I think it all comes down to why does Meta do anything?Money. And, the timing of their supposed interest in the Fediverse is after the second notable exodus from a major social network. Meta sees more people & more engagement here which equates to more potential profits on their end.
I looked into Mastodon after the whole Twitter thing in November, but I didn't really use Twitter, so an alternative at the time didn't make sense for me. However, I was an avid Reddit user for the last nine years, so when these API changes came to light and my app (Sync) was going to cease to exist, well I took the Fediverse alternatives more seriously and realized that ActivityPub is awesome technology that is now invaluable to the internet.
And, the timing of their supposed interest in the Fediverse is after the second notable exodus from a major social network. Meta sees more people
Project 92 has been on the news since at least May 20, a couple of weeks before the Reddit drama, and it seems that they have been testing it with influencers for months.
I wholeheartedly agree with the sentiment about Facebook, but I think some of these takes fail to get the whole picture. Facebook isn't interested in us, Fediverse users and our communities. As you said, they only care about money. And the money today is in creating a competitor to Twitter. Mastodon happens to have an open-source Twitter clone, and Facebook can use it without spending much in coding. Also, the federation aspect allows advertisers to defederate from problematic communities, which is why they're leaving Twitter.
Meta sees more people & more engagement here which equates to more potential profits on their end.
According to the article that I linked, every Instagram account will carry to a Project 92 account. There are like 2 million Lemmy accounts, and a few millions more of Mastodon accounts. Instagram has billions, with b, of accounts. We are anecdotal in comparison with the engagement that the migrated Instagram users will create.
We are not Meta's target. We are the ones that will suffer their consequences.
I completely understand the sentiment while simultaneously completely disagreeing. The idea of the fediverse, and seeing it play out explicitly with the various multiple posts and other things is kind of sexy to me in a technological and aspirational sense. I dig how janky this whole thing can sometimes be. It's part of the appeal for me. As it matures and becomes more streamlined over time all of that will surely change and get cleaner and easier to use. Which will be awesome to see. But I greatly appreciate what it is now for the time that it will be. Being in close to the ground floor of this is really fun. I loved Usenet back in the day. I remember and loved reddit at the very very beginning. I love and appreciate this shit for what it is while it still is this. This has legs. And people will be nostalgic for this time later on. Love it now too while enjoying watching it grow.
I have my skepticisms about this whole thing. While I know the answer is "they will be defederated", what if one of the big ones, like lemmy.world or lemmy.ml get huge, then sell out to something like Meta?
We lost 3rd party apps and we are mourning the biggest breakup we've ever had with reddit. Say the server you've had your account on for so long and all your content gets taken over by a giant with strategically placed adds that are upvoted by bot armies for visibility. They may get defederated, but that means Meta just came in and destroyed a huge chunk of users accounts while gaining some ad revenue for a bit until the community dies. Everyone has to actively pack up their shit and move to another instance. I guess the loyalty to an account is less with a lack of account karma so it wouldn't burn as bad.
You would lose all your subscribed communities when you are forced to move out. That would suck. Too bad you couldn't export like a .db file from your account on the way out and upload it to another account on another instance. Possibly some sort of encrypted key so you can auto add as a mod to any community you were modding on your previous account. No clue if that makes any sense. Kinda Like a lemmy "Go-Bag"?
I don't know, just thinking ahead of the shenanigans that's going to happen if this really starts making a dent in huge corporations user counts.
Edit: I know there is likely no way to ever be able to move your content or comments. The logistics of remapping all of that to another account is likely impossible. Not sure how it works on the backend, but I'm pretty sure your home instance keeps track of your profiles history from your perspective, and all the instances you comment or post on only have record of where it came from. i.e. your username@instance, if your home instance where your profile is gets defederated, the only record of your existence is your scattered posts throughout the fediverse. And scanning the whole fediverse for your content from a new account you set up would be impossible. Even if your instance is not defederated and you just want to move it would still take editing the posting username to your new username on every comment you made. I guess that would be possible, but content is going to come and go as instances come and go anyways. It just is what it is, that is the downside of decentralization.
I wonder how it does work on the backend? Does your profile on your home instance save a copy of all of your content across the fediverse? Or does it just save the address to the post? If an instance you posted on dissappears, does any evidence of it exist in your post history? Or does it dissappear?
I wonder if there could be a universal subscribed communities + followed users data format people could export before they move instances. Hard part would be getting everyone to use it
I think in the long run, the descendent of ActivityPub will look kind of like Freenet, where the content is completely dissociated from the node from which it was posted and instead propagates across nodes mirrored in proportion to popularity. (Obviously a social media protocol would be very different from Freenet in terms of things like ownership/attribution and moderation of content, of course.)
I don't think lemmy as a whole can be sold out to Facebook since it's open source, right? (Also why it's not a total dealbreaker for me that the original devs are tankies, since they won't be profiting off us using it.)
I don’t think lemmy as a whole can be sold out to Facebook since it’s open source, right?
Yes, but lemmy is even more resilient. It is licensed as AGPL-3.0.
