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…"

Agreed. I was thinking about reposting it in my little magazine and thought that was overkill. But now I'm re-thinking it ...

The population doesn’t care about the technology. If we make social media about activitypub more than it is about social media and connecting people - we’ll be shooting our own foot off no mater what meta or anyone does.

Instances and fediverse are great because of the mods, admins and people. Activitypub is the protocol and it’s an open web standard. We should expect web standards and join them but remember the product isn’t the protocol - it’s connecting people

i for one look forward to bridging to p92 and showing them what great communities can be like.

I have no plans to support p92 precisely because it's going to "push" users together as a commodity. What Meta has jurisdiction over is not its communities but rows of data - in the same way that Reddit's admins have conflicted with its mods, it is inherently not organized in such a way that it can properly represent any specific community or their actions.

So the cost-benefit from the side of extant fedi is very poor: it won't operate in a standard way, because it can't, and the quality of each additional user won't be particularly worth the pain - most of them will just be confused by being presented with a new space, and if the nature of it is hidden from them it will become an endless misunderstanding.

If a community using a siloed platform wants to federate, that should be a self-determined thing and they should front the effort to remain on a similar footing to other federated communities. The idea that either side here inherently wants to connect and just "needs a helping hand" is just wrong.

You're not thinking broad enough.

Meta joining and be successful means Reddit has to think about federating or not being successful.

Wordpress is going to have all their blogs on activitypub soon. Tumblr says they're joining - Mozilla is hirring product and developers to build out their platform.

Also, Meta is a multi billion dollar company - they know how to do UI/UX - they can spend their investment/R&D on solving problems we can't and we can be nice and welcoming to the users who show curiosity.

It's a shame we're too short sighted to see opportunity here. We really have nothing to lose since it's not like meta will suck all the haters back in

Speaking of not caring about technology, what is p92?

Meta's attempt to fill the twitter void. At one time it was going to be called Barcelona, but now it's apparently going to be called Threads. Coming to a Fediverse near you later this summer.

I hate that name, it’s too generic and is going to eat up into other matters that use the word threads. This is going to be annoying.

Interesting article. I'm still pretty new to the concept off federation but I'll keep an eye out for these kinds of takeovers in the future.

These have been going on for a long time, the author kinda makes a mention to it, with a reference to MS's long playbook of "Embrace, Extend, and Extinguish". IE's growth, MS breaking Java, Office dominance; all had examples from that playbook. While MS hasn't used it that much now compared to the past, don't trust any Big Tech company to not do it when the opportunity presents itself.

Meta has already tried it with Instagram stories after the success of Snapchat. The possibility of them attempting it with federated platforms after what appears to be two migrations to the Fediverse (one from Twitter and the other from Reddit) is definitely there, especially given Meta's reputation.

The main reason M$ stopped doing it is it did not work as intended in the long term. If anything, it hurt them in the long term. Hence c#. Hence their awkward embrasure of linux.

What I can do is only to post my activity to fedi instances with fun, even if fedi will win/lose.
Don't get on the popularity game.
Just make fun and keep yourself healthy.

this article is stupid. boo hoo capitalism. the number one thing that harms the fediverse is easily the frivolous defederation that people do all the time. it's the reason why I have to have multiple microblogging accounts, and now multiple link aggregator accounts, on different instances, just so I can talk to everyone. these same shitty little tyrants are coming over from reddit and deciding who you are allowed to talk to and what you are allowed to talk about, and it's splintering the network into neighborhoods that have to guess what the other ones are ever talking about. enjoy your insular echo chambers.

this article is stupid. boo hoo capitalism. the number one thing that harms the fediverse is ...

So you're talking about two things, the article being stupid and your troubles with defederated instances.

The solution to defederated instances is to join a fully federated instance, if you really want that. Note, there are various reasons to defederate, including spam accounts. Anyways, it's easy to find fully federated instances. No need to maintain multiple accounts.

All this was off-topic. Sadly, you did not say much on-topic.

And this is different then you having to have a Twitter, Google, Facebook, Discord, Reddit, Tumblr, Pinterest, etc etc account how exactly? Difference with federated networks is that those "insular echo chambers" (not my experience, but hey) can work together and in actuality do work well together.

The point of activitypub is to not have walled gardens. If meta is successful then you bed RTeddit is probably going to have to federate.

Tumblr and Wordpress is already coming.

Mozilla is too.

I see it a bit differently. For me, the point of activitypub is to decentralize. One of the wonderful things about activitypub and the fediverse is that while it supports universal federation, it also allows people to contemplate smaller, integrated communities. I never saw it as an "all or nothing" proposition; if a community like Beehaw wants to select their federation partners carefully, that's absolutely okay.

If an instance decides that Meta, or Tumblr, or notareal.in.stance don't fit their community vibe and they exclude them from federation, that's... the fediverse working properly. Having the ability to interconnect is wonderful... but we should not expect that all instances will want to interconnect with everyone else.