Comment by nickorlow | Hacker News Reader

Comment by nickorlow | Hacker News Reader

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Yeah, I agree it all feels very disconnected. I think this problem extends to the communities on federated platforms too. Taking a look at the Reddit like federated alternative (lemmy), there's multiple instances of the same 'subreddit' on different servers. Makes it hard for everyone to gather.

I think federated projects really look at federation as an add on to their platform, not a core feature. E-Mail did this well where everything was automatically federated by default (I.e you can send email from anywhere to anywhere for the most part) whereas some fediverse software, specifically lemmy, require that federation be enabled (and I believe you choose to federate with servers on a per-server basis).

Where I work we're working on a solution to this where your identity remains sovereign between servers [1]. We currently have a Twitter-esque microblogging demo setup [2].

[1] https://gitlab.futo.org/polycentric/polycentric

[2] https://polycentric.io

The big problem with federation-by-default in the current incarnation of federated software (at least Lemmy, I'm less familiar with Mastodon) is that you will likely end up publicly hosting any content from instances that you choose to federate with.

With email, it doesn't really matter if someone is using your email platform to spread controversial political ideas or using it to share pirated media or whatever, because you're not hosting it for the general public to consume.

With the fediverse it's different. If I own fedifoo.app and allow my app to federate with neonazis.app or tankies.app, then eventually neonazi or tankie content will be accessible at fedifoo.app/c/unpleasantcommunity. I don't want that, so I defederate, but now the fediverse is fractured and "it doesn't really matter which instance you choose" is no longer true.

Disabling federation by default helps protect new hosters from the unintended consequences of federation, which is good, but it leaves us starting out on a fractured footing.

The solution to this is to have a unified namespace which is distinct from hosting. So then /c/unpleasantcommunity is only hosted by instances that choose to mirror it, but if anybody goes to /c/unpleasantcommunity and their default instance doesn't mirror it, it redirects to an instance that does.

Then you don't have to host anything you don't want to but you still have a unified network.

Yeah, I also think having the option to censor communities in specific is a good way to do it. So you could just choose not to host /c/hatefulcommunity. I'd imagine blocklists and community reputation systems would be created much like what exists with e-mail.

The generally right way to do this is to put actual censorship on the far side of impossible but give individuals good filtering tools. So then maybe your instance provides a default blocklist, but if something gets blocked, it isn't just silently invisible, it shows up as a collapsed comment that you can unfurl or a warning page that you can click through if you really want to. And if you don't agree with an entry your instance added by default, you can strike that one out and choose to always see it.

The key is to never let anything like a central party impose censorship that can't be overruled by the user, but still allow them to filter out 99% of the crap by default.

Yeah, Polycentric lets server operators choose to censor individual posts or entire users. Your client can query anything that's censored from one server by querying it from another where the content was published. It's fairly easy to tell when a post is censored since each post has a logical clock per user that is incremented per post, so you can pick out any missing logical clock entries.

i quite like how censoring is done in the fediverse. there is no censoring but each user can chose to block content from showing up in the client. i don't like the idea of censoring. some authority decides what other people are allowed to see.

I like it in principal, but I think it's hard to keep up with spam in a manner like this.

How does a user choose to block content without seeing it, say in order to avoid seeing gore videos from war zones or such?

Sadly Lemmy’s implementation is quite poor. The owner of each instance can choose which other instances to federate with. So shortly after the Reddit exodus, many are already forming tight ideological bubbles. For example, Beehaw defederated with almost every other instance because they want an ideological safe space. This despite the fact that the protocol already gives individuals plenty of tools to block and avoid users and communities they don’t like. So there is a strong push to control the experience for all users in an instance, instead of allowing individuals that control. And I see a lot of support for this model in other, “less” authoritarian instances like lemmy.world.

I think many people are just very authoritarian today, and don’t appreciate the internet as we knew it 20 years ago. They’re not content to control how they interact with the internet. They want to control how everyone interacts.

Beehaw did not do that. They defederated 2 large ones because of open sign ups, and Lemmy not having other modding/admin tools available yet

That was the claim, but it’s clearly a lie. First, they’ve defederated with and blocked hundreds of instances, not two. It looks like close to 1,000. You can review yourself here: https://beehaw.org/instances

Second, it appears they have even more moderators than the instances with which they defederated. More than enough to keep illegal content off the instance. But that’s not the intended goal. They want content off the instance which is ideologically opposed to the owner. They make that clear in the instance description. They want more moderation than Reddit, which is already filled with insular ideological spaces.

The users are all very much on board with this ideological purity. They freely admit it, so I’m not sure why you would contend it.

> It looks like close to 1,000

It’s 400. Versus over 3000 linked instances. That does not sound like an insanely long list, considering how many spam instances there are and those with questionable content.

> It’s 400.

I don’t understand how this argues against my premise. This is decisive evidence that they want strict ideological adherence.

I'm unconvinced the majority of people are like this, but the type of person who becomes a moderator will be, it's self selection. This happens in every community on any subject matter, I've seen moderators on power trips in phpBB forums 20 years ago, it's nothing new.

The type of person who we want as moderator don't want to be moderators. A real decentral solution needs to give power and sovereignty to the users and take it away from admins and moderators. Some group of elite privileged few federated servers with all the power, demonstrates how worthless Lemmy and fediverse are.

Not a fan of ideological censorship myself, but deferderating from instances such as pedo.school, cum.camp, various kiwifarms instances and hentai.baby, seem reasonable to me.

Sure, but they defederated from a lot more than those four instances. They also defederated from 400 others, including lemmy.world, which is about as milquetoast as it gets.

That’s my point. There’s valid reasons to defederate and then there’s ideological reasons.

Basically Usenet then?

Yeah, literally a modern Usenet. Reddit is barely different than Usenet anyway

A big problem with this is that certain kinds of content are illegal both to host but also to link to, in many parts of the world (including the USA). Your solution works well for legal-but-reprehensible-to-the-admin content such as nazi or tankie content (or porn or [...]). But if you end up linking to illegal pornography, or to drug selling, or even to gambling etc, then you're likely still liable and the fact that you're not directly hosting the content is not going to protect you that much (look at torrent trackers to see how well that defense worked).

You can't censor content on a federated platform without fracturing that platform.

You can't login to Hotmail to read your Gmail email. You can however have an e-mail client that pull your mail from both.

But email is the same as xmpp or DMs on "social media" - you can comunícate with various instances. the problem arise with groups (so mailing list, multi user chat or "communities") - in case of email you have mailing list which is not federated and is tied to particular server / address... same issue so it wasn't exactly solved. it's just it's used slightly differently.

All I get from polycentric.io is "Please add Polycentric to your home screen" (Android browsers call it installing) - even after I added it to my home screen (Firefox on Android). Works on Chrome though.

We'll look into it. Thanks for checking it out

Same on safari on iOS 17.

Both current Firefox for Android and Safari 17 (Beta) have a bug where display-mode: standalone doesn’t return true when running standalone, that’s probably what’s broken.

Perhaps a safer way is to use a different url (parameter) for the standalone mode.

It somewhat works if you tell Firefox to get Desktop Site...

But they also broke the back button

Wow, that's odd.

There’s an open issue on Lemmy’s GitHub about making it easier to combine multiple communities on separate instances: https://github.com/LemmyNet/lemmy/issues/818

Seems like something they’re thinking about solving.

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