That is a copyleft license which requires anyone using the code publicly (e.g. to run a proprietary server) to make their code public and permit free usage of it. And they must not change the license.
I don't see the point of buying something which is already freely available to everybody, especially since you are not allowed to hide it, even partially, or modify the free nature of it.
What could more reasonably be sold is data, visibility and userbase (big, active instances).
I wonder if it would make sense to use PGP keys to link accounts so you could tell it’s the same user even if they make an account on a different server. It could be used to verify users so they could remain a mod for all their existing communities as well as confirm they are the same person.
Maybe there'll be a standard for threadiverse that each software like Lemmy and Kbin will eventually follow. A standard that lets us migrate from Lemmy to Kbin and others easily. Then, if at some point some software becomes GPL-licensed, we don't have to be worried about software overtake like MS did with Minecraft.
Popular pieces of software that's part of the fediverse usually give you either:
Export options - manual export options intended for GDPR-Compliance and peace of mind
Account Move options - Mastodon is best known for this, as you can migrate your profile (but not your posts and followers) to another instance. Anyone which then visits your old page will have it blurred out, linking to your new one.
#2 could be expanded in the case of Kbin and Lemmy to also include subscribed communities/magazines, settings and some other things where Federation allows for it.
Search indexing is also a huge problem. While it's possible to create a search index over all content local to a given server, maintaining an index over all content on all servers that you federate is a much bigger issue. And that's before we get to the problem of migrating associated content when a profile moves from one server to another.
Same here. My domain name and email address will turn 30 next March. I've been doing this since the days when Usenet posts were transmitted across sites using UUCP.
We will always find the next place. Reddit has peaked and is destroying itself and it's time to move on.
Yeah, a lot of these concerns strike me as coming from people who don't remember the time before the big, centralized media sites. Hopping from forum to forum, making new friends and learning new things along the way, is all part of the adventure.
Mastondon does allow you to export your profiles and set them up on a different instance; I reckon some folks will figure out a solution on how to easily jump ship.
This is one of the biggest things I think Lemmy needs. You should be able to create a backup of your profile and export/import it into another instance. That way if something happens or you have a problem with the instance admins you can migrate with no loss or minimal loss to your account.
Yep, the devs have said it's on the radar, but will probably be a while. Not too many contributors and their priority is to work on stability and bug fixes first
i'll be honest hearing lemmy while being on kbin threw me into a loop, made me wonder if i was in a lemmy community and not a kbin magazine lmao. i gotta get used to this.
But yeah, both Lemmy and Kbin need the same flexibility of Mastodon. The more easily one can move, the less likely megacorps will see value in gobbling up instances. Long-term goal might be cross-platform profile compatibility, but right now that's a pipe dream.
For Kbin, you might want to check out the @kbinStyles magazine. Folks are creating tweaks for Kbin in the meantime that improve functionality like this :)
Oh I know how the Fediverse works, I was just commenting on how sometimes I have to question which instance the post is hosted on. For example, I see you're on lemmy.world.
I think one limiting factor that has yet to be addressed is that you can move your profile, but you can't move your content. Another is identity. How do you know which Mastodon server has an authoritative (i.e. "blue-check") profile for a given person/entity?
edit: Search indexing is also a huge problem. While it's possible to create a search index over all content local to a given server, maintaining an index over all content on all servers that you federate is a much bigger problem.
Again, it's just like email. Anyone can set up an email address with any yourname@whatever. If you really want an identity then you can eg, publish pgp keys. Presumably at some point we'll have a way of signing posts/accounts.
This was my thought too. Migrating an identity is one thing. What does your content even mean? All posts, comments, and votes? They wouldn't make sense without context of the thread. That's an awful lot of data because it's not yours alone. Just think about migrating entire communities and their history. That's a lot of duplication! Please elucidate me if I'm misinformed.
I guess for the privacy conscious and content creators, one solution of this would be to host your own instance just for yourself. You control the domain and what's hosted. I could setup @thorned@rose.social and store my content on my server. In much the same vein as custom emails - hello@rose.social could be my email (technically I could have thorned@rose.social but that could be confusing with only a dropped @ but anyways).
Obviously this is not going to be a solution for everyone and it would be good to have a way to backup your content and be able to move it between servers. But in the mean time, it's a workable solution for those who find it important enough to go down that route. 🤷🏻♀️
I guess for the privacy conscious and content creators, one solution of this would be to host your own instance just for yourself.
That's exactly what I did. Have it running in docker containers at a VPS provider for $5/month and ship backups off to Backblaze nightly.
Never have to worry about my "home" instance dying/suddenly disappearing or defederating other instances. I like to self-host when it makes sense to, and this is definitely a situation where it makes sense.
Mastodon has the seeds of this authority in that you can put links on your profile and then have them flagged by putting code on the website. So my Mastodon account could have a link to kazuyadarklightofficial.com and the flag proves I own/control that site. So if you know/can determine that site is THE KazuyaDarklight site, then you know you have the right Mastodon account.
Wow that’s actually an incredibly clever way to go about handling verification. But does this add a check mark to the users account ie twitter? Or does it just add a little note confirming the ownership of the linked site? Could I in theory just make a website, set up the flag, and be “verified”? Or is there more too it than that?
