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…"
While I can't say I agree with the political views of the lemmy devs (at least as described in this article, as I have no other reference point), I think that it shows one of the really cool things about the fediverse. So what if those guys over there are weirdos? I can take the ball they gave me and go play somewhere else with other people.
Yeah can't say i am on board with the hardcore tankie stuff but like you said that's a positive of the fediverse other instances can choose not to play with them. Been on lemmy only for a few days but so far i haven't seen anything terrible, no more than the shit popping up on reddit now lol.
All the really obnoxious Tankie stuff seems to be contained to Lemmygrad, at least. I'm glad they had the foresight to cordon it off from their showcase instance.
You are missing the point that while you are free to do as you please, others also enjoy that same freedom. I don't WANT to make posts about fashion, cooking, politics, or non-techie things, but if you do, then by all means, please do that? Be the change that you would like to see in the world, and all that? I hope you find your bliss.
While I am at it though, "nobody talks about anything else" is objectively false - it is a "feels like" statement that falls prey to the hyperbolic fallacy that your POV is the only one that matters. In point of fact though, there are TONS of such discussions happening, right now, all across the Fediverse! Granted, probably not at the frequency that you want, or perhaps not as easily discoverable as you wanted. Have you considered that Reddit or Twitter or Facebook etc. may legit serve your needs better at the moment, and that's okay too?
And now we both are breaking your rule: discussing things about the fediverse. This place is for those with an early-adopter mindset: we don't have daddy spez over here "taking care of us", so we must build our own things. Thus, we often resort to talking about actions that involve that process - which I for one don't think is a bad thing? It makes us better, to have these civil conversations about how to make things better moving forward! Although I think your post is poorly written, using inflationary emotional language that misses several points. Even so, I am absolutely LOVING how the comment section here isn't full of harassers saying things like "U SUK", but instead people offering constructive feedback, both positive and negative. To me, THAT is the difference between this place vs. Reddit that makes me enjoy being here more than there. Even though, admittedly yes, it does have FAR less content, and it is all of a biased nature (towards the topics that we here enjoy posting about).
I don't WANT to make posts about fashion, cooking, politics, or non-techie things, but if you do, then by all means, please do that?
I didn't ask you to do those things, specifically. What kinds of hobbies do you have? Talk about those. If your topics are all tech-focused, that's fine, keep talking about those, but I'm really hoping I see people here talk more about pomeranians and nail polish, even though I'm not into either, because those topics will engage people who are into those things.
And now we both are breaking your rule: discussing things about the fediverse.
I think you misread my post. I did not say people should not talk about the fediverse, I just think we should post about other things, too. Especially if we want to see the fediverse succeed, we need more than just the meta-conversation.
is a direct quote from your post. We ARE talking about other things, just again, perhaps not at the frequency that you would like, or it being as discoverable as you would like.
I did not like how you worded your post, as if we were not, when we ARE - and I gave examples of that happening, thousands and thousands and thousands of times all across the fediverse.
If you want to take responsibility for the exact words that you said that may have mislead people into thinking that you are a Karen who is telling people what they "need" to do, then I offered my feedback in case that would be helpful. Fwiw, I do think you had a point, buried in there somewhere, I just think it is hard to find b/c your post had so many objectively false statements - "feels like" wording that if I stretch out really hard I could maybe guess at what you might have meant? (but which if you are honest with yourself, I hope you can see are factually incorrect)
And mixed in along with the false statements are the extremely obvious ones like:
People use social media to either talk to their friends or talk about their hobbies and interests.
I mean... yeah?
Admittedly, yes fashion does seem to be a neglected topic, but you cannot force people to create content for your amusement? Maybe make a post on Reddit about this place, targeted to fashion enthusiasts and gently advise them that this place exists too if they would want to come here? Or start posting there yourself, every single day and maybe multiple times a day, to help attract other like-minded individuals?
Also, why pick on fashion, but then add on cooking, as if it is the same - isn't that cherry-picking your details? Also:
We need people here talking about immigration policy.
But again, WE ARE - here's an article that is not even 20 minutes old yet.
TLDR: your post came across as telling others what to do, while not wanting to lead by example and actually do any of it yourself. Why not DO IT, rather than ask for all that work to be simply done for you? Again, I have no idea what thoughts were in your head as you wrote that, I'm simply saying that this is how your words strike me. Especially the statements that are outright falsehoods.
But if you are not interested in knowing the effects of your words on others, then I am sorry to have bothered you. Fwiw, I do think you meant well.
Some folks really don't understand they can absolutely get what they want out of the fediverse, they're that accustomed to the limits of the more mainstream options. It's whatever they want it to be. If you're tired of not seeing enough of something, there's nothing stopping you from creating your own instance or a community within a pre-existing instance and rallying others to engage. You're always bound to find someone with a few similar interests around.
It will never grow or change if nobody is willing to directly participate in what they wish to see grow or change.
