The Federated App Problem
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I do see the potential advantages of federation to prevent the same fate that overcame Twitter and Reddit, but I can’t figure out how to make a user’s server choice actually meaningful. Without solving that piece of the puzzle, I don’t see any practical advantage to federated services.
The need to do this obviates the utility of federation completely.
A lot of people got mad for being blocked, but honestly I can't blame the admins for trying to reduce the amount of moderation necessary. There are thousands of people per moderator on those sites and that combined with open registration is a recipe for toxic bullshit nobody wants to deal with.
Smaller instances don't get blocked, though. I doubt they will be until the low quality shitposters will figure out a way to host a server of their own, but without a central gathering place I think even then the abuse will be easily prevented.
That said, Lemmy used to be set to whitelist-only by default for ages. This has been changed, but if someone wants to federate with just their servers of choice, they can just toggle a setting.
Lemmy also comes with an approval form by default, which is used manually to vet users during signup. Open signup servers disable that field, obviously, but those servers are often also the ones that get blocked.
I can see this evolving to a situation where only closed or manually approved servers get federated by default. Requiring manual reduces the probability that a small team of admins will get overwhelmed by a large influx of users.
Email is also old and unextendable, whereas the Fediverse has interoperable stacks built on top of it, opening the door to better moderation and web-of-trust tools that help combat spam and decrease the pressure for centralization.
Servers defederating because of viagra/nigerian prince/etc. spam is one thing. A "lefty politics" server defederating with a "righty politics" server or vice-versa because they just want an echo chamber? Sure, you do you. General-purpose defederating other general-purpose servers because of "misinformation" and "trolling", when those terms basically mean "disagreeing with the current mainstream narrative on any controversial issue"? That's absurd. The generally-accepted issue with social media was for years that it created echo chambers. Now people are trying to use mastodon to create even more powerful echo chambers.
What's the definition of too low? Up to the admins of that server.
If one seeks out something that explicitly isn't an echo chamber, I'm sure there are many places for that. I'm just not seeing that as, really, at all desirable for a lot of people.
With federated solutions, users have a choice.
Twitter is fairly lightly moderated I think, and the "following" tab gives a raw timeline.
If federated services pick up steam, they will pick between a few popular options.
in theory, the instance-specific bit of it is the moderation. the one you sign up with chooses which other instances to federate with, as well as how to moderate the content on their own instance. in theory, you could sign up for an instance that only allowed the sort of politics you agree with, or that had very lax moderation, or that had very strict moderation.
unfortunately, none of the fediverse seems to actually talk about this so without signing up and using an instance for a while to see what the moderation policies are like there's no way to know.
Correct, but that's why you can actually migrate your account (including your followers!) from one instance another. The initial choice doesn't matter too much. Just migrate if you don't like it. That's why there isn't much discussions about it.
The fediverse is not one unified whole, the fediverse is a bunch of loosely-connected communities that can very easily throw up walls at a moment's notice.
Admins are actively incentivised to kick problem users off. If a server becomes known as a source of problems, then other admins will defederate from it. How you define "problems" depends on who you are, in general if an admin looks at a report for one of your users and finds you doing the exact same kind of bullshit as what your user was reported for then they will probably defed from you without a second thought. After a while your server will only be federated with other servers that are also fine with that particular kind of bullshit. If your particular kind of bullshit is "finding people who are different from you and making fun of them" then there's a high chance that the users on your server will either wander away, or turn on each other; both of these tend to lead to admins deciding it's not worth keeping the place running in my experience.
Mastodon.social is way too big to realistically be handled by anything but a bigger crew of paid moderators than it has, and "we should defed from mastodon.social because it's right on the border of being a constant source of trouble" is a topic that admins constantly chew on in places like the #fediblock tag. But you can start on one of the big servers and move, too. Possibly to a small one with a lot of your friends, so that the "local" timeline is useful. Possibly one run by one of your friends, who will make largely the same "oh god look at this server full of assholes, block'd" calls that you would, and save you the trouble. Possibly one with a cool name, would you rather be sxg@mastodon.social, sxg@possums.gay, sxg@gop.party, sxg@...?
(As far as I know neither Lemmy or Kbin offer account migration yet, so you're stuck on your initial one until they fix this. I'm sure it's in their roadmaps.)
Here's an issue for Lemmy user/community migration: https://github.com/LemmyNet/lemmy/issues/3057
And here's one for Kbin: https://codeberg.org/Kbin/kbin-core/issues/382
Lemmy seems to have a lot more contributors than Kbin, but who knows, maybe someone will dust off their god-tier 100x PHP skills and Kbin will get it first.