I feel there will at some point be a "this is why we can't have nice things" moment with ActivityPub and Federation in general.
Karma is probably pretty easy to farm using fake home servers or botted accounts, and other kinds spam is probably going to be an issue if this platform reaches any level of mainstream popularity.
I think many parallels can be drawn between ActivityPub and E-mail, here. E-mail works, but not without a lot of gatekeeping, blocking and spam. Its really hard not to get blocked as a self hosted email server today, you are probably going to be mostly blocked by default until you build somewhat of a reputation for your server, etc. I foresee similar levels of maintenance being needed in the future in order to keep servers federated.
As far as moving your account, some things are easier than others to deal with. Things such as subscriptions and likes is probably a lot easier to move to a new account than entire post histories and such.
That's why we need to decentralize. If there's 100 communities over 50 servers, then it doesn't matter which website goes down or defederates. It's only if everyone stays on one or two instances that the fediverse breaks.
Over on mastodon, big instances have gone down, people notice but it isnt the end of the world.
I mean I can't be the only one who doesn't enjoy the idea of setting up a new account if the ship you picked in the beginning sinks a few years later. You make it sound so simple but at least to me it would be a huge drag.
Why? It literally takes 2 minutes and you shouldn't spend extended amounts of time on a single account anyways for security reasons. Especially with AI on the rise. No one should have account that is a year old - that's enough data to dox almost anybody given proper research.
This is why having frictionless one-button migration seems really important to me. Imagine that your Lemmy client keeps a constant backup of your profile so that if and when your instance go down, you can set up shop somewhere else super easily. Or when an instance get too big, or when you feel like it, you can instance-hop super simply. This is the future I'd want. You control your profile, noone else.
Honestly, this isn't even necessary. The only thing that needs to be implemented is federated authentication, because then you could log in to any instance with one set of credentials. Since the content you post/comment is already replicated locally on other instances, you wouldn't even need to import/export anything, it would already exist on the other instances.
Implement federated user authentication and you're golden.
Maybe I'm misunderstanding (and that's certainly a possibility because I've been on Lemmy for barely a week), but wouldn't the profile be rebuildable since the content generated by the user has been replicated to other instances?
If that is the case, the only thing that's missing is federated authentication so the user can log in to any instance with a single set of credentials.
From what I understand of federated authentication, your instance needs to be up to authenticate against. This doesn't help if your instance goes down. Did you have some other mechanism in mind?
Replicate password hashes & salts to all instances
#1 would absolutely be the most preferable. There are two possible snags with option #1: sdfsdf
You're introducing a small element of centralization into a decentralized platform
The admins of the centralized authentication server must be competent and trustworthy
Cost wouldn't really be a factor for this solution and could easily be sustained from donations, you're not going to be getting a huge amount of traffic from authentication requests.
I included option #2 for the sake of completeness. This would work, but it isn't the best idea from a security standpoint. The risk can be greatly mitigated with good password requirements and the use of a strong password hashing algorithm like Argon2/bcrypt/PBKDF2/etc in combination with salting the hash. A quick look at Lemmy's code shows that they're already hashing passwords with bcrypt, so that requirement is met, but it doesn't look like they're explicitly salting it. That doesn't really matter too much in this scenario with that algorithm though, since it's going to be salted automatically anyway. Lemmy's code also shows that it's using bcrypt's default cost value (10 rounds), so it would take thousands (to millions) of years to crack the hash if you have even the most basic password requirements in place. If you add the option to put MFA in front of that, you've almost removed the risk entirely, as it won't matter in the very unlikely event that the password actually is cracked, because it's useless without access to the second authentication factor.
So yeah, there are a couple of ways to do it, and each have their downsides/tradeoffs, but the level of difficulty/effort to do it is not very high in either case.
I hope I'm wrong, but... I think network effects could lead to a single instance becoming dominant and therefore vulnerable to such a takeover/sellout. I'm less sure about this, but perhaps non-technical users don't understand the concept of federated instances and flock to a single one. Perhaps there are other tangible benefits of everyone being on a single instance. Just because the protocol allows for decentralization, doesn't mean it will naturally happen. E.g. How many email users are on Microsoft exchange/outlook, Gmail, and Yahoo?
I love the concept of your own data being portable, but am afraid there might be other factors that somehow naturally lead to centralization. Please change my mind!
The biggest risk is if all the most active communities end up centralized on a handful of the biggest instances like they seem to be right now, that means a bad actor would only have to buy up those instances to control almost all discussion on lemmy / kbin.
However, it would much easier for mods to migrate their community to an uncompromised instance than it would be to migrate to a new site completely. Jumping from reddit to lemmy / kbin, users have to abandon their old reddit accounts, move to a completely new website with a completely new interface, and start over from scratch. Jumping from one lemmy / kbin instance to another, users would just have to unsubscribe from the old community and resubscribe to the new one.
