Maybe a hot take, but if you want this big libertarian anarchist federated system you get all the pros and cons along with it. Not having a central authority means you have no real power to stop someone from coming in and taking it. It’s inevitable by design.
I'd argue the system is working quite well, every individual and/or community has the liberty to choose what to do about Meta.
That's what federation is all about, no central power taking decisions in behalf of everyone else.
every individual and/or community has the liberty to choose what to do about Meta.
Untrue. Users cannot decide which instances they see.
of course they can. if they don't like their instance's policies, they just have to move to another. or host their own.
there has been people in pro-threads instances that have moved to one that blocks threads and the other way around.
if they don’t like their instance’s policies, they just have to move to another.
So they have to sift through instances until they find one that federates exactly how they would? Lol. Or do they have to compromise because they don't actually have the power to choose who they federate with?
host their own.
Hosting their own instance makes them admins.
So they have to sift through instances until they find one that federates exactly how they would? Lol. Or do they have to compromise because they don't actually have the power to choose who they federate with?
You can see the blocklist of any mastodon instance without joining it. You can and should read their policies before joining.
Hosting their own instance makes them admins.
This makes no sense. You are saying that just because you're the admin of an instance you can't be an user?
You can have a single user instance of your own and be done with it. If you don't like someone else choosing what instances defederate, you have that possibility.
It legitimately feels like you are incapable of understanding what I'm saying, so I'm just gonna make the executive decision and duck out.
Have a nice day. You may have the last reply.
Sure, but the rhetoric behind it is my point. Trying to get everyone to do it is antithetical to the design of the system.
Sure, but the rhetoric behind it is my point. Trying to get everyone to do it is antithetical to the design of the system.
No, it is precisely the kind of action that we must take collectively in order to protect what we value about the fediverse. This is the work of maintaining a positive community space. If you don't agree that is fine, genuinely I think it is good there is a diversity of opinions here, but it is pretty obvious to me that if we don't have a lot of conversations about the importance of solidarity in defending the fediverse from corporate capture then history is just going to repeat itself.
....I am tired of history repeating itself, I like this place. I like you!
We can't stop a massive corporation from interacting with open source, but we can choose whether massive corporations are allowed to get away with pretending they are benign members of an open source, federated community. At the very least, it raises the dollar amount these corporations must allocate in trying to convince us they are benign doesn't it?
They have the money and time to convince us, even if you disagree with everything I say you can't argue it isn't a better strategy to be difficult to convince. Massive corporations will spend money and time up to the point marketing calculates the change in public perception is worth it and not a dollar further. They wouldn't be doing their jobs well if they behaved otherwise and judging by how desirable those jobs are I feel like at least some of those people are pretty good at their jobs...
Call me a pessimist, but people are caring way too much about the idealistic implementation of the technology and missing the fact that the tech doesn’t mean shit compared to the community. If you don’t care about the community growing, then that’s one thing. But if you do, Threads is the competition that you won’t be able to beat if they feel like putting in the effort.
You say well we have to be pragmatic because threads/meta has so much more power than us that we will be able to reach so many more people with their help (or they could destroy us equally as powerfully)…. I say but wait a minute if they have all that power why is it shitty open source software projects with several orders of magnitude less funding than Meta are providing the vision of the future AND the technology to get us there? I mean sure if we just had the vision that might make sense but we already built the tools too…?
Honestly stop and think about why that is. Meta could have easily funded side projects and paid programmers to rewrite the code for the entire fediverse and all its associated softwares… many times over. Given the amount of money it has it could have done this over and over and over and over again and still be only spending a tiny fraction of its R&D budget. You have to convincingly explain to me why we were the ones who had to do it, through basically entirely volunteer work, and what makes you think engaging with them now AFTER we put in most of the groundwork to build the technology is a good idea.
You say we could get us so much growth, but every single damn person they bring us will still be the product for their true customers (advertisers etc) and from those people’s perspectives nothing meaningful will have changed. The relationship between meta and its users will be essentially the same, meta has to ensure this to protect their bottom line. So people will have joined the fediverse without actually joining it, who cares at that point?
There are a million ways meta can extend and embrace the fediverse, we need to prepare for the extinguish.
we need to prepare for the extinguish
And my entire point is you can't. The system is designed to allow anyone in, you can't decided to stop someone because they are a corporation. It's similar to people trying to stop the NSA from committing anything to the Linux kernel because you're afraid they're going to put in a backdoor. It can't be done by design.
My point is that you can, by raising awareness about what massive corporations ALWAYS attempt to do to public commons and by encouraging everyone to defederate with them.
Sure they can contribute to and use open source, doesn’t mean we have to treat them like they are actually well meaning members of the community?
Raising awareness about what massive corporations ALWAYS attempt to do
How many family members have you convinced to stay off Facebook, Instagram, Snapchat, TikTok etc? How many are tired of you annoying them about it? Your statement isn't false, but it's also not new, and I'm arguing it's inevitable. You're not going to stop massive corporations by trying to group together a ton of individuals who all have to come to the same decisions. It's a Catch22 of sorts. You're only worried about it because people can't beat corporations. You can't overcome that because people can't beat corporations.
I don't like Meta either, and don't use any of their products. But you've invited them in already.
"No, it is precisely the kind of action that we must take collectively in order to protect what we value about the fediverse. This is the work of maintaining a positive community space."
But therein lies the problem. The fediverse isn't one homogenous entity. Although there seems to be an overall leftie tint to much of the fediverse, opinions on what is" valued" and "positive" vary quite a bit. The beauty of the fediverse is that you can choose your experience based on the instance you join. Trying to control the entire fediverse goes against the point of the fediverse imo.
Is that really a problem? It's not trying to "control" anything. It's a voluntary pact meant to conserve the non-corporate fediverse, as it is right now.