How do favourites and up/down votes work? What are the different purposes of each?
I see this post is current at +24 and has 12 favourites. If I click on favourites (or boosts) at the bottom then I get a list of who favorited it.
But if I click on favourite in a comment, it just adds 1 to the favourite count.
I do wish that the up arrow and boost functionality would be reworked. Have up arrow actually be an upvote (the same as boost is now) and replace boost with a favorite function that would store the thread/comment in your profile so you can easily find it again
The up arrow is the equivalent of a boost on Mastodon, adding to favorites is represented by a star. The down arrow is equivalent to the Dislike button on Lemmy and Friendica, Mastodon probably doesn't have an equivalent (Dislike will be federated this week). Compared to Lemmy, it works a little differently, as the up arrow there is the equivalent of a favorite.
The comment activity can be checked by expanding the "more" menu and selecting "activity"
Is there any way to make "votes" (equivalent thereof) private? I don't want to have to think "do I want other people to know that I've liked this" every time I vote on something and that was a big draw to reddit for me compared to something like twitter.
They aren't visible from your profile. Only under the activity details of each comment. Someone would have to be really stalking you to keep track of all your upvotes.
Or someone checks through the activity of obscure posts and happens to find someone they know liking something they dislike or disagree with. It's not me, but my suggestion stands!
I think this is a sensible suggestion. Maybe it could be implemented through privacy settings. Right now, you can hide your subscriptions (they are public by default btw, fyi). Maybe it's possible to make it so you only upvote anonymously.
Pardon my ignorance, I checked faqs at the repo, and I’ve searched a bit here, and can not find privacy settings (fwiw I’m on mobile); how do I find it?
Tap on your username at the top, select Settings, and you should find a privacy section. Right now you can only toggle showing magazines or users you follow.
Just a reminder that nothing on the Fediverse is private. Because of the distributed nature, anyone with an instance can scrape everything you’ve ever posted and this is working as intended.
Direct messages are readable to whoever is hosting your instance and the instance of the person you send them to.
Be careful what you share on the Fediverse and be careful what you share when setting up an account
A correction/clarification for those people who are trying to find freedom of speech on Fediverse,
as Nate says, nothing on the Fediverse is private.
Because everything is transparent, and they all link to your personal email address.
Freedom of speech on Fediverse is still limted cuz it is not private, and still has moderator.
Most public platforms interacting with the Fediverse today does require you to register an email address out of practical considerations but this is not a requirement of the system in itself. It is possible to both post and read an unmoderated fediverse with enough effort.
If you don't like the moderation of your particular server, you are fully able to create your own or set up an existing solution yourself that gives you 100% control over what kind of content you post, and in turn which content you federate to your server. Of course, you can't control which servers decide to allow your content on their server, but any user of servers where your content is blocked can do the same and have access to your content again.
As far as privacy goes, you can rent servers and purchase domains with crypto currencies which are not traceable back to you where you can host your own service that interacts with the fediverse, making you 100% able to control the information you post into it.
Of course it can. They are simply 2 unrelated concepts. Expressing yourself on reddit was like going into public space, and yelling whatever you had in mind. Doing so on fediverse is the same, but with microphones picking up your yelling to propagate it around the world.
You can have Freedom to express yourself while respecting your privacy: just don’t yell it (i.e. chose a closed private invite only community) or go to som remote forest / desert where there is nobody to hear you yell. Join an invite-only group/room on signal or matrix.
Freedom and Privacy can only exist with common sense.
Hey, a month ago I would have simply pressde the button and not thought too much about it. Now the situation looks completely different. I have bookmarked all the discussions I came across, and next week I will read every single post to have a complete picture. I owe you that.
However, we need to think about additional privacy features, as priorities have drastically changed in recent weeks, and I will have to carefully consider that. Now that I have dealt with infrastructure issues, I will focus on the most important matters.
While I absolutely appreciate the commitment, you do not owe us that. You don't owe us anything really.
If you want to have a discussion, I suggest maybe you could make a thread where it's discussed officially, rather than you having to go through everything that has been written all over the place. We owe that to you. :)
My worry that many articles are going to have a biased take on the situation, or be coming from Mastodon etc. where things don't map up 1:1.
My perspective:
I moderate a medium-sized magazine here on Kbin (@Disneyland, about 264 subscribers here and a couple dozen elsewhere on the fediverse). You can't moderate a magazine from another instance, nor can you redirect a magazine somewhere else. This means I effectively must use Kbin.social, especially since I also mod the /r/Disneyland subreddit and have been redirecting people to our magazine for a month now.
I personally would like to see Threads here, if only because @disneyparks would be a nice fit to have automatically included in our microblog tab. I can't go to another instance that supports Threads because again - moderators on Kbin can't be from different instances. And besides - me being on another instance doesn't stop the fact that I couldn't have content from Threads automatically added here. So my options are basically "deal with it" or "abandon the community here".