I think without account karma the loyalty to the account would be less for the average person. The more annoying part is the communities you've subscribed to and finding them again. I think a simple download of a list that automates resubscribing on a new account would ease that issue for most people.
For an active user would be that you lose access to communities you created. That is a real logistical problem. I started on lemmy.ml and crelated a community then realized that lemmy.world ran a lot smoother (at the time) and moved. I luckily still have access to my original account so I was able to appoint my new account as a mod. So problem solved. If your instance splodes you lose that ability. But likely your sub went with it too anyway.
I guess the real problem I am identifying here is while the fediverse itself is decentralized, your account isn't. It is locked onto one instance and the fediverse is volatile.
Maybe add an ability to attach your account on 2 or 3 instances and keep them synced? If one goes rogue then you have a backup that's still on the fediverse? You can then defederate yourself from one if needed.
Idk.
I guess running a small private instance just for yourself is the best answer.
Thank you for your responses. It really makes me think about the meaning of portability:
Are you moving your identity? (e.g. implementing something like instance-agnostic user PGP keys)
Your data? The posts and comments you've contributed, which would only make sense with the context of the entire thread.
How would the contents of entire communities be migrated? I presume that's where the valuable content is for potential buyers either to drive ad traffic or train models.
Mastodon's export portability mostly focuses on the local social-graph aspects(follows, blocks, etc.) and while it has an archive function, people frequently lament losing their old posts and that graph relationship when they move.
Identity attestment is solvable in a legible fashion with any external mechanism that links back to report "yes, account at xyz.social is real", and this is already being done by some Mastodon users - it could be through a corporate web site, a self-hosted server or something going across a distributed system(IPFS, Tor, blockchains...) There are many ways to describe identity beyond that, though, and for example, provide a kind of landing page service like linktree to ease browsing different facets of identity or describe "following" in more than local terms.
I would consider these all high-effort problems to work on since a lot of it has to do with interfaces, UX and privacy tradeoffs. If we aim to archive everything then we have to make an omniscient distributed system, which besides presenting a scaling issue, conflicts with privacy and control over one's data - so that is probably not the goal. But asking everyone to just make a lot of backups, republish stuff by hand, and set up their own identity service is not right either.
I think you are right for the most part. I assume that some big servers will take most of the users and that the cost of maintaining the fediverse will become quite high in one way or the other as the network grows and the malicious actors gain incentives to interact with the network.
I think the fediverse is more like the old web. I don't really consider my data very portable, but my ways of consuming and interacting with the content is. I for one don't really care if my posts go with me if i move somewhere else. If my home server defederates, then I can move to another kbin instance and my experience remains much the same. The monolithic singular identity that I can take with me wherever I go isn't something the fediverse delivers on right now, but that is fine.
I think kbinners are doing a good job with having a good reputation in the fediverse. But ex-redditors as a whole both on here and Lemmy are the new kids on the block. It's important to keep that in mind. We arent redditors we're kbinners now :)
Yeah, kbeans just makes me chuckle every time I hear it. I'm actually pretty ambivalent about what name is used and maybe in the spirit of federation we end up with a handful of names
I dunno, i like kbiner so long as it isn't pronounced binner, more like carbiner. I'd rather be a rifleman, than a bin diver, lol. As for kbinauts, makes us sound spaced-out crazy, as in twirl your index finger in a circular motion around your temple type. I'm on the fence about it.
I'm one of those new kids and I'm still struggling to wrap my head around a lot of things. Like I understand the concept of federation, but I can't figure out how to use the tools (if they exist) for distinguishing between local and federated stuff. What makes federated threads show up here on kbin? Are there any that don't? I guess I'm just unclear on the execution in practice.
so you can tell where something is coming from by checking the full @/name. you can see this in the sidebar for magazines, or hovering over someone's name to see for the users. there's userscripts to show it automatically and I think it's planned to have an official option to do so.
What makes federated threads show up here on kbin?
By default, we can access every other federated instance. However, it might not show up if someone isn't subscribed to the person or magazine. Threads for magazines should be 100% in sync across instances (though sometimes things are a bit finnicky due to the influx of users).
Are there any that don't?
Content from other instances won't show up here if:
it's not part of what the collective kbinauts have subscribed to (if we subscribe to another instance's magazine, it pulls in that content for everyone here.)
if another instance decides to block or "defederate" with us. as of now I think every instance is federating with kbin.social so this shouldn't be an issue.
if you mark that you don't wish to see federated content. this will only show you stuff from kbin.social.
Not sure if I'll do a good job of answering this, but there are a few ways to discern between local and federated content. First, by how you filter content. e.g. by All or what you've Subscribed to.
Secondly, in two parts:
Next to the title it says where the link first came from, originally. That might be kbin.social, lemmy.world or it might youtube.com. In the latter one, each post in a thread also says who posted it with "[username], 3 hours ago to [thread]" That [thread] indicates the origin in the fideverse of that post. So if someone first posted that youtube link on lemmy.ml and then it was brought over here, that's where you'd find that out.
Note that you might have to hover over it to fully where it came from (that's the case on my desktop). For example, right now I see some post marked "[Username], 1 hour ago to Technology." Hovering over "Technology" reveals that it was @technology meaning that's where it came from.