The beauty of the fediverse is that you can choose your experience based on the instance you join
This is never going to change. If you just don't like the intent behind the fedipact, no problem - the majority of the fediverse will be talking with threads. You get the personal choice of which instances you make accounts on. Hell, you can make your own instance.
There is no problem here.
I don't know exactly what the fedipact is, but I know of a collection of instances with arbitrary mods without accountability who have sworn to collectively create a block list and block instances based on what opinions those instances allow etc. Instances can even be blocked for not blocking another instance. I see that as a problem for the fediverse because it can grow and create an unnecessary rift of the verse.
Also, yes it's great that you can chose instance and jump wherever you want, but an even better thing would be to put more emphasis on user controlled blocks. We can ourselves block instances from our feeds and we should make that the norm (and perhaps make those blocks more powerful and configurable if need be), and have the instances focus more on blocking straight up illegal things.
If you want a place where admins are not allowed to block communities and instead leave moderation of all but the most egregious, illegal content, up to individuals, there are places like that already in X and Threads.
This is the fediverse, where admins are expected to look after their members. If they don't, the members will leave. I don't want to block every toxic user or instance on my own - I already spend too much time blocking normies from lemmy.world.
Let me know how I can curate my feed by blocking whole instances over at X et al.
Also let me know where the fediverse defines "looking after" the same way you do. And I reiterate, use your imagination as to what tools could be made available to make blocking easier and more efficient for the users.
Maybe you should block lemmy.world if you have such issues with normies. It's also fascinating that you consider "normies" something to be blocked, and it hints at the problem I'm talking about. I've seen many users (but still a very small minority) on Mastodon having similar attitudes where they just want to block everyone that doesn't agree with every single opinion they hold, and preferably at the instance level, and even block instances that doesn't block those instances. That is problematic both for the fediverse itself, for the people who put themselves in those artificial filter bubbles, and for the people outside of their filter bubble who don't get to take part of their opinions.
Let me know how I can curate my feed by blocking whole instances over at X et al.
"looking after" is defined on a case by case basis, by instance admins. Anyway, I'm sorry about my normie comment. I don't mean to sound so intolerant, so I can't blame you from extrapolating. But I'm very on board with admins blocking entire instances if they've shown to have inadequate moderation. For everything else, there's ⛔
It was a rhetorical question, since X doesn't have instances. But it's good to see that people over there have access to block lists on a user level. Fedi should have that too, or something similar.
Whats your opinion on an instance blocking another instance simply for not blocking a third instance?
an even better thing would be to put more emphasis on user controlled blocks.
Why would the instance maintainers have to deal with it if the norm is that the users block the individuals and instances they want no part of? You see shitty content - block the source, either the user or instance. There could be a feature where an instance blocks something if a certain percentage of its users block it.
the norm is that the users block the individuals and instances they want no part of?
"Yeah, just block every bigot in existance and you will achieve a somewhat good experience"
Spammers also exist, and they can go long ways to avoid blocking by e.g. creating many accounts. There are people out there who could do this just to troll and harass a single user. If you're fine with blocking every piece of shit there are - good for you. But it doesn't mean it should be a norm.
This isn't rocket science. First, let instance maintainers handle bigots, spammers etc. on their own instance. If you still find that instance contributing with too much crap in your feed - block those users or the entire instance. I've blocked several accounts and a couple of instances. It's very easy to do.
And again, there could be a number of tools and features created to help users block stuff. Use your imagination. A user with an orange warning triangle is harassing you? Well that triangle means that user is in one or more block lists for problematic behavior - do you want to use any of those block lists? Click a button. Or whatever. Just let the users decide and prevent instances from creating a cascading instance-blocking that puts the fediverse at risk.
I don't think trying to control is the best way of looking at it. There's a hive mind about the fediverse that has a purpose, that wants to protect it as part of the identity of it. So a collective of instances banding together to keep that intact seems right up its alley.
Not having a central authority means you have no real power to stop someone
This is demonstrating the exact opposite. Community organization is valid.
But... the majority are federated? And if counted by affected users I don't even know how large they federated majority is since the biggest instances are all federated iirc.
Either way I think it's good that we can at least choose our own experience by selecting which instance to join.
We’ll see. I don’t think you can beat a 100 Billion dollar company with 3 Billion users if they are motivated enough.
I mean they haven't infiltrated the private phpbb forum me and my friends have been running since 2008, for the simple reason that they aren't invited.
Same difference with the fediverse. I have no problem going back down to pre-2019 levels where it's just a few hundred of us, chatting and sharing #caturday pictures. The fedipact means we can easily find those networks of like-minded communities to federate with.
I mean they haven’t infiltrated the private phpbb forum me and my friends have been running since 2008, for the simple reason that they aren’t invited.
Mark Zuckerberg smiled to himself. Nobody knew that he was DarkWolf47.
I have no problem going back down to pre-2019 levels where it’s just a few hundred of us, chatting and sharing #caturday pictures.
IRC did do that on a few cases, where one federated IRC network had irreconciliable differences with another and you had a split, with a new IRC network forming.
EFnet or Eris-Free network is a major Internet Relay Chat (IRC) network, with more than 35,000 users.[1] It is the modern-day descendant of the original IRC network.
In July 1996, disagreement on policy caused EFnet to break in two: the slightly larger European half (including Australia and Japan) formed IRCnet, while the American servers continued as EFnet. This was known as The Great Split.[5]
Undernet was established in October 1992 by Danny Mitchell, Donald Lambert, and Laurent Demally as an experimental network running a modified version of the EFnet irc2.7 IRCd software, created in an attempt to make it less bandwidth-consumptive and less chaotic, as netsplits and takeovers were starting to plague EFnet.[4] The Undernet IRC daemon became known as "ircu". Undernet was formed at a time when many small IRC networks were being started and subsequently disappearing; however, it managed to grow into one of the largest and oldest IRC networks despite some initial in-fighting and setbacks. For a period in 1994, Undernet was wracked by an ongoing series of flame wars. Again in 2001, it was threatened by automated heavy spamming of its users for potential commercial gain. Undernet survived these periods relatively intact and its popularity continues to the present day.