It really sucks that there is a way that could make my magazine better by including actual official Disney sources in our Disney-themed magazine, but some people are afraid of EEE they are trying to keep that from everyone. I'd rather federate with Threads and allow users to individually block the domain if they desire.
If EEE is the worry, fight them at the "extend" step, not the "embrace" one.
If mountains of spam is the worry - people have to manually follow people from other instances for those posts to federate to Kbin, so not every single account will magically pop up here on Kbin. It'll be accounts that people on Kbin have followed; a small chunk.
Vice-versa, Threads is full of casual users who don't know much about the fediverse. Any Threads users interacting on Kbin are those who understand the fediverse and go out of their way to subscribe to Kbin magazines from Threads. We know from past history that these are going to be a minority; even within the fediverse, Mastodon is huge (and tech-savvy) but we see very few Mastodon folks posting to Kbin threads.
If "Facebook is sucking up all my data" is the worry, they could do that anyway. The fediverse is open and public; they can easily set up a "shadow instance" that federates everywhere and slurps everything. They don't need Threads for that.
If people just don't want to see Threads users at all, making the block button defederate on the account level would be wonderful. If people choose to block Threads, then Threads users couldn't see them and vice versa. People who see Threads as a potential useful resource (myself, for the magazine I mod) would still be able to have that content in the community here on Kbin. Everyone's happy.
and thus the entire issue with reddit. The glory of the fediverse is that there can be competition. You do not work for Disney, you do not own Disney. The community is not yours because you got to it first. If you want to own a Disney forum, start your own website.
We should not be allowing FB/IG to gain their foothold on the work of other people, yet again, so they can eventually take control once it's too late to stop them. Especially not because it would help your own ego and foothold on a community you do not own.
I am using "my magazine" as a colloquial term for "the magazine I moderate", obviously not as the term for "the magazine I own". I trust you know that and are arguing in bad faith.
You can go start your own magazine on another instance if you wish. The presence of one does not preclude competition. Heck, you can even start another one here; we had similar subreddits on Reddit. The /r/WaltDisneyWorld folks were an example of a bad mod team on a power trip, which caused splinter subreddits to pop up like /r/DisneyWorld. The /r/WaltDisneyWorld mod team came here to Kbin and sure enough Kbin has already splintered too - there's @WaltDisneyWorld (original WaltDisneyWorld mods), @DisneyWorld, and @wdw.
If you think you can do a good job running a Disneyland magazine, I'm not going to stop you from making DisneylandResort or DisneyParks or going to Lemmy and making something there. Competition is good and healthy.
But... I don't think you truly appreciate how much work moderating a community can be. I literally was a mod for 1 sizeable subreddit (I was a mod on 2-3 other subs, technically, but they had subscriber counts in the dozens and rarely saw activity).
I'd love to show you what moderating a subreddit with 500k subscribers really looks like. It gets bad. Gore, scat, porn, hate, bigotry, and trolling - you deal with it all. Death threats in modmail to boot. And we were just 500k subs! The former default subs have millions and they are far worse, I've been told.
We ran a community for folks to discuss a single topic: the Disneyland Resort in Anaheim, CA. Not Hong Kong Disneyland, not Disneyland Paris, not Walt Disney World. Those have their own subreddits, with their own communities and their own mod team (plus /r/disneyparks). I wasn't associated with any of them outside of small formalities; I only got to know them during the blackout when we did look into coordinating our own site. (More on that later.)
If each mod team didn't do their job, each sub would be overrun with posts that don't fit the sub. We're constantly removing posts about WDW or Disneyland Paris or Shanghai Disneyland or whatever. We're constantly removing posts from people talking about general Disney stuff that doesn't have anything to do with the park. It's a lot of work to curate a feed, and when the effort is made in good faith we redirect people to more appropriate places to talk about the things they're passionate about.
People joined that subreddit to talk about the Disneyland in Anaheim; many didn't care about Shanghai Disneyland or whatever. If we missed something and a person posts about the "wrong" park (which happens sometimes, even with AutoMod), the community generally comes in and downvotes the post (and sometimes insults the user). From their perspective, they're seeing some content they don't care about/want in their feed. And technically, per Reddiquette, that's what the downvote button is "supposed" to be for - sorting out things that don't belong.
It's like posting a TikTok link to /r/YoutubeHaiku or a picture to /r/videos - each community has a set of rules and a social contract to enforce them. That's what makes a good community with relevant content that makes you come back. Without a good mod team, a subreddit gets overrun with posts that don't fit the sub - you can see some of that here on Lemmy/Kbin already. This is both because mod tools are lacking (no AutoMod) and because people are changing instances as they see fit. For example, @Starwars is abandoned, I think - the only(!!!) mod hasn't been active in weeks. I've seen things here like videos in the politics communities and other things that wouldn't fly with larger mod teams.
