The Fediverse is an opportunity learned societies can't ignore
blogs.lse.ac.uk
blogs.lse.ac.uk
I think the answer to that isn't inertia or greed. I would argue that the tools of federation aren't necessarily suitable to that specific problem. There is a difference between tweets and feeds compared to peer-reviewed papers in magazine-like journals.
That is, Mastodon does solve a kind of problem that is related to closed groups of individuals collaborating on a moderated topic. And it allows those closed groups to broadcast their work into a network and to selectively include elements from outside networks. You could probably use those raw tools to create something that might sort of work for scholarly societies.
But it does feel a bit like trying to shape the problem to fit the solution (put another way, if you have a nice new shiny hammer, suddenly a lot of problems start to look like nails). I think the article is trying to suggest that federation is a tool that is flexible enough to fill that role, but I believe a significant amount of infrastructure would need to be built on top of federation to achieve such a role. And also, a significant culture and process change would have to take place within academia.
Federation might be a part of a solution to the problem, but no where near the whole solution.
Some disciplines are switching to open access journals, meaning that anyone can read the articles for free, and there's no big publisher sucking up tons of money. But there's still peer review.
The journals are completely replaceable. You could also just designate a simple website as the publishing destination. The volunteers would do exactly the same work. Obviously, the website requires some funding, but a tiny fraction of what the journals take.
I had an idea[0] about this last week on here!
Just as a quick counter - you'd want to base this on something more permanent. CLOCKSS[0] or something similar is a necessity with DOIs pointing to the papers. Otherwise you're back to "the source code is here: (broken link to old academic site)"
I agree that the use of journals for the literal job of publishing seems antiquated.
(disclaimer, worked previously for the parent company of FigShare, other providers are available)
https://clockss.org/figshare-preserves-with-the-clockss-arch...
But data, including academic papers published by scientific societies, being free and open has nothing whatsoever to do with the communication protocols underlying those societies. You can have free, open and peer reviewed journals distributed by email, by FTP, by carrier pigeon, etc.
So if your beef with academic societies is merely the cost or the closed nature, federated protocols needn't be part of the discussion at all.
That is a decision by granting agencies and administrators who distribute funding. The scholars will organize around whatever the people who pay them tell them to.
I still don't see the point in choosing federated protocols as a mandate if we were to do this. My preference would be to use that energy towards free and open data sources. I think arXiv is the best example for that and not Mastodon.
They aren’t necessarily. In some branches of linguistics, history, and archaeology, for example, the major journals are still published by learned societies or national academies of science, and they are open-access and authors don’t pay to publish. The costs are covered by the massive endowments that the learned societies sit on (some were founded in the 19th century).
> Federation might be a part of a solution to the problem, but no where near the whole solution.
To be clear, federation and even the ActivityPub protocol have nothing to do with the tweet-like interface of Mastodon (and ActivityPub isn't the only way to federate, either. Email is federated), although TBF the article itself fails to make this distinction clear. There are a number of ActivityPub applications which use a different presentation:
* Pixelfed: Basically federated Instagram
* WriteFreely: federated super-minimalist long-form blogging
* Wordpress: Ubiquitous (maximalist?) long-form blogging platform that has recently added ActivityPub support
That said, I'll admit I have no idea what the obstacles are since I never got into that world. Are there technical requirements which nothing else fulfills? Does it mainly require providing a means of searching for research documents in different stages of review and validating that an individual is a legitimate reviewer/contributor (something like the authorization around git, come to think of it)?
There's a few fancy things to have stuff like user profiles and stuff to make it "look nice", but if you look "under the hood", the data structures you find ends up and the methods of communication end up looking more or less like a modernized version of email.
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Mastodon is a sub-implementation of AP that follows some of the components and then weirdly tweaks some of them in weird ways (because Mastodons internal representation doesn't actually match up with these data structures and Gargron wanted some features like Content Warnings without bothering with the entire process of protocol modifications, so he ended up cannibalizing a different field for it, resulting in an implementation that... mostly results in people yelling at each other for not using CWs "appropriately"), resulting in strange compatibility issues when writing your own AP instance.
Most AP instances typically end up trying to then match Mastodons weird implementation (basically look at the social feed of any AP implementer for long enough and you'll find complaints about how Mastodon doesn't follow the spec), simply because of Mastodons excessive popularity.
The first quote is an observation that It is unlikely that Mastodon will be a suitable drop-in-replacement for the current process.
The second quote is an observation that perhaps there is a way to use the technological pieces that are currently available for federation and apply them to the organization of scientific/academic societies. But that whole system is going to be significantly more than the federated aspect.
Part of this is I remember Google Wave and the unreasonable hype around it. It would replace email, newsgroups, instant messaging … basically all forms of text based communication! Some of the hype for these more contemporary niche technologies is even wilder, this article for example claiming it should force a complete re-think of academic publishing.
There are some perverse incentives in place that hinder migrating away from official journals. The publish or perish pressure leads only high-quality work to count, and the method used to objectively determine if a paper meets the bar is whether it was accepted in established journals. New journals do not have the reputation in place, thus they don't feature in lists of acceptable publications for the purpose of gathering publication metrics. In some places some of these rules applied to state institutions are even set by laws, which are hard to change.
On top of that, some journals are even controlled by leading researchers, which helps building up influence in the field.
To put it plainly, why would any researcher go the extra mile to switch publications?
The mainstream federated servers of the fediverse largely draw from those same North American or Western European circles. It is very common to see founding members of Mastodon claim that their own subculture’s values and concerns ought to be upheld across the fediverse even as new members sign up, and never diluted. How welcoming can the fediverse therefore be to academics from elsewhere with different concerns and views?