How do you know about DW?
anti-meta activism is not a bad thing at all. The billionaire corps have their marketing teams, individuals and communities have their activism. Everyone can listen to both and take an informed decision.
They are just that, activists, informing everyone about a possible issue. There's nothing wrong with that. They are not enforcing anything on anyone.
The worst that can happen is that if your instance admin decides to ban Threads and you want to federate with Threads, you'll have to switch instances. Not a big deal. You'll still be able to interact with the Fediverse, it's not like you were in Twitter, you had to leave and now you've lost all your contacts there.
The worst that can happen is that if your instance admin decides to ban Threads and you want to federate with Threads, you’ll have to switch instances.
Honestly, the lack of cross-instance account portability is one of the major issues that I think the Fediverse has today.
I'd rather have some sort of public-private key system to permit for moving across instances and being able to associate accounts.
between Mastodon instances it's quite easy and painless. everything else is kind of a mess.
I'd rather have some sort of public-private key system to permit for moving across instances and being able to associate accounts.
that would be very useful and a fairly good solution.
I don’t see moving instances as this simple thing that everyone else does. Until I can bring my comments and subscriptions over instantly it’s a huge waste of time. Regular users aren’t going to do that. I’m on my third instance already and almost didn’t make the third jump due to the annoyance of adding them all again.
I meant on Mastodon, where it is that simple. After all, it makes more sense since they are both microblogging.
In Lemmy it's a bit of a hassle, but the devs were working on it.
Haven’t really done much with Mastadon, I always liked following topics over people, and when I last tried it was still firmly people based.
Not at all. Instances are free to ask other instances to not federate with Threads. And the other instances can tell the original instance to fuck off or agree with it.
And then instances start fighting and decelerate from each other and it becomes this annoying game of will I be able to see the content I want to tomorrow? We’ll see how it turns out. Needing to keep moving instances isn’t my idea of a good thing like everyone else seems to think it is.
If that is the case, then the Lemmy will start to shrink or straight up die, but that is life.
That's the risk of the federation. But I much prefer that than a monolithic black box controlled by a mega corpo.
I just want to find the content I like, the content that helps me solve problems, and a way to interact with it without being forced to see ads. I'm not going to use a worse product just because it's not controlled by a corporation and I don't think I'm alone in that across most of the population.
Then maybe Lemmy isn't for you then. The way the fediverse is structured at its core seems to be a problem for you.
I don’t see it as a problem. If my instance starts walking off the content I like, then it’s a problem. But it’ll be a slow burn where I just use it less and less.
Yes.
I think a fully p2p system with a community, a user, and a post being identified by a key and connected via asymmetric cryptography, and then a reputation system yielding a number between, say, -100 and +100, would work better.
That reputation system wouldn't be like karma, it would possibly also affect whether we store something below -50 score, to then share.
It should be relative - we may attribute an evaluation to a thing, which would affect its children. Or we may attribute an evaluation to a user, and then derive score for a thing from that user's evaluation of it. Or maybe all of the described.
Maybe something like that is going to be easier to build on Locutus when it becomes operational.
I don't think that any single score is going to make everyone happy.
Maybe if there are multiple user-scoring systems run by various sources, and I can choose which score I want to use as a metric.
Like, I think that the Marxist-Leninist crowd on some of the left-wing instances is bonkers, but I imagine that they'd say the same thing about me or other people who subscribe to mainstream economics in general. You're not going to find a Single Source of Truth on that matter.
Eh, that was the whole point. Do not leave moderation to other people or at least make that easy.
It should be relative
Which means that the score of anything would be derived from 1) what you directly set, 2) what another user sets, modified by what you set for that user, 3) what a user sets, modified by what is set for him by another user, which has a value set by you attributed ...
One can even make a logic where you see high score for things disliked by people you dislike.
There is some computative difficulty, but nothing big for our times.
You're touching a sore topic. Hence the downvotes, many that have bought into the fediverse, believe (in a religious cult way) that its architecture won't be taken advantage of by bad actors. Even though history has proven the opposite.
Technology won't save us if we allow unethical companies to mess with us.
Spot on... but we have very little power to stop them, unless you are comfortable with the size of Lemmy today.
I get that cult feeling for sure. There is a lot less nuance here. I’d be curious of the average demographic because I see a lot of naivety that’s probably linked to age & experience.
That's such a reductive sweep of a whole userbase. It's not because you have a negative outlook that everybody has to be like you.
People are thrilled to try and build something new and people like you come and shit on them to try to recreate reddit.
At the very least, people are trying to take back a part of the internet that corporations controlled for more than a decade. So it's normal that when a megacorp come and try to muddle the water, people are refusing that because they know their M.O.
People are thrilled to try and build something new and people like you come and shit on them to try to recreate reddit.
I'm not stopping you. If you want to re-lean the lessons of the past because you ignore those that experienced them, feel free. You can't design a system ripe for corporate takeover and act shocked when it happens.
You are advocating for Lemmy to be exactly that, a takeover from a big corporation. This is the exact reason why people don't want to federate with Meta.
You want to redo the same exact thing that we did 10-15 years ago, expecting a different result.
No, I am pointing out that you developed a great open system with the false idea that individuals will be in power and little to no real consideration on how to stop corporations from taking it. Lemmy doesn’t exist in a vacuum. All the problems we have in real life with corporations gaining power is true in the fediverse, but worse because there are no courts to limit their power. Make no mistake about it, if Meta is motivated enough, they will steamroll everyone else. Not that many people are going to be loyal to the platform if the content isn’t there. If the content migrated to Threads so will 95% of the user base. Defederating one-by-one is not going to stop them and will fragment and make what we have now worse. I don’t believe it’s the answer, but am happy to be proven wrong.