On sh.itjust.works, there's a way to only see content from that instance. Not sure rn how to replicate that for kbin.social.
What makes federated threads show up here: because you've subscribed to it; because you are viewing m/all, and someone else posted it there. btw, if you want to post something from elsewhere here, you simply copy paste the federated link for it. You'll notice on a kbin article/post, when you click "more" there's the option of either a local link or a fediverse link. Other instances will have that option, which is what you'd want to copy.
Bringing in a url from elsewhere in the fediverse, btw, becomes one way to then be able to subscribe to it here (iirc).
There's a lot of good guidance for understanding kbin and the fediverse. It's just a little scattered everywhere in the many discussions that have been had. Don't be afraid to keep asking for clarifications. Plenty of us are trying to pay forward the help that we've received.
I am very excited by what Kbin is doing and is becoming. That being said ever since they opened up Lemmy and the rest of fediverse I have started to see more and more hate speech to minorities. I had hoped that those kinds of people would have stayed on Reddit but it looks like they ended up on Lemmy and now Kbin users are having to deal with it since opening up it's gate. I am not saying Kbin should separate from the other fediverse I just think they should make it more obvious where content and post are coming from.
I have to say that I haven't experienced any hate speech here. as for "where content and posts are coming from" there's already two userscripts to do just that, and the admin/dev said that it's planned to be officially added.
That is were we as a community on lemmy and kbin need to do our part to report users that are bringing that kind of content. Most instances don't want that kind of content and flagging users will help clean that content up. So people will start to move to instances that will allow it and those can be de-federated. I wouldn't write the platform off as a whole because of a few bad actors, but with the massive influx of new users and the lack of mod tools its going to take awhile. Unfortunately the nature of the fediverse is that it'll be like a game of whack-a-mole for awhile.
Some of y'all getting angry need to look at yourself in the mirror. The whole point of federation was to allow communities to do things like this if they want.
A lot of new people are going to see this mudslinging and rightfully turn around. Nobody is coming to Lemmy to see drama between instances.
I mean some people absolutely do love and feed on drama, but is that who we want to attract? They're not the nicest bunch to have around in my experience.
exactly this; the whole point was so instances could pick and choose who they wanted to interact with
I'd always heard that federation was good because if you get an instance infested with fascists, you (and everyone else who doesn't want anything to do with them) can just cut that instance loose and let it drift away
I thought the whole point of federation was that everything from every federated instance was connected and I only need one account to see every part of it. The fact that federation has been the only discussion since the blackout is not good for the alternatives to reddit. My whole life is tech and if it's this distracting to me I can't imagine any remotely average user being interested. The fact that this was the perfect time to be part of an alternative but the whole experience has mostly just proven reddits "give it a week" response true.
kbin is only live a month or so.... of course there will be problems and missing moderation tools - it wont be much better for lemmy.
There is no perfect time - some people will stay some will go back to reddit witout any change. thats a user thing not the fault of beehaw or the federation of servers.
I thought the whole point of federation was that everything from every federated instance was connected and I only need one account to see every part of it.
That was never going to happen, not even in the best possible case.
Far left and far right are always going to split off. Do you want to be having discussions about race with neo nazis? I don't. Let them go to their own dark corner of the internet.
I thought the whole point of federation was that everything from every federated instance was connected and I only need one account to see every part of it.
No. If an instance hosts toxic communities then your instance can choose to defederate from it. You don't have to wait for the centralized authority to ban them. It's about being able to choose your admins and form a web of "good" communities.
I think what I’m still trying to learn and adjust to (having come from Reddit) is how it’s different in terms of filtering out certain subs you wouldn’t want to see there. Like I don’t want to subscribe to conservative I can just not do so or filter it out, whereas this feels like whoever runs beehaw is choosing what communities we can interact with? Or is Beehaw itself and the communities contained within similar to Reddit?
Essentially what I’m looking for is something more akin to the forums of old with entertainment, tech and less toxic news. Decent communities to discuss subjects on while still keeping up to date on things.
I'd also like a way to filter out certain communities, I'm sure that's already on the todo list.
And yes, the 4 people who run Beehaw are choosing what communities you can interact with by defederating other instances, this means people from those instances can't comment on beehaw and you won't see posts from them.
Reddit admins did something similar when they banned subreddits, except the difference is that on lemmy if you liked those banned communities then you could create an account on their instance and continue participating in those communities.
The idea is for instance admins to curate an experience for their users by choosing which instances they federate with. That's why beehaw has defederated from around 200 instances https://beehaw.org/instances while my instance has defederated from 4 https://partizle.com/instances
I do think it's fair to criticize the decision to try to be one of the largest instances while only having four moderators. They should have accepted a place as a midsize instance with midsize communities in order to maintain their moderation goals. Or they could have worked to get more moderators. Blaming the defederated instances and mod tools seem disingenuous at best. That said mod tools undoubtedly need improvement.