(Continued from parent due to post length constraints.)
You say we should move off-site. There's already a large general-purpose forum for Disney: MiceChat. It's a classic non-federated forum, from a bygone age of the internet. People who aren't attached to a Reddit-like interface typically are on MiceChat, or one of the thousands of Disney Facebook groups. They're the largest Disney community on the internet.
We discussed running our own Disney-themed Kbin instance (like /r/StarTrek and /r/Android both did), that would be a federated competitor to MiceChat. The idea still appeals to me. But the fact of the matter is that we didn't have the time nor money to be admins. I have a full-time job where I can't be spending time working as an admin all day (and - fun fact - I actually did work for Disney, formerly), and I don't have the legal know-how to host a website.
Making a community on someone else's instance doesn't have those same issues. kbin.social has a sane admin team and is permissive with federation, giving the magazine a large reach (but keeping out hate speech and trolls). There are people on here who want to participate in their hobbies - like going to Disneyland, which for many is a hobby - or who want to use the community as a resource (and the Disneyland subreddit was a resource, too).
Because at the end of the day - it is a lot of work, but seeing a thriving community is rewarding. You grow attached to it. It's why people play simulation games; you help shepard people along, make people happy, and watch the line go up. It's not "ego" any more than playing a city builder game is "ego". I certainly never threw my weight around on Reddit; our subreddit was positively tiny compared to others. The only time I used my green badge on Reddit was to give people warnings or make community-wide announcements. The only time I mentioned I was a mod elsewhere was when I needed a "fun fact" to introduce myself with at work/school or when it's directly relevant (like letting people on the fediverse know that the magazine here is run by the same team that ran it on Reddit).
The Disneyland subreddit was a good community, IMO. The whole mod team did a lot of work to keep it good, and I was proud to help out. Connecting people with the resources they need and letting them show off the things that made them excited, while keeping the spambots and trolls at bay and redirecting lost folks to the right spot. It's something you need to experience to understand.
One thing that was missing was Disney's direct involvement. Disney never contacted us. Even when I worked for them - corporate knew I was a mod there but left us alone since it was considered my personal business (my only restriction was that I couldn't say I was speaking officially on behalf of the company). As long as the sidebar said that we were fan-run, Disney never said a peep. Because Disney didn't have any official presence on Reddit, folks would frequently repost news shared by Disney to the subreddit directly.
Threads gives us a unique opportunity to be able to connect folks to official Disney social media right here on Kbin. They'd be able to interact 2-way without needing to make a Threads account themselves (and without Disney needing to come here officially). It's really the best thing that could happen for that type of community, and it would be a shame to lose out on it.
Question, is MiceChat connected to Disney corporate in any way, or are they a fully independent website, of/by/for disney fans?
I hope you see where I'm going with this question and the fact they are the largest community, still around from the "bygone era of the internet". If you allow FB/IG/Threads to gain their foothold, you will not be around 20 years later. If MiceChat had integrated into FB/Reddit/etc, they would not be around anymore, especially not in the independent way they are.
btw, I wasn't arguing in bad faith. the idea of the power hungry power mod of reddit is a widely known concept. Immediately trying to disregard my argument on that continues to show your fragility in your control of your community.
Idk if you're familiar with GenCon, a board game convention in Indy, but I've run the unofficial Discord server since 2017. While not even close to as big as the official server, made in 2020, the users have stayed on our little server and we still gain new users each summer. The thing is, I don't run the server like some big corpo project, but literally as a diy space where people can feel comfortable asking questions and getting to know each other, myself included. I don't ban folks without community input, because while I have the sole power to do so, it's not my community, it's ours. GenCon LLC has never reached out to me, because I'm not trying to do what they do, and I don't care about them because of the same reason. I'd wouldn't mind having a larger number of users, but at the same time, I'd rather keep the community feel homegrown, and not artificially inseminated (with money).
To bring it all around again, kbin and the fediverse works because it is homegrown and community based. Waaaaaaaay back when, Reddit was the same, but being centralized, that will cause problems, thus the problems of the past months. kbin and the fediverse at large (not so much just the AP protocol) will continue to succeed without corpo takeover and influence. It can breed discussion and community without trying to make money off of it. Give them an inch, and they will redefine what an inch is so that it includes all inches in perpetuity.
I'm not bothered by it being federated with kbin, and if I don't like it, I should be able to ban the whole domain on my account on kbin. So I hope he doesn't give in to peer pressure to preemptively defederate with them before I can see what they are about.
Having the freedom to make my own choices like a fucking adult is why I'm here instead of Lemmy.
I understand your point but you also have the freedom to just go join threads yourself without the rest of us having to deal with the nonsense that it will bring here to kbin. I honestly don't see how this could end up a net positive for the verse.
Additionally, @BaroqueInMind has the option of creating their own kbin instance and federating with Threads that way.
