a PieFed one would it need to be on the precise exact instance as where the content is being migrated to?
And even more relevant, what if the recipient instance has different rules than the original? Like defederations? Rules about niceness or illegality of stuff (see e.g. Lemmy.world's whole deal with piracy community). Importing an entire community and keeping it all "live" while simultaneously offering pass-through connections from the old to the new seems fraut with such difficulties. Might it not be better to make a hard break from the old, allowing a fresh start on the new? i.e. community migration is just a convenience feature, it was never meant to do all the things that you said.
Tbh I don't have anything to do with PieFed's codebase or policies or anything at all - I am just a user like you, sharing my unqualified opinion here:-). I hope it is useful to see this pushback against implementing what I interpreted your words to mean though.
So applying that same thinking process here, does anyone - not just Rimu but anyone - have the right to simply steal community content wholesale?
In my opinion this is a mindset issue. You are thinking of communities as integral parts of instances rather than modular concepts. In my mind, a community migration would be mutual and transparent. There could even be a "Community History" button somewhere in the sidebar that details its timeline if it has moved instances at any point. Instances could in theory 'reject' recognition of migration from all other instances or specific instances, but in a collaborative cross-instance setup - ideally I'd imagine most instances would be on-board as it benefits everyone. The purpose of being able to just shift instances like that, to such an extent, is to prevent them from having to completely restart if an instance (like lemm.ee) goes down, or if they find that they're having disagreements with the instance administrators.
Lemm.ee shocked everyone, but the passage of time will lead to more instances slowly dropping and forcing their communities to find new homes. That isn't a slight on the fediverse system, it's just what will happen naturally as some instance owners just lose interest over time.
Why wouldn't the commentors have the right to do or not do what they wish with their own comments?
I mean I don't know why I would be bothered if my own comment history on "television" (for instance) suddenly publicly changes from television@piefed.social to television@piefed.world. It would still be the same community, and describe itself as such. You could even add little disclaimers in automatically migrated comments for transparency.
And even more relevant, what if the recipient instance has different rules than the original? Like defederations? Rules about niceness or illegality of stuff (see e.g. Lemmy.world's whole deal with piracy community).
Presumably a piracy community wouldn't migrate their community into an anti-piracy instance. The host community and instance would have to consent to migration.
Might it not be better to make a hard break from the old, allowing a fresh start on the new? i.e. community migration is just a convenience feature, it was never meant to do all the things that you said.
Depends on how built-up your community is. It sucks to have to start all over again.
It just seems like you are placing a LOT of trust in community mods to make decisions on behalf of the community for its own well-being rather than to feed their egotistical desires. However, I am recalling the semi-recent controversy of the 196 mods attempting to forcibly move their community from blahaj to Lemmy.world and people got insanely angry and started a whole new 196 (again, which is how 196 had moved to blahaj in the first place).
A lot of people came here from Reddit to get away from such practices, not subject themselves to an army of little fiefdoms within which each mod is in control of their own community. If Reddit was an empire, then your model sounds like a peaceful, hopefully loving (sometimes, but... perhaps not always?) kingdom, whereas I am talking about a democracy where the individual people who submit their content get to control their individual futures, even if their past submissions are carved in stone and their own control over it mostly released.
It's something to think about anyway!:-)
It just seems like you are placing a LOT of trust in community mods to make decisions on behalf of the community for its own well-being rather than to feed their egotistical desires.
To be fair, community mods have any number of ways to behave badly as stewards even without such a system. I also don't see what is immediately potentially corrupt about moving instance in a way that would inherently annoy the audience.
However, I am recalling the semi-recent controversy of the 196 mods attempting to forcibly move their community from blahaj to Lemmy.world and people got insanely angry and started a whole new 196 (again, which is how 196 had moved to blahaj in the first place).
Well, I mean there we are. I suppose in that event someone else would co-opt them entirely.
But supposing community migration did exist then, the blahaj administrators would have to give consent - and if the community clearly rejected it, I doubt they would give it.
A lot of people came here from Reddit to get away from such practices, not subject themselves to an army of little fiefdoms within which each mod is in control of their own community.
To be fair, the current piefed migration system relies on the consent of the new instance. You can't just do it unilaterally. And I assume a piefed to piefed community transfer would require the consent of the old instance too, so you can't just do it uniltaterally. And in a general sense we are already all at the mercy of corrupt instance owners as it is.
If Reddit was an empire, then your model sounds like a peaceful, hopefully loving (sometimes, but... perhaps not always?) kingdom, whereas I am talking about a democracy where the individual people who submit their content get to control their individual futures, even if their past submissions are carved in stone and their own control over it mostly released.
I mean as I said, the ideal migration system would leave public records of movement - and people would post knowing full well that all communities are modular and could be moved.
I also don't see what is immediately potentially corrupt about moving instance in a way that would inherently annoy the audience.
Read more about the attempted forcible migration attempt, against the wishes of the community members, here:
Let's just move a whole community to a new instance without asking!
If the 196 mods had used the migration feature, thé output would have been the same: other would have created !onehundredninetysix@lemmy.blahaj.zone and most of the people would have moved there
Absolutely. That example shows how mods do not always act with full concern for the community members, and much turmoil and drama ensued as a result of that mismatched set of expectations between the "rulers" and the ruled, consent by the governed and all of that.
Maybe there is a friendlier way - like the mods move and a notice offered to those still visiting the old, without necessarily blocking the old... which as I say this I realize can't happen, bc an unmoderated community would instantly become a source of literal spam sent out to the entire Threadiverse, as sadly happened to Kbin.social.
