another admin can decide to defederated from yours anytime they feel like it, that’s still a lot of power in the hands of a single person…
All of the top 20 instances ask feedback from their communities before defederating. They know that if they don't, people will switch instances in two clicks.
Most people won't switch though, they won't want to lose their username, their feed and so on, we're creatures of habits...
Hell, trolls could go around and recreate accounts on the top 100 instances with the same username users have on other instances to prevent them from reusing the same username elsewhere, just that is a weird concept to explain "Oh yeah, someone else can create an account and pretend to be you and unless people notice that the instance they're from isn't the same, there's no way to know it isn't you!"
You're sending users to Lemmy.ee but in the end it's an instance controlled by one person paying the hosting fees and with the last word on what goes on on their server.
Most people won’t switch though, they won’t want to lose their username, their feed and so on, we’re creatures of habits…
You can keep your username, export and import your subscriptions and block list in two clicks from the settings.
Hell, trolls could go around and recreate accounts on the top 100 instances with the same username users have on other instances to prevent them from reusing the same username elsewhere, just that is a weird concept to explain “Oh yeah, someone else can create an account and pretend to be you and unless people notice that the instance they’re from isn’t the same, there’s no way to know it isn’t you!”
Also, this kind of impersonating would probably get the trolls banned.
You’re sending users to Lemmy.we but in the end it’s an instance controlled by one person paying the hosting fees and with the last word on what goes on on their server.
In the end Lemmy is centralized, just in a different way, someone can wipe out a huge part of the content in a single click.
The content itself is harder to be deleted, because federation means that every post comment gets duplicated on all instances.
You do have a point regarding identity, and this is something that bluesky has solved already in a more elegant way. But this is also fixable with activitypub: as Takahe already showed it is possible to efficiently serve different domains with the same server. And on the extreme case, you can run your instance.
Did you see the scramble when feddit.de went offline for weeks and all its content became unavailable?
If there's going to be duplicates anyway, why not do as I said (decentralize the hosting separately from the front end and make it available to all) and just really duplicate everything so there's always a real backup and no one can wipe anything by shutting down their server?
Like I said, the content did not become unavailable. My instance still has the data from every community being followed.
The only unrecoverable problem with feddit.de is that the domain was lost. If the owner had given the domain to someone else, one could (theoretically) get all the identities back. They would need new keys, but the accounts would still be salvageable.
As for "separate frontend": this is already possible and like I said it is a matter of improving the existing clients. We don't need a fundamental change in the protocols to get what you want, we just need to get more resources available to developers so that they can continue working and improving on what we have.
But if a new instance is created after one was deleted, the new instance users will never have access to what was on that instance that got deleted.
We have "separate front ends" at the moment (guessing you're referring to apps, otherwise people log in through their instance's website), but the content the users have access to and the people they can interact with still depends on the instance they sign up on, I'm talking about eliminating that completely and letting the users be the ones that decide who and what they can interact with.
I'll never be able to check what's going on on beehaw or hexbear as long as my instance is the one I'm on, but no one should have the power to decide that for me or the other users I'm interacting with.
You are always free to run your own instance, and this is absolutely no different than "decentralizing" everything. The federation model where all users distrust each other degenerates into a fully p2p network.
And then admins from other instances can decide they don't want to federate with my instance, see how it doesn't solve anything?
Yeah, that's exactly the point! How do you think that a decentralized system is any different?!
If everything is "decentralized", you still must have a way to get rid of bad actors. Even nostr is set up in a way that you can not force your node into anyone else's relay.
Forgive my bluntness, but the more you try to argue you point the more it seems you have no clue what you are talking about. There are plenty of things to criticize about Lemmy and ActivityPub in general, but you are missing the mark on all of them.
Getting rid of bad actors is the job of the users (from their feed) and the mods (from the communities they moderate), no one should have the authority the admins have.
Admins still need to have control over what goes into the servers. If you are running a server and someone pushes content that is illegal in your jurisdiction, you can not go around asking users to please stop it for you.
If you follow that logic, people should never be able to block or ban you? That makes no sense. Of course anyone should be allowed to block anyone else for whatever reason they choose. That's what defederation is as well. If you don't have the option of blocking or banning, stuff degenerates really badly and really quickly.
No, by my logic only users should be able to decide to ban me entirely and only mods should be able to ban me from specific communities, admins shouldn't exist at all, that's real decentralization, Lemmy is an half-measure.
only mods should be able to ban me from specific communities
As I stated elsewhere, I don't really see how you can even have mods without admins.