I so often see this presented as "choosing what others see" when it's not just about that. It's about choosing how many/which kind of people are coming onto this platform and interacting with us.
The article Ernest posted mentions a "firehose". Politics of EEE aside, It's totally okay if instance admins don't want to deal with the strain that puts on servers, moderation etc.
This is way too simple of a view. It’s about what happens to kbin. Threads will be huge and generate a lot more content. Eventually there will be people joining Kbin just to view Threads content. Kbin’s own content will never match the output of threads. That gives meta a lot of leverage against kbin.
Threads can pull an API pricing trick just like reddit, unless Kbin bends to their will. And since kbin users are just here to view threads content, they basically have to. Who knows, maybe threads will develop a new advertising platform plugin and charge API access for any platform that doesn’t agree to it. To make the money back from “lost ad revenue”.
Of course if you only care about what you see and not the fediverse platform itself, then it doesn’t matter to you.
Hopefully no credible Fediverse platform actually federates with their trojan horse. If we let Zuck, or anyone like him, become a major player in the ActivityPub world, pretty soon we're going to end up right back where we started.
Genuinely curious as I'm new to all of this, why would it matter? Isn't that the whole point of the fediverse? If their spyware app interfacing with it is what gets the casual users into it who already have Meta's spyware installed, you can still use the fediverse from whatever service you prefer, right?
what they could potentially do is to post Ads across the fediverse, and their sales-pitch could be something along the lines "hey look, for just 20 bucks a month, your AD can be shown on 1500 other domains and not only on FB.com"
A few others have commented below, but from a top level perspective I'd argue that taking a relatively small platform like the fediverse and smushing it with Facebooks user base would dilute the community / environment.
If meta federates with everyone, it'll be a huge uplift in quantity as new people start posting, but the quality I feel would be impacted.
I imagine it would be like pouring a small cup of liquid and a big container of liquid into the same bowl, one would definitely dilute the other.
I have no doubt their backend would eventually somehow be able to link you to other accounts and create shadow profiles of you just like they have with their other products.
It's more or less the same problem as XMPP (end-to-end encrypted, federated chat protocol) had with Google Talk.
All users went to Google and then Google broke interoperability with federated servers, leaving them dead/unable to communicate with the majority of users.
Later Google killed the project as they always do. XMPP is still around, but the userbase is very small.
The "fediverse" has been gaining traction recently, the fear is that Meta comes in with 1.2bn users, gets everyone on their service and the breaks federation, leaving the rest of the fediverse a drying carcass as they "move on".
Personally, I don't really care about the "popularity contest" - I'm not here because the community is large, I'm here because it isn't. Signal > Noise. So I'm all for defederation.
The TL;DR is "so it doesn't become XMPP" - if a big player from the corporate internet world achieves significant sway over the Fediverse, that gives them a position of power to steer the platform itself, eventually letting them undermine the whole "open-source" and "decentralised" part of it entirely before taking their chunk of the federation private, effectively kneecapping the remaining communities outside the walled garden.
If you've ever heard "the three Es" - Embrace, Extend, Extinguish, best known from the Microsoft antitrust days - that's what we're worried about happening here.
Honestly I think a lot of it is that the Fediverse (especially Mastodon) wants to remain a small community relatively isolated from regular social networks, and a very big instance would ruin that. It’s very similar to Usenet when AOL customers got access to it (en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eternal_September).
Some people are worried about Meta having their data, but anything you post publicly in the Fediverse is, by definition, public. A whole heap of servers have your data, and even today some of the federated servers could be operated by large companies. How would you know? My Lemmy server is federating with over a thousand others… I don’t know who runs all of those or what they’re doing with the data…
I’m still trying to wrap my head around Fediverse concepts as well but the thing that stands out for me is that there is a history of private companies effectively killing open source projects.
For us, the vulnerability is ActivityPub. If Meta begins “contributing” to a foundational Fediverse technology, they have the resources to extend the protocol in a way that benefits Meta only, at a pace that only a company with the resources of Meta can.
Yep. Just like how we don't want any particular web browser core becoming the standard core as opposed to having a common web protocols that anyone can write a browser to use. We saw what a mess people writing for only Internet Explorer became, and even Microsoft felt the pains of that when they wanted to retire Internet Explorer. The legacy of that remains to this day when coming across under or non funded web sites created through contract funding or grant funding and then not updated.
I certainly can see the same things happening long term with a large corporate entity joining the Fediverse, initially 'contributing' some great feature, and then in the future having a large number of instances dependent on that feature and having the tables turned by the corporate entity saying "Oh, well, we're charging for this now." You know... kind of like what just happened with Reddit and third part readers.
Similarly, if the Earth can’t survive Exxon, it was never going to succeed in the first place.
I just have to keep on hammering this point, because it pisses me off so, so much. Many people seem to believe that, since regulatory bodies can be captured, that regulation shouldn’t be done. This is called learned helplessness, and it’s something malicious people inflict on people they want to exploit.
