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.
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.
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 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.
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.
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.
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…"
Meta is allowed to use the ActivityPub standard just as much as any other standard. This does not mean anyone who decides to use it must interact with others who use it. SMTP will block your mail if you aren’t from a larger server, have the right signatures and even then. Servers block HTTP over VPNs often, and there are even rules about referencing content via other servers on HTTP (CORS). Just because a standard is open doesn’t mean everything using that standard has to communicate with each other.
The beauty of this is that those running instances can’t restrict access of other instances to the fediverse. If Meta does start using ActivityPub, every current instance can block it. Other entities could want to run an instance that federates with Meta who has the resources to do so. Currently the biggest issue is the vast difference in scale between current instances and Meta. But if other entities got into the fediverse that federated with Meta this would still be a decentralized system, just with larger nodes between them. All of this still allows those who run small instances to block these larger instances that are more mainstream and keep it the way they want it.
Yeah, that seems like exactly the kind of selfserving virtue signaling that makes the left look like a bunch of edgelords.
But I guess, it's easier to start such "actions" to feel like you're doing something than actually doing something. (not that I'm actually doing something, but I'm not pretending either)
In German, there's a relatively new phrase for that: Gratismut, free bravery. On the surface it looks "brave", but it's actually 100% riskfree and has no consequences whatsoever. But you do look brave.
Jury is till out it’s way too early to tell. The fediverse seems very unrefined still (which I kind of enjoy tbh). If its truly going “save the internet”, a lot of refining needs to be done in order to attract at a mainstream scale.
Mastodon is a bit more polished than Lemmy/kbin, although is still missing some important features.
But the really important thing to remember is that the maintainers of Fediverse platforms will be continuing to make things better for users (overall), while Reddit/Twitter/Facebook will continue to make things worse for users (overall). In the long run, the Fediverse will be way better for users than the corporate platforms.
agreed. It’s got bugs, and scalability issues, but i’m liking to “quirkiness” of it. I’ve most most of my stuff to the fediverse so far. It’ll need a lot more polishing to attract mainstream attention, but it’s nice to have this option.
It is really strange, in that it WORKS like the old Wild West of Web 2.0 when it was all blogs and RSS feeds but it doesn't FEEL like the Wild West. It's definitely civilization here.
I’m hoping that now that we have seen a fair share of social media companies rise and fall and why they’ve fallen, many people will begin to find out what they are looking for in a social media network.
Haha yeah this is tame compared to when we went from static sites to dynamic communities. This seems so easy in comparison. Things are much easier now.
Hmm interesting. I do think it's just as important that we double-defederate unfortunately. Meta/Threads has to be treated as if it's contagious.
If we stay federated with an instance that has accepted the Embrace, what do we do when the Extend happens? Is that when we defederate? Will we even recognize it?
EEE only works because it's difficult to see it happening to you. Instances that ally with Meta/Threads will actually present the same threat of EEE, or even a greater threat, because the Extend step may appear to come from non-Meta instances.
Imagine ActivityPub upgrades developed by a Meta/Threads-ally, let's say improved inter-instance moderator tools. That sounds good right?
It's basically all the exact same arguments again, but with a middle man.
Meta/Threads have different foundational priorities (namely, profit) and real incentives to monopolize.
Meta-ally instances have real and implied incentives to accommodate
Meta/Threads.
And we have incentives to accommodate the instances that we federate with, so of course kbin would use the well-developed new mod tools right?
Seems crazy not to, even if it was developed by a Meta-ally. Right?
Great! Repeat for thousands of tiny changes, that's called Extend.
That's how accepting EEE works, each little step looks great but big picture we're unknowingly in trouble. We'll have to treat any Meta/Threads-ally as if it is Meta/Threads. (Hell, some of them probably will be lol, the fediverse is just asking for astroturfing lol.)
We can trust instances that don't have economic incentives. But any instance that shows they can be swayed by money, or that shows they'll accommodate instances driven by profit, well they're showing that they'd consider eating us to become the next reddit.
Many people that I talked to about it think that this will be Meta's attempt at an "EEE".
probably. but the normies wouldn't have joined a federated service anyway. and when the "extenguish" part comes, it will just go back to the status quo (i.e. normies on private FB service, the rest of us on federated instances)
Some Mastodon instance admins that I chatted about it say that Meta will "likely attempt to pull their user data", and they "will defederate immediately".
got bad news for anyone that thinks meta wouldn't just run a crawler and scrape anything they want from your server.
at worst i'd see this as a net-neutral to the fediverse.
This is my thinking as well. I'm going to silence them on my Calckey instance, just because it's going to be a very noisy and poorly moderated space, but it will functionally be its own thing within a couple of years.
It's just using ActivityPub because it's new, it's likely not pulling from Facebook for content, and the existing Fediverse gives new users an active ecosystem to engage with making it not feel empty.
Maybe there'll be some good UX ideas there to steal, beyond a high profile URL backed by high capacity servers.
Fear of EEE is never a reason to reject investment. Something like EEE always arrives eventually, either externally or internally. When things get too big, they begin to collapse under their own weight one way or another. The dead burn and new life is born.