But how is admins banning you from an instance any different than a mod banning you from a community? Why are you okay being banned from a community by a mod but not okay being banned by an admin from an instance? Isn't it the same conceptually speaking, just on a different moderation/administration level?
"real" decentralization was never the goal of Lemmy or any project in the Fediverse.
Again, it seems like you are either stating the obvious or complaining that the people designing the applications have made different trade-offs that you would like.
I’ll never be able to check what’s going on on beehaw or hexbear as long as my instance is the one I’m on, but no one should have the power to decide that for me or the other users I’m interacting with.
Well, that's a choice Beehaw made. Shouldn't they be allowed to defederate?
Quite a few people left Beehaw because of that, which is a sign that the decentralized model is working.
In your model, how do you deal with spammers, CSAM, trolls etc. ? Should every user do their own moderation for the 47k Lemmy monthly active users? Or should people create shared moderation lists? But then you still come back to the trust issues: do you trust someone else to add a user to a block list?
Allow NSFW content at your own risk, same for users and hosts.
Block users and communities as you see fit, why should a centralized authority decide for the users? It's the same thing as Reddit except that there's a bunch of centralized authorities instead of one.
I can create my own instance but other instances can decide to not federate with it.
If admins were the problem on Reddit we should work on making a platform where admins don't exist at all, not one where there's just more of them.
Allow NSFW content at your own risk, same for users and hosts.
I am not talking about NSFW, I'm talking about CSAM. There were a few CSAM attacks last year, some mods had to see some disturbing pictures of pedo pornography, that's probably not something you want your average user to have to deal with.
It’s the same thing as Reddit except that there’s a bunch of centralized authorities instead of one.
Have you ever had a look at Nostr? It only has moderation at the user level, so that might be what you are looking for.
And those CSAM attacks weren't prevented by the way it works at the moment so that point is moot...
That people will upload illegal content is basically inevitable, the important thing is that there is someone (other than the original poster) with the authority to remove it.
there’s a bunch of centralized authorities instead of one
I mean sorry but that's just what decentralization is, unless you want a fully peer-to-peer protocol which is not realistic at all.
Or, as I keep suggesting, you make the authority figures have as little power as possible, i.e. the only people with authority are mods so they only have control over communities and don't have the power to prevent tens of thousands of people from communicating with each other.
They really have as little power as they can given the constraints. If you don't want an admin to have power over a lot of people, join a small instance and advocate others do the same.
It really sounds like you just want to be your own admin though. Maybe a personal instance would be a way for you.
Hell, trolls could go around and recreate accounts on the top 100 instances with the same username users have on other instances to prevent them from reusing the same username elsewhere, just that is a weird concept to explain
Yes but that doesn't mean you should get automatic dibs on a name everywhere. It's just a name. If you are Joe Bill at lemm.ee, that does not give you any rights over the name Joe Bill all across the world. Statistically speaking, there's at least 18 thousand other Joe Bills around at this very moment.
Like, this is something that is already solved by the instance's moderators.
No, thanks for suggesting. I saw a thread by other curious users and checked fediseer. Might be an admin issue, but I didn't see clear evidence.
Don't think it was spam as, unless I'm misunderstanding, that seems unlikely from fosstodon.
I always point new users to Lemm.ee nowadays.
Most people are not interested in moderating their own feed. Leading people to an instance that does very little moderation on the defederation side of things could push them away. In that situation, they are likely to just leave the fediverse altogether and less likely to go to another instance I would say. I respect lemm.ee as an instance but I would not recommend it as a "gateway drug" to the fediverse.
The issue is that
LW is too big
SJW has a non neutral name
Lemmy.ca advertised itself as Canadian
Feddit.org has a meta community in German
There is Lemmy.zip, but they are also very light on defederation. Lemmy.dbzer0 blocks lemmygrad but still federates with hexbear
Do you have any other suggestion?
Yea... I get what you mean. There isn't really an instance that is "not zero defederation"-moderated and general enough for all people if you take out lemmy.world. That's honestly kind of surprising, it feels like a niche that more players could fill. But I guess that's how lemmy.world got as big as it did.
If you had to give one suggestion, maybe. But still, any instance matching geographical location or a specific of your interest would be better.
If you had to give one suggestion, maybe. But still, any instance matching geographical location or a specific of your interest would be better.
Indeed, but the thing is generally, people just one want URL, and that's it.
