Interesting read. I was unaware of the history there with other tech, and it does feel like a plausible future for the fediverse as well. In my mind, though, the biggest threat to the success of...
Interesting read. I was unaware of the history there with other tech, and it does feel like a plausible future for the fediverse as well.
In my mind, though, the biggest threat to the success of the fediverse is fragmentation and infighting. We're already starting to see some of those cracks in the wall, like with beehaw defederating from lemmy.world. I saw this mastodon toot the other day lampshading it quite well as well. Without central oversight, it doesn't seem surprising that more and individual instances would end up turning more inward like that for more control over their home base, since nobody is personally responsible for the bigger picture (by design). It's one of the many reasons why I've come to value Tildes so highly - that strong focus on openness and deliberate anti-fragmentory behaviors built into the DNA of the site itself.
That's hilarious and definitely highlights one of the problems I've had with the Fediverse. I went through a lot of that with the federated instances and eventually joined a few after the first...
That's hilarious and definitely highlights one of the problems I've had with the Fediverse. I went through a lot of that with the federated instances and eventually joined a few after the first instance I joined turned out to be a bad choice. I ended up just not bothering with the current round of federated servers.
As to inward instances, it already seems to be happening. Kbin.social and Lemmy.world seem to be turning inward a bit. There's also sites like Hexbear that simply don't federate at all. Lemmy itself encourages turning inward. Your default view is local content. Your default community view is local communities. In both cases you have to select "All" to see federated content and communities. Not exactly the best way to encourage federation.
I think that the recent push of federated social media and link aggregation software has some fundamental architectural issues. As the platforms grow these issues will become stressed and probably...
I think that the recent push of federated social media and link aggregation software has some fundamental architectural issues. As the platforms grow these issues will become stressed and probably break after a point.
I'd prefer it if each individual Lemmy instance was a subreddit equivalent and if instead identity was the thing federated. The client should be the thing that does the aggregation across the instances, not the individual instances themselves. Basically like hosting RSS feeds that support comments with shared identity across each entry. The sites you are getting the RSS feeds from have zero awareness of each other and don't need to know.
I think Solid aims to go in that direction, which I agree simply works better, but it's early days so far. There are people working on integrating it with ActivityPub at the moment.
Yeah. I think the trouble started with Mastodon because they bit off a bigger project than “create a federated social network. They pretty explicitly wanted to make a version of Twitter that...
Yeah. I think the trouble started with Mastodon because they bit off a bigger project than “create a federated social network. They pretty explicitly wanted to make a version of Twitter that wasn’t as prone to bullying and dogpiling and ad focus. The federation was part of the feature-set but not their primary motivator initially.
My particular problem with Mastodon is exactly the one that drove me off Twitter. The early days of Twitter were incredible. The 140 character limit which included any links and image links forced...
My particular problem with Mastodon is exactly the one that drove me off Twitter.
The early days of Twitter were incredible. The 140 character limit which included any links and image links forced people to think about what they were saying. Subsequently if you followed someone you generally would align even though you might have followed someone for one particular thing. And you didn't see too much crap because people had to really think what they were saying to condense it.
When people were allowed to splurge a lot more it just broke down.
I would follow someone for an interest (swiss army knives or whatever) and then the same person would be banging on about the state of their court system or views on Trump or whatever.
Ads are always a pain but I think Twitter just polluted itself by it's very nature.
This forum style where you follow interests is far better imo.
That's what keeps me off Twitter too. I'd follow someone because I was interested in their part in voice acting, but all I'd get was politics and ads. Honestly, Twitter is kind of a bad platform...
That's what keeps me off Twitter too. I'd follow someone because I was interested in their part in voice acting, but all I'd get was politics and ads.
Honestly, Twitter is kind of a bad platform by design. Even the short form messages became an announcement board for upcoming projects (essentially ads).
If that’s all it was I’d be happy with it honestly. I just want to follow people and know what they’re up to. I don’t want to hear soapbox rants from each and every person on my list.
Honestly, Twitter is kind of a bad platform by design. Even the short form messages became an announcement board for upcoming projects (essentially ads).
If that’s all it was I’d be happy with it honestly. I just want to follow people and know what they’re up to. I don’t want to hear soapbox rants from each and every person on my list.
Yeah after 2016 a lot of things started to break down that way. Everyone online (and many people IRL) started talking politics, and while I generally enjoy talking politics I usually try to have...
I would follow someone for an interest (swiss army knives or whatever) and then the same person would be banging on about the state of their court system or views on Trump or whatever.
