Look at here and the people who complain about it being too hard to figure out are the ones complaining about “I can’t use muh slurs, this is awful.”
“The left of today is very much in favour of censorship to avoid “harm.” This makes those of us in the middle very wary of signing up to any partisan media.” /u/decidedlysticky23
/u/misshapensteed claims he isn’t far right, but explictly only posts on PoliticalCompassMemes and TheLeftCantMeme and KotakuInAction.
If they are too stupid to figure out we know they’re lying, they’re too stupid to figure out lemmy.
I’m not super over how the fediverse works mechanically; I was under the impression that users could create their own instances and interact with who they choose to?
Take my reply with a grain of salt because I’m also very new to this. From what I understood, although you can create instances and interact with everyone, other instances can choose to cut ties (blocking) with your instance. For example, beehaw blocked lemmygrad.ml which can be seen at https://beehaw.org/instances (on the bottom of this page there’s a link in “Instances”). So, if your Lemmy account is on Beehaw, you won’t be seeing lemmygrad.ml posts. I don’t even know if it’s possible to comment on them (maybe someone can elaborate on this).
That’s correct, yeah. It’s basically the equivalent of the instance being blocked by a firewall as far as I understand.
Basically, but it is not seamless. The biggest hurtle is that when you stand up a new instance, you will only see posts and comments from after the instance was created. This is the way most federated social media works. The rationale is that it would be too burdensome (for both ends, the massive established instance, and the small upstart instance running on a budget VPS), and prone to DOS abuse, to request the entire history from every instance in the network. The initial experience on a new instance can be a little barren. After a while, when it has discovered other instances in the network and had time for new posts to roll in, it starts to be natural. This doesn’t happen automatically though. Actions must be taken (following a user, subscribing to a community, etc) for these connections to be made. The first actions must be deliberate, but it eventually begins to snowball with user activity.
When I started up my Mastodon instance, I had a bunch of friends, some situated on the network already, some newbies joining in, all follow each other and recommend other accounts to follow. Within a day, 400 instances had been discovered. Months later, it has discovered over 12,000.