To be fair, they said the reason they were defederating from those two instances in particular is because most of their moderation involved people from them. They didn't expand beehaw beyond what they could handle, the rest of lemmy expanded beyond what they could handle. If this really is just a temporary measure, which is also what they said, then I think it's pretty reasonable.
That's because they defederated from the two largest competing instances. I'm talking about the communities users not the instances. The issue is that beehaw has the largest and therefore defacto default communities. The timing is bad and will likely affect wider adoption. The biggest problem is that it is entirely foreseeable and solved by either accepting a smaller community (closing signups) or improving moderation capabilities (getting more moderators or investing in an alternative moderation system) before it meant splitting the threadiverse in half.
I'm not denying that it sucks, but if you'd told anybody this was going to happen a month ago they'd have just laughed at you. Of course they were unprepared. Everbody has more than they can deal with. Adding more mods isn't as simple as picking some names out of a hat, and this isn't a thing anyone was preparing for. There currently are no alternative moderation systems, everything is too new and until recently was all way to small for that to be important, and they just have more work then they can deal with trying to suddenly moderate all of the threadiverse.
This was a bad option that sucked, but every option was a bad option that sucked. I'm more concerned with how they deal with things as they normalize over the coming weeks and months than I am with how they're trying to put out the fires in the short term.
But they chose a nonstandard moderation strategy that limited their ability to scale moderation with users. The default system is that communities are moderated independently of admins (not saying admins don't form communities or that there's no overlap between admins and mods) whereas on beehaw only the admins can create communities and therefore are the primary moderators.
Now I'm not saying that there's anything inherently wrong with the system they've chosen but the fact that it is nonstandard and in fact built into the core precept of beehaw means that this was easily foreseen.
Easily forseen if you knew that lemmy was suddenly going to have a hundred times as many users in the space of a couple weeks. That was the thing no one was prepared for though.
lemmy.ml has a completely different idea of how it wants to be run. That happens to have been hurt a lot less by a sudden massive influx of new users, but that wasn't the reason it was different. What do you even think beehaw could have done that would have better given their goals?
The admins have always been clear that they’re not trying to replace Reddit, and I’m quite sure they were not trying to be one of the largest instances.
If they weren’t trying to get large then how did that happen? Based on admin comments, beehaw was one of the more active instances when the first wave of migration happened; and a decent amount of the pre-first wave posts about lemmy I saw on Reddit were about how Beehaw was a good instance to join as it was defederated from lemmygrad.
I'm not saying this has anything to do with replacing reddit but it is bad for the larger threadiverse community. Notably there were several other instances that closed registration for the purposes of not growing quicker than they could handle long term (see lemmy.ml). Beehaw has most of the largest (and therefore defacto default) communities. Active steps to avoid that would have allowed them to maintain their moderation goals while growing in an organic and sustainable way that benefits the larger threadiverse community.
I was strictly replying to the part of your comment where you said they made a decision to try to be one of the largest instances – imo they did not make a explicit decision to try to be that, but rather the growth was a side effect of the circumstances around reddit users checking out the fediverse.
Is closing registrations is better than having an application with questions that weed out low-effort users? IMO it’s probably a wash. beehaw has only banned one user from the local instance that I know of, so the application process seems to be working overall. The issue is that other instances are growing too quickly and needing to moderate those users, not their own.
I do agree this isn’t great for the threadiverse and I wish it hadn’t come to this, both on a personal and community level. I was subbed to the knitting community on lemmy.world, it was the most active of those communities that I saw, and now I’m locked out. Idk if I want to move to an alt on a different instance, or self-host my own so that I’m fully in control of what I can see, or what. :S
No the issue is that four moderators for the whole instance was always unsustainable and allowing the communities to become the defacto defaults without growing the mod teams was a bad idea. This was easily foreseen and corrected. Blaming other instances is not at all fair.
you do not understand the problem. The growth was on every server of the fedivers - so moderationg users from different servers was to much work. how should they stop people from other servers? two options - block any individuell(which is to much work with so many open registration servers - they can just spamm new servers) or nuke the server where most of the trolls come from.
I DO understand the problem. They only have an issue with an influx of users because they are the largest (defacto default) communities. A position that was incompatible with their moderation system from the get go. Had they had more sustainably sized communities none of this would have been an issue.
The moderated, reasonable stance is that everyone is right! Beehaw probably could have done things differently, including making a stickied post that they don’t want to be the default large instance, and/or acquired a lot more mods to manage the federation of other large instances. On the other hand, Lemmy doesn’t have the same principles as Beehaw and prioritized the growth of their userbase over a filtering system. To you it looks like one is worse than the other, that’s because you want to see content from everywhere and don’t share the principles of the other federation - so you’re probably not a good fit for Beehaw atm (and if anyone is blindsided, I don’t get it.. I could see it written all over Beehaw that they are trying to promote certain principles over growth, I don’t share in those principles but I can respect that they were direct about it).
Everyone on the Fediverse should expect to see instances un/re-federate several times over especially in the growing stages. The critique is fine but it should definitely be tempered with reasonable expectations and not unnecessary ridicule.
