masterspace

@masterspace@kbin.social
0 Post – 62 Comments
Joined 1 years ago

But I don't need it to be defederated, I'm happier if I have the tools to deal with this (and other similar stuff).

I'm sorry but this is asinine. We're not talking about blocking too many posts about Taylor Swift, we're talking about new users of kbin getting fed illegal child porn in their feed.

Kbin should defederate immediately.

3 more...

So in your mind the only valid reason to not serve child porn to your users is if you happen to be subject to the laws of Poland at the time?

Comments like this alone make me want to leave kbin.

23 more...

If you have to write a long ass post telling users that they're using your software wrong, then you wrote bad software.

Don't want people to think it's supposed to be Twitter? Don't model the entire UX after Twitter.

9 more...

As for the confusion / chaos around multiple/redundant/competing communities and so on...that will get better over time as people figure things out. Honestly it's not that different than reddit with all of its splinter subs like "true-" whatever.

That's true for just the duplication problem, but the defederation / shadow banning issue is not one that reddit has and is pretty confusing and poor user experience for new users coming in.

13 more...

In this case the American and Canadian coast guard spent resources trying to save people after they got into danger, and it sounds like the Greek coast guard might have spent resources keeping desperate people in danger until hundreds drowned.

The tragedy in Greece is an endictment of the Greek coast guard and western countries attitudes towards the developing world and refugees in general, but just because more people's houses are on fire elsewhere doesn't mean you shouldn't put out your own.

No, this feels like a massive corporation with massive marketing and market research departments succinctly breaking down a concept that most on the fediverse nerd out too much to do.

We're talking about illegal child porn here. Kbin should defederate immediately.

We're not talking about pornography laws that were enacted with no basis in harm reduction, we're talking about child porn laws that were enacted to not encourage and normalize pedophiles and pedophilia.

Some laws are justifiable, some are arguable, and some are completely unjustifiable, throwing out an unjustifiable one in contrast to a firmly justifiable one is not debating, it's childish nonsense.

Go find your shitty twisted instance and sit there with the rest of the 4chan incels if you want, but you don't need that instance federated with anyone else.

I looked underage for most of my adult life thus far, guess what I did? Dealt with it and enjoyed my life, I didn't insist that we should be able to freely publish nudes of myself so that pedos can jerk off to them.

Hell we're not even talking about free society here, if you look underage but are overage you're still free to exhibit your body in whatever art exhibit you want, digital or irl, that doesn't mean kbin should allow potentially illegal loli content to show up in users' feeds.

I think what they mean is identity that is coupled to them the person and not whichever instance they choose to sign in on.

I'm already starting to get pretty tired of people in the fediverse saying shit like this:

What this means to you is when a user within one instance (e.g. Beehaw) that’s chosen to defederate with another (e.g. lemmy.world), they can no longer interact with content on another instance, and vice versa. Other instances can still see the content of both servers as though nothing has happened.

A user is not limited to how many instances they can join (technically at least - some instance have more stringent requirements for joining than others do)

A user can interact with Lemmy content without being a user of any Lemmy instance - e.g. Mastodon (UI for doing so is limited, but it is still possible.)

Considering the above, it is important to understand just how much autonomy we, as users have. For example, as the larger instances are flooded with users and their respective admins and mods try to keep up, many, smaller instances not only thrive, but emerge, regularly (and even single user instances - I have one for just myself!) The act of defederation does not serve to lock individual users out of anything as there are multiple avenues to constantly maintain access to, if you want it, the entirety of the unfiltered fediverse.

Having "multiple avenues to maintain access to the unfiltered fediverse, if you want it" is the most nightmare user experience sentence I can possibly imagine.

A user does not want multiple avenues to maintain access to the unfiltered fediverse with it being unclear when their comments will be shadow banned and not. They want to be able to see a post and go in and comment on it.

Federation is not a feature, it's an implementation detail.

11 more...

The fediverse not dying has yet to be proven.

Everyone on here keeps acting like they're in a position of power and the fediverse is destined for success, but here's the thing, it still sucks compared to the content that's on Reddit and FB/IG, because there's still a tiny fraction the number of users. The fediverse is only going to be the great place to have a conversation about stuff if people use it, and everyone rushing to cut off a massive source of funding / users / content while the fediverse is still trying to compete against Reddit et al seems like a huge mistake.