Email is often a good analogy for questions like these: Why do you pick one email service over the other? Maybe you think the domain is cool. Maybe you heard that they are reliable or have features that others don't. Maybe your university, company or other community you belong to runs its own service. Or you decide to host your own. Or you really have no preference and you just go with the one your friend uses.
We just don't have just don't have the gmail-equivalent catch-all choices yet. Maybe that will come later or maybe it won't.
These are recognizably proven brands that aren't going to disappear next year, and which integrate with your other tools in ways that clearly provide benefit.
And back in the day before webmail was a thing, your ISP gave you an e-mail address so you didn't pick at all.
But none of these are even remotely applicable to Mastodon instances. So I'm not sure that e-mail is actually a helpful analogy at all here.
I offered the email analogy because that helped me to wrap my head around it when I was starting out.
Sure they are - come join my instance which I run from a pentium beige box in my closet and check the uptime
You can also do that with Mastodon if you're keen, so email analogy holds.
I'm `@aj@s.aj.immo` and I can follow and have conversations with other mastodon users of various servers seamlessly. I was just doing it this evening in a thread while tagging four different people on four different servers. When people tag me in posts it just looks like `@aj`
This is the right way to do this stuff in my opinion.
Just Mastodon - it's not what I'm talking about. Please let me know if my parent comment wasn't clear enough.
Mastodon certainly works and you can be just @aj (as long as no one else with the same host-local part walks in, I guess) no matter where the actual conversation is hosted. But what about Lemmy, Peertube, or other Fediverse systems? I'm aware that Mastodon can talk to them with some success, but AFAIK it is only optimized to present certain types of content, so if you want Reddit-like user experience rather than Twitter-like one you want Lenny. And then you need a different subdomain. And then you realize you're splitting your identity on the same network in two - and in my opinion that's an indicator that something is wrong.
Which is where it's different to email. When self-hosting mail, you can have separate identities too, but those will be created on a purpose (different addresses for different personas/purposes), rather than fragmented because of necessity.
This is partially true. I run Pleroma, which is a microblogging server like Mastodon, so Mastodon content that federates to my instance shows up identically to my own posts. On a system like Lemmy, when their posts federate to me, what I see natively on my instance is a person posting a link that links to the originating website. I can see some replies inline, but they're linear and not threaded like on Lemmy. However, unlike what you said, still using my @me@my.domain identity, I can click the link from my instance to the Lemmy instance and interact with the content there natively. No need to create a different subdomain. There's no need to host a Lemmy instance yourself if you want to interact with Lemmy instances. Lemmy on the backend is still talking the ActivityPub protocol and it's only the frontend that alters how the posts are presented, so as long as your server speaks ActivityPub, you can use the same identity.
I'm not sure how this applies to Mastodon servers in practice.
>why would all problematic users congregate on the same server? Isn’t it far more likely that you’ll have to block individual users across numerous servers to keep the platform sane?
Well, exactly. And who's doing all the blocking and filtering? What are the rules? And which community is better at reporting and keeping the instance the way you like it? What about your interests? If you join a busy generic instance, of course, you will become disinterested in your local timeline.
This just seems like the creation of another echo chamber.
IIUC (and I may not) there are blocklists that are shared between fediverse instances that, depending on the configuration, are automagically updated/applied on a regular basis.
Perhaps that's what's going on with your instance?
Edit: Modified comment to address GP's specific issue.
Having "themed" instances implies that you're committing to whatever that theme is, but all you want to do is share whatever is on your mind from day to day. This apparent pigeonholing is enough to make the whole idea a failure. Remember Yahoo? It wanted you to drill down through dozens or hundreds of canned search categories... and then Alta Vista came along with just a text box. And of course today that's Google too.
Speaking of search... the bizarre and rabid animosity expressed by many Mastodon users toward FINDING CONTENT on Mastodon is baffling. I've seen threads where someone asks how to search for things on Mastodon and gets berated for even suggesting that people who PUBLISH STUFF on the Internet would ever want it found.
There's no point denying it, discoverability will be harder and communities will be smaller. So if you actually know of a really good community or magazine to point someone to, just do that. They can read the content without logging in. If they want to participate, then the server that they found a community they want to participate in is the obvious place to create an account, from which they can see everything else as you've said.
Little is being forced by the choice of server/instance, but that's not helping solve the hard part. The hard part is them finding what they need to find. They need a librarian, not a tech support desk. Tech people constantly assume the solution is technical... make the popular destinations popular by talking about them everywhere.