The idea that people are missing content on Lemmy/Beehaw/Kbin instances that get defederated are looking at this from a “this should be super convenient” mentality which, convenience is why Reddit expects you’ll go back. Quality of content, genuine community-building, and/or responsible upper management doesn’t have as much value there, it is inherent in them being a VC, convenience is what matters most on Reddit/TikTok/Twitter/etc.
On the Fediverse, the one thing that should be said more is that the instance you join, you should prepare to be involved locally through that instance more than anything else. The idea you can or should just join anywhere was something I wrong wrong about, as was much of the Reddit people saying “join Lemmy it doesn’t matter where, it’s all federated.” I don’t blame them or myself, it’s a newer concept and nuance is lost at the entry- level to anything. If people were coming to the Fediverse for fully federated, more convenient content than they should try Mastadon, because they’re farther along and had their own issues to deal with during the Twitter migration that propelled them much like these instances that are still growing and learning will, in time.
That's not necessarily true. There's both approaches at work here, one is the "themed community" one, and the other is the "universal citizen" one. That user/forum migration has not been implemented from the beginning (but it will hopefully asap), speaks rather more about the mindset of the developers. I myself would find it an absolute no-go if i would be participating in the technical desigh of a social server network, if servers were to own users and communities. That would lead to the exact same problems as corporate sites pose -- they are governed by people with specific mindsets, and that is to be avoided.
You have largely missed the mark on my motivations for posting and familiarity with the fediverse. Ultimately, this is an issue of responsible community building. As it stands the beehaw communities are the only ones with subscriber counts over 10k. There is absolutely no way new users will not end up there without the larger threadiverse community making an active effort to phase out the beehaw communities in favor of more open ones and if that does not happen the same four admins will continue to have an outsized effect on the network. This is bad for everyone.
I wonder if it would be worth it to have an option to combine content of communities with the same name from different federations into one feed automatically.
Part of those options could be to exclude a community from a certain federation from that feed if their content in that community does not match the others (r/superbowl for instance, where the name does not match the expected content)
I might be wrong about this, but KBin supports “tags” which can be set at a Magazine level by the mods. This will lump content related to this tags into the Magazine. It won’t be in the feed directly, but will be listed as related content.
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'
Being someone who is on Mastodon and also have to still be on Twitter for professional reasons, I consistently get way more engagement to my posts on Mastodon.
Plus, I have been able to build a larger following in Mastodon within a year than I was able to in Twitter in the eight years or so I have had an account there.
Anybody who expected Mastodon to simply become Twitter minus Elon Musk, was being naive and that didn't exactly happen. But as a platform on its own, Mastodon is a success. As a user, I consistently see more interesting content on Mastodon than Twitter or pretty much any other social media platform (except maybe Reddit till they decided to screw up).
Honestly, I would recommend everyone here who hasn't already to sign up to a Mastodon server in addition to Kbin.
Not the person you're replying to, but if I want to use a Twitter-alike, I want to use a UI geared towards that. If I want to use a Reddit-alike, I want to use a UI geared towards that.
The idea of using Twitter to interact with a Reddit post sounds horrible, or Twitter to interact with YouTube (or YouTube to interact with Twitter!)
@Kierunkowy74 That interesting, especially that the most active fediverse instance is misskey.io -- ok, interesting because I even didn't know about its existence, only about the software.
Hi, good to see you here :) I honestly have no idea what the pronunciation is. It's a reference to the Linux /sbin, a container for things that are important to you. This is intentional, I want /kbin to be perceived as each individual instance. Each instance is different. Each community is different. That's what's cool about the Fediverse.
Can we not like, do that Reddit thing at every turn where a certain topic/title always makes it to the top and everybody just duplicates it even though the exact same conversation happens every time?
I came to the Threadiverse because Reddit was closing its APIs and building the walls higher around its garden.
I will be supremely disappointed if the Threadiverse collectively turns around and does the same thing.
Instances should be defederated when they do something harmful. Preemptively defederating is counterproductive, it gives Meta no incentive to do things right.
Nothing makes it special. My point is not that I think Facebook will do no wrong, my point is that it's counterproductive to defederate from them before they've done something wrong.
I came to the Threadiverse because Reddit was closing its APIs and building the walls higher around its garden. I will be supremely disappointed if the Threadiverse collectively turns around and does the same thing.
So instances on the fediverse have some obligation to let entities who (A) will control 99% of the content, against our values of a decentralized, more evenly distributed fediverse; (B) have zero interest in an open fediverse; and (C) have all the incentive in the world to prevent its growth and get more people on their own platform to ensure profit? As usually hesitant as I am about preemptive defederation, if the fediverse is to preserve its values of openness and ensure its growth, it can't let in for-profit corporations that will control most of the activity and that go directly against those values of openness we care about so much. Just as tolerance doesn't mean letting in those who are intolerant, an unwalled fediverse can and should put its guards up against those who want to take everything for themselves.
it gives Meta no incentive to do things right
Meta already has zero incentive to do things right. In fact, they have negative incentive, as people being on Mastodon or Kbin instead of Threads actively harms them. You will never see Mark Zuckerberg suggest that people spread out to other instances so that no one gains too much control, but you will see him try to get as many people from the other instances on Threads as possible. We are talking about making our activity dependent on a for-profit tech corporation. If we were way larger so that Threads wouldn't control such a massive portion of activity, I wouldn't be as concerned, but as things stand now, we're letting our content pool be dominated by a company that has interests in direct opposition with ours. I can't see a scenario where any of this ends well.