Reddit lasted around 15 years as the de facto Front Page of The Internet, which is honestly an amazing run. Twitter has been around for almost as long and only recently entered its death throes. Even Instagram which arrived "late" in web2.0 terms is over a decade old. We've all been spoiled by these marathon runs of social media services and have forgotten that before these, any popular Place To Be used to only last about 2 years before being smoked by something better, or just proving themselves to be generally unsustainable.
With that in mind, anyone and anything that contributes to the accelerated growth of the Fediverse is a good thing in my book, bearing in mind that accelerated growth comes with a shortened total lifetime. That just means we'll have something even better, sooner. When kbin and lemmy and mastodon all die, maybe even ActivityPub itself dies, to be replaced by some new technology, paradigm, interface, or experience 5+ years down the line.
I'm happy we're all here now but I don't expect to be here forever. Large scale investment and adoption absolutely will kill what is being built here, but that's just the nature of life and progress. Bring it on.
I'm of the same mind - I'll watch with great interest and welcome interaction with users on Meta-run instances, but I don't think it'll be much of a threat to the fediverse. The increased activity from Meta will in some ways be a rising tide that adds to the appeal of existing instances, and their development on top of ActivityPub will potentially be useful as case-studies of what kinds of UX can feasibly be built on top of ActivityPub, and may serve as lessons to existing fediverse projects that we can learn from as we find ways to provide good UX on top of a complex federated system - either as good examples of ways to present federated data structures in ways that are easy to understand, or as examples of what not to do if they do something that doesn't work well.
My limited understanding of this is once a Meta instance user follows or communicates with another user or magazine/collection on a kbin, Lemmy, Mastodon or any other Fediverse instance, that account is now accessible to everyone on that Meta instance. Other people with Meta accounts can see those kbin etc. posts on their federated timeliness. What that also means is that there is less of a reason to visit kbin, Lemmy etc. for their content and create an account in one of their instances. Meta becomes the face of the fediverse.. In other words, it can kill off the need for non-Meta instances. (Maybe I am misunderstanding this. If I am, please someone provide the correct info!)
I personally do not want a Meta instance account because I like the anonymity of my kbin and Mastodon (and Reddit) usernames. I updated my FB pic once and Meta automatically updated my IG one. My IG handle was automatically that of my FB one. It was very annoying (and inhibiting). I don't want everyone and their Nana seeing what my interests are.
Plus, it may just be another way to data mine and will be filled with ads and boosted posts from magazines im not subscribed to and people and hastags I have no interest in.
People who want Facebook accounts will make Facebook accounts.
The Fediverse isn't going anywhere. There will be plenty of people who don't want to make Facebook accounts, and they will live on existing instances as before.
Note that Meta is trying to make a Twitter clone. The "threadiverse" (Lemmy, Kbin, etc.) - while it can interop with Meta's Twitter clone - will always have a better UI for making content. Kbin and Lemmy will continue to have a reason to exist.
their development on top of ActivityPub will potentially be useful as case-studies of what kinds of UX can feasibly be built on top of ActivityPub
Absolutely. Devs at Facebook, Twitter, etc have built a ton of great things that have been adopted by web devs across the industry. I'm looking forward to what they do with ActivityPub that we get to 'steal'
Honestly, this is really good to hear! More mainstream accounts will definitely get the fediverse a bit more credibility.
And here's a bit more from BBC:
The team at BBC Research & Development are researching social technologies and exploring possibilities for the BBC. One part of our work is to establish a BBC presence in the Fediverse.
This is an experiment - we will run it for 6 months, and then look at how much value it has provided, how much work it requires to maintain and then decide whether and how to continue. We're learning as we go, and we'll write about what we discover in the hope that it might be useful for others. The BBC will continue its normal social media activity in the usual places.
We're starting off small with just a handful of accounts from R&D and our colleagues at BBC Radio, but we hope to be adding more accounts from other areas of the BBC soon:
FYI to anyone who doesn’t realize, you can follow each of those @names individually or just use the url https://kbin.social/d/social.bbc to subscribe to all social.bbc posts in kbin
Sorry, I’m a little new. I tried to sub but it brings up a login for Kbin. I created my account on .world. Will I be able to access this community w/o making a new account?
You can through kbin! There's a nice discussion of it here.
You can add their name to your kbin url like this: https://kbin.social/d/social.bbc. It should open the page as if it were a kbin magazine and have a subscribe button. After that, you should see it when you browse your subscribed threads (although it seems like it won't appear in your list of magazines).
Yeah even for large Media uploads I'll probably not use my own instances server and instead use something like YouTube or streamable. Since many instances don't even support displaying large Media at all i noticed. Like i uploaded a multiple hundreds MB video on my instance and on all Mastodon based instances it showed the file not being available.
Good question! By and large, some of the following would count as a "strike":
Poor moderation
Excessive spam
Most importantly: Making non-backwards compatible changes to the ActivityPub specification that may lead to the classic "Embrace, extend, extinguish" situation
Threads as it exists now is poorly moderated in that it is 90% shameless self-promotional commercial content.
