MHLoppy

Minor bug in the UI / frontend I guess - you could try reporting it to the lemmy devs on GitHub if there isn't already a GitHub issue for it

Seems like there are other Imgur submissions on Fedia that mostly work fine (no thumbnail, but the image itself shows up if you click on the expando thing in the UI) https://fedia.io/d/imgur.com

I did notice that at some point around the time of my second comment Imgur was having some issues (I was given a JSON file instead of a webpage or image when I found and clicked on the image that OP submitted), so maybe fedia and a few other instances just got unlucky with the timing?

If you notice it becoming a recurring problem you can report it on Fedia's meta magazine/community: !fedia@fedia.io

Well, now that's just discrimination :(

Weird though!

Edit: it also doesn't show for kbin.earth (which is running mbin) - I'm curious what the source of the problem is for this strange and seemingly-arbitrary minority of users https://kbin.earth/m/fediverse@lemmy.world/t/1028068/So-after-using-Lemmy-for-1-5-Years-You-are-telling

I seem to be missing some context - anyone want to fill in the rest of the class?

Edit: the image being shown to ~~lemmy users~~ everybody else is not being shown to ~~mbin users~~ ~~me and/or fedia.io users (unclear)~~ some unknown subsection of mbin users including me, so here it is for those like me: https://imgur.com/q4zuZzz

The mbin equivalent (which is relevant to the OP) is More -> Open original URL or Copy original URL

Unfortunately seems to not work for mbin (which fedia.io runs)

But (it sounds like) you're talking about voluntary grouping, where if you dump 100 people together at a party or networking event or whatever, theoretical-person Amy will vibe best with certain types of people, and so ends up chatting up Cleo, Ming, and Kiara because they share similar interests / humor / whatever -- but there's nothing actually stopping someone from outside of that from walking up and chatting with the newly-formed group. That's kind of what (I thought) we had now in the fediverse, where for example I can go talk about Australian news on aussie.zone, jump to lemmy.world to talk about fediverse stuff, swing by redd.that to look at Unraid updates (all communities I'm part of), but then browse the incoming feed of everything coming into my instance and view a whole lot of communities which I'm not part of, most of which I never will be. It's (nearly) all open-by-default. Yes, there's some blocking / defederation etc, but the default state is that users on one instance can (whether or not they actually choose to) talk to other instances.

If a new user randomly picks any instance from the top 50 (of any fediverse software, excluding maybe Pixelfed since that's probably the least interoperable with the others) to join up on, chances are very good (but will vary based on personal interest) they'll be able to participate in like >=90% of the conversations that they want to in the sense that their instance is federating with all the people and communities they're interested in.

What I'm thinking-out-loud-ing ("arguing" sounds a bit more assertive than what I'm aiming for) is that this might not be how ActivityPub would optimally be used; maybe just because ActivityPub could allow 90% of users to talk to 90% of users, it doesn't mean that's actually the best way to use it. Maybe it serves the user's interests better if there are clusters of "sub-fediverses" instead.

As a grounded example: Beehaw partially self-isolates from the wider fediverse (it's not just that users could communicate but don't; the connection is severed) in an effort to better maintain its vibe and values. I had always viewed that as the exception to the norm, but maybe having (e.g.,) clusters of instances that only communicate with a comparatively smaller amount of other instances, say the other instances in its "cluster" plus a few other clusters only (as opposed to most instances communicating with most other instances) is a different -- and potentially healthier -- way to architect things. So I guess partial, selective federation rather than (what felt to me like) the current goal of "if it uses ActivityPub, we want to communicate with it*". * with obvious exclusions for spam etc.

but the fediverse is equally suited to federated islands as to one fediverse, right? Most people will want the full fediverse but people can also create their separate spaces if desired.

I guess, yeah, but it has tradeoffs. Each island loses even more diversity of perspective (e.g., political echo-chamber, or building fedi tools that might work well for their island but make no sense for other islands), and making it harder to use as replacements for Xitter / reddit etc.

Like, a lot of discussion happens on topics like "how can we make Mastodon better for former Xitter users?" or the same thing but for lemmy and reddit. Maybe they're fundamentally not the right questions to ask if the endgame state of federated social media is that it isn't a direct replacement of centralized services.

Although it wasn't really specifically the point of the post, reading it's made me think that maybe the whole idea of "universally" federated social media (even excluding the spam etc) is fundamentally untenable regardless of the technical protocol, and that treating it as the end-goal might not be the play.