The ability to not be beholden to the preferences of whoever runs a fedi server is, in fact, the #1 selling point of federated network in the first place.
And all other alternatives are far worse in that specific aspect you bring. There is a very mild barrier to running your own Mastodon/PeerTube/etc. instance (you don't even have to self-host, you can get one on Masto.host or similar services). But it is flat-out impossible to run your own Twitter or Youtube or Discord.
And most cloud services adhere strictly not just to Western cultural norms, but specifically to Bay Area cultural norms, which are even more narrow.
Of course that selling point isn't, in practice, what's happening, as anyone observing or participating in the space for the past couple years knows.
Fediverse is a lonely place if no one wants to federate with you, but that's where you'll end up if you don't yield to the specific set of concerns and demands of a small minority that infected the main network, and rules it under threat of "do not federate with those we don't like, lest you find yourself on that list too".
But you're ignoring that this is dependent upon not being blacklisted from the majority of (and the biggest) servers for not agreeing with their politics.
Folks regularly make the comparison to e-mail, so let's go with that: anyone can run their own e-mail server and send/ receive e-mail from users on other servers. We would find it unacceptable to blacklist an e-mail server because of the politics of the owner or users. Spam, sure, but not _politics_.
The main Mastodon developers also run the main instance, run a directory of other instances, and blacklist instances which do not follow their politics.
So anyone can run their own instance, but the other important part of federation is BROKEN.
There's a very real and dangerous trend towards extremist positions as a result of social media bubbles. I'm sure most people have noticed how large family gatherings have shifted over the last 15 years, and how some family may no longer even be invited as a result of social media driven shifts.
The fediverse makes these bubbles so much worse, with servers of like minded moderation creating a trend towards groupthink as opposed to representing a variety of opinions.
So while it's promising from a standpoint of shrugging off corporate driven issues in managing social media, the fragmentary nature is perhaps the opposite of what social media actually needs, which is less bubble driven optimization with regression towards extremist means and more broad exposure and interaction with regression towards the normal mean.
So because of social media bubbles, people split their families into bubbles too? If even in a real life setting, where no algorithm curates who they interact with, people choose to segregate despite of family bonds, then that sounds more like a people problem than a social media problem to me.
There's definitely families out there who can get together despite holding diametrically opposed political opinions, even discussing them at the dinner table without getting overly emotional about it and needing to un-invite people from later gatherings. I'd call that a normal, functioning family.
We can still develop common sense and a culture that is highly cautious of these attempts to censor everything, the stuff motivated by an ever expand hyper sensitivity to anything in shades of grey of something they don't like.
We've experience half a decade where being censor-happy has become the norm, rather than merely cleaning up communities of the fringe edge cases that are truly bad. As usual with humans a good idea leaned on taken to the extreme, a hammer seeking nails. Definitely not the first time humans attempted something like this.
The constant negative outcomes of these impulsive behaviours usually build up ad nauseam, and almost always result in cultural backlash which eventually turns into a new common sense. Democracy was built of a similar reaction to negative base desire for isolated hyper centralized authority. I'm confident a similar shift will happen in reaction to the hyper-ideological "everyone I disagree with should be banned from commenting" safe space movement. At least as long as the force of government doesn't turn it from merely cultural to criminal or regulatory as it already starting to in some countries.
You say groupthink bubble, I say place where I don't have to brace as much for racist or sexist views being expressed.
> regression towards the normal mean.
Yeah, the normal mean is something to strive for... If it already benefits you.
I think OP is addressing the paradox of tolerance, hence the call for differing but not hateful opinions. There’s a fine line between the two and cloistering oneself among likeminded people seems to inevitably lead to some form of intolerance.
And yeah ok, you say that’s not your responsibility. That’s fine, but then you shouldn’t be surprised when society is torn apart by these differences.
When they exit, the remainders are going to more and more normalize these, as more and more of the moderates exit. Eventually it could even become the default norm.
[1] https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/ZQG9cwKbct2LtmL3p/evaporativ...
those people were formed due to and in part of a bubble; and denying them the opportunity to have their bubble popped as it causes you discomfort is the exact opposite of being able to express oneself at all - it always comes with the chance of making someone uncomfortable.
"In order to be able to think, you must risk being offended." -JP, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0BW9haau6Hw
Until they get their bubble popped.
But you think it's better to all live in separate, but presumably equal, bubbles.
If you can exclude the ppl that say slurs, the ppl that say slurs can do the same, ending up in slurland, were they get worse and worse until they go to the street and kill someone.
This doesn't respect the power of the radicalization pipeline and let's others escape accountability for their part such as avoiding conflict when their friend says a racial slur or joins an incel forum rather than providing a less extreme take.
Small price to pay for a functional democracy comprised of unprecedented individual liberties.
But since some of the least-creatively-programmed amongst us want to use the "n-word" as an example (how surprising,) let's.
When and who get to decide which buzzword becomes a slur today? Tomorrow?
There are black Americans who prefer the word "negro," instead of the latest white-savior siccophant, acting as a virtue-signaling intellectually degrading euphemism.
Basketball Americans do not need your saving, thank you Mr Mayonnaise Man.
It is not that we must allow people to say slurs, is that it is better for those people to say slurs in a public multicultural site, so that good people can essentially social pressure the slurers into simply not saying slurs. This was possible with centralized social networks, but with decentralization is not possible as the nature of decentralization means that those kind of people now can create their own bubbles of hate instead of having to behave to be in the public spaces.
