Idea for future corporations trying to federate

haui@lemmy.giftedmc.com to Fediverse@lemmy.world – 45 points –

Disclaimer

I‘m not asking if you want to federate or not and why. The question is if a defined ruleset would make it more transparent for everyone and more future proof.

Since we are seeing major divides due to the (de)federation of threads and now the federation of flipboard, we might wanna discuss future rules so to not fight about everything.

I can see arguments for both sides but some of the technical ones are more compelling since peeps who are unhappy can always move, an overextended instance will have to close. So I‘d take this as the basic principle:

  • no federation with instances bigger than half the fediverse (arbitrary number, could be no bigger than all of it as well)
  • no federation with instances that push ads with their posts
  • no Federation with instances that use altered versions or proprietary versions of AP.
  • no one way federation

These are obviously just ideas. There are several „unions“ of instances already that implement more or less of these ideas but I think its something that should be discussed instead of just yes or no.

Also, I‘d suggest we make such rules permanent as in if any instance changes in this way, it gets auto defederated.

This would make interaction more clear and easy for users to choose their instance. For example, If someone wanted the possibility of twitter federating, they‘d not go to an instance that has this ruleset.

Any other ideas?

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I mostly agree with your rules, they seem well thought out. I have two objections: Firstly altered versions of AP seems hard to enforce. I think if the versions of AP are compatible enough for federation to work, we should let it run.

Secondly, and more importantly, the part were you want to defederate with servers that do not follow these rules is a really bad idea. If some small instance wants to consume the content from threads, their users may still add content to the fediverse. I think these rules would be a good recommendation for any new server admins and committing to these rules would be a good reason to join a server. But I don't see any reason to turn this into a "you're either with us or against us"-type conflict.

I think we're having a misunderstanding here. I dont mean defederate those who do not agree to these rules but those who break them. Like if lemmy world we're to get as big as all other fedi instance, they would need to be defederated as to make them help other instances to grow. Power consolidation is bad and this rule would try to preempt that.