I always point new users to Lemm.ee nowadays.
All of the top 20 instances ask feedback from their communities before defederating. They know that if they don't, people will switch instances in two clicks.
Most people won't switch though, they won't want to lose their username, their feed and so on, we're creatures of habits...
Hell, trolls could go around and recreate accounts on the top 100 instances with the same username users have on other instances to prevent them from reusing the same username elsewhere, just that is a weird concept to explain "Oh yeah, someone else can create an account and pretend to be you and unless people notice that the instance they're from isn't the same, there's no way to know it isn't you!"
You're sending users to Lemmy.ee but in the end it's an instance controlled by one person paying the hosting fees and with the last word on what goes on on their server.
You can keep your username, export and import your subscriptions and block list in two clicks from the settings.
"You are bob@gmail.com, but someone could create bob@outlook.com and pretend to be you"
Also, this kind of impersonating would probably get the trolls banned.
Lemm.ee had 5 admins. The main one has been very clear that he keeps defederation to a minimum: https://lemm.ee/post/35472386?scrollToComments=true
Of course you need to trust him and his team.
If you prefer a paid model where you have a customer relationship with the admin, you might to have a look at https://communick.com/services/lemmy/
The owner is @rglullis@communick.news , who commented below
That's 5 admins out of how many users?
In the end Lemmy is centralized, just in a different way, someone can wipe out a huge part of the content in a single click.
The content itself is harder to be deleted, because federation means that every post comment gets duplicated on all instances.
You do have a point regarding identity, and this is something that bluesky has solved already in a more elegant way. But this is also fixable with activitypub: as Takahe already showed it is possible to efficiently serve different domains with the same server. And on the extreme case, you can run your instance.
Did you see the scramble when feddit.de went offline for weeks and all its content became unavailable?
If there's going to be duplicates anyway, why not do as I said (decentralize the hosting separately from the front end and make it available to all) and just really duplicate everything so there's always a real backup and no one can wipe anything by shutting down their server?
Like I said, the content did not become unavailable. My instance still has the data from every community being followed.
The only unrecoverable problem with feddit.de is that the domain was lost. If the owner had given the domain to someone else, one could (theoretically) get all the identities back. They would need new keys, but the accounts would still be salvageable.
As for "separate frontend": this is already possible and like I said it is a matter of improving the existing clients. We don't need a fundamental change in the protocols to get what you want, we just need to get more resources available to developers so that they can continue working and improving on what we have.
But if a new instance is created after one was deleted, the new instance users will never have access to what was on that instance that got deleted.
We have "separate front ends" at the moment (guessing you're referring to apps, otherwise people log in through their instance's website), but the content the users have access to and the people they can interact with still depends on the instance they sign up on, I'm talking about eliminating that completely and letting the users be the ones that decide who and what they can interact with.
I'll never be able to check what's going on on beehaw or hexbear as long as my instance is the one I'm on, but no one should have the power to decide that for me or the other users I'm interacting with.
You are always free to run your own instance, and this is absolutely no different than "decentralizing" everything. The federation model where all users distrust each other degenerates into a fully p2p network.
And then admins from other instances can decide they don't want to federate with my instance, see how it doesn't solve anything?
Yeah, that's exactly the point! How do you think that a decentralized system is any different?!
If everything is "decentralized", you still must have a way to get rid of bad actors. Even nostr is set up in a way that you can not force your node into anyone else's relay.
Forgive my bluntness, but the more you try to argue you point the more it seems you have no clue what you are talking about. There are plenty of things to criticize about Lemmy and ActivityPub in general, but you are missing the mark on all of them.
Getting rid of bad actors is the job of the users (from their feed) and the mods (from the communities they moderate), no one should have the authority the admins have.
Admins still need to have control over what goes into the servers. If you are running a server and someone pushes content that is illegal in your jurisdiction, you can not go around asking users to please stop it for you.
If you follow that logic, people should never be able to block or ban you? That makes no sense. Of course anyone should be allowed to block anyone else for whatever reason they choose. That's what defederation is as well. If you don't have the option of blocking or banning, stuff degenerates really badly and really quickly.
No, by my logic only users should be able to decide to ban me entirely and only mods should be able to ban me from specific communities, admins shouldn't exist at all, that's real decentralization, Lemmy is an half-measure.
As I stated elsewhere, I don't really see how you can even have mods without admins.