Bakeries and NGOs aren't sticky. Your relationships with them is a series of one-time transactions, and at any time you can switch to the alternative at no cost.
Picking a Mastodon instance is more like picking a school or university - it's a choice of where to commit, made at a point when you're least equipped to make a good call, and increasingly hard to reverse the longer you go along with it.
Who runs the server? On what kind of funding, and how long can it last? Are you served intrusive ads? Are your a customer or a product for the people running this instance? How hard is it to run an instance yourself, and what happens if you suddenly post a video that attracts 10M views?
So many questions, I know, that's too hard, gimme something easy.
But also, that's a complete strawman. No serious group I am advocates medical treatment without parental consent. There is a strong movement to let 12-year-old choose what pronouns to use in school even without parental consent.
The idea that there is one globally correct way to moderate is demonstratably completely untrue, regardless of what your actual views are. There must be multiple moderation standards that users can pick from.
To answer your question; because they are demonstrably required. Different subreddits already moderate to different standards - why do you insist that each community needs to fit in as part of the same whole?
Groups that promote hate speech and misinformation do so by invading other communities and being disruptive. Brigading and doxxing have been their tools for a long time.
Personally, I've seen that breaking up groups that promote hate speech and misinformation helps the remaining members to enjoy the community in peace.
Mastodon's approach allows you to outsource a part of that by just joining an instance that doesn't even allow "alleged hate speech" into your timeline. That's the appeal of that.
But the point of federated Mastodon is not to have a platform that is solely moderated less than Twitter.
It's that:
- it's not twitter (or rather, it's a "twitter clone" that's non-commercial, not reliant on a single entity, has a degree of data portability built in - decentralised)
- it can allow for the spectrum of moderation styles to exist. The majority of bigger "mainstream" instances are probably going to opt to moderate similarly-ish to social networks, but this doesn't negate the other reasons for mastodon to exist. You can have instances that have an even stricter moderation standard, or even looser.
But at the end you don't need to get why one person prefers a network in one way, because federation means different ways can happily exist, and you chose what you prefer. Just don't be surprised if other people aren't enthusiastic about the people you hang out with.
"Non-default" sounds too harsh here. It's literally a big tab saying "Following". It's only default for the very first time you log into Twitter, afterward it will remember your decision (it will be "default").
> , replies, likes, and retweets will often put content from people you don't follow into your timeline.
No only retweets will show in the Following tab. Which seems reasonable, as retweets were historically done via copy&paste. The other things aren't the case anymore for the "following" tab since Musk introduced it. (By the way, after pg himself asked him to add that possibility!)
I agree that Facebook is way worse in terms of moderation, but Mastodon doesn't seem an improvement over Twitter, quite the opposite. Those moderators are moderating for users, when this should be simply left to their decision of whom to follow. People or posts will be hidden from users who would not have hidden those themselves.
The decentralized approach sounds cool initially, but it leads only to even more segregation / filter bubbles / echo chambers. As if the choice of whom you follow didn't cause enough of that.
I think that's a real issue. Political polarization increases since the amount of media channels increases. When there were only a handful of newspapers or TV channels, they couldn't be too politically biased, otherwise they would scare away most other people. This changed when the number of media outlets increased. And with social media, every user now is able to create their own little reinforcement chamber.
Having to choose between politically charged "you can't read that" gatekeepers is a dystopian nightmare. Yes you can make your own, but next thing you know is "block this list of servers or we block you".
Because they have been banned from other servers ?
Another, even more annoying side-effect, is that conversations may have bits silently missing, if they're posted by someone not on your instance. I have been reading a thread of seven posts, posted by five different people, and then looked at that same thread from another server and found that it was actually sixteen posts, posted by eight different people, several of which had not federated to my server. I have been irritated by two different people asking me the same questions, leading to two separate threads hanging off my initial comment, covering exactly the same subject, until I looked at the conversations from their servers and realised that they were invisible to each other.
I would never use Mastodon for anything serious: the chance of irritating people, missing context, and talking at cross purposes are far too high.
In such world, Twitter and Facebook could add support for ActivityPub, Google and Microsoft could build their own, different ISPs and media companies could run their instances, and so on. Then the benefit of choice becomes more clear - who do you trust the most to provide you an account. Basically, it would be like the situation with email where most people use a 3-4 biggest services, but the ecosystem is open to new competitors.
The current state of federated social networks is very experimental. If it catches on with big corporations 90% of people will use that, and these small communities can still survive but would be more or less irrelevant.
Then i read about the codebase and people were struggling with SQL so performance is bad - i mean what? is that really the state things, where's the talent working on this?