We had segregation at one point. I'm not sure that benefited everyone equally. Why return to that?
And the left is completely ideologically unable to be around a black person without first acknowledging their privileged presence by an oppression tirade of apologizing blithering woke-double-speak.
The left and the right are equally racist for similar reasons, for example; they both think blacks should had gotten the vaccine first.
You and OP are confusing "safe spaces" for "bubbles"
Whats the alternative? That most shared discourse happens in a single space? I think its fairly clear that that doesn't work so well when everyone has write access to that space: it either dissolves into q conflict zone, or bubbles form within it, or both.
Before social media there was less of a problem because of gatekeeping by traditional journalism and state regulation, and because print media moves too slowly to permit high-freqency positive feedback loops to form.
I'm not suggesting going back to the situation before social media, but I'm not convinced that "comfortable bubbles" are the main problem. I suspect that the frequency and scale of discourse are at least as important.
USA. They only didn't succeed with their coup.
And no US government in recent history, including the one before the current one, had killing people on their agenda. That's just complete and utter horseshit.
There are two kinds of countries, I guess. Those that ~landed on the moon~ voted in fascist leaders and those that use metric system.
There is a real risk that avoiding topics or people one finds offensive can make a person less resilient. Its a totally reasonable response to the internet where you have the opposite problem of being exposed to more than you otherwise would have, but creating too tight of a bubble can have downsides.
Creating a space where you don't have to face the fact that your fellow humans are sexist or racist is the very definition of a bubble.
The problem with social media is not that. It is the feed algorithms that make expressing any extremist position the only way to get other people to talk to you. Fix this problem and many of the problems will go away.
Unfortunately, as it is a social coordination problem, the only way for this to happen is government regulation that either bans feed algorithms altogether, or ensures that users individually have full control over the algorithm for their own feed.
The real bubbles are your family, your workplace, and your friends. Most of them are the same nationality, roughly the same social class, and roughly the same level of education as you. Your colleagues, by definition, all work in the same business as you. You have (subconsciously) hand-picked your friends to align with you on a multitude of levels.
Meanwhile, on Facebook or Reddit, you suddenly read a comment written by a veterinarian in Azerbaijan – someone who you would almost certainly never have met in real life and who is more different from you in every way than all the people you interact with as part of your daily routine.
that veterinarian may be more different than the people you see in everyday life, but the point of a social media bubble is that the veterinarian and you are likely to be very similar. Otherwise, why would you be on the same subreddit? How would you have met them on the internet if not because you were interested in common topics?
On any anglophone forum, it can happen that just enough participants are North Americans with the same views, that their political and social concerns are considered relevant and important. Some Reddit subs have seen this, too. Obviously a moderation rule of “no politics” or “no off-topic” would help, but sometimes even the moderators are passionate about those same political or social concerns, and believe that preventing discussion of such would be fascist.
Worse, as long as the the mods have free reign to decide what is and isn't politics this is just yet another way of phrasing the real rule of "no things we don't approve of".
It's such a lazy analysis that it overlooks countless ordinary and familiar examples that are not controversial or problematic at all, niche communities of every variety, convergences of common interest where the commonality is a baseline of curiosity about ideas are interests that supports healthy and curious and varied discussion, communities that aren't in any strict way of bubble but are just proactive about filtering out hate, communities where a common interest doesn't clearly map onto the analysis of bubbles or politics that people have in mind when they say bubble is a problem (eg tech early adopters, FOSS enthusiasts), and on and on. It's totally ignorant of the kinds of communities that in practice have emerged and taken advantage of the ability to form these niches, which in Mastodon's case was things like comic book artists, the furry community, astronomy nerds and so on.
Not to mention the theory of this "bubble" is fundamentally broken, because it lazily equates common interests specifically to the narrow idea of political escalation and extremism, and the actual convergence of human interests plays out with any number of social dynamics that can't necessarily be mapped on to the specific one of political extremism.
It's just across the board an embarrassing and intellectually lazy idea that misses out on dozens of counterexamples and dozens of social dynamics that it can't and doesn't even bother to explain, and assumes everything fits a narrow theory that's specific to certain kinds of political conversations among specific kinds of political groups.
Only if you hide behind the shield of anonymity. Which you can't really do in the real world.
They see right-wing fascists all the time on the television and think it is normal. They see a few moderate leftists on the fediverse and "the fediverse is a bubble, a niche".
This does feel a little like a bubbley description of things.
Other than as a generic pejorative, what "fascists" are regularly on television? What tenets of Fascism are they preaching?
This includes things you might have happily accepted you might have just made a mistake on (but I thought I remembered this documentary about Mandela's assassination...) when your real world social circle pushed back, if only it wasn't so easy to find other people that thought the same, and theories of why you are right all along. Usually with a lot of other baggage linked into you being right and everyone else being wrong
Obviously this isn't always a bad thing: people also use the internet to discover that same sex attraction is actually accepted in places outside their community or that their government's position on a border dispute isn't universally accepted in environments where alternative views are legal to express. And it happens offline too (the original 'Mandela Effect' was apparently conceived by a bunch of paranormal enthusiasts in an offline environment). But if the Azeri vet is one of the few people in the world to not think what you're saying is complete nonsense, you'll be much more likely to find him online. Not all taboos are against stuff which is inherently bad to discuss, and not all beliefs universally held within a community are accurate. But a lot of fringe stuff on the internet is fringe for good reason, and even when such views are quiet widely-held "bubbles" suck in people who would never have had the motivation to seek out an offline group for discussing the coming race war or whose fault their lack of confidence in dating really was.