I disagree that fediverse is inherently libertarian/anarchist. In fact, a big selling point is that you can find an instance the administration agrees with your politics and will implement moderation policy accordingly.
If you consider each instance as the “person” it’s essentially libertarianism.
No, each instance is more like a country with it's own laws, and trade agreements with other countries to share or block content.
In real life you’re probably not traversing three or more countries in a single day. You’re much closer to small communities at this scale, and having all these differences at that level is terrible for community building. Reddit was complicated enough with subreddit specific rules for regular people. Now you may not be able to find the same content as your friend if they signed up for a different instance, which is suggested as a feature not a bug. It’s exactly the same time of idealism without thoughts of consequence that libertarianism has.
I was going to use communities as my examples due to the relatively small size of each, but decided country was a better metaphor due to each instance's ability to fully control their own rules or "laws", where as communities in the real world are usually beholden to the higher laws of their countries.
Yes. Imagine if every culdasac had its own set of laws that you’d have to consider. Some your friends can’t come i to. Others don’t acknowledge the culdasac next door exists. Sure you could move to the culdasac you fit in with the best, but I wouldn’t want to limit my friends or interests that narrowly, nor would I want those things to be taken away from me and be forced to move all the time. I don’t see it as better.
I think the problem with these analogies is that they're based on physical spaces, you wouldn't want to travel to another country or whatever daily because it takes time, if you had a portal to every other country then it would make more sense compared to here
You wouldn't want to traverse the border red-tape, that's my point.
Yes. Imagine if every culdasac had its own set of laws that you’d have to consider. Some your friends can’t come i to. Others don’t acknowledge the culdasac next door exists. Sure you could move to the culdasac you fit in with the best, but I wouldn’t want to limit my friends or interests that narrowly, nor would I want those things to be taken away from me and be forced to move all the time. I don’t see it as better.
It really is terrible for building a community here, I've been trying to decide the best place to even start and it's so difficult to know where when most people won't be able to find it even if they are federated because the discovery system is so weak then there's the possibility of it not lasting or either defederating or been defederated from...
I think it's also especially bad for creating insular groupthink communities which are totally closed to other opinions, seriously look at the moderation logs sometime, the mods are really pushing their bias heavily in a lot of places and it's pushing away anyone that doesn't conform.
I hope better systems emerge that allow this to be what it was intended but honestly at the moment it just feels like it's getting more closed.
Some of the issues, like multiple communities of the same subject were true of reddit in the beginning, and perhaps time will solve the issue, but your right in discovery being terrible. I still don't know what the Apple community is. Half the time using iOS the app fails to load search. Other times there doesn't appear to be many subscribers on any over any other. Subscribing to multiple just gives me the same topics over and over again. So I end up with a feed that doesn't refresh much and has many duplicates. Not a ton of discussion or self posts either.
Eh, IRC and Usenet were both federated systems that had a ton of technical issues when they kicked off that got fixed over time via protocol and code changes. I would guess that discoverability is probably one of the things that'll be improved -- right now, using the Lemmy Explorer is kind of an important tool for people using small instances.
I don't think that that's the end-all-be-all of discoverability, but it works well enough for me now.
Nah, the Fediverse is based on freedom of association while most people live in countries they were born in and leaving one is really hard in most cases. Not to mention that 'self-hosting' a state just for yourself would be considered an extremism by existing states.
The Fediverse is clearly a libertarian idea.
Sure, to a certain extent. But having an ability to opt out is far healthier than the walled gardens we have now.
In theory. In reality you’re bringing feather dusters to a nuclear bomb fight. A handful of hobbyists hosting instances with how many users? Couple hundred thousand? Against a 100 Billion dollar company with 3 Billion people? Yea good luck with that.
How do you think this works? Yes, Meta will partake in the Fediverse. No one is trying to stop that. That chart won't get to 100% and no one cares if it does. People are just ensuring that there's a place where Meta won't be, and you don't need billions to do that.
Look at a pie chart of "internet users of x type platform" from pre fediverse. If original internet dies and fedi does take off, it will be the same chart but they will be instances instead of www sites. There are still plenty of those prefacebook, premyspace forums on the www, it's just only a few people use them.
What are we competing on exactly? Profitability? We're not a company, we're just a bunch of people talking among ourselves. This is like saying your casual Friday hangout with your buddies is no match for the likes of Rogers Telecom Combined International Userbase - like, by wtf metric? It's not even a competition. They're a company, and we're a community.
We'll just keep doing our thing, and if threads gets annoying then I'll pressure my instance to block them, and if they don't I'll just move to a nicer place. 🤷
If it’s no big deal why the immediate talk of defederating? And if they get annoying, every one of the instances I happen to follow something on has to defederate to keep the community at the same engagement level. I can personally block instances which is great, but that’s not helpful if the community starts posting there. It’s already sometimes difficult to keep topics together across who knows how many instances, with random defederation it makes it more difficult to experience lemmy with users on different instances.
It’s just my opinion, but the reddit backend wasn’t the important part that we lost, it’s the content and community. If my instance goes to shit I can move somewhere else, but I’m disconnected from my posts, follows, etc. that’s what I care about. Not the tech. I try not to, but I can’t help but be pessimistic on the idea when I feel like the point is being missed entirely.
Nah you're just attached to the old idea of the One Big Marketplace of Ideas, where all the saints and sinners of all the world gather 'round and hash it out. I get it. But it didn't work out, specifically because corpos put profit over community well-being, so that's why I'm here.
I'm sure there will be bridging or collating tools for people like you who don't want to give up precious content just because it comes from a problematic source. Personally, I think wanting it all misses the point of real community.
What are you talking about? There's nothing stopping corporations from coming here and doing the same exact thing they've gone covertly on Reddit. If Lemmy becomes popular enough it will happen. Arguably it already has from certain interests and people here are extremely naive if they think it's not.
