Hacker News Reader

Comment by INGSOCIALITE | Hacker News Reader

What really grinds my gears is that all of the signup pages and “how to join” pages just say to pick a random instance because it’s federated and it doesn’t matter which one you join.

What if the random one I pick gets defederated? Now I need to find a new instance and make a new account?

This will make federated services into even MORE echo chamber ultra-moderated spaces than Reddit ever was, as the fear of defederation will cause lockdown policing of wrongthink.

I honestly think it may be worse for free speech.

Then again, I’ve never joined a federated service and I have no actual anecdote or evidence to back myself up, I’m kind of just spitballing thoughts.

View on HN

It's not a big problem - just pick a reasonable instance, which 4/5 instances are anyways. Yes, if you pick an instance like lemmygrad on Lemmy that's specifically built to be an echo chamber, the chances of being defederated are higher. But picking a popular instance or an instance made for access to the fediverse (like what social.lol does) won't put you at much risk of being left out.

This seems like the correct approach. Two or three large instances with slightly different flavors that keep each other in check, then a long tail of specialized instances.

> This will make federated services into even MORE echo chamber ultra-moderated spaces than Reddit ever was

That already happened. In fact that’s the main selling point of the Fediverse. Make your own bubble and enjoy the likeminded people

the lemmy instance I've looked at is already a terrible echo chamber, as bad as some of the worst parts of reddit. I think defederation is going to lead into more insular communities unfortunately.

I've thought about it further.

'Federation' or decentralization is a fantastic idea. There is really only one way that it truly 'works' as a decentralized service...

Each and every user runs their own instance of a federated server. This way, they can 'defederate' anything they please, without affecting the whole. This way there is still no 'central' service that can be monetized, locked down, etc. and all of the federated data is available to all private instances, akin to BitTorrent or a (and I shudder typing this) blockchain.

Maybe I'm wrong.

>Each and every user runs their own instance of a federated server.

That's not federation. Federation is a distinct concept from decentralization; federation does involves trusting a third party of your choice (namely, whoever's running the instance you joined), but simply offers choice of which third-party you choose to trust.

The "everyone can run their own server" thing is just a side-effect of federation not blessing anyone with any sort of exclusivity over power to be a third-party.

Outside of tech circles, your idea is DOA because nobody wants to run their own server just to use facebook. Plenty of people don't even know what a server is, and had the ISP set up their router (and BTW they don't know what a router is either). With federation, you can still have a fairly normal app and get most of the benefits of centralization.

The point of federation is to avoid giving anyone absolute power over the community without recourse, not to completely avoid trusting anyone whatsoever.

That's because instance operators in EU became extremely uncomfortable with the majority content on the second, third, and half of top 10 largest Mastodon instances. That destroyed the Fediverse and it's more than half dead.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com