jointhefediverse.net seems to be a commonly linked resource for directing people to join the Fediverse.
Curiously, it does not list Lemmy under the list of Reddit alternatives. Their GitHub README explains why.
Previous relevant discussion: https://lemmy.ml/post/78808
All valid concerns.
No, they’re not.
Doesn’t matter if you stay away from .ml.
Kind of valid, but open source and open license negates a lot of that.
You think anything else on the Fediverse is better? When you post something publicly, it’s public. Doesn’t really matter what the software does. If you don’t have End to End encryption, it’s not private.
And they are. They have delisted Lemmy as a recommendation.
It’s really bad PR. I don’t recommend Lemmy to people because of this shit.
If their servers delete content you want deleted, yes.
It’s the case for Lemmy
https://github.com/LemmyNet/lemmy-ui/issues/2384#issuecomment-1978857727
To me the first one is an instance problem (ml, hexbear?), and not a lemmy problem. It has looked like they’ve been trying to separate the two as much as possible.
Unfortunately, .ml is a default instance and the main devs instance, what happens there reflects on all of us
To me, the only solution to this is to do a hard fork. Take the code (It’s AGPL), rename it if Lemmy is trademarked, and encourage admins to use it and contributors to target it. Maybe start a non-profit or LLC while we’re at it.
Good luck finding Rust devs interested in link aggregators. That fork would probably fall behind, and people would switch back to Lemmy as they keep delivering features.
Mbin and Piefed use more popular languages and haven’t caught up yet
Default where?
https://join-lemmy.org/
I don’t see it on that page. Going to “See all servers” lists “lemmy.ml” at a random position in the list. Looking at “Join a server” and using “Generic” or “All topics” also lists it in a random position. Am I missing something?
If you use “Most active”, it will shows up after lemm.ee and the other big instances. So not default, but would still be recommended to new joiners
Well to me that doesn’t fit the “it’s default” description.
While looking at that, I couldn’t see lemmy.world on that page. I found that join-lemmy.org now excludes instances with >30% user share in order to dampen centralisation. Which makes sense I guess.
It was made very clear from the start that .ml was not meant to be a ‘default instance’.
Too bad for all of us that it is though.
If anything is too bad, it’s .world being so prominent.
Half this comm’s activity is spreading FUD about the platform and being a gathering place for all the people developing their alternatives to huddle and advertise those.
But the Lemmy project and specific instances are not so easily separated. From the archived mastodon thread:
So yeah, newcomers are presented with a join-lemmy site that promotes Lemmygrad and Lemmy ML, both of which appear to be run by the Lemmy devs.
That pretty much makes it a Lemmy problem.
On what basis can anyone declare one instance to be the ‘main’ one? I’ve seen a number of people claim the same thing about .world, but none of them need to be considered the ‘main’ ones. The entire motivation for the creation of the fediverse is to allow segmentation… I think people simply want to make it an issue because without these little cross-community spats things get boring.
I agree that ideally the concept of “main instances” is beside the point in a federated network. Let’s call them “flagship” or “onboarding instances” then, the initial ones set up by developers as proof of concept that usually get the most traction by way of being open for registrations the longest.
I think it’s disingenuous to classify the decision to omit Lemmy from a list of fediverse software as “a spat”, though. Bringing it up again 1½ years later probably fits the bill better.
But lemmy.ml isn’t the most active, nor does it host the most active communities
What is the issue with user privacy? These do not sound like valid concerns to me.
This is all quite old drama, and the issue itself is fixed now, but at one point someone kicked off about how if you uploaded a picture to Lemmy, there was no easy way to delete it (you could delete your post, but the image would still be there at whatever URL was created for it, and it wasn’t even that easy for admins to find and remove it) - so I’m guessing that it stems from that.
Its older than that, and still ongoing. The devs doubled down on how GDPR (and user data privacy rights in general) do not matter to them
I hate it when people try to gatekeep like this. I don’t need to be handheld. If there’s a Fediverse alternative to something and it mostly works, it should be on the website. Anything less is not useful at best.
Edit: I say this as someone who has historically criticized the behavior of the devs as well as multiple Lemmy communities BTW.