Yeah after 2016 a lot of things started to break down that way. Everyone online (and many people IRL) started talking politics, and while I generally enjoy talking politics I usually try to have something to say that hasn’t already been said. But everyone just keeps repeating each other. It’s the same general idea being riffed on over and over and over again because the mechanism on Twitter is to retweet and one of the easy engagement hacks is to try and encourage people to talk about [subject] to raise awareness of it. In fact, after a while you start to worry you’re being judged for not standing in the circle chanting the same shibboleths even if you agree with everyone.
This has had all kinds of nasty effects for the quality and people’s engagement with discourse on important matters, but he worst is that Twitter seems to have had special purchase with the most neurotic sectors of the economy (journalism, media, academia) and they’ve all been brain wormed from overexposure. Everything now seems to boil down to the same derivative take and one-note narratives. It’s become extremely tiresome.
I kind of like this idea of doing the aggregation at the client. But at that point, why is it necessary to have federated identities? I don't understand the need to link one's identity across...
I kind of like this idea of doing the aggregation at the client. But at that point, why is it necessary to have federated identities? I don't understand the need to link one's identity across instances.
Another thing is that it could make it harder to find "subreddits". Clients could make suggestions, but I don't think this would help smaller and more niche communities.
In the long long ago, social media was primarily a tool for socializing with people you knew rather than getting into arguments with strangers. People who mostly interacted online with people they...
I don't understand the need to link one's identity across instances.
In the long long ago, social media was primarily a tool for socializing with people you knew rather than getting into arguments with strangers. People who mostly interacted online with people they met online, rather than people they knew IRL, were weird basement nerds or something.
So the main appeal of social media is the network effect of having the people you know on it. You need to federate identity to be able to have the social graph unlinked from any one service.
Federated identity would allow you to associate reputation with a single person and/or have the same person volunteer to moderate multiple communities with the same identity. It also means you...
I kind of like this idea of doing the aggregation at the client. But at that point, why is it necessary to have federated identities? I don't understand the need to link one's identity across instances.
Federated identity would allow you to associate reputation with a single person and/or have the same person volunteer to moderate multiple communities with the same identity. It also means you only need one "account" instead of registering at each community.
Another thing is that it could make it harder to find "subreddits". Clients could make suggestions, but I don't think this would help smaller and more niche communities.
I think a discovery mechanism would be built here, almost like an old-fashioned web ring. The top bar could link to other communities. This doesn't tightly couple the instances or require them to do any sort of expensive data exchange.
I have a different opinion. The biggest threat to the success of the fediverse is fragmentation, but also scale. You need scale to have a lot of people to have a lot of content so that more people...
I have a different opinion. The biggest threat to the success of the fediverse is fragmentation, but also scale.
You need scale to have a lot of people to have a lot of content so that more people want to use your site, it's a naturally exponential process.
Tildes has done a really good thing with the invite system that takes that exponential process and forces it to be linear.
Because scale is great, except when you have to start paying for it. The fediverse can scale far beyond the point that any sane actor can fund the traffic that the federers creates, and I'm pretty sure that activity pub gets harder and harder to host the bigger the network gets, so at some point you're going to scale me on the point the people are going to be willing to open up new servers.
This is part of what killed the old pre-internet networks that were based on files being shared between hosts. They got so expensive you had to pay to use them.
Federated systems have very big problems when it comes to keeping everyone in sync and updated to the latest versions. Keeping costs down for a new server, and discoverability between servers one eventually the federals becomes so bloated that of the big hosts choose to stop the defaulting to federating with new hosts as well.
New hosts should reduce traffic load on the network. Always.
Some central host should have broad reasonable amounts of control over everyone they federate with. I'm talking the ability to take an update from the central server and push it out to all the clients at the once, in an automated way, and make it so that everyone moves to the new system at the same time.
Anyone who doesn't gets dropped.
And then you need to have some way to handle spam.
So many flaws in the federated system that I just can't see it taking off and being successful in the long term, although I'm happy to see it taking off right now.
Yeah, this is basically what may happen with the current Fediverse. One server grows large enough that you either continue to accept them into the fold or defederate from them and lose a large...
Yeah, this is basically what may happen with the current Fediverse. One server grows large enough that you either continue to accept them into the fold or defederate from them and lose a large amount of content. Lose enough content and people may migrate off your server to follow the content.
This is the issue I have with the fediverse - it’s just many centralized authorities. They control who gets to cross the border and it is possible for a bigger fish to fry them with financial and...
This is the issue I have with the fediverse - it’s just many centralized authorities. They control who gets to cross the border and it is possible for a bigger fish to fry them with financial and legal headaches because each server owner is responsible for that. So if Meta enters the game with their unlimited resources, they will dictate the rules of the game and the server owners that don’t adjust will either be left out or if Meta lawyers are stringent enough, hit with legal action.