4 more...

That's standard practice if you're going to be talking about an unreleased product.

4 more...

It's working for me, but quoted below:

Regarding Beehaw defederating from lemmy.world and sh.itjust.works, this post goes into detail on the why and the philosophy behind that decision. Additionally, there is an update specific to sh.itjust.works here.

For now, let’s talk about what federation is and what defederation means for members of Beehaw or the above two communities interacting with each other, as well as the broader fediverse.

Federation is not something new on the internet. Most users use federated services every day (for instance, the url used to access instances uses a federated service known as DNS, and email is another system that functions through federation.) Just like those services, you elect to use a service provider that allows you to communicate with the rest of the world. That service provider is your window to work with others.

When you federate, you mutually agree to share your content. This means that posting something to a site can be seen by another and all comments are shared. Even users from other sites can post to your site.

Now when you defederate, this results in content to be no longer shared. It didn’t reverse any previous sharing or posts, it just stops the information from flowing with the selected instance. This only impacts the site’s that are called out.

What this means to you is when a user within one instance (e.g. Beehaw) that’s chosen to defederate with another (e.g. lemmy.world), they can no longer interact with content on another instance, and vice versa. Other instances can still see the content of both servers as though nothing has happened.

A user is not limited to how many instances they can join (technically at least - some instance have more stringent requirements for joining than others do)
A user can interact with Lemmy content without being a user of any Lemmy instance - e.g. Mastodon (UI for doing so is limited, but it is still possible.)
Considering the above, it is important to understand just how much autonomy we, as users have. For example, as the larger instances are flooded with users and their respective admins and mods try to keep up, many, smaller instances not only thrive, but emerge, regularly (and even single user instances - I have one for just myself!) The act of defederation does not serve to lock individual users out of anything as there are multiple avenues to constantly maintain access to, if you want it, the entirety of the unfiltered fediverse.

On that last point, another consideration at the individual level is - what do you want out of Lemmy? Do you want to find and connect with like-minded people, share information, and connect at a social and community level? Do you want to casually browse content and not really interact with anyone? These questions and the questions that they lead to are critical. There is no direct benefit to being on the biggest instance. In fact, as we all deal with this mass influx, figure out what that means for our own instances and interactions with others, I would argue that a smaller instance is actually much better suited for those who just want to casually browse everything.

Lastly, and tangential, another concern I have seen related to this conversation is people feeling afraid of being locked out of the content and conversation from the “main” communities around big topics starting to form across the Lemmiverse (think memes, gaming, tech, politics, news, etc.) Over time, certain communities will certainly become a default for some people just given the community size (there will always be a biggest or most active - it’s just a numbers game.) This, again though, all comes down to personal preference and what each individual is looking to get from their Lemmy experience. While there may, eventually, be a “main” sub for <topic xyz> (again, by the numbers), there will also always be quite a few other options for targeted discussions on <topic xyz>, within different communities, on different instances, each with their own culture and vibe. This can certainly feel overwhelming and daunting (and at the moment, honestly it is.) Reddit and other non-federated platforms provided the illusion of choice, but this is what actual choice looks and feels like.

[edit: grammar and spelling]

Having a larger market = having a larger network = greater network effects for content

Having Meta join with Mastodon might actually sway people off twitter and into the fediverse where it will be easier to migrate over to a different instance.

It's foolish not to hear them out, you accomplish nothing. This isn't some silicon valley episode where he has some arkane secrets that meta engineers couldn't figure out that he might leak. Meeting with them is zero risk and he would gain more information on what they're planning.

4 more...

My guess would be that

a) building their next social network on an open platform will let antitrust regulators off their back

and/or b) a Twitter clone sounds less sexy then a web3 / decentralized fediverse play. Meta has chased every other bandwagon (metaverse, ai, etc), it's entirely possible this is just them always chasing the hot new thing so that they don't miss out. They certainly aren't going to let themselves be Blackberry and refuse to change, they'd rather desperately copy every hot new thing and change quickly to always have an offering that appeals to their customers good enough

I think the spirit of the OPs comment is that it is the style of conversations, atmosphere and culture that each of them foster what makes them somewhat different.

If you want to organize discussion around topics, model it after reddit, where you subscribe to topics.

If you want to organize discussion around people, model it after twitter, where you subscribe to people.