And the newspaper/channel/site(s) you frequent.
This is not the average vet in Azerbaijan. It's the vet telling a story that fits the values of YOUR bubble. There are probably Azerbaijanis in your own city who you don't know and wouldn't even listen to because they don't live in the same bubble. They might be struggling to put food on the table and they may think that you are a privileged ** and that you think you are morally superior because your bubble also contains privileged **s who happen to live in other countries.
You'd probably get more outside of your bubble by getting acquainted with a person at your local bus stop. But the reality is: you wouldn't want to because they don't live in your bubble.
That phrase is hiding the real issue: on the internet, people engage with what they want to, and ignore what they want to. Attention, respect, engagement don't result from 'suddenly reading a comment'.
When there was only establishment newspapers and media they presented (what they considered) a balanced and responsible view. Now they've lost control of information and communication. Journalists dug deep to find a problem with the internet, and landed on 'the bubble'. The bubble is when people lack a balanced and responsible view...
There is just enough truth to 'the bubble' to keep the idea alive. On the internet it's easy to find radical information, and restrict your information sources to what you want. Back when everyone read the newspaper it kept public discussion narrowly focused [1]. Now we have lots of people who 'do their own research' and hold radical views. Also, the views that were suppressed under the establishment media are public and accessible to everyone.
There have always been people who live in their own little world, or bubble, but now it's much larger number. From the view of companies and social establishments that controlled the news this is a huge problem. From my view of society, I now sympathize with the US being a republic rather than a pure democracy, and I never thought that would happen.
[1] The smart way to keep people passive and obedient is to strictly limit the spectrum of acceptable opinion, but allow very lively debate within that spectrum..." -Noam Chomsky
We interact with more diverse people online outside of our bubble. It's actually our real life that's the bubble, and bubbles aren't necessarily bad.
Link to paper: https://www.pnas.org/doi/epdf/10.1073/pnas.2207159119
"When individuals interact locally, the outcome is a stable plural patchwork of cross-cutting conflicts. By encouraging nonlocal interaction, digital media drive an alignment of conflicts along partisan lines, thus effacing the counterbalancing effects of local heterogeneity. The result is polarization, even if individual interaction leads to convergence. The model thus suggests that digital media polarize through partisan sorting, creating a maelstrom in which more and more identities, beliefs, and cultural preferences become drawn into an all-encompassing societal division."
So the paper is supporting exactly what I'm saying. That in your local community you need to engage with differences of opinion to successfully navigate local social structures, but that online with an expanded network you can interact with only like minded people.
Yes, the overall bubble is larger online than in real life, but as a result it allows for self-selecting subnetworks which align with confirming your biases and further radicalization rather than compromising with differences of opinion.
I disagree with your interpretation of the stable plural patchwork that you’ve represented here as supporting your claim. However, the nuance in difference of our opinion isn’t that important in the grand scheme.
For your last two paragraphs, I think you are actually describing social sorting - which the paper asserts as the underlining mechanism for which polarization happens online. The filter bubble is colloquially known as not seeing differing opinions online, yet as the paper states is untrue. Online we counter more diverse opinions. That’s what I wanted to point out.
Best of luck to you.
People radicalized have their entire identity structured around a need for confirmation.
When you only talk about a specific topic 24/7 online, what happens in person is that you still bend over backwards to tie every possible subject into that topic. A QAnon believer sees it everywhere and points it out to family. A flat earther is going to make some comment about NASA at dinner guaranteed.
It existed previously in cult behavior, but that sociological structure has now been distributed from small local gatherings to global reach online.
In fedi borders are being drawn and they're creating these little bubbles of opinions. So you know that within your border your opinion will never be challenged because the admin already took care of that for you.
If I were to find any glimmer of hope in that it would be that certain instances will be more inclusive and perhaps some borders will be drawn around that, but I'm not sure.
I actually ran a node since 2017 but left in 2022 because of this very reason.
Threw everyone using twitter into one big melting pot.
Fediverse doesn’t really have anything on FAANG. It needs people to run it, who’s gonna pay them?
Free software became successful in as much as it reduced the cost for companies selling other things to consumers. Would Google or Facebook be viable if they had to pay Microsoft (or Sun) a license per server. Linux enabled them to have a free operating system to run all their data tracking for ads. Free software reduced the cost for Apple to develop the he software that powers iPhones and Macs.
For the most part, the end user actually doesn’t use the free software, rather it is a part of something else they pay for.
That's surprisingly true even when the FOSS alternative is a perfectly suitable drop in replacement for a popular proprietary program. How many people pay for Microsoft Office instead of just using LibreOffice? When FOSS became more popular than the proprietary competition, it was only because the FOSS product was 10x better (think Firefox and Chrome vs Internet Explorer or VLC vs Windows Media Player and Quicktime) not because users actually chose FOSS.
Another example that proves this is how the single biggest increase in Linux desktop market share was likely due to a gaming handheld called the Steam Deck that is actually a Linux laptop. Linux allows Valve to sell gaming hardware without paying license fees to Microsoft or creating their own operating system.
The reality of FOSS is a far cry from the ideals of Stallman, ESR, et.al. that were the original rationale behind FOSS licenses.
How many people pay for Microsoft Office instead of just using Google Docs/Sheets/...? LibreOffice doesn't replace Office for the same reason why Sheets doesn't replace Excel despite being free. Huge difference in functionality if you're more than a casual user
Same applies to most free alternatives to industry standard software. FreeCAD isn't a replacement for Solidworks, GIMP isn't a replacement for photoshop, etc
From reviews of Windows-based gaming handhelds (ROG Ally, etc.), the cost of a Windows license is likely secondary compared to just how badly the stock Windows UI and power management (and incessant forced updates) suit the form factor, and Microsoft don’t look like they can be bothered to accomodate this comparatively small market (at least judging by their public behaviour so far).