I think the fediverse in general has a better chance because it's built on an anti-corporate philosophy, from the software, maintainers, admins, moderators, and much of the community (though increasingly less so, as it becomes more popular).
If you have a problem with corporate influence on Reddit, then your ability to act on it ends with your subreddit's moderators. To the admins and owners of reddit, that kind of influence is a feature.
Hell they can even monetize it, bake it right into the DNA of the back-end, give the corps a nice little API to poll, maybe some webhooks...
That is not something I see happening on the fediverse as long as its open source and run by the community.
There already is that someone, it's the owner of the .world instances.
Things like fedipact are the main way of dealing with such abuse in ancap.
Funny, I've never gave a thought to this before, but Fediverse works on ancap principles. Even in pushing out ancaps.
Not even generally libertarian, but specifically ancap.
It's also funny that the system I'm imagining and would prefer (if it weren't imaginary) is closer to being generally libertarian and further from ancap.
the point of freedom is that authoritarians deserve it too, and when they want to use their freedom to take your freedom away, it's fair game.
Maybe a hot take, but if you want this big libertarian anarchist federated system you get all the pros and cons along with it. Not having a central authority means you have no real power to stop someone from coming in and taking it. It’s inevitable by design.
I'd argue the system is working quite well, every individual and/or community has the liberty to choose what to do about Meta.
That's what federation is all about, no central power taking decisions in behalf of everyone else.
Untrue. Users cannot decide which instances they see.
of course they can. if they don't like their instance's policies, they just have to move to another. or host their own.
there has been people in pro-threads instances that have moved to one that blocks threads and the other way around.
So they have to sift through instances until they find one that federates exactly how they would? Lol. Or do they have to compromise because they don't actually have the power to choose who they federate with?
Hosting their own instance makes them admins.
You can see the blocklist of any mastodon instance without joining it. You can and should read their policies before joining.
This makes no sense. You are saying that just because you're the admin of an instance you can't be an user?
You can have a single user instance of your own and be done with it. If you don't like someone else choosing what instances defederate, you have that possibility.
It legitimately feels like you are incapable of understanding what I'm saying, so I'm just gonna make the executive decision and duck out.
Have a nice day. You may have the last reply.
Sure, but the rhetoric behind it is my point. Trying to get everyone to do it is antithetical to the design of the system.
No, it is precisely the kind of action that we must take collectively in order to protect what we value about the fediverse. This is the work of maintaining a positive community space. If you don't agree that is fine, genuinely I think it is good there is a diversity of opinions here, but it is pretty obvious to me that if we don't have a lot of conversations about the importance of solidarity in defending the fediverse from corporate capture then history is just going to repeat itself.
....I am tired of history repeating itself, I like this place. I like you!
We can't stop a massive corporation from interacting with open source, but we can choose whether massive corporations are allowed to get away with pretending they are benign members of an open source, federated community. At the very least, it raises the dollar amount these corporations must allocate in trying to convince us they are benign doesn't it?
They have the money and time to convince us, even if you disagree with everything I say you can't argue it isn't a better strategy to be difficult to convince. Massive corporations will spend money and time up to the point marketing calculates the change in public perception is worth it and not a dollar further. They wouldn't be doing their jobs well if they behaved otherwise and judging by how desirable those jobs are I feel like at least some of those people are pretty good at their jobs...
Call me a pessimist, but people are caring way too much about the idealistic implementation of the technology and missing the fact that the tech doesn’t mean shit compared to the community. If you don’t care about the community growing, then that’s one thing. But if you do, Threads is the competition that you won’t be able to beat if they feel like putting in the effort.
You say well we have to be pragmatic because threads/meta has so much more power than us that we will be able to reach so many more people with their help (or they could destroy us equally as powerfully)…. I say but wait a minute if they have all that power why is it shitty open source software projects with several orders of magnitude less funding than Meta are providing the vision of the future AND the technology to get us there? I mean sure if we just had the vision that might make sense but we already built the tools too…?
Honestly stop and think about why that is. Meta could have easily funded side projects and paid programmers to rewrite the code for the entire fediverse and all its associated softwares… many times over. Given the amount of money it has it could have done this over and over and over and over again and still be only spending a tiny fraction of its R&D budget. You have to convincingly explain to me why we were the ones who had to do it, through basically entirely volunteer work, and what makes you think engaging with them now AFTER we put in most of the groundwork to build the technology is a good idea.
You say we could get us so much growth, but every single damn person they bring us will still be the product for their true customers (advertisers etc) and from those people’s perspectives nothing meaningful will have changed. The relationship between meta and its users will be essentially the same, meta has to ensure this to protect their bottom line. So people will have joined the fediverse without actually joining it, who cares at that point?
There are a million ways meta can extend and embrace the fediverse, we need to prepare for the extinguish.
And my entire point is you can't. The system is designed to allow anyone in, you can't decided to stop someone because they are a corporation. It's similar to people trying to stop the NSA from committing anything to the Linux kernel because you're afraid they're going to put in a backdoor. It can't be done by design.
My point is that you can, by raising awareness about what massive corporations ALWAYS attempt to do to public commons and by encouraging everyone to defederate with them.
Sure they can contribute to and use open source, doesn’t mean we have to treat them like they are actually well meaning members of the community?
How many family members have you convinced to stay off Facebook, Instagram, Snapchat, TikTok etc? How many are tired of you annoying them about it? Your statement isn't false, but it's also not new, and I'm arguing it's inevitable. You're not going to stop massive corporations by trying to group together a ton of individuals who all have to come to the same decisions. It's a Catch22 of sorts. You're only worried about it because people can't beat corporations. You can't overcome that because people can't beat corporations.
I don't like Meta either, and don't use any of their products. But you've invited them in already.
"No, it is precisely the kind of action that we must take collectively in order to protect what we value about the fediverse. This is the work of maintaining a positive community space."