Kbin and lemmy do a good job of modelling things after reddit, where you subscribe to topics. The decentralized nature just adds another layer of community duplication, but that was already a problem with reddit (r/gaming and r/games) and isn't that big a deal since all are subscribable from your preferred instance as long as it's federated with everyone.

The problem with Mastodon though is that it wants to model itself after Twitter where you subscribe to people, but unlike with topics, having duplicate copies of people is a real problem since it makes it hard to trust that you're actually subscribing to the right person and not a spam account. That is an extremely real problem that Mastodon tried to side step by pivoting to following topics, but at it's core the mastodon/twitter UX is not formatted for that, it's formatted for following people in real time and Mastodon seems like it has ignored that and is trying to insist that it's it's own thing that no one actually wants. Organizing discussion based around servers is not a user helpful format, it's exposing unwanted technical implementation details to the user in a way that only a tech nerd could ever love.

Now, there are single sign-on (SSO) possibilities, but for them to be universally accessible across the Fediverse, you either need to impose them on 20,000 admins across two dozen software implementations, or you need them all to a) agree to support SSO, and b) agree to support the same SSO options.

Yeah, this is the real crux of the issue and is a large unsolved problem. We simply have no standardized system for decentralized identity verification.

SSO works as a way of maintaining identity across the fediverse, but that's not really federating identity so much as it's getting all instance to offload identity verification to various central services.

I believe I heard Microsoft had a research project in the area of decentralized identity verification but I don't know if it went anywhere or how suitable it would be.

2 more...

Lmao at you complaining about toxicity when you're toxically judging and gatekeeping 2 Billion people.

Such bravery coming from someone who sounds oh so employed.

2 more...

I'm guessing kbin doesn't have the same level of mod tools as reddit yet

1 more...

ex: fediverse@lemmy.world vs fediverse@lemmy.ml

Isn't the point of federation that those communities would federate and then have merged comments sections? Or am I misunderstanding how it works?

1 more...

Meta is more likely to pull people away from Twitter than Mastodon is, and having all of Twitter be run with ActivityPub / open to federation is a good thing.

This is not a proper talk by meta that you could just "hear them out". They explicitly said off the record and confidential, there's no reason for that if it's something innocuous.

They plan on showing demos of their product to them or talking about potential features it might have. Boom, they require an NDA.

I don't think you understand how the professional world works or how common NDAs are. I've signed NDAs while going through interview processes at FAANG and other large companies just so that we can talk freely about projects I might work on. Especially for a company like Facebook where everything they do will get about a dozen news articles written, they're going to make you sign an NDA for any conversation about an unreleased product.

That's an upside, but it's not necessarily a "good" thing to be fragmented if it means you don't have the network effects to make a satisfying community.

End of the day a lot of Reddit's value came from its popularity.

5 more...

Signing an NDA to talk about an unreleased product is not predatory, it's standard practice for virtually any business (especially the kind inviting random people off the internet to see them). Many jobs require you to sign NDAs just to go through the interview process.

There is nothing gained by not going to the meeting with Meta, if they want to launch their Twitter clone they are more than capable of doing that regardless of whether or not this guy takes a meeting to hear them out. All he's done is learned less about what they plan on doing leaving him less capable of taking the best course of action, and if you trust him to make the right decision then that's objectively a bad thing.

Software exist to solve a user's problem. All software's primary motivator should be user experience.

It's quite frankly asinine to spend your time building a social network that user's don't want to use (see: Reddit's official app / new site).

Ignoring psychology, network effects, and how social networks work while instead trying to build one based on naiive dogma is doomed to failure.

Still not a feature users care about.

Everyone keeps talking in analogies like "playing their game" because if you said "we gain nothing by getting a ton of free content from Threads users" it would sound ridiculous.

1 more...

No, I'm just not willfully blind to the fact that social networks are only valuable when people use them. Reddit wasn't great because it was a niche forum with a handful of decentralized tech enthusiasts, Reddit was great because it was a big non-gatekeeping umbrella that welcomed everyone.

  1. The regulatory angle makes the most sense given the scrutiny they're under from regulators, courts, the FTC consent orders, etc. Also entirely possible that the product manager building the project was able to pitch the fediverse because it was the hot trendy thing (NFTs, metaverse, ai, web 3, decentral etc.)