It isn’t sticking your head in the sand to resist assimilation by an evil corporation.
Similarly, if the Earth can’t survive Exxon, it was never going to succeed in the first place
Actually, yes. The reason Exxon is fucking the planet right now is because of weak regulation. If we can't build a system that is resistant to the threat of earth destroying corporations, we were never going to succeed in the first place.
Your post is arguing (by analogy) that we shouldn’t even bother trying. But I guess you don’t need a suicide note when you can just leave a copy of Atlas Shrugged by your body.
On the contrary, I'm just saying if you build something and it gets co-opted by a corporation it probably wasnt meant to be.
It's like when people talk about politicians being bought out by corporations. If that's something that can even happen, it's the fault of a broken system that would even allow that to happen.
This is a very computer sciencey view, which is why I leapt past the intermediate logic straight to its conclusion. But I’ll spell it out.
There is no rules-based system that will actually stand in the way of determined, clever, malicious actors. To put it in CS-style terms, you’ll never cover all the contingencies. To put it in more realistic terms, control systems only work within certain domains of the thing being controlled; partly this is because you start getting feedback and second-order effects, and partly it’s because there’s a ton of stuff about the world you just don’t know.
If a system is used as intended, it can work out fine. If someone is determined to break a system, they will.
This is why the world is not driven by rules-based systems, but by politics. We’re capable of rich and dynamic responses to problems, even unanticipated problems. Which is to say, the only actual solution to Exxon and Meta is to fight back, not to bemoan the inadequacy of systems.
Indeed, this belief in technocracy is explicitly encouraged by malicious elites, who are aware that they can subvert a technocracy.
What he said is right though. Let me put it this way, politics has a system it's relied on. Ancient Greece has its own style of democracy. Current US has its own style of democracy. The EU has its own kind of system. Here's the thing to consider, the content and state of the system can change over time, but the low level of it - the rule to how the changes can happens or how things operate - rarely changes. Politics can change the rules within the system, but it doesn't typically change or revise the foundation of the system. When revision of the system foundation is so rarely done, the things taking advantage of this foundation obviously don't get solved.
When you say someone who wants to break a system will, it's actually because the base of the system doesn't change so the abuse can keep happening. Let's use US politic as an example. Gerrymandering is a problem. There's no sign of it getting fixed and continue to be a problem even now. The reason is because the current system had made it so that the decision to do so could never come to past, at least not easily. It's a deadlock. If instead the system is revised from the ground up this would be as simple as reasoning during the redesign process that the current method is broken and it isn't good at representing the people so it should not be used. Currently that's not how it's being solved, and it's like trying to fix a problem on your computer without the option to shut down or reset the device.
What he's saying is the system is broken like that and we're not solving it by the most efficient method (mainly due to it being so costly). Even so, sometimes it's just better to scrap and start anew.
That said, I don't think it applies to Fediverse at the moment. It's so new that there are so many ways it could develop and if it fails that doesn't imply the concept of Fediverse is never supposed to succeed. It may just be because the best steps to manage it wasn't taken. Going back to the political analogy, it's like having just the concept of democracy as a framework. But it hasn't been decided yet whether this democracy is going to be dominated by just two parties (like the US), or has many different parties with ranked voting (like the UK). Both are democracies but the foundations and implementations are different. And well, one works better than the other.
Things are politically stagnant because people believe that politics is about systems. Politics is about power, and politics will always be an expression of the dominant power dynamics. Governmental systems are just how power is explained to outsiders; it’s a mythology that’s told to disguise the real nature of power.
So the question of systems is a red herring, that’s been carefully instilled. This has been true for all history: Many kings don’t really rule, courtiers do. Only kings who can effectively wield power rule, and they’re historically in the minority. This should also be obvious in the US: corporate power is only ever checked in the presence of enormous public action. Not public bitching, public action—general strikes being the most important example.
Or to put it really bluntly, while there’s a lot of pageantry in politics, what politics actually is, is power struggles. But they sure don’t want people to recognize this, which is why there’s so much pageantry and partisanship.
This is also why the government is going so hard against Trump, but letting Pence, Clinton, and Biden slide. It’s not because they cooperated—if you or I had security clearances and just took documents out of a SCIF and kept them at home, we’d be in jail. It’s because Trump clumsily challenged existing power, namely the federal bureaucracy (which he conspiratorially calls the “deep state”), and he wasn’t up to the task.
They're not really "duplicate". Each instance has it's own magazines/communites/whatever, and those can have different rules, moderators, etc.
If you want to follow all of them, then follow all of them. If you only want one of them, then do one of them. Reddit had various subreddits all on the same topic, for instance /r/technology and /r/tech, and they had their own nuances, users, rules, etc. One might end up being more popular than the other for whatever reason.