Open source and non-profit, like Wikipedia, like Tildes (hopefully), seems like a much more resistant way to run a platform if it wants to remain independent. You have an organization with paid employees that 'face the music' when shit hits the fan for the platform. And if users love it, they will support it by taking care of the code and donating money. Wikipedia has faced so many battles with governments and corporations and it is still here.
I’m also not sure decentralization is the way to go. Who is responsible for the content? If the server owner has the legal and financial responsibility to moderate anonymous content, who can afford legal action from Meta for example? Who has the time to do both? It will only be users that are either unaware of their responsibilities or are big enough to deal with the costs. It’s not very decentralized.
Interesting, but how do you think gpg keys could be used for a layman? Just have it stored on-device or something? Following the trail it just comes back to regular username/password
Interesting, but how do you think gpg keys could be used for a layman? Just have it stored on-device or something? Following the trail it just comes back to regular username/password
Year is 2023. The whole Internet is under the control of the GAFAM empire. All? No. Because a few small villages are resisting the oppression. And some of those villages started to agregate, forming the "Fediverse".
With debates around Twitter and Reddit, the Fediverse started to gain fame and attention. People started to use it for real. The empire started to notice.
Interesting read. I was unaware of the history there with other tech, and it does feel like a plausible future for the fediverse as well.
In my mind, though, the biggest threat to the success of the fediverse is fragmentation and infighting. We're already starting to see some of those cracks in the wall, like with beehaw defederating from lemmy.world. I saw this mastodon toot the other day lampshading it quite well as well. Without central oversight, it doesn't seem surprising that more and individual instances would end up turning more inward like that for more control over their home base, since nobody is personally responsible for the bigger picture (by design). It's one of the many reasons why I've come to value Tildes so highly - that strong focus on openness and deliberate anti-fragmentory behaviors built into the DNA of the site itself.
That's hilarious and definitely highlights one of the problems I've had with the Fediverse. I went through a lot of that with the federated instances and eventually joined a few after the first instance I joined turned out to be a bad choice. I ended up just not bothering with the current round of federated servers.
As to inward instances, it already seems to be happening. Kbin.social and Lemmy.world seem to be turning inward a bit. There's also sites like Hexbear that simply don't federate at all. Lemmy itself encourages turning inward. Your default view is local content. Your default community view is local communities. In both cases you have to select "All" to see federated content and communities. Not exactly the best way to encourage federation.
I think that the recent push of federated social media and link aggregation software has some fundamental architectural issues. As the platforms grow these issues will become stressed and probably break after a point.
I'd prefer it if each individual Lemmy instance was a subreddit equivalent and if instead identity was the thing federated. The client should be the thing that does the aggregation across the instances, not the individual instances themselves. Basically like hosting RSS feeds that support comments with shared identity across each entry. The sites you are getting the RSS feeds from have zero awareness of each other and don't need to know.
I think Solid aims to go in that direction, which I agree simply works better, but it's early days so far. There are people working on integrating it with ActivityPub at the moment.
Woohoo! I was waiting for it
Yeah. I think the trouble started with Mastodon because they bit off a bigger project than “create a federated social network. They pretty explicitly wanted to make a version of Twitter that wasn’t as prone to bullying and dogpiling and ad focus. The federation was part of the feature-set but not their primary motivator initially.
My particular problem with Mastodon is exactly the one that drove me off Twitter.
The early days of Twitter were incredible. The 140 character limit which included any links and image links forced people to think about what they were saying. Subsequently if you followed someone you generally would align even though you might have followed someone for one particular thing. And you didn't see too much crap because people had to really think what they were saying to condense it.
When people were allowed to splurge a lot more it just broke down.
I would follow someone for an interest (swiss army knives or whatever) and then the same person would be banging on about the state of their court system or views on Trump or whatever.
Ads are always a pain but I think Twitter just polluted itself by it's very nature.
This forum style where you follow interests is far better imo.
That's what keeps me off Twitter too. I'd follow someone because I was interested in their part in voice acting, but all I'd get was politics and ads.
Honestly, Twitter is kind of a bad platform by design. Even the short form messages became an announcement board for upcoming projects (essentially ads).
If that’s all it was I’d be happy with it honestly. I just want to follow people and know what they’re up to. I don’t want to hear soapbox rants from each and every person on my list.
Yeah after 2016 a lot of things started to break down that way. Everyone online (and many people IRL) started talking politics, and while I generally enjoy talking politics I usually try to have something to say that hasn’t already been said. But everyone just keeps repeating each other. It’s the same general idea being riffed on over and over and over again because the mechanism on Twitter is to retweet and one of the easy engagement hacks is to try and encourage people to talk about [subject] to raise awareness of it. In fact, after a while you start to worry you’re being judged for not standing in the circle chanting the same shibboleths even if you agree with everyone.
