How to Kill a Decentralised Network (such as the Fediverse)

WTFisthisOMGreally@kbin.social to Fediverse@kbin.social – 161 points – How to Kill a Decentralised Network (such as the Fediverse)
ploum.net

Everyone who’s into the fediverse concept should read this article.

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I'm really happy to see so many people posting this article. While I was a little annoyed at first, I realized that it's better overall to see this popping up everywhere.

If you haven't read this yet, It's great for understanding the upcoming challenges the Fediverse will face.

I had just found that it appears an instance only pulls posts/comments from when their first member subscribes. Even after subscribing any and all comments/posts remain missing for that instance.

This is something that I hope is improved, along with the above mentioned concerns.

Boost things.

Things here get pushed from publishers to subscribers and their servers, and boosting is basically a way of republishing things.

Communities are, in some significant way, bots that boost anything that they see, and they see anything that mentions them, or that is in reply to anything that mentions them. Lemmy and kbin just hide the "To:" field of thr message, which is where the community bot (or "group actor" in Fediverse technical lingo). Boosting things that mention the community bot also triggers the not to boost it in turn, which sends it out to everyone following the bot.

Including newer users.

I agree. I understand it's a lot of data to pull, but even a status bar that can be checked on it's own page would be a help for people to understand why their comments/posts aren't showing up/why the stats are unbalanced.

I've also found upvotes etc, to be different between instances.

I haven't looked into the protocols in detail yet, but maybe it's possible they're using eventual consistency. Upvote counts don't have to be 100% accurate across all instances all the time, as long as they're eventually accurate at some point.

Part of the issue is an upvote means different things on different instances. I have a Lemmy account (inactive) and a kbin. Lemmy has Upvote, Downvote, and Star buttons which can be compared to Reddit's system, with Star meaning saved. Kbin is different. It has Upvote, Downvote and Boost. For whatever reason, upvote on kbin is equivalent to Lemmy's star (called favorite on kbin instead of saved) and Boost is more equivalent to a Reddit upvote. Boosts and downvotes affects post visibility and your Reputation, while upvotes seem to only save the information (for you) for later reference.

this seems so messed up. I like kbin, don't get me wrong, but I consider this to be a bug, not a feature. When you have upvotes and downvotes one next to the other, you (a user) expect these 2 to do the exactly opposite action. Not one of them just add something in your favourites while the other starts negating another user's karma.

Wait, everything I’ve upvoted has been saved??

Well now I don't know. Couple of days ago, if you look at your profile there was a favorites section. That section is gone now....just when I thought I was figuring it out.

Also interesting, Apple implemented XMPP in its messaging app way long ago and pulled support a few years back.

When people insist that Apple needs to implement Google's new secure messaging stack for better interoperability with Android, I wonder if they are thinking back to XMPP and saying "Yeah, fooled us once…"