Also keep in mind that they're subject to rules/moderation/control of the instance they're on. I'm using kbin.social, but if beehaw decides to do some weird thing or decide they no longer want a technology group, it's basically out of my control. Whereas a technology group here on kbin.social wouldn't be effected by beehaw's stance for their instance as a whole.
I imagine people interested in a topic will just follow all the related groups unless there's an issue with one of them.
I'm new to the fediverse but have a long history with FOSS and P2P. Realistically, the fediverse is not a money-making venture. It's a passion project to fill a gap in existing software offerings. The source code is hosted online (just confirmed by visiting kbin and Lemmy on GitHub). But the reason they can run without massive influxes of cash is because they are P2P in the resources they consume (fediverse style).
So donations are key. @ernest won't get rich on donations, but they can keep him supported while he develops and maintains kbin, and his experience with kbin could underpin and propel a very prosperous software engineering career, where his reputation precedes him. The passion project continues and the software remains in positive development. I've done the exact same thing in my career and I'm probably 5-10 years ahead of where I'd otherwise be because of my FOSS passion project.
Since the fediverse is a peer-to-peer structure with freely available foundational software, anybody can pitch in resources. Anybody with a computer, an Internet connection, and some sysadmin skills can run a fediverse server. Mileage will vary based on connection speed, hard drive space, etc, but it's completely doable. Lemmy/kbin servers are probably going to be the next most popular service that homelabbers start hosting, and peak-demand can be offset with scalable solutions like virtual servers (VPS offerings like AWS, but these cost more immediate $).
So knowing that, hopefully your question is answered. Short story is the fediverse follows the peer-to-peer (P2P) backbone that torrenting and other piracy methods used (e.g. Napster or Soulseek, but without a central server!) and similar to Tor as well. I specifically name those networks because P2P networking has been incredibly resilient for decades (except Napster, whose central server was shut down).
Decentralization is not only the future, I fear it’s our only hope of maintaining an internet that is truly free as opposed to one built solely for data collection and corporate profit.
To that end. Passion project can end of life, if the dev quits or have other priorities in life. Also something to keep in mind that comes with decentralized structure - the lack of invested continuity.
Perhaps some form of replication could come to the fediverse. If instances can choose to work together to canonically replicate content, that would increase resilience.
The other side of that coin, though, is that money turns something into an obligation, and obligations are soul crushing.
People can always offer to accept a transfer of ownership from a retiring admin. That's happened multiple times on the Fediverse in the past year, and it used to be relatively common back in the days of community forums.
I pay for a seedbox that has 4TB of storage and ungodly speed. Technically I could load my own instance of Kbin yeah? But then what? To be useful to the fediverse at large wouldn't I have to open it up to the public to use? What would attract users to some randos kbin server over any other?
The fediverse is a step towards p2p but there is further to go before "anybody" can pitch in resources. Running a server is not for everyone, I've done it and won't do it again (I've been doing this stuff for a long time BTW).
This creates an imbalance been those running and controlling servers and those not, which has a number of downsides which in the extreme lead to capture and centralisation. The fediverse is a fantastic attempt to reduce those downsides (FOSS, portable accounts etc) but the server/service model remains at the core of the downsides including as the OP asks, how this can be funded and sustained.
IMO the fediverse will struggle to do this at scale. It is here to stay but will find it difficult to reach so many of the population because while small it remains separate, and where it scales sufficiently it becomes attractive for capture and centralisation.
So IMO we need something that breaks from the server model as well as solving the problem that not everyone can contribute resources, and I'm hoping p2p projects can do that.
If there was a p2p network where anyone can contribute resources just by running an app, and anyone can use by paying those running those apps, I think we would be able to have the nice things we want - at increasing scale - without fear of capture, and the real prospect that everyone can participate without being made subjects and exploited.
Is there any reason an instance couldn't just copy Reddit's model? (Advertising that's hidden if you subscribe, paid awards, etc.)
The beauty of federation isn't that we have a million instances. It's that if there's a problem with one instance (such as greed), we can just go to another. In effect it adds competition instead of walled gardens.
Even if there's only a couple big instances that make up the majority of users it's not really a problem as long as the federation option holds. It's not the leaving that makes federation great, it's the ability to leave.
An instance can do whatever it wants, within the terms of the license of the software it runs.
But so can every other one. And ad drive social media has demonstrated itself to be toxic social media. So, you'll end up with a lot of other sites defederating from it.
Being ad driven is what has led to Reddit doing what it's doing, after all. The people who have come here from there should be much more concerned about emulating that kind of model all over again. Otherwise, why not just stay there?
It needs to be a subscription model, an ad model, or a donation model. It's not free to host a website especially one with millions of users. I think a Wikipedia style model could work.
True, I always throw a few euro at Wikipedia when it needs some, and I regularly fund the open source software I use (like Krita).
I'd be curious to know if there are any data on how many people on average would donate to support something they deem valuable vs people who don't.