I'm honestly surprised that both the design, performance and docs of these alternatives are this bad in 2023.
If this has to work you need an extremely simple and well designed landing page with a super simple explanation of how this works, the creation of a user should work on more or less all instances, and you should be able to easily meta search for the communities you want and get an easy overview quickly.
The phone network is a federated service. You can call an ATT customer from Verizon. You can also call them from Joe's Discount Boxes and VoIP sales.
Now, if you start making spammy calls, ATT might block you as a customer (after warning you first). Same for Verizon. But Joe's Discount Boxes and VoIP sales doesn't, because box sales are down and these VoIP margins are so, so juicy.
Spammy customers flock to Joe, because he allows it. Joe keeps letting customers on, without doing due diligence, without caring if they're legit (beyond a valid looking credit card), and eventually gets blocked by FCC order. (See https://docs.fcc.gov/public/attachments/DA-23-389A1.pdf, for an example).
Now, federation doesn't have an FCC, the various server admins will be filling that role themselves, but there is a reason scummy people will use scummy servers.
Side note: This kind of FCC enforcement is fairly new to the industry, so if you're wondering why you get spam called all the time still, there is some hope this'll change.
There’s a simple answer to why server blocking is a feature of mastodon. It was built to handle a real world problem. I.e there was early on a server that was a “free speech absolutist” server that server mods wanted to block at a server level.
- Because might not be accepting new users.
- Because some other server has a local timeline that is interesting, perhaps catering to certain interests.
- Geographic: it may be closer to you.
- Language restrictions. You want to toot in certain languages, but some instances are English (or whatever) only.
- Some instances run hacked software with useful features.
> why would all problematic users congregate on the same server?
Because they behave in a way that gets them banned in other servers.
The latter seems to be a mindset people aren't able to shake off for some reason, applicable to the given case or not. If a person can write and read two sorta coherent paragraphs of text for a internet forum, they are already on the level of being willing to learn and a little curious, above what the tech giants expect from their model user. There are enough of such people to have interesting and diverse discussions. Don't tell me Discord is easy to figure out. I'm not saying the devs should be working to make the experience easier, but it starts to be one of those topics where the discussion is meme-based.
You can tell search engine robots not to index your copies of different forums. I don't think they are viewable by default anyway? Avoiding small instances to avoid outages sounds like 4D strats to most users, who might prefer cosiness, personal connections and camaraderie, like on Minecraft servers, say.
Case in point, I am a member of some hobby and travel communities where, a decade ago, many people had blogs where they described their experiences with rich, detailed text. Now those same people hardly even touch a keyboard and are content to maybe just post a few pictures. They also are more likely these days to engage in political battle, since political polarization is so much greater than it used to be.
Where do I go? How do I search for something worthwhile? There's no central space to find it, compare communities etc. I was curious but now I am kind of put off.
In principle this probably happens but the alternative is having no large vibrant communities.
Trolls, bullies and harassers though will have better access to you.
I did this for a "dead" forum and after about a week of "squatting" there and posting for myself, other people started showing up and replying to it.
People should treat the digital silence of dead communities as an asset and free real estate to share their thoughts.
It just needs to be posted as a main aggregator at https://join-lemmy.org, or even better, on the right hand side panel on every Lemmy instance.
I know this would be a centralized database of communities (which is probably frowned upon in the fediverse) but I don't think there's a sensible way around it.
https://kbin.social/m/RedditMigration/t/59927/rant-Why-is-th...
And they still state that it's easy and the other posters are scratching their heads as to why don't people understand this. "Whyyyy???"
They don't seem to understand that the average user doesn't find it easy to use. That's the biggest hint, but instead are acting like everyone is stupid but them.
That's why the fediverse is going to get a bump for a bit during this reddit situation, but then calm down as users aren't going to want to stick around. The same happened when others were leaving Twitter.
This fediverse situation reminds me of that Silicon Valley episode in which they're testing an app with a focus group. The group just doesn't understand the app and find it too complicated. Richard tries to explain the app to them, but it's too technical for them to comprehend.
In all fairness those were the exact same comments when people moved away from Digg to reddit, only in the opposite direction. History is just repeating itself.
Both sites you simply clicked the register link, input your username/pass/email then done. The fediverse does not have a clean onboarding that lends itself to comprehension by a regular non-technical person. It seems way over the head of your average user. I've tried to get friends to check out Lemmy and it's a solid no-go.
If you need an entire matrix of understanding of a concept before feeling comfortable to use it then it is simply too much cognitive friction.