But therein lies the problem. The fediverse isn't one homogenous entity. Although there seems to be an overall leftie tint to much of the fediverse, opinions on what is" valued" and "positive" vary quite a bit. The beauty of the fediverse is that you can choose your experience based on the instance you join. Trying to control the entire fediverse goes against the point of the fediverse imo.
Is that really a problem? It's not trying to "control" anything. It's a voluntary pact meant to conserve the non-corporate fediverse, as it is right now.
This is never going to change. If you just don't like the intent behind the fedipact, no problem - the majority of the fediverse will be talking with threads. You get the personal choice of which instances you make accounts on. Hell, you can make your own instance.
There is no problem here.
I don't know exactly what the fedipact is, but I know of a collection of instances with arbitrary mods without accountability who have sworn to collectively create a block list and block instances based on what opinions those instances allow etc. Instances can even be blocked for not blocking another instance. I see that as a problem for the fediverse because it can grow and create an unnecessary rift of the verse.
Also, yes it's great that you can chose instance and jump wherever you want, but an even better thing would be to put more emphasis on user controlled blocks. We can ourselves block instances from our feeds and we should make that the norm (and perhaps make those blocks more powerful and configurable if need be), and have the instances focus more on blocking straight up illegal things.
If you want a place where admins are not allowed to block communities and instead leave moderation of all but the most egregious, illegal content, up to individuals, there are places like that already in X and Threads.
This is the fediverse, where admins are expected to look after their members. If they don't, the members will leave. I don't want to block every toxic user or instance on my own - I already spend too much time blocking normies from lemmy.world.
Let me know how I can curate my feed by blocking whole instances over at X et al.
Also let me know where the fediverse defines "looking after" the same way you do. And I reiterate, use your imagination as to what tools could be made available to make blocking easier and more efficient for the users.
Maybe you should block lemmy.world if you have such issues with normies. It's also fascinating that you consider "normies" something to be blocked, and it hints at the problem I'm talking about. I've seen many users (but still a very small minority) on Mastodon having similar attitudes where they just want to block everyone that doesn't agree with every single opinion they hold, and preferably at the instance level, and even block instances that doesn't block those instances. That is problematic both for the fediverse itself, for the people who put themselves in those artificial filter bubbles, and for the people outside of their filter bubble who don't get to take part of their opinions.
Block lists https://auxmode.com/support-knowledge-base/advanced-options-for-using-block-twitter/
"looking after" is defined on a case by case basis, by instance admins. Anyway, I'm sorry about my normie comment. I don't mean to sound so intolerant, so I can't blame you from extrapolating. But I'm very on board with admins blocking entire instances if they've shown to have inadequate moderation. For everything else, there's ⛔
It was a rhetorical question, since X doesn't have instances. But it's good to see that people over there have access to block lists on a user level. Fedi should have that too, or something similar.
Whats your opinion on an instance blocking another instance simply for not blocking a third instance?
And force your instance maintainers to deal with the amount of bigoted content they won't be able to moderate? There's already a huge amount of stuff any other instance would be blocked with no hesitation.
Why would the instance maintainers have to deal with it if the norm is that the users block the individuals and instances they want no part of? You see shitty content - block the source, either the user or instance. There could be a feature where an instance blocks something if a certain percentage of its users block it.
"Yeah, just block every bigot in existance and you will achieve a somewhat good experience"
Spammers also exist, and they can go long ways to avoid blocking by e.g. creating many accounts. There are people out there who could do this just to troll and harass a single user. If you're fine with blocking every piece of shit there are - good for you. But it doesn't mean it should be a norm.
This isn't rocket science. First, let instance maintainers handle bigots, spammers etc. on their own instance. If you still find that instance contributing with too much crap in your feed - block those users or the entire instance. I've blocked several accounts and a couple of instances. It's very easy to do.
And again, there could be a number of tools and features created to help users block stuff. Use your imagination. A user with an orange warning triangle is harassing you? Well that triangle means that user is in one or more block lists for problematic behavior - do you want to use any of those block lists? Click a button. Or whatever. Just let the users decide and prevent instances from creating a cascading instance-blocking that puts the fediverse at risk.
I don't think trying to control is the best way of looking at it. There's a hive mind about the fediverse that has a purpose, that wants to protect it as part of the identity of it. So a collective of instances banding together to keep that intact seems right up its alley.
This is demonstrating the exact opposite. Community organization is valid.
But... the majority are federated? And if counted by affected users I don't even know how large they federated majority is since the biggest instances are all federated iirc.
Either way I think it's good that we can at least choose our own experience by selecting which instance to join.
We’ll see. I don’t think you can beat a 100 Billion dollar company with 3 Billion users if they are motivated enough.
I mean they haven't infiltrated the private phpbb forum me and my friends have been running since 2008, for the simple reason that they aren't invited.
Same difference with the fediverse. I have no problem going back down to pre-2019 levels where it's just a few hundred of us, chatting and sharing #caturday pictures. The fedipact means we can easily find those networks of like-minded communities to federate with.
Mark Zuckerberg smiled to himself. Nobody knew that he was DarkWolf47.
IRC did do that on a few cases, where one federated IRC network had irreconciliable differences with another and you had a split, with a new IRC network forming.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/EFnet
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Undernet
How do you know about DW?
anti-meta activism is not a bad thing at all. The billionaire corps have their marketing teams, individuals and communities have their activism. Everyone can listen to both and take an informed decision.
They are just that, activists, informing everyone about a possible issue. There's nothing wrong with that. They are not enforcing anything on anyone.
The worst that can happen is that if your instance admin decides to ban Threads and you want to federate with Threads, you'll have to switch instances. Not a big deal. You'll still be able to interact with the Fediverse, it's not like you were in Twitter, you had to leave and now you've lost all your contacts there.
Honestly, the lack of cross-instance account portability is one of the major issues that I think the Fediverse has today.