But how is admins banning you from an instance any different than a mod banning you from a community? Why are you okay being banned from a community by a mod but not okay being banned by an admin from an instance? Isn't it the same conceptually speaking, just on a different moderation/administration level?
"real" decentralization was never the goal of Lemmy or any project in the Fediverse.
Again, it seems like you are either stating the obvious or complaining that the people designing the applications have made different trade-offs that you would like.
There you go, a fully p2p reddit alternative. Now go away and be useful instead of complaining for the sake of complaining.
Well, that's a choice Beehaw made. Shouldn't they be allowed to defederate?
Quite a few people left Beehaw because of that, which is a sign that the decentralized model is working.
In your model, how do you deal with spammers, CSAM, trolls etc. ? Should every user do their own moderation for the 47k Lemmy monthly active users? Or should people create shared moderation lists? But then you still come back to the trust issues: do you trust someone else to add a user to a block list?
Allow NSFW content at your own risk, same for users and hosts.
Block users and communities as you see fit, why should a centralized authority decide for the users? It's the same thing as Reddit except that there's a bunch of centralized authorities instead of one.
I can create my own instance but other instances can decide to not federate with it.
If admins were the problem on Reddit we should work on making a platform where admins don't exist at all, not one where there's just more of them.
I am not talking about NSFW, I'm talking about CSAM. There were a few CSAM attacks last year, some mods had to see some disturbing pictures of pedo pornography, that's probably not something you want your average user to have to deal with.
Then it's not the same. You have communities like !yepowertrippinbastards@lemmy.dbzer0.com or !fediverselore@lemmy.ca used to document abuse from admins and mods, and modlogs are public, it's a drastic change from Reddit.
Have you ever had a look at Nostr? It only has moderation at the user level, so that might be what you are looking for.
And those CSAM attacks weren't prevented by the way it works at the moment so that point is moot...
That people will upload illegal content is basically inevitable, the important thing is that there is someone (other than the original poster) with the authority to remove it.
I mean sorry but that's just what decentralization is, unless you want a fully peer-to-peer protocol which is not realistic at all.
Or, as I keep suggesting, you make the authority figures have as little power as possible, i.e. the only people with authority are mods so they only have control over communities and don't have the power to prevent tens of thousands of people from communicating with each other.
They really have as little power as they can given the constraints. If you don't want an admin to have power over a lot of people, join a small instance and advocate others do the same.
It really sounds like you just want to be your own admin though. Maybe a personal instance would be a way for you.
All the feddit.de content is still available on https://lemmy.world/c/dach@feddit.de and all the other instances which where federated.
Yes but that doesn't mean you should get automatic dibs on a name everywhere. It's just a name. If you are Joe Bill at lemm.ee, that does not give you any rights over the name Joe Bill all across the world. Statistically speaking, there's at least 18 thousand other Joe Bills around at this very moment.
Like, this is something that is already solved by the instance's moderators.
This isn't an absolute rule. Of course they don't (and shouldn't) ask for feedback before cutting off Nazi instances, but it's not always so clear.
.world defederated from fosstodon and I'm still unsure why.
Have you asked on !support@lemmy.world ? Could be spam issues too
No, thanks for suggesting. I saw a thread by other curious users and checked fediseer. Might be an admin issue, but I didn't see clear evidence.
Don't think it was spam as, unless I'm misunderstanding, that seems unlikely from fosstodon.
Most people are not interested in moderating their own feed. Leading people to an instance that does very little moderation on the defederation side of things could push them away. In that situation, they are likely to just leave the fediverse altogether and less likely to go to another instance I would say. I respect lemm.ee as an instance but I would not recommend it as a "gateway drug" to the fediverse.
The issue is that
There is Lemmy.zip, but they are also very light on defederation. Lemmy.dbzer0 blocks lemmygrad but still federates with hexbear
Do you have any other suggestion?
Yea... I get what you mean. There isn't really an instance that is "not zero defederation"-moderated and general enough for all people if you take out lemmy.world. That's honestly kind of surprising, it feels like a niche that more players could fill. But I guess that's how lemmy.world got as big as it did.
If you had to give one suggestion, maybe. But still, any instance matching geographical location or a specific of your interest would be better.
Indeed, but the thing is generally, people just one want URL, and that's it.
Latest example to date: https://old.reddit.com/r/RedditAlternatives/comments/1fe87g5/map_of_2000_lemmy_communities/
You'll see a comment on how to join Lemmy, in this kind of scenario I just give one link