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Comment by unpopularopp | Hacker News Reader

>Don't overthink this. It doesn't matter which instance you use.

Nah. Disagree and I don't even know why is this highlighted. It really does matter what you choose. Same with Mastodon.

Each instance has an admin who can do whatever they want (eg delete the instance and permaban you) and on top of that each topic has a mod too. Plus your instance can be de-federated by others (what if your instance end up being a far right honeypot?)

The usual reply is that "but but then you can just move to another instance" but this is basically where the federated system fails for average people.

Just like with Mastodon the only way to use a federated system is self hosting a single user instance for your own profile.

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Yes, I was hit by this downside as I signed up for Mastodon.se, a big and seemingly "safe" (as in not to be suddenly shut down) general interest Mastodon instance used by tens of thousands. Well, and so it happened that some other instances began defederating it because it allowed members of any political party to join it, not blocking far right users. The admin didn't have resources or interest for such a kind of political moderation despite where no freedom of speech was being violated to boot. As he just ran the instance as a hobby project, he had to shut down because he lost interest when his instance was drawn into negative light.

So BOOM and tens of thousands Mastodon users had to migrate instance. The problem now was that you try to learn from past mistakes but realize that many other large instances aren't that transparent about funding models and how willing they are to work with these issues. You have alternatives but most others are also just "some guys who run this instance and provide a server for a community".

I don't think I really bounced back to Mastodon since then even if I did migrate. But it didn't feel the same when we were on this shaky ground.

I think it matters significantly less with Lemmy than it does with Mastodon/Pleroma/etc.

For one, it's pretty low-stakes: With Mastodon, you lose your followers, your posts, and your platform. It's hard to start from scratch, unless you have a chance to move house with the “migration” tool. Lemmy accounts are, comparatively, much more disposable. You can move house at the drop of a hat and it doesn't matter too much; your new profile has fewer comments in its history, who cares? People don't follow _you_, after all, they follow the _community_.

If you pick a bad server, just make a new account, no problem.

This is my biggest issue with current federation implementations, your ability to communicate with people on other instances depends entirely on the whims of your (and their) local BOFH.

As opposed to your nonlocal corporate BOFH and his MBA masters at Reddit?

frankly, yes? the reddit admins didn't care about anything, really, and very rarely went on banning sprees. when they did it was just deleting subreddits that were regularly posting about wanting to kill people. and in those cases it didn't require thousands of other random people who just happened to be using an instance but weren't part of that stuff to create a new account on a different website, it just got rid of that one community.

the real problem isnt always your local bofh, it's the other bofhs, and it's the fact that your friend's local bofh who has a tiny fiefdom of a few thousand users can unilaterally cut off access between those users and the few thousand people on your instance.

i'm not going to go so far as to say "centralization is good", but in a centralized system, a personality clash between a couple internet janitors might lead to a new subforum being made that a few users might choose to go to. in a decentralized system, a personality clash between internet janitors leads to platform-wide technological incompatibilities for thousands of users who have nothing to do with it.

It's not a problem of federation, it's a problem with ActivityPub or at least the networks built on it. The current system is echo-chambery in nature because your instance owner does not only control your own speech being hosted there, but also who you're allowed to read from your feed and who you're allowed to talk to.

It may be intentional, it may be due to a byproduct of how the federation details are implemented, but regardless of how it came to be the end result is an undesirable protocol for discourse and as far as I'm concerned, not worth the effort compared to just switching to scraping Reddit until a worthwhile federated social network appears.

Having run a Mastodon solo instance for a while now, I disagree on several points...

Mastodon has very few federation blocks built-in. Truth Social and Gab are about it. In both cases, the defederation is mutual, because even those two cesspools don't wanna mix effluence with each other, never mind the rest of the "libtards" in the wildly diverse and worldly Fediverse. They've chosen to be siloed.

So that pretty much demolishes the idea that even Mastodon is somehow intrinsically "echo-chambery". There are, again, no other built-in domain blocks.

If Mastodon is "echo-chambery" it's because the alternative is to remain federated with absolute cesspools. I made it 3 months running my instance before I had to start banning whole domains. There's multiple websites to help Mastodon admins curb the incessant shitstorm that exists in the Fediverse. Whole troll farms do nothing but pump out juvenile invective at innocent users... hundreds of posts with nothing but the N-word, K-word, F-word and detailed rape threats.

Again... this is happening on ActivityPub, right now.

You tell me... is it creating an echo chamber to ban Nazi scum?

All of the same arguments can be made for SMTP, and hosting your own server there.

And those would be good arguments, if the SMTP landscape looked different. I think the OP's views would be best summarized by "either host your own server, or go back to Reddit". Similarly, you shouldn't be using random-joe.biz as your SMTP host. You should use Google, Fastmail, or a handful of other reputable providers you can probably count on one hand. Or host your own server.

Reputable does not mean large, and (more importantly), large does not mean reputable.

The difference is that email is private. The contents of your email are not seen as being endorsed by Google just because you have an @gmail.com address, so Google doesn't have an incentive to ban you just because they find your politics odious.

In the fediverse calls to defederate happen pretty regularly, and the reasoning is sound—your instance will be publicly mirroring any content on a federated instance, so if you don't want to publicly host extremist views (from either wing) your only option is to defederate from instances that allow them.

Banning in the email world means having your messages dumped into a junk folder. Or worse having your IP address in a reject list so its impossible to operate a private server.