Which lemmy site have you used that was any more difficult than that? Click sign up, enter a username and password, and then you're done.
It's not just "average users" that don't find it easy. It's just more complicated - for everyone.
Identity is the hardest problem. Yes, there's stuff like OpenID. But few non-programmers use it. We badly need some kind of ID system that doesn't depend on a vendor that's in the advertising business.
Discovery is a problem mostly because Google has a monopoly in search.
The problem with federated storage is that storage is currently organized by "where", not by "what". There's the BitTorrent approach, where the address is the hash of the content. There's IPFS, but it's 90% Make Money Fast with crypto and 10% actually storing stuff. Whatever happened to the DOI concept?
There's distributed caching, like PeerTube, which works better. Every file has a home location, but if lots of people want something, it gets replicated. So if your cat video goes viral, your tiny server won't be overloaded. That solves the problem of popular content, but not the long tail.
And because the option to not index posts is enabled by default and a good chunk of the fediverse is opposed to indexing due to their irrational fear of bots:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33546937
https://www.reddit.com/r/Mastodon/comments/131amhl/why_are_s...
> Due to extreme backlash from the Mastodon community we decided to end the project, it is obviously not wanted by server admins.
Heck people already scratch their heads when an email isn't hosted @gmail.com or @hotmail/outlook.com.
And the learning curve exists because unprofitable companies like Twitter and Reddit made centralization possible by burning money, the old internet was decentralized because centralization was impossible, it was too expensive.
If these failing companies die, federated services will be the mainstream again. But as long as there is money to be burned to try to make a poor business model out of social interaction, federation is never going to be able to compete.
What people? Are they in the room with us right now?
Anyone that works at a small/medium/large company has an email address @company.com
I've always used a custom domain for my main email addresses and whenever I've had to give it to someone else verbally it inevitably leads to some amount of confusion. At the very least they get thrown off by the fact that I didn't say gmail/outlook/yahoo after the @ and I have to repeat the domain name.
This does not line up with what I've seen in the world.
The point of federation is not to be dependent on oligopolies from a single country, one with poor grasp of and legal enforcement of personal privacy at that.
>It kinda loses its point.
Even if it comes to this, it doesn't. Another migration can happen at any point, but this time you wouldn't lose your social contacts - and in the future hopefully neither your content.
>But Google and Microsoft got in the game.
That's like your common anti-Linux argument.
>Search engine indexing for these federated services SUCKS.
Decentralized content/link aggregators just became popular so we'll see what'll happen, but personal social media shouldn't be as public for most people as it right now anyway.
The oligopolies from a single country might get replaced by groups of instances who will claim they're holders of the Truth and who are the Service, while rest is dangerous. Nothing also stops countries from running own instances or compatible services by dedicated companies or people to either dominate or lure people out of the federation. A good campaign, attractive interface and features and people will follow.
The remaining option is to "run your own instance" but in time when the federation will most likely solidify enough it might be hard to do so. Hard as in getting people to join your new playground. What we're seeing right now it's a boom period.
Don't get me wrong, I do like concept of federated services but there's too many sides where it might fail in long-term and help create a highly tribalized echo-chambered communities
There is nothing you can do to make Firefox or Chrome to understand what a “federated network” even is. For a browser, an “Origin” is an extremely well defined concept. You can’t just decide to amend it because that’s how you feel it ought to be. If you can’t make mastodon.social be relates to social.mastodon in the browser, then you’ll have a rough edge. And that’s just to start. Federated services have so, so so so, many usability issues that all could be attributed to what a “browser” interrupts HTTP or the internet to be vs what is actually possible.
Browsers don't need to care, anyway. There are some problems that need solving (notably, following/interacting with users on other platforms) but there are ways to do that. I'm not quite sure why nobody has come up with a good standard for a web-activitypub: URL handler, but once everyone agrees on a format adding support for cross-server stuff should be easy.
Web browsers can access webmail clients and mailing lists just fine. They even have mailto: as a means to cross the federation gap. All of these problems are implementation issues, not conceptual impossibilities.
I like how you're talking about it like it's some abstract underground BBS style system that requires a modem, ISDN line installed, custom software running on a unix subsystem
I mean I found https://fosstodon.org/home signed up, clicked on local, liked posts, followed people, now I get a stream of posts to my home feed every day
Maybe your everyday facebook user might struggle with the idea of signing up to a site and interacting with it but I'm just not seeing why anyone who can sign up to discord or reddit would struggle with it
Looking at the image source despite it being uploaded to another instance it's hosted on Fosstodon: https://cdn.fosstodon.org/cache/media_attachments/files/110/...
