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Comment by kemotep | Hacker News Reader

Why is everyone required to federate with everyone on ActivityPub? What if I want to only see Wordpress, Peertube, and Pixelfed content but nothing from Mastodon or Lemmy? How is that problematic as an ActivityPub client? Or I only want Spanish language content?

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Because otherwise social graphs and organic exchanges don't work. I'm not joining a Mastodon server to passively consume curated collection of serfs owned by benevolent server admins offer. Yet, that's the model of users and communities in Mastodon as it is.

Is there any kind of social media that doesn’t become a serfdom in your opinion? I mean Hacker News falls under that definition as well yet here you are consuming a curated feed.

Are there thousands of HN?

I don’t understand the question. You are currently using one of the most heavily moderated sites on the internet complaining that another platform which allows individuals to create their own clients which to view content published on the protocol has servers that you are not required to use that are too moderated?

I'm not sure I follow you. It sounds like you expect to receive from every instance, and in turn expect all to receive from yours?

I don't see the appeal; it sounds like it would devolve into white noise

I'm expecting random person to reply to my comments here, and expect my reply to yours shown to you. I don't expect* others to be on a blocked sub-cluster of HN server that my comments would not show or someone else's response to be removed from my sight.

*: for the sake of argument

in practice that's not the kind of content that is defederated. what is defederated is usually for ideological reasons, but sometimes it's because of illegal content (there's a lot of Japanese Misskey instances that will happily federate images to you that are questionably legal to possess in the US whether you want them on your drive or not) or out of spam control / distrust (small instances often have trouble federating)

ironically when I used Mastodon, while dealing with these issues, I was unable to filter out other languages. So in addition to extremely questionable content, a lot of it was simply in another language.

ActivityPub is a really half baked protocol and the sooner we realize that and move on from it the better. Personally, I didn't feel that defederation was an adequate defense against those MissKey instances and I decided running an instance is a very big liability.

I guess I just have a unicorn of an instance because I never see these issues. Yes there is a large list of servers defederated but many of them are at best 4chan tier content which I can easily find on 4chan no need for my mastodon feed to have everything under the sun on it.

Like I get that moving instances or between applications isn’t really possible on AP and there is concerns with moderation and so on but it’s been the best internet experience I’ve had. It’s a bubble but I easily just come here or to 4chan or reddit to see outside that bubble.

The second largest Mastodon instance is Chinese, third and fourth Japanese, fifth NSFW exclusive. Third and fourth combined is 32% larger than the first, fourth also has about 4x more post per user(~49 vs ~195). The list I'm referring does not include Misskey-based systems(also APub based).

Defederation is not a huge issue if you assume and embrace a segregationist view and cut off likely major fractions of the organically formed Fediverse out of itself. After all it's porn and scripts you don't even recognize, what's the point in having them? My insistence is, that's a fresh dead canary in cage.

1: https://instances.social/list/advanced#min-users=100000

If I want a feed of 100 people who post statuses/tweets, blogs, videos, and pictures who I am interested in and by using ActivityPub can use a single client to view all this activity, is that by your definition segregationist and a dead canary?

I don’t understand how if I host my own AP client on my own hardware and choose only to federate and subscribe with a small subset of sites and people who post using AP that this is a bad thing. I can use other websites like Hacker News to see other opinions and views.

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