That’s not necessarily to say that this was Valve’s original motivation. I think it’s just as likely they were setting up a fallback position for when Microsoft tried to push them out of game distribution using their Xbox platform. But right now it wouldn’t make sense for Valve to switch back even if that problem disappeared overnight.
Google and Facebook could afford to pay for expensive servers, even more expensive datacenters to house them in, and fat compensation packages to their employees and execs, so obviously yes. Plenty of industries exist that have high capex costs and manage to get off the ground just fine. Continuing to give away free software to startups with millions of VC dollars raised that are growing to billion dollar businesses no longer makes sense.
Weirdly enough this is likely to be Meta with Threads.
Once it adds ActivityPub integration we should start to see a lot of cross-pollination with Mastodon users.
But by then there should be well in excess of 200-300m people on Threads.
Many of them will want to converse with Mastodon users and vice versa and I am sure there will be instances available that will be happy to allow that conversation to happen. Because ultimately it's all about users not instances.
If I'm on instance A and my friend is on instance B and she is talking to someone on Threads (instance C) and instance A blocks instance C .. it just means I won't see posts from instance C. So maybe my friend on instance B gets into a conversation with someone on instance C. In my view I just don't see the C side of the convo. No harm, no foul.
A lot of the fediblock stuff is not 'well they won't defederate from the BADPEOPLE so i'll defederate from them too!'. In fact I'm not sure I've seen an example of that actually happening. You often see grousing and calls for it, but I'm not sure I've ever seen it happen. Most of the block lists i've seen are simply instances of 'free speech warriors' who refuse to moderate calls for violence from their userbase, instances that are straight up 'we are nazis' here, or instances that are extremely sketchy porn.
Fediverse: We are open for federation and you to join!
Meta: Ok here is what we are doing with instagram/threads.
Fediverse: Not that kind of open!More awareness won't help while the churn is so high. The Fediverse seems to be happy staying small, actively disdaining the sorts of user-friendly moves that would give them mass appeal (but in the process, perhaps, destroy something its current users find special).
Such as? Difficult onboarding?
I still think p2p is the way to go. When I get some time, I want to spin up a little p2p app around sharing ad-free news and commentary. (Articles + photos + threads.)
It can all be ephemeral, because 99% of the use is in the short-term. I rarely if ever access old tweets or Reddit threads.
Yeah a lot of stuff is what I wouldn't care about 2 minutes after I read it, but the protocol can't really know what any given person will want to come back to.
Over the weekend there was a post about XMPP and somebody asked for a client with the same level of UX as Telegram. There were a few replies, but none of them were what I would say were anywhere near the same level.
For example one of them had an option to choose between three different methods of encrypting chats, and it was one of the most prominent UI features in the chat window. That's great if you want to feel like James Bond and encrypted chat is your main use case, but 99.9% of people are just sending memes and photos of their cats and don't even know what encrypted means.
Element is doing quite well in this department, but last time I tried (admitidely a couple of years ago) there were still some edge cases.
One interesting outcome of Reddit changing their API pricing was long-time 3rd-party Reddit apps shutting down. Some of those added Lemmy support to their existing UI and importantly thought through new user behavior (like showing a default instance vs forcing users to sign up).
There's still work to be done, but if we're talking about the different between the Official Reddit client and the (now defunct) Boost for Reddit, the latter had better UX. Now that Boost only supports Lemmy and the Reddit app keeps getting enshittified the UX argument is harder to make.
In a small way, we can have the Internet of old back, the one where in order to participate in communities online, you weren't driven by algorithmic feeds setup to push ads in front of you constantly, or just generally shit posting about whatever pop culture moment.
It seems they have had some issues with Google Play and the App Store with their weird catch-all policies, requiring integration with Google/Apple login etc. but they have managed to work around it for the time being.
https://apps.apple.com/us/story/id1668483560
So conceptually they are fine with it. And there is nothing you stopping your running servers on your devices.
I'd just like to interject for a moment. What you're referring to as the Fediverse is actually OStatus/ActivityPub.
Who knew what the Internet was when it started spreading into the mainstream? People don't need to know what something is or does to start interacting with it, it either needs a smooth enough onboarding process that people can easily experiment, or it needs some compelling value that they've heard about from others to make the extra effort worth it. Not sure where the Fediverse is on either of these points.
I understand their concern (I still, however, think it is extremely overblown), but you can't have your cake and eat it too. Even me, a techie, hesitate to sign up for some random instances ran by people I don't know, and with the risk of it getting shut down at the mercy of said people. Right in this thread, you will also see people that advocate for keeping it niche. That is completely fine too, but the Fediverse not taking off is partly self-inflicted and one could even argue that it is in fact the goal.
It's the API equivalent of people asking for iPhones while nerds keep on throwing Raspberry Pis at them and pretend that they're the same thing if you squint hard enough.
It is not the same, it will never be the same, you will never get the masses to adopt it, so if you want to do the hobbyist thing go ahead. Just don't be upset when nobody gives a crap about your federated platform and you're forever 5 years from being adopted by the masses regardless of the date.
The big barrier to adoption is people and content.
Mastodon has been an okay twitter replacement with its feature set, it’s just missing people.