I mean the person maintaining this site just chose to not recommend it themself based on valid concerns. Nothing is stopping you from looking into lemmy and using it anyways.
Well, since you’ve vocally criticised the developers and they haven’t bothered changing their ways, wouldn’t you agree they deserve to be gatekept?
On the other hand, it’s not for you to decide the criteria for what is included on jointhefediverse’s curated list. I personally think it is a perfectly reasonable judgement call they’ve made.
No, I don’t. If it’s about instances I’d understand it a bit more, even though I wouldn’t entirely agree with that either (I’m a free speech stan), but this is a page listing Fediverse alternative software. The software is fine and relatively untainted from the intentions of the Lemmy devs from what I can tell (although that was not originally the case). They deserved to be criticized, but not censored from Fediverse articles listing alternatives to big tech platforms.
It’s not “censorship” when somebody decides to omit a software from a curated list over the developers’ horrible takes. See also Soapbox.
Edited to add: Free speech does not obligate anybody to boost or acknowledge subjects that they disagree with.
Is that really what all this protest is over? Someone’s ‘horrible takes’?
Well, horrible genocide apology takes, TBF. I didn’t mean to downplay the gravity of the points they bring up in the archived mastodon thread.
Yea, but that kinda nails the pettyness of it, doesn’t it? They don’t even gain anything by having people adopt their software, nor do they suffer a loss by a boycott - and it’s all because they have some questionable (to put it charitably) opinions about an entirely unrelated political issue.
The thing that gets me is that launching this diatribe over the developer’s political opinions on an open sourced project that’s built specifically so that no one group or person has control over the platform - that you have complete control over the instances you federate with - ends up looking an awful lot like protesting public libraries over providing access to ‘woke’ books.
Generally fair point. My issue though is that most people will just go to this website and won’t consider other lists or websites, viewing this as the definitive list of Fediverse alternatives. Someone not putting someone’s software on their website isn’t technically censorship, true (this is the other coin of free speech), it does effectively censor Lemmy from the general conversation about Fediverse alternatives.
Do most people go to jointhefediverse, though? Honest question, I don’t know the site’s traffic stats vs fediverse.to or fediverse.party (which both show up way above jointhefediverse in my duckduckgo search). It’s not like an authoritative index or search engine blackballed Lemmy, it is literally about a single grassroots site.
It’s the first one I always see whenever I look up lists of Fediverse alternatives and I always end up on the site. I use fedidb.org but I don’t use it to find Fediverse software.
Lemmy is bigger by a LOT (LIKE A LOT) than mbin and piefed. So don’t see how Lemmy is losing the strong grip it already has on this type of fediverse. Heck, google reddit alternatives and Lemmy is also king.
This change on that site was in 2023. It’s 2025. So it has not impacted Lemmy’s user base.
Another good point 👍🏾
How is this censorship though?
You can always start joinfediversefreespeechstan.io or whatever. The code is even available, no?
I could never understand american-style preference for “free speech” themed theatrics.
Because as the leading “Fediverse alternative” website, it essentially tells the viewer that Lemmy doesn’t exist, which I think does a disservice to prospective Fediverse users.
But yes good point, anyone can make an alternative website, I think right wing people made like a fuckgab.com site back in the day to recommend Gab alternatives on the Fediverse.
This is why I’m looking forward to Sublinks launching.
Piefed is more promosing. Sublinks has been on hold for a while now
Point 1 and 2 really need to be addressed.
It would be so much better if lemmy wasn’t developed by genocide white-washing tankies.
https://piefed.social/ is catching up
Any way to migrate a self hosted lemmy instance to piefed?
Unfortunately migrating from one fediverse application to another on the same domain is actually basically impossible, due to the way ActivityPub works. It’s very unfortunate.
We built this whole place from scratch 18 months ago. We can do it again, especially when Lemmy instances would still be around and help to redirect people to the Piefed instances.
Well, in theory sure. But you always lose people during migrations, it’s inevitable. And it’s cumbersome for users. It’s not a nice experience. The fediverse has enough bad UX as it is, I’d prefer if we didn’t pile on more.