That said when I see posts linked to Mastodon on HN I do notice that maybe the HN Hug of Death hits them hard as they are noticeably slower to load than my day to day interaction with Mastodon, maybe this is what you're seeing?
In which case it's being mis-sold. It will never replace the thing that people are claiming it will replace.
> Mastodon is designed to avoid viral posts
"viral posts" aren't inherently a bad thing. It's part and parcel of some of the good aspects of social media - the sense of having a collective conversation among a large group. Fragementation is fine up to a point (We're already fragmented between half a dozen large social networks) but I want people to find me easily if they are interested in what I'm posting.
And why do you want to be found easily, really? In case you get your 15 minutes? I think the goal is to build community. Large numbers and reach are actually not so important.
Cheap.
Like with email, you have to think about it in terms of "service".
The "gravitate to one provider" problem is there (as with gmail), but those who care can still have their own email services or use reasonable third parties.
The tragedy of course is that very few people care.
People want to install a single “Lemmy” app on their phone that shows them all Lemmy content and lets them post to all instances, using a single account and a *simple* user interface. If Lemmy cannot provide that user experience (abstracting away the federation), then yes it is doomed.
Federation just means multiple independent servers/domains can talk to each other, such as with email or Matrix, without the need for central authority (other than for discovering each other).
To answer the question, and I have just a superficial understanding of the concept, the main issue with decentralized vs. federated protocols is that you have to store the whole (or quite a large chunk of the) social tree locally on your device. That's a lot of data that you don't really care about. It might be fine if you access the network from a computer with plenty of space, but a mobile device might be more problematic.
I have had a number of actually average users asking me about the Reddit blackouts recently. Most of them don't know of Reddit beyond the first party app. 3 or 4 didn't even know Reddit had a website. None of them could even comprehend how you could use a third party app to access Reddit and their minds were blown when I told them that Reddit didn't have an app at all originally and the Reddit app today was originally Alien Blue.
For most people, the word "service" doesn't even enter into their minds. It's an app. It either does what they want or it doesn't. The inability for many in our group, including myself, to comprehend and understand this is why the fediverse, Linux, crypto for non-investment/gambling purposes, etc. continue to fail to gain much popularity. For most people, they don't care how it works... they only care that "it just works".
I don't see why this is described as such an insurmountable fundamental flaw.
Can not log in, can not register.
Can not be bothered (for today, at least). I will try again, maybe with different credentials, but it shouldn't be this difficult.
Quick edit: happened on other fed sites, too. Worked on others, too.
There are several rust instances: https://lemmy.ml/c/rust, https://programming.dev/c/rust, https://lemmyrs.org/, and probably more. Why aren't they linked together, so that you see posts from one instance in another and can post and comment in one instance from an account on another? (I get there is e.g. https://lemmyrs.org/c/rust@lemmy.ml, but you should see and make posts from https://lemmy.ml/c/rust on the page https://lemmyrs.org, not a specific subpath).
Even better, why can't Rust lemmy link with rust kbin (https://kbin.social/m/rust) link with Rust discourse (https://users.rust-lang.org/) link with Rust Zulip (https://forge.rust-lang.org/platforms/zulip.html), so you can see and make posts on all instances from one?
This is what I initially thought the Fediverse was like. Right now it honestly just seems like many people running completely different servers and communities using the same software.
(This could even help with the decentralization aspect, because ideally the content and accounts would be replicated. So if one instance goes down, its content is still on connected instances, and possibily "ghost accounts" from that instance which let users there continue to post).
So Usenet?
To make it more confusing though, all of those networks EACH have their own smaller channel for those technologies, just the official one is on x server.
Reddit is awesome because it's one place to get ALL content related to a niche under one umbrella, and because you can use awesome 3rd party apps -- the next reddit replacement doesn't need to be federated, but it could be community-ran as a sort of DAO, where users can vote on features/etc...
"Why are all of these communities there" is a bit of a weird question, in my opinion. Why is there a news.ycombinator.com when Reddit already existed? Why was reddit founded when Digg was around? Why aren't don't Outlook and Gmail combine forces into one? Why would anyone want to go to stackoverflow when expertsexchange and hundreds of forums already existed?
Every server has its own rules, that's why. Some are more tolerant of abusive behaviour under the banner of free speech, some will use bans liberally to maintain their community. Some servers ban NSFW posts, others don't care. Some servers block some other servers for abuse, others don't. Some communities are fine with meme posts mixed into serious posts, others want to stay on topic.
Even on a centralised platform such as Reddit there have always been duplicate subreddits because of people who disagreed with another subreddit's rules or moderation practices.
