Comment by Nextgrid | Hacker News Reader

Comment by Nextgrid | Hacker News Reader

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They won't, because federation doesn't actually solve any of the problems the average social media user has, while introducing its own, (sometimes very hard/impossible) problems.

The main driver behind current social media's shittiness is the user-hostile business model that means the incentives of the user and the platform are opposed.

Federation doesn't actually address any of this, and currently the federated social media world "runs" on effectively charity. "Runs" in quotes because we've already seen instance shutdowns which caused a fair bit of trouble. It only currently "runs" because the scale is small enough that it can indeed be sustained by charitable efforts, and hasn't devolved into a unusable spam-fest because it's too small to actually be worth spamming.

If your "solution" to social media shittiness is effectively turn it into something ran by charities, that's fine but you can achieve this much easier (and more efficiently) by just having one charity run one centralized service with an open API (since the business incentives around lock-in are no longer applicable).

Back in jr high school we had halo modding forums that were hosted on free hosts until we had someone with money to pay for a server, until that ran out and we moved again.

Some of those communities might go on and last a while and accumulate knowledge.

Ah maybe not, sounds like a path the gamergate stuff. But the concept certainly feels nostalgic.

And besides now I have a job and a small amount of extra cash to pay for a small community website.

Would be nice to have federated reddits instead of reddit.

What? What does Gamergate have to do with any of that? That's absolutely deranged and obsessed.

There's some pattern of creating those sorts of environments.

Maybe it's the opposite, a community like reddit if You're banned or maybe shamed or even down voted for an ignorant take, not even a bad faith argument, maybe that user stays on Reddit but joins a different subreddit that new subreddit may be more likely to indulge in that viewpoint, maybe even sarcastically.

While on small websites I think a user in that case might just be dissuaded from engaging in the community outright.

I don't believe gamergate to be a special thing, just oxygen, fuel, and a spark.

The reason forums lost out to Reddit and centralized social media is because the latter is more convenient. Turns out having to register an account on every single forum and have to prove your worth every time is less convenient that having a single account and a proof of trustworthiness (as in if you haven’t spammed/misbehaved elsewhere, chances are you won’t misbehave here either) following you around.

I'd say it's more of a failure of certain search engines, among other things.

Personally I've found reddit karma to be correlated with the obnoxiousness of the user, not the inverse. There's plenty out there who feel the same. Even with that point aside, what is there to prove? I don't understand the assertion. Wrongthink will get you censored on Reddit faster than anywhere else regardless of how much karma you had.

Even good posts on Reddit get shuffled past the first pages after a few days. There's too much negative incentive to put effort into content when it can get censored, downvoted, or buried. Sure, you might potentially reach more users in the right circumstances, but many of those users are addicted to notifications and doomscrolling, not enthusiasts of the subject matter. Plenty of that here on HN as well (more on the side of trend-chasing, manufactured two-minute hate about climate or national news, while rarely challenging the status quo) but it's at least tolerable, and I know the moderation is fair here.

Forums haven't "lost out" when they can still serve to bring people together who have, or want to read unpopular opinions. I could go on about use cases. If there were none, there would be no forums.

The takeaway here is that Reddit can be and is considered by a decent proportion to be a dystopian failure, not a "convenience". A black hole of siphoned search traffic that regurgitates a watered down and sanitized imitation of something resembling a community.

Here's an example just from today: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HPuAOYIjieQ

Doesn’t Federation solve exactly that problem?

Ignoring all the publication of content bits, I always felt like what the internet really needed to improve portability of accounts and data was just a federated user authentication standard.

It does until the ‘Federation’ splits into multiple competing blocs that auto-blocklist each other… Which typically happens within a few months.

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