I'd rather have some sort of public-private key system to permit for moving across instances and being able to associate accounts.
between Mastodon instances it's quite easy and painless. everything else is kind of a mess.
that would be very useful and a fairly good solution.
I don’t see moving instances as this simple thing that everyone else does. Until I can bring my comments and subscriptions over instantly it’s a huge waste of time. Regular users aren’t going to do that. I’m on my third instance already and almost didn’t make the third jump due to the annoyance of adding them all again.
I meant on Mastodon, where it is that simple. After all, it makes more sense since they are both microblogging.
In Lemmy it's a bit of a hassle, but the devs were working on it.
Haven’t really done much with Mastadon, I always liked following topics over people, and when I last tried it was still firmly people based.
Not at all. Instances are free to ask other instances to not federate with Threads. And the other instances can tell the original instance to fuck off or agree with it.
And then instances start fighting and decelerate from each other and it becomes this annoying game of will I be able to see the content I want to tomorrow? We’ll see how it turns out. Needing to keep moving instances isn’t my idea of a good thing like everyone else seems to think it is.
If that is the case, then the Lemmy will start to shrink or straight up die, but that is life.
That's the risk of the federation. But I much prefer that than a monolithic black box controlled by a mega corpo.
I just want to find the content I like, the content that helps me solve problems, and a way to interact with it without being forced to see ads. I'm not going to use a worse product just because it's not controlled by a corporation and I don't think I'm alone in that across most of the population.
Then maybe Lemmy isn't for you then. The way the fediverse is structured at its core seems to be a problem for you.
I don’t see it as a problem. If my instance starts walking off the content I like, then it’s a problem. But it’ll be a slow burn where I just use it less and less.
Yes.
I think a fully p2p system with a community, a user, and a post being identified by a key and connected via asymmetric cryptography, and then a reputation system yielding a number between, say, -100 and +100, would work better.
That reputation system wouldn't be like karma, it would possibly also affect whether we store something below -50 score, to then share.
It should be relative - we may attribute an evaluation to a thing, which would affect its children. Or we may attribute an evaluation to a user, and then derive score for a thing from that user's evaluation of it. Or maybe all of the described.
Maybe something like that is going to be easier to build on Locutus when it becomes operational.
I don't think that any single score is going to make everyone happy.
Maybe if there are multiple user-scoring systems run by various sources, and I can choose which score I want to use as a metric.
Like, I think that the Marxist-Leninist crowd on some of the left-wing instances is bonkers, but I imagine that they'd say the same thing about me or other people who subscribe to mainstream economics in general. You're not going to find a Single Source of Truth on that matter.
Eh, that was the whole point. Do not leave moderation to other people or at least make that easy.
Which means that the score of anything would be derived from 1) what you directly set, 2) what another user sets, modified by what you set for that user, 3) what a user sets, modified by what is set for him by another user, which has a value set by you attributed ...
One can even make a logic where you see high score for things disliked by people you dislike.
There is some computative difficulty, but nothing big for our times.
You're touching a sore topic. Hence the downvotes, many that have bought into the fediverse, believe (in a religious cult way) that its architecture won't be taken advantage of by bad actors. Even though history has proven the opposite.
Reminds me of this comment by one of the Lemmy devs: https://lemmy.ml/comment/6744852
Technology won't save us if we allow unethical companies to mess with us.
Spot on... but we have very little power to stop them, unless you are comfortable with the size of Lemmy today.
I get that cult feeling for sure. There is a lot less nuance here. I’d be curious of the average demographic because I see a lot of naivety that’s probably linked to age & experience.
That's such a reductive sweep of a whole userbase. It's not because you have a negative outlook that everybody has to be like you.
People are thrilled to try and build something new and people like you come and shit on them to try to recreate reddit.
At the very least, people are trying to take back a part of the internet that corporations controlled for more than a decade. So it's normal that when a megacorp come and try to muddle the water, people are refusing that because they know their M.O.
I'm not stopping you. If you want to re-lean the lessons of the past because you ignore those that experienced them, feel free. You can't design a system ripe for corporate takeover and act shocked when it happens.
You are advocating for Lemmy to be exactly that, a takeover from a big corporation. This is the exact reason why people don't want to federate with Meta.
You want to redo the same exact thing that we did 10-15 years ago, expecting a different result.
No, I am pointing out that you developed a great open system with the false idea that individuals will be in power and little to no real consideration on how to stop corporations from taking it. Lemmy doesn’t exist in a vacuum. All the problems we have in real life with corporations gaining power is true in the fediverse, but worse because there are no courts to limit their power. Make no mistake about it, if Meta is motivated enough, they will steamroll everyone else. Not that many people are going to be loyal to the platform if the content isn’t there. If the content migrated to Threads so will 95% of the user base. Defederating one-by-one is not going to stop them and will fragment and make what we have now worse. I don’t believe it’s the answer, but am happy to be proven wrong.
I disagree that fediverse is inherently libertarian/anarchist. In fact, a big selling point is that you can find an instance the administration agrees with your politics and will implement moderation policy accordingly.
If you consider each instance as the “person” it’s essentially libertarianism.
No, each instance is more like a country with it's own laws, and trade agreements with other countries to share or block content.
In real life you’re probably not traversing three or more countries in a single day. You’re much closer to small communities at this scale, and having all these differences at that level is terrible for community building. Reddit was complicated enough with subreddit specific rules for regular people. Now you may not be able to find the same content as your friend if they signed up for a different instance, which is suggested as a feature not a bug. It’s exactly the same time of idealism without thoughts of consequence that libertarianism has.
I was going to use communities as my examples due to the relatively small size of each, but decided country was a better metaphor due to each instance's ability to fully control their own rules or "laws", where as communities in the real world are usually beholden to the higher laws of their countries.
Yes. Imagine if every culdasac had its own set of laws that you’d have to consider. Some your friends can’t come i to. Others don’t acknowledge the culdasac next door exists. Sure you could move to the culdasac you fit in with the best, but I wouldn’t want to limit my friends or interests that narrowly, nor would I want those things to be taken away from me and be forced to move all the time. I don’t see it as better.