Threads appears to have succeeded by bootstrapping their platform with major accounts, brands and popular personalities. This isn’t a thing more feature development can solve.
Imagine if you had to pick a particular node to access Facebook, or select a particular data center before you started shopping on Amazon. Consumers just want to find people and exchange a mix of public and private messages, they do not want to be bothered with the dogma of federation.
Mastodon is, by far, the most active software and both their app and site now guide you to Mastodon.social.
What worked 50 years is not going to work today just because it's technically similar, the environment has changed and it's foolish to ignore that.
You're right that the environment changed, but not for the best. Many people would jump on a federated messaging network, not because it's federated but because they won't need to use dozens of app and accounts to communicate. It is more the business incentives that are not there.
Email surely has succeeded because SMTP was the de-facto communication protocol when Internet developed, but it is still successful and relevant because it is still the de-facto communication protocol.
First movers in a market or technology space have an advantage because the costs of switching to something else rise over time, creating economic inelasticity. Go read up on preferential attachment and consider the fact that success is accidental or lucky as much as merit-based.
I wouldn't be surprised if Mastodon also went the distrust-by-default route if it gains in popularity, at least for the big instances. Looking at the server moderation for mastodon.social, there's 256 different Mastodon instances which are completely blocked from reaching mastodon.social.
I've been running my own mastodon instance for me and a few friends as well. It's been fine, we federate fine, no bans that I know of, no reports about my users. I think more smaller instances is probably better for the health of the network than a few huge instances. Especially if those instances are free to users.
Large instances need more moderation than a couple of admins can handle, I am concerned that instances like msdn.social or whatever may not be sustainable from both a 'actual costs' standpoint (bandwidth, hardware, etc) but also from a moderation standpoint.
In terms of my instance, the costs are very low, the mastodon software itself is frankly kind of painful to maintain, it's designed to run in a way that is scalable but that makes it a bit too complicated for a smaller instance..
I hope we see some more interesting experiments in moderation, tools like spamassassin for mastodon to automatically score and flag local posts for moderation review.
It's early days. I think we may just end up with what we see in email like the blackhole list. Have an instance full of nazis you refuse to moderate, your instance ends up on the list and everyone who subscribes to it will just defederate automatically.
People already get social media for free. There's no reason for them to switch.
success of reddit and facebook feel like counterexamples if they can offer for free the privacy controls that most people are satisfied by (you certainly have very little control over your subreddit or your discord - all your shit is plaintext and can get deleted tomorrow if the service provider determines their best interest diverges from yours)
I probably agree with you, in that if self hosted solutions were one click installs and modest cost they would be more popular, but I can't tell.
The reason to switch is that once you get over the initial barriers to entry (having to choose which server to join being a lot bigger barrier than most Fediverse activists seem to realize), the experience is SO MUCH BETTER. You get posts from people you've followed, in the order they were posted, and when you've read them all, you're done. No adverts, no infinite scroll, no wading through 75% "you may be interested in this soft-core porn" posts to see stuff from people you actually followed.
Today the issue for social media is curation, I.e. moderation.
Dreams of that freewheeling intellectual market place were inspiring.
However, reality trumps fiction. Results trump theory. Success creates Business models.
But the Fediverse could certainly offer services that fit the needs of the sciences. Wordpress can be connected to the Fediverse. There are other, more long form services.
Mastadon is the answer to Twitter.
In general, I think a lot about hyper efficient marketplace companies. Like craigslist which is still have less than 50 employees.
Suppose we had a goal to connect consumer to producer and have the lowest fees, provide a well ranked marketplace that consumers and producers could trust.
1% fee w a $100 cap. A super app like WeChat - Umbrella to Uber, AirBnB, Expedia, MLS, Amazon.
With rise of AI, it could be possible. "The most efficient way to provide for human wants"
In a world influenced by Taylor Swift and Cardi B I'd bet anything federated will lose to a tiktok of the day every time.
The main issue with the fediverse is the pervasive naysaying. Merchants of FUD are abundant. They all have their "the main issue" why it's hopeless. Few bother sparing even a second to contemplate the possibility of success - however faint it is against the meteor of doom which surely is careening through the sky right at us & will obliterate us all momentarily that they see.
There's so many criticisms & critiques, and so much lowly & pervasive nattering of fediverse & alternatives. I think though that what's important now isn't getting everything right & tackling each and every problem first. What's important now are strong solid bases for innovation. We need early adopters & innovators trying things.
We need to grow our capabilities, to figure out how to iterate again, after being well served by free with surveillance systems. The nattering can be constructive, once we have a base. I think we are losening things up, greasing into fluidity capabilities that have been ossified into place by titan sized ultra-captive industry. Making the connective online space fluid again is more important than anything. We can find wins, and the titans will keep stumbling & making errors. Innovation from the edge is going to shed some blood, but it will also allow iteration & evolution, will drive future wider forms of meta-moderation that will help us all suss & grok each other in ways that these highly centralized walled gardens can never be open enough to allow.
The paradigm here, of connectivity being participative and evolvable and changing: that seems like something we forgot a while ago, and in the hours of such discontent about so much being decided for us, I think the commonality should be more important than the quibbles. No one is leaping to defend the creaky status quo. We haven't figured out all the safeguards and onroading we need to get to the world scale that the titans are at now, but it sure seems to me like we have some viable starting places to work from now. We can iterate and change, socially direct ourselves, and that hope for iteration and ownership is what is at stake here. Scant criticism is on offer that has constructive alternatives, offers any rays of hope.