Oh yeah I appreciate that, but under an official migration system - they would have to get blahaj's approval. Which they wouldn't give if the community erupted.
But again, this happened without a migration system anyway - so what difference does it make?
Because it illustrates the underlying issue: who owns the community, who gets to decide what happens to it, who gets to decide whether each individual user gets to use it, or to be moved elsewhere to a different instance entirely that they may know nothing about?
I am saying that the choice should be at the level of the individual users - as in democratic. Example implementations may include a pop-up box appearing, notifying users that the community has moved and asking (requiring consent!) if the user would like to subscribe to the new one?
Currently it belongs to the mods, as too happened on Reddit, and to the admins. Lemmy is extremely authoritarian in nature btw, even more so than Reddit, e.g. Reddit does all of: (1) notifying users of a moderation event (e.g. post/comment removal) while Lemmy users in contrast may never find out that anything ever happened to their content; (2) providing a means of appeal or at least communication with the people responsible for that removal, chiefly the modmail but also similar means to contact admins; (3) in lieu of a modmail, people on Lemmy used to DM the mod who was reported by the modlog, however a long time ago now that was changed and now the modlog can simply say that it was done by a "mod".
Users have little enough control over what happens to their content as it stands now. And as the 196 situation reveals, and the Rexodus likewise did long before that, people do not enjoy that feeling.
Your way, if you have a great and responsible set of mods and admins, would work great, just like a kingdom or dictatorship - very effective, very efficient, but with little to zero control over what happens to someone below the authority at the top. i.e. once you make a post to a community or subscribe to it, you automatically get ported over to the new place like a commodity that the owner decides to shift around as they please. If I am understanding you correctly, you wouldn't even ask the user? I don't mean in a nefarious way! It is totally "for their convenience", of course... and it genuinely would work that way, if the mods and admins in question are trustworthy. But that is not always the case.
But the trustworthiness of the mods is not the strongest point imho, and rather it is the question of who owns their own personal accounts, who gets to decide what communities someone subscribes to or not? Are followers the property of the celebrity being followed, or of the follower? Systems that aid in migration - e.g. a pop-up box with a question asking for consent - are one thing, but systems that attempt to force migration cross a line that should not be crossed, imho.
Because it illustrates the underlying issue: who owns the community, who gets to decide what happens to it, who gets to decide whether each individual user gets to use it, or to be moved elsewhere to a different instance entirely that they may know nothing about?
I mean again, this is just down to a fundamental difference between how you and I view communities. I view them as modular concepts essentially temporarily on a server space, being able to move if they do please. And the federative nature of the Fediverse means that badly run communities can be abandoned for another one with the same name.
An example here that's relevant: I unilaterally just moved obscuremusic from lemm.ee to piefed after lemm.ee shut down. It's a small community, but was it wrong for me to do that?
I would be in favour of automated prompts going out to all users informing them of community moves.
Currently it belongs to the mods, as too happened on Reddit, and to the admins. Lemmy is extremely authoritarian in nature btw, even more so than Reddit, e.g. Reddit does all of: (1) notifying users of a moderation event (e.g. post/comment removal) while Lemmy users in contrast may never find out that anything ever happened to their content
Reddit mods can absolutely silently remove posts without telling the poster. I don't know why you think they can't.
(2) providing a means of appeal or at least communication with the people responsible for that removal, chiefly the modmail but also similar means to contact admins
I don't think this is specifically omitted, just modmail infrastructure doesn't exist properly. You can still do it the old fashioned way by DMing mods.
You are a good actor, but I was speaking here about bad actors that choose to do things differently. Small communities by their nature definitely have differing dynamics, especially in situations such as when the original founder is the only or primary mod, or the chief poster. Communities change dynamics as they age though, and the question of ownership gets much more murky then.
Reddit mods can absolutely silently remove posts without telling the poster. I don't know why you think they can't.
REALLY? I was a mod of a couple of different small to medium sized communities and I never heard about that. I definitely would have tested it too, by removing my own content and seeing if I received a notification event. Then again, Reddit has changed since the Rexodus so perhaps that is what you mean? Or shadow banning? (But that was done by admins, not mere mods.) And there was most definitely a modmail on Reddit, whereas on Lemmy there is no such method of connection provided.
But now I feel like you are ignoring what I said: no you can't DM a mod, on Lemmy, when the modlog merely says that the action was done by a "mod" - unless you message every single mod listed in the entire community, one by one. Which for a small community with one mod is of course easy, but some of the largest communities have much larger mod teams, showing that just because something works under one set of conditions does not imply that it will work under all of them. Anyway DM mods definitely is not the same as a dedicated modmail. Perhaps I am not the best one to communicate this to you but you will see over time as you notice how Lemmy works on the large scale.
I mean in the form of subscribers like how Mastodon lets accounts transfer over their followers.
196 on blahaj tried that forcibly once, it did not go well for them.
Let's just move a whole community to a new instance without asking!
You have to ask first.
You should (they however, did not🤪)
Don't we already have community migration and backfilling of comments? @rimu@piefed.social
It could work a lot better than it does.
Yes, but it only migrates posts and comments locally to the incoming instance its moving to. What is needed for proper community migration is the ability to all instances to recognise comment migration. And ideally, the automatic rerouting of all subscribers to the new community.
Effectively making communities modular. Much of this is outside Rimus power (due to the Fediverse still being most Lemmy, but one day... one day)
Is there a way to remove posts I’ve interacted with on piefed? Last time I used it, that option didn’t work.
