The Fediverse is already dead | Hacker News Reader

The Fediverse is already dead

nora.codes

25 pointsniklasfyi25 comments

>It doesn’t matter that you can’t see them, as a Mastodon user you are sharing a social media platform with them.

I really dislike this sort of argument. Doesn't it apply to anything? Your ISP, email, Facebook, internet, TCP/IP, WhatsApp, TikTok, roads, flats, air, city, country.

Computers in general too.

What solution for this "problem" would the author accept? The offenders would have to be denied internet access or computer ownership as far as I can tell.

The article suggests it was killed by the same thing that kills all "total freedom, no moderation" chat forums. They attracted all of the pedos, trolls, and nutjobs and it killed the community, just like every single community that has tried this in the past. The concept just doesn't scale. You can't build a social platform without accounting for bad actors. It's like trying to build and airplane without accounting for wind resistance.

It feels like every federated network will be judged by the worst actor in that network, whether or not they are isolated from each other. As a result it doesn't matter (for public opinion) if there are strictly moderated mastodon instances because they will be associated with the free-for-all ones by the Mastodon name alone. This is different from how the internet as a whole is interpreted, where both HN and 4chan can exist without impacting each others reputation.

My thoughts exactly. Hell there are plenty of decent boards on 4chan, but everyone judges the site by the horrible ones (not that i particularly enjoy 4chan, but I know plenty of sane and reasonable people who do).

This magical perfectly moderated wonderland led by the Mr Rodgers or whoever they think should be at the top of these things doesn't exist to my knowledge. Not saying it's right what people are doing, but it strikes me as picking and choosing when these complaints ultimately boil down to "yeah turns out there's shitty people"

Any single site should be judged by the worst elements it allows.

I think the point is that the fediverse is more of a protocol than a site. That said people who run well moderated sites on the fediverse should probably try to distance themselves from the rest lest they get rolled up in the inevitable backlash when someone with media presence discovers other sites.

Clearly. 4chan is a site, however. It’s not a relevant comparison.

"It will be judged" a way doesn't mean it makes any sense to judge it that way. Eventually, people will get wise to being mislead to think there's nothing of value there by such a faulty metric.

It's really just obnoxious journalists that shape this kind of public opinion too, who well, nobody sane really trusts anymore.

I used to think this too, but as it turns out there is always a younger generation not jaded to the lies that fall for them every single time.

The Fediverse is not dead and has existed long before Mastodon. People do not call IRC the Fediverse but for all intents and purposes it is one. It just works a little differently. The bigger IRC networks are comprised of many servers linked together but owned by different organizations, companies, individual people and so on. Rather than joining an instance, they are all joined manually and one instead joins or creates a channel. Some IRC networks will let people register their channels with IRC services. People can run their own instances but the bar to entry for linking a server is a little higher and each server owner must abide by some global rules. Each IRC network or sets of interconnected IRC servers may have different rules and guidelines so this is where there is more similarity to Mastodon.

The difference with IRC is that when one agrees to the global terms of the particular network they are joining, there are global network operators and admins that can ban bad behavior network wide. This is a middle ground between one centralized service like Twitter and the completely decentralized concept of Mastodon. There is still drama and bad actors but I would suggest far less than what one gets when each instance can have it's own rules or lack thereof. When a person is repeatedly violating the global rules they will be globally banned on that specific IRC network. They can go join another one and repeat the process.

Anyone can create their own IRC network and have their own global rules and connect their servers to their friends servers. There are small IRC networks, some are public and some are private.

Based on all the discussions I have seen on HN about Mastodon, I believe that the lack of a concept of global operators and admins is the missing piece that encourages bad actors to poison the well. The bad actors will find the instances that lack moderation and the human moderation delay will make the entire network look bad. This is not even counting the trolls that intentionally post illegal things and then instruct search engines, archive.org, archive.ph and other archive sites to mirror the content so they can get the domains and servers cancelled. To add more clarrification around my comment, this is not so much about the technology yes IRC lacks a web interface by default and must be bolted on but rather about the concept of global admins and moderators. People can block a specific instance but that is just and endless game of whack-a-mole and does not solve the root cause of the issues.

> The Fediverse [...] has existed long before Mastodon.

Yes, 100% agreed - I spend the first section talking about just that.

Ultimately I think that IRC-like networks might be a really interesting social form to explore via smaller federations of ActivityPub software. It's not something I'd want to start or run (and huge shoutout to IRC ops, it's not an easy job) but I'd love to see what such a thing looks like in the world of microblogging.

I think the global moderator concept could be applied to microblogging and all the other ActivityPub software. It's just a matter of people trusting those they link to enough to assist with zapping bad content when they are asleep or busy. There should also be a fully automated validation mechanism in place to verify that at least global moderator trust is working vs full admin otherwise the instance out of compliance must be automatically isolated from the network ring of trust after a couple automated warnings that cause a banner to display on the rogue instance.

The inability to move existing posts or DMs from one instance to another discourages Twitter blue-check types. What if your instance is blocked by others? What if your instance shuts down?[1] What if you change jobs? (I think the last is why we haven't seen CNN or BBC or Yale create an instance and its people start using it.)

[1] Such as the recent spectacular implosion of mastodon.lol after its owner got horribly abused by members over Hogwarts Legacy. <https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34748195>

From reading the article I think the Fediverse - whatever it eventually is - is not dead but became fulfilled, at least for the target audience it could reach. And this goal couldn't have been that everyone hosts servers/instances that are all globally interconnected - but that they are capable to do so in the first place. People just want a good protocol easy setup, good apps/UX, standards that everyone knows. The "idea" doesn't matter. It could have been just as well IRC/XMPP. TCP/IP people didn't have grand ideas about society on the network.

>Others have documented the sordid tale of Mastodon’s development better than I could, but suffice it to say that many queer people, people of color, and women have been cast aside by Rochko despite significant and often culturally defining contributions to the software and ecosystem.

This is why pandering to extremists never works.

It's time that everyone born after 1980 realize the Christ Freak of your childhoods has wrapped herself up in rainbows and moved onto a new culture to destroy.

In 202X The last refuge of the scoundrel is diversity.

what's the link between your quote and "pandering to extremists" ? who is the extremist in your reasoning ?

i'm trying to follow your argument but i honestly couldn't ( i also haven't followed mastodon dev story, so maybe that's why)

An extremist is someone who can't change her mind and won't change the subject.

That definition would make anyone who refuses to be silent about injustice an extremist.

No, those people are idiots.

Don't just talk about injustice, do something about it.

Nora is a long-time member of and contributor to the fediverse and not some looky-loo who parachuted in during a boom to dismiss it out of hand. I've skimmed and read past the headline and saved for later reading. I recommend everyone also read past the headline.

Thanks for giving me the benefit of the doubt. I kind of regret the title, given how much confusion it's caused. I didn't initially intend for it to be clickbait, but I think it's functioning that way :(

> “The Fediverse” needs to end, and I don’t think anything should replace it. Speak instead about communities, and prioritize the strength of those communities. Speak about the way those communities interact, and don’t; the way they form strands and islands and gulfs. I’ve taken to calling this the Social Archipelago.

For a wildly different path to reaching the same conclusion, see also this SSC post: https://slatestarcodex.com/2014/06/07/archipelago-and-atomic...

I don't read SSC, so thank you for linking this - super interesting to see that someone coming from, as you say, a totally different perspective came to a similar conclusion.

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