Take Twiter as an example. It's rapidly deteriorated under Musk's stewardship [1]. Bias aside, quality is down to support a subscription models with what many now call the "blue check reply guys": low-quality replies from "verified" users being boosted when thos esame people couldn't otherwise get organic engagement.
What would be the benefit to a user of federation? Federation at what level? Is it just other companies? How do you create a feed with federated content? Are you copying it between nodes? Can I, as a user, set up my own server like I theoretically can with email? How then do we police content in such a world? What about bad actors spamming as we get with POTS and email? Who enforces things like law enforcement requests and content moderation?
All of those things are real problems/ Yet the value proposition for users is at best hypothetical. A service can still degrade. It can get swept away by whatever the new social network is. Will that be federated too? Most likely not because it's easier to scale that way.
Twitter may well die. Who cares? It'll get replaced by something else. Federation just isn't going to happen with these philosophical arguments given all the practical problems.
[1]: https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2023/05/elon-...
There are ways to make identity floating and separate from the server, at least in theory, but ActivityPub (the protocol under Mastodon and many other things) does not implement anything like this.
We'll see if it gets there, but I find their thinking generally pretty persuasive.
Is it persuasive enough to have multiple implementations and multiple instances running? How many instances of blue sky are there running out there?
Federation IMO solves problems on the developer side:
1. We want to write software, not to wrangle with the laws of a hundred countries. 2. We don't want to deal with providing infrastructure for millions of users. 3. We don't want to run a community in general. Our passion is software, we don't really care what they talk about.
On the user side, the value proposition is lack of lock-in. That if you like the system, you'll eventually find some place where you fit in.
> What would be the benefit to a user of federation?
If Twitter were federated with other services, basically you'd have a way to reach select Twitter users from a saner place.
> Can I, as a user, set up my own server like I theoretically can with email? How then do we police content in such a world? What about bad actors spamming as we get with POTS and email? Who enforces things like law enforcement requests and content moderation?
People federating with you can decide to stop dealing with you in that case. Federation doesn't mean links can't be broken, or never established in the first place.
> Twitter may well die. Who cares? It'll get replaced by something else. Federation just isn't going to happen with these philosophical arguments given all the practical problems.
No system is perfect, but IMO a federated system, if done well enough is more resilient. In a federated system, the hope is that something like Twitter would be just one of many providers. Thus if the leadership goes nuts one day, it has to content with that there's 20 other nigh identical providers, and that it can over time be marginalized if it keeps being crazy.
Also, ideally federation means each community can be more focused, and have its own culture and local rules that make sense for it, but may not make sense for anyone else.
I couldn't disagree more.
First, nobody cares about this. This has no value proposition to users. It shouldn't even be a topic of conversation.
Second, IMHO it's not even true. It's a bit like how you split a monolithic into microservices. Now you've created a bunch of versioning and orchestration problems where you have to deal with network issues. Federation means talking to third-parties, dealing with them being unreachable or behaving badly. It's a whole new class of problems.
> f Twitter were federated with other services, basically you'd have a way to reach select Twitter users from a saner place.
There's a ton of hand-waving that goes along with this statement. It's like if you tried to cut out talking to Verizon on your POTS exchange. Well, technically you can do that but then you can't talk to the customers on that service and they can't talk to you.
Did you quote the wrong part? Obviously, value proposition to developers isn't a value proposition to users a lot of the time.
Second, this is a dev-centric forum.
> There's a ton of hand-waving that goes along with this statement. It's like if you tried to cut out talking to Verizon on your POTS exchange. Well, technically you can do that but then you can't talk to the customers on that service and they can't talk to you.
It's exactly like that, yes. That's the very point: that if say, Verizon starts doing something unpleasant like spamming, they can find themselves cut off from the rest of the system.
Meanwhile, unlike with POTS, any alternative is accessible to Verizon users, so they could move over with minimal pain.
The ideal is that in a federated system, there's always alternatives, and no instance is too big to fail.
Most of the problems you pose exist with every social media platform, and only get worse as scale goes up. We can all agree that as user count goes up, abuse and moderation scales as well.
A centralized platform takes all of that moderation load at once. You need a team of people or some crazy moderation software that doesn't work. Abuse runs rampant as the company doesn't want to invest in proper moderation. We see that on twitter, Facebook, tumblr, all of them.
The fediverse aims to solve this problem by limiting scale. Smaller communities are easier to moderate. We see this with forums and chat rooms. When the community is small, they tend to self-police more. People tend to self-identify with that community and actively protect it.
But small communities are small and don't reach far. So we connect these small communities into larger networks. The implementation details of that are IMO pretty much irrelevant, but to answer your question: posts are duplicated throughout the network. Each server caches copies of all incoming posts to serve them directly to their local users. There are downsides to this approach, but the positive is that it crudely balances server load across the network.
Bad actors aren't much of a concern. If you start a server that just blasts spam into the fediverse, the network will quickly drop you. Individual servers have the option to refuse connections from other servers or domains. Server admins actively network with each other to warn of malicious servers. So far it's been incredibly effective.
As a user, you also have the option to block servers or other users. You also have extensive filtering options so that you can effectively moderate your own timeline.
And of course, there's also the drama between server admins blocking each other and harming users by cutting them off from part of the network. The solution I chose was to start up my own server. It took a weekend and operates exactly the same as the big instances I've been on.
When a server shuts down, users can move elsewhere. You can keep all your follows and followers, but lose your post history. That's obviously not ideal, but what were you able to keep when MySpace closed down? It's not perfect, but you can still keep going. Plus there are limited workarounds, but that's not important.
The fediverse has problems, but not the ones you pose.
