The Fediverse is better than regular social media

Better for what? Even though I agree the Fediverse is better, it's useful to ask that question.

There seems to be a gap in the understanding around what the internet is and what it's for, and the gap is a social one around the concepts of the Private and Public spheres. I use caps for them because they are ancient, named concepts (look up "polis and oikos," the private sphere wiki page has been vandalized). The 90's internet was initially an extension of, and a bridge between Private spheres of individual thought, competence, family, niche communities of interest, and preserved this with conventions around both anonymity and tribal, benevolent-dictator style governance.

The Fediverse seems to replicate some of that, but to me it still seems like an anti social media reaction technology and not one that grows organically from a higher-order use case.

Social media was the act of hauling out these Private sphere relationships into a Public sphere, for which they were not adapted, and to satisfy the infinite vaccuum of need for attention that defines the Public. The Public sphere has always necessarily fed on the Private, and the Private used the Public for its civilizing social benefits. I'd go so far as to say that the insanity of the Public sphere right now is the direct result of scarcity of Private sphere culture to sustain it and it's cannibalizing itself.

Viewed through this broader lens, the Fediverse doesn't need social media features, it needs a Private sphere purpose for people to create and build things together, and then it can be more careful in adding bridges to the Public sphere.

Anyway, abstract comment, but the question shouldn't be whether the Fediverse is an adequate social media replacement, it should be, "what are we going to make?"

> Regular social media platforms like Facebook have a single point of failure. If their servers go down, your content goes down with it.

While I agree with the principle of this argument, I think it's far more likely that any of the publicly available Mastodon instances goes boom long before Twitter does. My different kinds of social media activities might be spread across the fediverse, but all of my toots are only on one point of failure, and technically in significantly more incompetent hands than on Twitter.

I'm not disagreeing with this article per se – I want decentralized social media to succeed as much as everyone else – but it's much too brittle and technically minded for the people I mostly like to hang out with, i.e. non-techies.

Silly, but I've never seen an explanation of "Free as in Beer" before. Until now I equated it to the way you might get a free beer from a mate in the pub, but with the understanding that you'd get the next round. Give and take.

Also now really isn't the right time to promote the Fediverse's uncensored prowess, everyone's looking for the next Parler and every time I've looked at the Fediverse it's been fringe weird already.

lately (2-3yrs) I've found twitter has generally become completely insufferable, I can't simply enjoyably watch a broad twitter stream, the fediverse manages to bring the joy back into this for whatever reason it is _less_ political and less full of influence(r)s shoveling trash into the shared social spaces

> Reason 2: It can't be censored

Unless you own the core network, say a satellite in space with your own IP network there's nothing stopping a country blocking you or lawsuit to subpoena access. I won't mention that such mastodon services are mainly hosted by AWS/Azure et cetera; which was Parlers mistake. If they owned their own infrastructure they've wouldn't of been hit so badly.

Censorship-free? What are you talking about? On instances there are moderators that can do as they please and the largest federation doesn't allow instances like Gab in it.

If someone deletes an instance, is your content gone? Can one join many instances and, if so, does that mean what you post in one instance is not seen on others? Or does everything you do show up on your profile?

>As mentioned, the great thing about the fediverse is that all of these services are connected with each other. If I signed up for an account on a mastodon instance, I can subscribe to your posts on Pixelfed, and vice versa.

This part confused me a bit. Can anyone ELI5?

>I don't want to engage in any political discussions, but the main flaw with this is the violation of freedom of speech.

Someone needs to get educated on "free speech".

The author raises Donald Trump as an example, I'll counter with Wil Wheaton's experience on Mastodon[1].

It's great that there are moderation teams that will accept inflammatory and controversial characters. But if the userbase doesn't believe in freedom of speech, it doesn't really matter if the platform does.

1 - http://wilwheaton.net/2018/08/the-world-is-a-terrible-place-...

Pretending the Fediverse can't be censored is naive. New Internet protocols plus secure boot chains plus legislation will make it all moot.

The past decade I learned to lose hope in these ideas of freedom, thanks to my friends.

Just like copying VHS and cassette tapes (easy) led to copying DVDs (more difficult) and HDMI (difficult). Every tech makes it more difficult. The same will happen with distributed systems. More work for the users of those systems.

And the discussion over the past decade shows that public support will be lost too.

From the title, I was hoping for more "tangible" reasons. Most of the reasons given have to do with mitigating potential problems. Bad privacy, single point of failure, closed, censorship are purely theoretical problems for most people. Moreover, these are points that are harped over everytime mastodon is mentioned. It's not that they are not important, it's just not going to convince many people. I'm really curious: what are some user experience reasons to join?

The article talks about the technical and political issues but not about the content quality. Can I currently find more accurate and interesting content in the decentralized network than in specialized groups in Reddit like /r/netsec?

Orthogonal to this, but I find it terribly ironic that many of the "freedom of speech"'ers are probably the least likely to actually be able to argue their corner in a rational, sensible and polite way.

Consider for example a left wing person trying to have a conversation with a pro Trump group on Parler. They'd get shouted out. That's not promotion of "free speech", it's promotion of "echo chamber of the same opinions as mine".

Same goes on the left - imagine suggesting that maybe immigration should be thought about or you have an angle on the trans community that didn't quite sit well with the wokies...

The point is that life is subtle and nuanced. Free speech in my humble opinion needs to be earned - which means open dialogue where ultimately you might be prepared to admit you're wrong.

> Reason 1: It's decentralized. Regular social media platforms like Facebook have a single point of failure. If their servers go down, your content goes down with it.

Recently had a discussion broken into nonsensical fragments because one of the participants was banned.

> Reason 2: It can't be censored. Even if everything someone says is controversial nonsense, it is still in his good right to express his thoughts.

Only the admins have rights on their servers, as it should be. And if you run an instance which doesn't publicly state that it blocks right-wing servers, you'll be blocked by some of the big players, a move which is another step that the wider Fediverse is taking towards silencing a lot of speech. Granted, I don't want to hear most /any of it, but the author has conveniently omitted mention of this emergent behaviour.

> Reason 4: It respects your privacy

Admins can read everything you post on their instance, including DMs.

>Reason 5: It's all about the community

Until you say the wrong thing in the earshot of the wrong user and find yourself banned, with no idea why and silence when you try to follow the procedure to regain access. I've never tiptoed around a service like I do the Fediverse.

I like the Fediverse. It's full of interesting people and discussions, art and humour and folk exchanging ideas but it's the utopia demonstrated by the Star Trek: The Next Generation episode "Justice". One wrong move and there may be no discussion about what you may have done wrong, no questions as to what your speech meant, the justice is simply executed. At least there's always another instance, until user reputation is added.

Pro-tip in terms of naming: Calling it "Fediverse" is going to strike a lot of people as meaning "The Feds" not, I dunno, "federated". Gotta pick another name.

Is there real content?

> You probably heard that the Twitter-account of Donald Trump recently got compromised by the owners of the platform. I don't want to engage in any political discussions, but the main flaw with this is the violation of freedom of speech.

Freedom of speech is a deeply political demand. Who gets the right to speak freely and who shouldn't? Does even the US believe in freedom of speech when that speech involves a provocation to harm it? Would the US tolerate this from a foreign entity? A domestic one?