I mean, this is not a project started for profit, but if a significant chunk of reddit migrates here, it could get a pretty penny just out of donations, I think.
While I'm not discouraging you from donating to the Wikimedia Foundation, it's worth knowing that it's not really a situation of Wikipedia needing your money to survive. Last year's fundraising drive provoked something of a revolt among contributors (they seem to be going around). While it's spread across several pages, the English Wikipedia Request for Comment discussion is probably a good place to start.
In short, the Wikimedia Foundation runs those fundraising drives, previously presented as if they were coming from Wikipedia itself, asking for donations to "keep the site running". In reality, these donations go to the Foundation and are used to fund its "sister projects", leading to a situation where "Wikipedia" is asking for donations that are neither necessary for Wikipedia to survive, nor in most part, going toward Wikipedia at all.
I'm not suggesting the Wikimedia Foundation is off committing acts of evil with your donations, but the Foundation has significant wealth, to the point where they themselves actively donate large amounts to other charities like the human rights org Tides Foundation, with which it shares some current or former staff.
tl;dr: Wikipedia isn't actually struggling financially, isn't asking for donations, and your donations to Wikimedia are in reality going largely to other causes.
If you're a former Redditor, I hope this multi-paragraph "Akshually" screed makes you feel at home.
The idea that any given instance here is going to host "millions of users" is, uh... Frankly, kind of counter to the point of the whole space, really.
Millions of users will be spread out over thousands of instances, and those instances cost from a few dollars to a couple hundred dollars per month to run. Most of these will be primarily funded by the admins' day jobs.
There will be a couple of very, very large servers, which will be a bigger money sinks, but those have also successfully been funded via donations, and are usually run by the underlying software maintainers.
At present, and throughout Rexxit, most need users are going to rock to the largest instances. Yes, this is contrary to the spirit of the fediverse, but it is consistent with the perception of Rexxitors. Perhaps eventually, things will spread out . I think the initial de facto centralization will persist for some time.
It depends on the scale, and on who the advertisers are. The whole idea that ads-based social media is toxic isn't due to annoyance, but due to the fact that it incentivizes the hosts to extend user sessions and stimulate engagement. That means promoting more controversial content, and refusing to moderate toxic people.
The hardware is getting smaller and cheaper, it’s coming pre built with Docker and decentralized apps. It’s catching up. I see a future where you type a command and you have a running instance on your network. On a usb drive. Wherever.
I don't understand why all fediverse CMS written in php.
If authors used go/rust/java it should handle lots of users much easier.
Imo tools that has purpose to serve thousands of concurrent users should consider energy efficiency.
Kinda. PHP is fine for web workloads. Don't forget Facebook tried to move off PHP and wrote Hack/HHVM because of the performance. It just happens that PHP 7 was faster.
I've not looked at the codebase, but there are probably some routines (search) that could be done faster outside pure PHP/Postgres.
The dev seems to have done a pretty good job with this though, performance issues are likely server load more than the stack. Not sure what he's running this on...
@symfonystation Yes, I don't think php is the problem here. It's rather about devops matters, in which I am completely inept. But I have already sought help, I just need a little more time.
IIRC Lemmy is Rust, Mastadon is Rails, Pleroma is Erlang. I'm not a huge fan that Kbin was PHP, but PHP is a lot better than it was. Presumably the dev is more capable with PHP and for basic web work it's fine.
What I think they should probably focus on is offloading some of the work for search etc. onto external services like Elasticsearch. As far as I have seen Mastadon is the only one that makes use of this. Maybe it's too expensive to run up other services like this though.
PHP today is amazing compared to the version 5.0 days, it persists because it is actively worked on and is very mature. Can't speak for symphony though, never tried that framework. Laravel is another nice framework for php.
Fediverse servers are written in all kinds of languages. Mastodon is in Ruby (using Rails), Pleroma, Akkoma, and Bonfire in Elixir, GoToSocial is in Go, Misskey and Calckey in typescript (using Node). Whatever works!
If as the link suggests this is from 2018 a lot (!) has changed at least in the JS world and the Python world. Can't speak for the others. Would be nice to see the underlying paper to see how the author defines the measurements, ie whose time is being measured, system (speed), development?
Not to mention that paper doesn't list the versions of those languages being used. PHP has some major performance improvements over the last few years.
This person (link below) is creating a nice reddit alt using Rust. I know its Rust because I spoke with them. I think this php site can work very efficient with proper caching, file storage (storing images and videos elsewhere), and db optimization. I think Flask/FastAPI is quite fast as well. I ran a small site using flask with 250 concurrent users using light calculations for the backend a couple years ago on my home server and it still loaded extremely fast. I am seriously curious what sort of server or shared hosting this site is being ran off of, because one article every 15min to an hour makes me believe its not extremely bogged down with traffic, yet its still not performant. Maybe its a host issue of being ran using a slow shared hosting service, idk. https://www.reddit.com/comments/13x0hzo
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