Ask yourself how one scales a website to tens of millions of users. It's pretty complicated, right? Lots of servers and load balancers and whatever else.
But what about a website for a thousand users? Ten thousand? That's much more doable. That's just a single machine. The magic of federation is linking ten thousand websites run by volunteers that each host only a thousand users into a more or less cohesive network.
No matter which node in the network your account belongs to, you get roughly the same experience. No one has to spend millions filling up a datacenter. Most servers are run on donations from users or out of their admin's pocket. It doesn't cost too terribly much unless you're serving thousands of users.
When one server goes down, even a very large server, the network stays intact and absorbs the load and the users as they migrate. When a server with tens of thousands of users shuts down, we don't see a dramatic drop in total network users. Nearly all of them just move. This makes the network very resilient. No one person can do any meaningful damage to the network as a whole.
Fediverse is far from perfect. And I agree that it won't be a monetized ad- and celebrity-friendly platform like Facebook or twitter. But that's fundamentally misunderstanding what and why it is.
The fediverse is the next logical step from hundreds of small isolated forums. People built and use federated services because they want small communities driven by and for people who simply want to talk to other people. Nothing more, nothing less. It's not going to grow to encompass billions of users because that's simply not the goal.
The goal of the fediverse is simple: give people a place to talk and share with each other that is controlled exclusively by people who want the same thing. No money, no tracking, no corporations, just people talking to other people.
Everyone I know on mastodon is perfectly happy with the way things are. We see a very stable network with slow and steady growth. That's pretty much all we want or need.
> No matter which node [...] you get roughly the same experience.
How do you mean this? Besides HN, I'm on some big guys, a few discords, and some private groups. Some of the big guys delegate moderation to private participants in each sub-forum - of course. NO TWO of these have the same rules. Not even close. Some have fundamentally different basic rules of conduct. Many of the moderators enthusiastically want to block "the bad guys" but they mostly agree to each other's label on that in spite of their rules being all different. Basically if someone was lynched by some other group, that's good enough for them.
I'm willing to be amazed that it works but for now I do not believe that two of these systems actually will agree long term to use the other guy's forum rules.
Of course the local and federated feeds are different, but those are local to the server and will always be unique.
What you're describing is drama, which is pretty easy to ignore.
My previous server got wrapped up in some ridiculously inane large-scale drama that I couldn't avoid. So I started my own server and moved everything over. I still see all the same posts from the same people and they still see mine. It's all exactly the same except for the local and federated feeds.
It's the opposite. We have monolithic services because all of these problems benefit from scale. Is it easier to build one system for site safety and the ability to report illegal content or to build more than one?
> Each server caches copies of all incoming posts to serve them directly to their local users. There are downsides to this approach, but the positive is that it crudely balances server load across the network.
It doesn't load balance anything. It just multiplies the work, particularly given that any such service is going to have a long tail of low-distribution content. Are you going to replicate that preemptively? Or cache-on-demand? If it's the first, it's more work. If it's the second, it's not clear it actually works and certainly adds propagation delay. By this I mean, you can't really produce a feed of content you don't have, for example.
> If you start a server that just blasts spam into the fediverse, the network will quickly drop you.
Famously, POTS has no issue with spam because of this.
> Bad actors aren't much of a concern.
Just like POTS, just like email, just like SMS.
> As a user, you also have the option to block servers or other users.
Blocking servers makes as much sense as blocking a country on Twitter would.
> But what about a website for a thousand users? Ten thousand?
But it's not. You still have to deal with all the traffic from the rest of the network. Otherwise, what are you displaying to your users?
> Fediverse is far from perfect.
It's completely unworkable, offers no value proposition to users, is more expensive to implement and is way more complex.
That's not really the case. Blocking a user is done when the user is mallicious, blocking a server is done when the sysop is malicious, the server is host to bad behaviour, used for spam, etc. Domains and IP's are blocked in SMTP all the time, and the fediverse is just email with social elements attached to it.
And yet we still have thriving communities with tens or hundreds of thousands of people who are all pretty happy and satisfied with the way things are.
Because you don't understand what the value is doesn't change the fact that a ton of people do find it valuable. Calling mastodon a failed platform is laughable when we have so many people who enjoy it. I mean that literally, it's a running joke and we all laugh at takes like this. We even have memes about it.
The value proposition is actually quite simple: it's small, it's decentralized, theres no algorithm, it's wholly independent of corporate or advertiser influence, and it's full of people who value those things highly. It is the antithesis of centralized corporate social media, built by and for people who find the modern corporate web intolerable.
What you're complaining about is ActivityPub. It's bad, everyone knows it's bad, we talk about it all the time. There's a great deal of discussion and effort being put into improving it. It comes with some frustrations and odd behavior, but it's largely irrelevant to most users.
The fediverse in general has quite a lot of active users, and that count is growing slowly and steadily. Clearly these people find value and utility in these platforms. Claiming it's an unworkable platform with no value is objectively incorrect.
> Famously, POTS has no issue with spam
You should do some research into this claim.
https://mastodon.social/@jwz/109411593248255294 (safe to link to - and its following page via mastodon)
> Every time I do a new blog post, within a second I have over a thousand simultaneous hits of that URL on my web server from unique IPs. Load goes over 100, and mariadb stops responding.
> The server is basically unusable for 30 to 60 seconds until the stampede of Mastodons slows down.
> Presumably each of those IPs is an instance, none of which share any caching infrastructure with each other, and this problem is going to scale with my number of followers (followers' instances).
Is there anything besides the inbox endpoint that actually needs to be real-time dynamic?