This has had all kinds of nasty effects for the quality and people’s engagement with discourse on important matters, but he worst is that Twitter seems to have had special purchase with the most neurotic sectors of the economy (journalism, media, academia) and they’ve all been brain wormed from overexposure. Everything now seems to boil down to the same derivative take and one-note narratives. It’s become extremely tiresome.
LOL!
Also your last chapter about who Twitter attracts (and who stays on it) and affects and the way they affected is accurate. Unfortunately.
I kind of like this idea of doing the aggregation at the client. But at that point, why is it necessary to have federated identities? I don't understand the need to link one's identity across instances.
Another thing is that it could make it harder to find "subreddits". Clients could make suggestions, but I don't think this would help smaller and more niche communities.
In the long long ago, social media was primarily a tool for socializing with people you knew rather than getting into arguments with strangers. People who mostly interacted online with people they met online, rather than people they knew IRL, were weird basement nerds or something.
So the main appeal of social media is the network effect of having the people you know on it. You need to federate identity to be able to have the social graph unlinked from any one service.
Federated identity would allow you to associate reputation with a single person and/or have the same person volunteer to moderate multiple communities with the same identity. It also means you only need one "account" instead of registering at each community.
I think a discovery mechanism would be built here, almost like an old-fashioned web ring. The top bar could link to other communities. This doesn't tightly couple the instances or require them to do any sort of expensive data exchange.
I have a different opinion. The biggest threat to the success of the fediverse is fragmentation, but also scale.
You need scale to have a lot of people to have a lot of content so that more people want to use your site, it's a naturally exponential process.
Tildes has done a really good thing with the invite system that takes that exponential process and forces it to be linear.
Because scale is great, except when you have to start paying for it. The fediverse can scale far beyond the point that any sane actor can fund the traffic that the federers creates, and I'm pretty sure that activity pub gets harder and harder to host the bigger the network gets, so at some point you're going to scale me on the point the people are going to be willing to open up new servers.
This is part of what killed the old pre-internet networks that were based on files being shared between hosts. They got so expensive you had to pay to use them.
Federated systems have very big problems when it comes to keeping everyone in sync and updated to the latest versions. Keeping costs down for a new server, and discoverability between servers one eventually the federals becomes so bloated that of the big hosts choose to stop the defaulting to federating with new hosts as well.
New hosts should reduce traffic load on the network. Always.
Some central host should have broad reasonable amounts of control over everyone they federate with. I'm talking the ability to take an update from the central server and push it out to all the clients at the once, in an automated way, and make it so that everyone moves to the new system at the same time.
Anyone who doesn't gets dropped.
And then you need to have some way to handle spam.
So many flaws in the federated system that I just can't see it taking off and being successful in the long term, although I'm happy to see it taking off right now.
Oh the weirdest thought occurred while reading this.. it all seems very blockchain/crypto like.
This is Microsoft's classic "embrace, extend, and extinguish" strategy, yes?
Yeah, this is basically what may happen with the current Fediverse. One server grows large enough that you either continue to accept them into the fold or defederate from them and lose a large amount of content. Lose enough content and people may migrate off your server to follow the content.
The Matrix protocol was not developed in response to the popularity of Discord (Matrix released in 2014, Discord released in 2015).
But who would pay for a public server?
This is the issue I have with the fediverse - it’s just many centralized authorities. They control who gets to cross the border and it is possible for a bigger fish to fry them with financial and legal headaches because each server owner is responsible for that. So if Meta enters the game with their unlimited resources, they will dictate the rules of the game and the server owners that don’t adjust will either be left out or if Meta lawyers are stringent enough, hit with legal action.
Open source and non-profit, like Wikipedia, like Tildes (hopefully), seems like a much more resistant way to run a platform if it wants to remain independent. You have an organization with paid employees that 'face the music' when shit hits the fan for the platform. And if users love it, they will support it by taking care of the code and donating money. Wikipedia has faced so many battles with governments and corporations and it is still here.
I’m also not sure decentralization is the way to go. Who is responsible for the content? If the server owner has the legal and financial responsibility to moderate anonymous content, who can afford legal action from Meta for example? Who has the time to do both? It will only be users that are either unaware of their responsibilities or are big enough to deal with the costs. It’s not very decentralized.
Interesting, but how do you think gpg keys could be used for a layman? Just have it stored on-device or something? Following the trail it just comes back to regular username/password
From the link:
This breaks down the threat of Meta in the Fediverse in a succinct way:
https://social.coop/@loshmi/110594900719666868