If the fediverse actually held true to the promise of easy migrations, then maybe it wouldn’t be a big deal. But unfortunately it’s still not really that easy.
I see it happening gradually.
There might be a start with another Piefed instance (e.g. Piefed.zip, managed by Lemmy.zip admins). People who really don’t want to use Lemmy would register on that instance, but would still be able to interact with the communities on Lemmy, the way Mbin and Piefed alreay do now. They start hosting a few communities onn Piefed.zip, locking other on lemmy.zip and redirecting people there.
Then over time some other admins want to give it a try. After a while a few Piefed instances make it to the top 10 most active instances, while the rest is Lemmy.
It doesn’t have to happen overnight. We have time, people are not going anywhere.
No, it’s not geared up for that. There’s a platform called sublinks where the intention is to be initially compatible enough with Lemmy that it can be a drop-in replacement, but they haven’t released anything yet.
And with their current pace, it seems likely they never will. There’s been no major development on it for months as far as I can see.
Python based: I was looking for that
Yeah, I don’t expect it to scale well. Certainly not as well as Rust.
In terms of incoming federation, PieFed sites are dealing with as much activity as any general Lemmy instance. It’s not happened yet, but I suppose it’s possible that problems will become apparent if the amount of local users gets over a certain size. A limit on the amount of users per instance isn’t necessarily a bad thing though (it’s cheap, and hopefully easy enough, for someone to spin up another one).
What’s going to cause problems? Python, the db, redis or other?
It uses postgres for the DB - I think that and redis are designed to operate at very large scales, so it wouldn’t be them.
My guess would be that it’s something in the interpreted nature of Python - this seems to be why a familiar dismissal of PieFed is a concern about how it will scale.
That said, this site shows that Python is the most popular language for Fediverse apps (just), the likes of Mastodon are written in another interpreted language (Ruby), and I think there are more big websites running Python (with Django or Flask) than people realise. So I don’t know, really, I’m just following other people’s lead on this. I don’t imagine that any problems would be insurmountable though: an admin could restrict the amount of signups, or if new users mean a few more donations, they could just throw money at the problem (more cycles for one server, or splitting up tasks across multiple servers).
If you consider all AI-chat sites are running on python, I guess python scales with no issue at all
Have you checked how muh software do you use that is enabled by capitalism?
Linux Foundation survives on Microsoft’s financing. Firefox main source of income is Google’s money. That’s like pointing out that we breathe nitrogen. Yes, it is almost impossible to avoid capitalism because we live immersed in it as a society. But it’s not an reason to stop pointing it out and trying to find more ethical and sustainable alternatives.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SDF_Public_Access_Unix_System
wow that’s interesting :D
SDF is pretty rad.
Yee
Yup! I should make more use of the awesome infra (and the much better payment model than $ocial Media) but alas, I’m like a cat: lazy.
These concerns, and more, are why just today, during a conversation with some friends looking to get off traditional social media, I advised them to join pixelfed, peer tube, mastodon, and loops, but suggested they strictly avoid Lemmy.
The communities aren’t right for anyone who isn’t seeking something exactly like Lemmy or leftie-Reddit-lite. I don’t even really like it here all that much anymore. Not the content; the interactions… across all my accounts… even joining “nicer” spaces is not a particularly nice or pleasant experience, plus the more interested is a woman, and Lemmy is a horrible sausagefest echo chamber not at all suited to a normal average woman person who isn’t techie. I’m techie, so I’m used to the vibe, but for your average cis-woman, Lemmy is a very very bad fit.
Bring on the downvotes if you like (the echo-chamber anti-voice sentiment is part of why people shouldn’t be recommended this platform, after all) but these are legit concerns for people who may want to join, and those of us already here can and do steer people elsewhere as a result.
Far be it from me to point out this is exactly how reddit started.
The foundational promise of lemmy and the fediverse writ large is freedom from proprietary software and closed-protocols; the kind of people who are going to be interested in seeking out those types of alternatives are going to gravitate toward techy men.
It takes time for new social media sites to fan outward from their initial adopters, that’s just how it goes.