What do you mean? On lemmy you simply click "all" and see a feed from all federated sources, on kbin that seems to be the default. When you open threads/posts you see comments from all sources. The other stuff doesn't exist yet as the platform is very new. You can help.
For example, clicking on one of the profiles I follow, and then their followers. This will only show the profiles I also follow on that remote server. Do that again, and it gets even worse.
Where instead, the "thing you expect to happen" is to list, 1:1, their follow list as it exists on the remote server.
Other things, for example, not fetching someone's post history earlier than before you followed them, when you're browsing their profile. e.g., a user with 100 posts that you just followed.
I'm aware of the technical reasons (you weren't subscribed), and the open source reasons (not enough volunteers to fix the bug); but both are inadequate to a new user, frustrated and lonely, struggling with a lack of network effects, where having a delightful app might save that experience.
You’re confusing instances with communities. Instances are servers. People create and mod communities. They shouldn’t be linked because they have different mods and rules.
As much as people don’t like websites making their behavioural profiles and selling that data or advertising with it, most people are also not willing to pay for access to social media. There are many who would be willing, but will there be “critical-mass” many?
So it will be very interesting to see how the instances can be made self-sustainable. Right now (but correct me if I’m wrong), I think it doesn’t make financial sense to run one. People can do this for a while to support “the movement”, but I wonder what happens when “the movement” is over.
That's a rather odd argument as "the biggest kicker". I'm fairly sure the teams at Google and other search providers are very aware of the fediverse and its rising relevance. It might be hard to find something today, but eventually the search engines will be improved so that they understand federated content.
Learning curve is a ux problem. Yes federated is a bit harder, but i think this is more the general problem that open source is terrible at ux, especially when it doesn't have sonething to copy, not a fundamental federated issue.
(Cross-instance) Authentication - definitely hard, but seems solvable as well. Whether with fancy crypto or maybe some federated oauth thing.
SEO - meh, who cares. Do people really use these sites for googling. Also seems like could be solved by getting everyone to shove some rel=canonical all over the place.
Personally i think the fundamental issue (as opposed to just engineering challenge issues) is that its hard to modify/adapt federated protocols. I very much agree with moxie's critique of federation at https://signal.org/blog/the-ecosystem-is-moving/ . Everything else is a simple matter of programming - an inability to rapidly iterate is on the other hand is an unsolvable problem.
Given that I, and probably half of hacker news, preface most of my searches with "site:reddit.com", I'd say Yes. Definitely Yes.
The "Learning curve" argument suggests that oligopolies tend to form, so it is not worth bothering. But that applies to pretty much any organizational activity, not just federated protocols, and often people try to push back against oligopolies or monopolies; often it is desirable and possible.
The "Authentication" one only applies to web-based clients, but you can login to remote instances even with those: converse.js supports it for XMPP, for instance. Possibly not in the way the author imagines it should though; perhaps that is closer to OpenID/WebID/OAuth. Still, generally users are not meant to login to every instance directly: even with just Google and Microsoft, you do not login to a Microsoft server to send them a message from your Gmail account, as you do not login into the receiver's email account to place a message for them. Maybe this section should have been titled "learning curve" instead.
The "Search Engine Optimization" probably describes the current state of things (I am not familiar with that), though does not apply to many federated protocols (e.g., I do not want my email or XMPP messages to be SEO'd), and I do not see a technical reason for that when it may be useful (e.g., public blogging or discussions); certainly does not sound like a drawback of federation itself to me, but maybe that of certain search engines' policies.
I personally usually saw discoverability/exploration as the primary issue with both federated and distributed protocols, especially when it comes to social ones, and hoped that RDF with FOAF will help with it. But ActivityPub and Mastodon seem to handle it rather well now, out of fairly widely used protocols.
What does it mean to set everything up right? Out of the box postfix, sendmail, dovecat, etc., no longer generally work, even with DKIMs, and other necessary domain verifications.
I have heard of some admins opening cases with some of the large hosts to ensure their mail goes through, but seeing how those are all big cos with little no guaranteed lines of contact or follow through I wouldn't hold my breath on it working or being a long-term solution as they can easily blacklist you at any time with you having no recourse.
I'd love to hear a counter argument, as it's also the same thing for basic transactional mail sending, there's a reason everyone switched to SMTP hosts such as Mandrill, Sendgrid, and AWS, deliverability.
Hosting email at big provider as a default option because it is "well known" that self-hosting email is unviable can be considered cargo culting.