  2. Given their history of buying WhatsApp and Instagram? Those aren't examples of EEE those are examples of anti-competitive corporate buyouts that should be illegal but aren't. Facebook does not have a history of EEE, and continue to be a large open source contributor, maintaining multiple open source libraries, frameworks, and protocols.

  3. Because you can just block their instance.

  4. They're scraping and selling your data regardless, this doesn't change anything.

  5. Sounds like a lot more potential moderators.

  6. I dunno probably the same way that half of Reddit posts are Twitter links. It will be fine. You can stay talking to your nerdy friends in the nerdy communities.

  7. Threads came out of New Product Experimentation (NPE), Meta's (now defunct) experimentation division that produced tons of different experimental apps to see what would stick, or in this case, to have a card to play if a rival social media network were to suddenly implode for some reason. Was it developed in good faith in regards to Twitter or creating a healthy competitive business landscape? No. Was it developed in good faith in regards to the fediverse? Yeah, they're not gunning after the dozens of Mastodon users.

  8. Until someone can actually state how federation with Meta would harm the fediverse, I'm for it. That EEE blog post that everyone keeps circulating does not do that. Its a quite frankly dumb take from someone who loved a protocol so much they didn't realize that users didn't. XMPP never had that many users, Google Talk did. The lesson to learn from that story is not that Google killed XMPP it's that a protocol's openness does not matter compared to user experience. It's awesome if you can have both, but if push comes to shove, and the protocol can't keep up, then the better UX will always win out, even if it's closed.

  9. No, I wouldn't add them or interact with them.

  10. I trust that they will do what they say want to do, which is to try and get a lot of users and make money advertising to them.

Now, I've answered 10 of your questions and I'm still waiting to hear what the problem with federating with them is that's not just someone blindly regurgitating that same blog post, or making vague accusations that they're so intrinsically evil we'll be cursed if we look at them too long.

How will not federating with them prevent that?

1 more...

It's more like locking your door and barring it up really good and making it inconvenient for you to get in or out and makes your place less appealing to others, and at the same time you've got several wide open doors behind you.

Federating from threads accomplishes nothing. It's just echo chamber hysteria. Threads isn't even organized around communities, it's organized around people, by default no Threads users would be in Lemmy communities and we wouldn't see any of their content.

And it would only be a protocol extension when it would be returned upstream, which I highly doubt that Facebook’s parent company Meta would do that.

Oh yeah, Meta definitely never contributes anything back to the open source community, I type into a React frontend, that uses a GraphQl communication protocol to an API built using node, watchman, and a variety of other meta made or sponsored projects.

/S

https://github.com/orgs/facebook/repositories?type=all

This is not a matter of good vs bad, or right vs wrong. It is about expected vs unexpected.

Yeah, if you copy Twitter's UI users will expect it to behave like twitter.

It's not complicated, mastodon just kind of sucks from a user perspective compared to twitter while completely copying it, leading users to dislike it.

Decentralization is not a feature, it's an implementation detail.

And I've worked at FAANG companies developing their apps and am well aware of precisely what they do to get people to use them, and it's not make a carbon copy of twitter that's harder to use.

2 more...

Yup. People gonna have to move.

Remember when people said that climate change would cost us trillions of dollars? This is why.

3 more...

I mean, if they actually subscribe to threads and discussions across instances, and isn't that kind of the point of a social network? For users to use it? Also odd that half the arguments against it are that it will kill the fediverse and half of the arguments are that it will provide too many users to the fediverse.

I'm sorry, but no. The point of the fediverse is not to spin up niche communities, since we already have forums. You want to be part of a niche small forum, go spin up your own bb instance and run a niche small forum.

The point of the fediverse is to recreate the global social networks that are twitter / Reddit / etc, but to do so using open source servers that are decentralized and anyone can host.

Again, federation is not a user facing feature, it's an architecture / implementation detail. Fediverse enthusiasts are like train enthusiasts who love every detail of how they're built and their history and how much philosophically better they are than cars, but none of that matters and train networks will fail if they don't provide quick and convenient transportation to their users.

6 more...

The only thing naiive is the people in here thinking that defederating from Meta accomplishes anything whatsoever.

Oh boo hoo, meta's instance is shinier than ours, doesn't that mean users will leave? Yeah, look around, they already will and are leaving for Meta's platforms, they have more users on Threads in 24hrs than the Fediverse has had in it's entire life.

Nothing about defederating changes that.

3 more...