I heard that the ActivityPub protocol is pretty inefficient when you have lots of small instances, so I would think joining an existing instance should be preferred.

I'm not sure why you think that switching instances is too hard for avg people but running your own isn't?

> the ActivityPub protocol is pretty inefficient when you have lots of small instances

This seems like a pretty fundamental design flaw. It means that redundancy is there—you can always find another instance if you're made homeless—but self-sovereignty was not prioritized in the design.

The kind of person who's attracted to the idea of federation is going to be disproportionately likely to want to self-host, so the system should be designed from the outset for at least tens of thousands of instances.

> The kind of person who's attracted to the idea of federation is going to be disproportionately likely to want to self-host

That's not my experience on Mastodon. Most people seem to be on shared instances. Very few people self host. It's mostly tech affine organisations who self host.

I didn't say most people would want to self-host, I said they would be disproportionately likely to want to.

To make up some numbers: if 0.001% of the general population wants to self-host, maybe 0.1% of fediverse users would if it were easier. Even with tiny percentages, there are still a lot of small instances and the protocol should have been designed for that.

The protocol is fine for federation without any sort of centralization - though this causes some problems to be noted. The servers... less so. The servers have difficulty when something goes viral (and the content that it links to may also have trouble as noted in https://mastodon.social/@jwz/109411593248255294 (even though this is jwz, this link is safe))

If you have a small mastodon instance that has a member that has a post that goes viral, instead of trying to handle a handful of federation threads that your users are doing to pull content in you've now got hundreds of other sites trying to pull content from your site to theirs.

For a small site, this can completely consume all the treads.

A user on your site going viral can inadvertently DDOS the site. A widely followed user posting a link to some content can DDOS that content as every instance of mastodon wants a preview thumbnail of it now. This is known as a stampede.

https://www.networkworld.com/article/3682129/surviving-a-mas...

https://www.netscout.com/blog/mastodon-stampede

> The problem arises when a federated user with a high number of followers shares a post, or boosts (Mastodon’s term for sharing another user’s post) on their timeline. The core protocol for coordinating and sharing information among Mastodon instances is ActivityPub. When a user shares a post, it is published via ActivityPub to the Mastodon instances of all of that user’s followers. When an instance gets a new post that contains a link, it makes a request to that link to generate a preview. The process happens automatically.

> This creates the fan-in problem. A user with 100,000 followers posting a link to coolthing.example.com has effectively acted as a command-and-control for 100,000 processes to hit coolthing.example.com.

You are right, I misunderstood your comment.

Maybe it is still possible to fix the protocol. I think it's pretty impressive that it does work so well in practice (from a non-self-hosting users perspective)

Back in November, I was looking at what it would take to buy a hosting solution from a company that would spin 'em up.

https://masto.host/pricing/

Note the 'federation capacity' which is described further down.

If you are federating to many sites (because your users are following many users across different sites), that can get expensive in terms of time/network/cpu.

Even if you are self hosting, it is most efficient if your users tend to follow other users at a limited number of other sites so that the processing threads don't get too congested. Furthermore, if something on your instance goes viral and everyone starts boosting it and following your sites users it can significantly impact the performance.

If you are expecting to be making connections to tens of thousands of instances, the cost of an instance for that network / cpu load is going to be significantly higher than the average person can support / administer / host.

This gets to a bit of a paradox - the more you want to distribute and federate, the more expensive it is to stand up an instance and the more market forces will encourage users to go to the central hosts.

setup can be simpler than migration, no?

I'm reading through the docs now trying to understand how identity works, it seems like a blind spot to me, how to prove you are who you say you are when you move to a new instance. I don't know anyone that gets it right IMO, to allow self-soverign identities to post from multiple services, public-key-pair style. Mostly there's bad tradeoffs there for UX ("reset password" is just way nicer for everyone than "social key recovery") but I was recently swayed by KERI (key event receipt infrastructure) which seems to have thoroughly thought through these things, but it's new enough that no ones building with it that I've heard of.

AP is fine. Small instances are fine.

> Nah. Disagree and I don't even know why is this highlighted. It really does matter what you choose. Same with Mastodon.

This was my initial response as well, but realistically I rotate reddit accounts every few months anyways (I prefer the anonymity that codes with), so I can just do the same for lemmy. Try a server for a bit, and then move to a server when I find a better one. Treat it as ephemeral.

it's not actually clear to me who mods the communities. I created a couple, but don't see any tools to do any moderation, and looking at the docs, it seems it's the instance mods who would do it, and low-level stuff (reporting, blocking) can be done by any user

I haven't investigated too thoroughly though. I really have no interest in investing that kind of time, which is a problem in growing a new place in and of itself

> what if your instance end up being a far right honeypot?

Why does it have to be a honeypot?

Agree on the importance of choosing a server, they tend to have a distinct couleur locale. It is far more likely that you'll end up on a far-left server when you're using Lemmy. The most popular server is Aspiring to be(e) a safe, friendly and diverse place, under that lies one which proclaims itself to be A collection of Marxist communities, for memes, learning, news, discussion, media, or anything you like followed by A general purpose lemmy instance for queer and gender diverse folk, and their allies and one advertising itself as hosting Communities for furries by furries. If there are any right-of-centre Lemmy servers I have not come across them.

The right is not known for their meme talent.

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