I think the problem with these analogies is that they're based on physical spaces, you wouldn't want to travel to another country or whatever daily because it takes time, if you had a portal to every other country then it would make more sense compared to here
You wouldn't want to traverse the border red-tape, that's my point.
Yes. Imagine if every culdasac had its own set of laws that you’d have to consider. Some your friends can’t come i to. Others don’t acknowledge the culdasac next door exists. Sure you could move to the culdasac you fit in with the best, but I wouldn’t want to limit my friends or interests that narrowly, nor would I want those things to be taken away from me and be forced to move all the time. I don’t see it as better.
It really is terrible for building a community here, I've been trying to decide the best place to even start and it's so difficult to know where when most people won't be able to find it even if they are federated because the discovery system is so weak then there's the possibility of it not lasting or either defederating or been defederated from...
I think it's also especially bad for creating insular groupthink communities which are totally closed to other opinions, seriously look at the moderation logs sometime, the mods are really pushing their bias heavily in a lot of places and it's pushing away anyone that doesn't conform.
I hope better systems emerge that allow this to be what it was intended but honestly at the moment it just feels like it's getting more closed.
Some of the issues, like multiple communities of the same subject were true of reddit in the beginning, and perhaps time will solve the issue, but your right in discovery being terrible. I still don't know what the Apple community is. Half the time using iOS the app fails to load search. Other times there doesn't appear to be many subscribers on any over any other. Subscribing to multiple just gives me the same topics over and over again. So I end up with a feed that doesn't refresh much and has many duplicates. Not a ton of discussion or self posts either.
Eh, IRC and Usenet were both federated systems that had a ton of technical issues when they kicked off that got fixed over time via protocol and code changes. I would guess that discoverability is probably one of the things that'll be improved -- right now, using the Lemmy Explorer is kind of an important tool for people using small instances.
https://lemmyverse.net/communities
I don't think that that's the end-all-be-all of discoverability, but it works well enough for me now.
Nah, the Fediverse is based on freedom of association while most people live in countries they were born in and leaving one is really hard in most cases. Not to mention that 'self-hosting' a state just for yourself would be considered an extremism by existing states.
The Fediverse is clearly a libertarian idea.
Sure, to a certain extent. But having an ability to opt out is far healthier than the walled gardens we have now.
In theory. In reality you’re bringing feather dusters to a nuclear bomb fight. A handful of hobbyists hosting instances with how many users? Couple hundred thousand? Against a 100 Billion dollar company with 3 Billion people? Yea good luck with that.
How do you think this works? Yes, Meta will partake in the Fediverse. No one is trying to stop that. That chart won't get to 100% and no one cares if it does. People are just ensuring that there's a place where Meta won't be, and you don't need billions to do that.
Look at a pie chart of "internet users of x type platform" from pre fediverse. If original internet dies and fedi does take off, it will be the same chart but they will be instances instead of www sites. There are still plenty of those prefacebook, premyspace forums on the www, it's just only a few people use them.
What are we competing on exactly? Profitability? We're not a company, we're just a bunch of people talking among ourselves. This is like saying your casual Friday hangout with your buddies is no match for the likes of Rogers Telecom Combined International Userbase - like, by wtf metric? It's not even a competition. They're a company, and we're a community.
We'll just keep doing our thing, and if threads gets annoying then I'll pressure my instance to block them, and if they don't I'll just move to a nicer place. 🤷
If it’s no big deal why the immediate talk of defederating? And if they get annoying, every one of the instances I happen to follow something on has to defederate to keep the community at the same engagement level. I can personally block instances which is great, but that’s not helpful if the community starts posting there. It’s already sometimes difficult to keep topics together across who knows how many instances, with random defederation it makes it more difficult to experience lemmy with users on different instances.
It’s just my opinion, but the reddit backend wasn’t the important part that we lost, it’s the content and community. If my instance goes to shit I can move somewhere else, but I’m disconnected from my posts, follows, etc. that’s what I care about. Not the tech. I try not to, but I can’t help but be pessimistic on the idea when I feel like the point is being missed entirely.
Nah you're just attached to the old idea of the One Big Marketplace of Ideas, where all the saints and sinners of all the world gather 'round and hash it out. I get it. But it didn't work out, specifically because corpos put profit over community well-being, so that's why I'm here.
I'm sure there will be bridging or collating tools for people like you who don't want to give up precious content just because it comes from a problematic source. Personally, I think wanting it all misses the point of real community.
What are you talking about? There's nothing stopping corporations from coming here and doing the same exact thing they've gone covertly on Reddit. If Lemmy becomes popular enough it will happen. Arguably it already has from certain interests and people here are extremely naive if they think it's not.
I think the fediverse in general has a better chance because it's built on an anti-corporate philosophy, from the software, maintainers, admins, moderators, and much of the community (though increasingly less so, as it becomes more popular).
If you have a problem with corporate influence on Reddit, then your ability to act on it ends with your subreddit's moderators. To the admins and owners of reddit, that kind of influence is a feature.
Hell they can even monetize it, bake it right into the DNA of the back-end, give the corps a nice little API to poll, maybe some webhooks...
That is not something I see happening on the fediverse as long as its open source and run by the community.
There already is that someone, it's the owner of the .world instances.
Things like fedipact are the main way of dealing with such abuse in ancap.
Funny, I've never gave a thought to this before, but Fediverse works on ancap principles. Even in pushing out ancaps.
Not even generally libertarian, but specifically ancap.
It's also funny that the system I'm imagining and would prefer (if it weren't imaginary) is closer to being generally libertarian and further from ancap.
the point of freedom is that authoritarians deserve it too, and when they want to use their freedom to take your freedom away, it's fair game.
That’s the tolerance paradox by another name.
correct.