If your instance doesn't have a policy against horrible undisclosed commercial promotion, I want nothing to do with it. If it does, Threads already has hundreds of thousands of strikes.
is it even possible to federate with them without receiving thousands of posts per minute of barely moderated content that would drown everything else in the feed?
Most importantly: Making non-backwards compatible changes
That's the shift into "Extend" - they won't do this until their Embrace phase has enmeshed their users with other fediverse users so that defederation affects people's subscriptions.
I'm actually hoping Google or Microsoft or Apple etc create a compatible activity pub based service. That would create balance and make 'extend' problematic for meta.
I also think we need state actors and universities to start using Mastodon (not Twitter) - again that would make it difficult for Meta to deviate from standards.
I’d say any automated/integrated effort to direct users of federated instances to the threads site to view content should count as a strike. (Such as needing to go directly to the threads site to view an image that could be easily posted anyway.)
So should any automated/integrated effort to encourage users to make their own threads account. (Such as needing an account to visit this link or view this image.)
Any attempt to coerce non threads users to sign any sort of agreement or TOS with threads.
As well as any data collection on non threads users. Merely interacting with a federated threads account should not entitle meta to any data collection of that user.
Very cool! I installed it but it looks like custom instances are disabled for a bit. I don't feel like setting up an account on the Artemis instance so I'll wait. Exciting to see progress though
but it looks like custom instances are disabled for a bit
I think its because the API the app uses isnt officially in the kbin code yet, so only the developers server supports it. Thats another great thing that only the fediverse can offer, spinning up your own server for your own versions.
What concerns me is that Meta will likely be on their best behavior at first, making people who are rightfully skeptical look like alarmists. Some instances will then decide that it’s okay to federate with Meta, because they’ve played nice.
If Meta is smart, they’ll only show their true colors gradually and with subtlety. We must expect them to play the long game. It’s vital to remember that no matter how friendly they seem, Meta will always do whatever looks most profitable. There is no profit for Meta in allowing the fediverse to continue untouched.
Which means there is nothing to worry about because admins will continue to shoot their own foot off. Not sure why it's such a big deal for people who will never use it anyway.
Because they're both part of the Fediverse, Lemmy and Kbin do federate with each other. You can follow Lemmy "communities" in Kbin, and Kbin "magazines" in Lemmy, and I believe other Fediverse groups (like Frendica groups) also federate.
I've been leaning into this from Kbin, as a way of dipping into communities on Beehaw and other Lemmy instances while keeping my distance from Lemmy's devs.
I have one concern. As we're seeing with Reddit, it's a huge effort to move internet communities. If Lemmy-the-app becomes untenable even for more reasonably admin'd instances, then the most obvious solution won't be to fork Lemmy (a huge undertaking) but rather to move to an app that's maintained by more reasonable people. That's probably going to involve a messy migration, some data loss, some loss of community, and some dead links.
I'll keep using Kbin as a way of tapping into existing communities, but when it comes to building new ones I'd much rather see it done on kbin.social or other Fediverse instances where there's no long-term dependency on Lemmy's devs.
The linked article summarizes the problems in the paragraph starting "I've been aware of Lemmy for a long time". For an alternative view: the Fedi.Tips account on Mastodon – typically a cheerleader for all apps of the FediVerse – shared some more pointed words about them in this thread and reiterated the warning just yesterday after noticing the Lemmy team's successful recruitment campaign on Reddit.
I was one of the people they recruited, and ran into problems myself only after signing up at lemmy.ml and being surprised by the amount of CCP propaganda posted there. At first I thought it was strange that I was being downvoted for pointing it out, and that the devs (also admins of that instance) ignored/downvoted me when I flagged the issue for their attention. After researching a bit, I found that Lemmy's basically developed and maintained by two people, both of whom seem to be westerners fetishizing Mao Zedong Thought – literally to the point of writing lengthy apologetics for the CCP's human rights abuses including the Uyghur genocide.
They're clearly skilled engineers, but I can't trust or support them, and relying on instance of Lemmy means I'd have to do both.
Absolutely. The details do seem to surprise people, but I think that's because they're often elided in euphemistic summaries and don't stand out in someone's profile history the way that trolling and right-wing invective often do.
It's not like they're all-caps yelling about gas ovens, they're just politely welcoming people into their instance and occasionally upvoting or suggesting that wellactually everything's fine in XinJiang and it's racist to believe Uyghurs who say otherwise, etc.
I was thinking whether I should add a remark that you can add your Gmail account to outlook.com as well, but I didn't want to over-complicate it. In the end, both Outlook (the program) and outlook.com are mail clients of a sort, the latter being a webmail client.
That's using your Google account, with Google's OAuth, to get into an Outlook account — which is still weird and confusing, and IMO something Microsoft shouldn't have done because it'll confuse people, but hey.
Do you actually sign into Outlook.com with your gmail account, or are you just reusing credentials to sign into a separate account on Outlook.com? I'm not sure that the two systems federate, but I've got an Outlook.com account that uses my gmail email address as the username, but the account is completely separate.
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