The trouble with decentralized federation social media servers is the weight of the network falls upon whoever volunteered to host the program at the domain name in the first place, and sometimes the weight is too much to handle.
The solution is, as we all already know, self-authenticating messages that do not rely on any one server. Do we want to call this Scuttlebot? Do we want to call this Nostr? Does Bluesky even qualify? Well, I'm sure we'll figure it out eventually with enough minds trained upon the problem.
When I hosted a fedi node I disabled search engine crawling with robots.txt, but it can easily be enabled.
Learning curve is all about giving it time and earning experience in accessibility.
But regarding the scaling out of messages; I am writing a small activitypub app in Python, because it's just so fast to prototype in, but I want the option to rewrite heavily used components in another language. So instead of passing pickled or serialized Python/Ruby code around background job processing, I aim to only pass ActivityStream objects, simple JSON that is language agnostic.
Just put it in different queues depending on its destination. Then any background job processing program can process the queues and put the data into DB, or whatever needs to happen.
Smaller Lemmy instances feel more personal to me than subreddits did, and I think that is something people will find valuable.
People cluster around one or a handful of servers... that doesn't make federation pointless. People keep thinking of federation as an absolute, everything must be evenly distributed, but it isn't. Email is the perfect example. Most people use gmail or outlook. Imagine if outlook stopped sending or receiving from anyone else. The point of federation isn't to ensure even distribution of content, it is that it can and must be accessible from outside. It cannot be siloed without becoming useless. Even if 90% of users use one or two servers, the minute that server blocks outside access that server becomes a pariah.
Authentication... Why would one server let you login to an account on another server? I see the problem from a user perspective, but this is simply a misunderstanding of the architecture. In any case, hubzilla (zot protocol) has an interesting solution to this, and Nostr, which is not a federation, doesnt have this problem at all. I think both of those protocols are fantastic.
SEO, with only one engine mentioned... That sounds like a google problem. This technology is cool, if the content is there and google doesnt deliver it, it will affect them in the long run worse than the federated system.
I personally don't like the way activitypub works, or even like federation. I don't think community creation, maintenance and engagement are very good use cases for federation. I don't see why a server in a federation needs more than one community, as is the case with Lemmy, and I don't think communities, let's say HN for example, benefit from federation, because it encourages drive by engagement from people with no real commitment to the community. Reddit has this problem, spillover engagement, and the subreddit where it is not a problem aren't really communities, theyre just tags. "Memes" isn't a community, "chicagobears" is. The former could just be a tag in a federated system, the latter doesn't benefit from being in one. At best, two autonomous communities that have overlap could benefit from it, so having software that supports it is good, but on by default federation is not a good paradigm for forum like community software.
That said, Matrix is quite large, and growing, and being adopted by multiple national governments. And I know they want to eventually tackle decentralized identity, there are open issues and some brainstorming about it.
I am hoping that a federated alternative to HN will emerge because this is the only non-federated social platform I (will) participate on, post-reddit. And probably the only one that has reasonably stood the test of time in the face of tech capitalism, and it's certainly unique in that regard. I like building software that is aspirational and going to stand the test of time, and I wish I had spent more energy til now working to the same end in terms of "knowledge-bases" ala those that have grown in now-private subreddits and semi-private Discord servers.
This is the first I've ever heard of "server load" as being any factor of federation, let alone the primary point.
Prison door malfunctions and lets prisoners free.
Prisoners step out in the sun and get confused by their freedom to move in all directions.
They gloomily walk back to their well understood confines. The door locks again, this time for good.
Ok, fair enough, we don't want them prisoners to go back to the "comfort" of their cell.
What is needed? Not much. A few damn signposts would do. This way to inanity. This way to bliss. This way to scratch your itch. Etc.
To frame freedom as a problem because nobody put up some signs (because honestly who expected serious traffic?) shows how far we have fallen.
Prison door malfunctions and lets prisoners free.
Prisoners step out in the sun to find themselves confused in a never ending maze full of branches in all directions. They have difficulties finding shelter and food.
They walk back to their well understood confines, in relief. The door doesn't lock, but they choose to stay either way.
Assuming you are not a prison operator this smacks of complacency.
In the digital age where rules are there to be broken fast, any and all complacency will be used against you (us).
The era of web 2.0 social media, damaging as it was, is drawing towards a close.
The next phase will be an ever tighter "embrace", with airtight control of digital identity, access to financial transactions and unprecedented AI manipulation. Of-course the inmates will enjoy Cloud Atlas type amenities.
Freedom was never easy and is not an exportable good either. It is either in your real constitution or not. I just hope that there is a critical mass of countries that actually mean it.