Yep, the Reddit metaphor really backfired. If Reddit joined the fediverse I would happily consume their content. It would actually be a wonderful compromise where reddit wouldn’t have to provide direct app support and instead just publish out via ActivityPub and people could build third party clients through that.
I left Twitter because they killed Tweetbot and I left Reddit because they killed Apollo. I genuinely hate the experience of those sites with their native apps, and I use these kinds of services almost exclusively on my phone.
While I also hate Elon Musk and Spez, I strongly dislike most tech CEOs so while a motivator, it wasn’t the biggest factor for me. It’s important to remember we’re not all here for the same reason, and user-level instance blocking is the real solution here.
You don’t like some fediverse member? Then block them at the user level and move on, or start your own server and block them there. Don’t force everyone else on your server to not even have the option just for you.
Big takeaways, emphasis preserved from the original:
Threads is entering a space in the fediverse which is dominated by Mastodon, so it's Mastodon and other fediverse microblogging services (including, to some extent, /kbin) which will most heavily feel the impact of Threads.
Defederating another server means your instance will stop requesting content from that server. ... Defederation is about what data comes in, not what goes out. ... Defederation doesn't make you invisible, it doesn't block anybody else from seeing you, it doesn't protect your content, it only means you never have to see their content.
Firstly, the fediverse is a drop in the ocean compared to Threads (104 million registered users). Obviously, Meta wants everybody, but their specific goals in terms of user-poaching are far more likely to center around the ~350 million active Twitter users than the ~12 million fediverse users (~3.5 million active). The threadiverse [Lemmy, Kbin, et al] is smaller again, at something like 100,000 active users.
"Threads will overwhelm the fediverse with their inferior content and culture." Like the EEE fears, this one is legitimate but once again something that will primarily be felt by microblogging providers (/kbin included). Toxic users, advertisers, etc. can push garbage into feeds all day, but they will largely not be targeting the threadiverse because there's some 100 million sets of eyes to put that crap in front of on the microblogging side and it will be difficult-to-impossible for them to push that content into Lemmy/kbin threads from their interface that was never made to interact with the threadiverse.
Is there any chance Meta has good intentions?No. But it might have intentions that are both self-serving and fediverse-neutral. The absolute best intention I can possibly ascribe to Meta is that joining the fediverse is a CYA (cover your ass) mechanism to head off regulations, especially in the EU, [e.g.] the newly-applicable Digital Markets Act ...
Defederation is about what an instance allows in, not what an instance allows out. Defederation stops you seeing the defederated instance's content, but it does not stop them seeing your instance's content.
Threads poses some danger to the fediverse, in particular the portion of it centered around microblogging (mostly Mastodon, but also Pleroma, parts of /kbin, etc.), but very little risk to the threadiverse.
The worst thing about the fediverse is all the fondue, but you don't have to eat it.
Emphasis from the original post.
This is a detailed summary, thank you for linking.
I have also read some other POVs here; my fears are not totally allayed and I still think Meta is only engaing with Activity Pub to prevent new, potential competitors arising from it.
I hope the OP is right about it being very little risk to the Threadiverse. The good news is that Threads is focused enitrely on microblogging and not the Threadiverse. Perhaps that means Kbin and Lemmy users will be able to sit on the sidelines and see how it plays out for a bit, idk. Mastodon users will be seeing the most change.
The issue is that this does affect Kbin because Kbin is a microblogging platform. It's also a thread aggregator, but it has microblog functionality that some people do actually use. Should we not defederate, stuff from Threads will flood the microblogs of Kbin. If your home page is set to use the All Content feed (like mine is), you'll see microblogs from Threads there. This doesn't have as much of an effect as it does on a purely microblogging-focused platform like Mastodon, but it does still affect a big way that Kbin is used.
Right, and that’s part of why I remain a skeptic. Kbin’s microblog being overtaken by Thread’s content could very well limit kbin’s growth and viability as a microblogging platform - especially if Meta pulls the plug later.
But, I have also seen the opinion that not having Threads content could make kbin unappealing as a microblogging platform. (I’m not sure if I agree with this, but I have seen it mentioned.)
I guess the questions are, Can Kbin grow with Threads content? And, Will the lack of Threads content make it unappealing to new users?
Also, another problem I think is that kbin might not have the userbase and content yet to be self-sustaining when faced with a goliath company like Meta; if we produced as much content as Threads will (or enough to the point that defederating kbin would hurt Threads) then there wouldn’t be much of a concern.
Idk, Threads is ultimately the one forcing the situation (probably intentionally) where federating with them is risky but also refusing to do so could be self-isolating. I still maintain that they’re doing it now while the fediverse is still young for a reason, and that is so they can grab so much of the “fondue” that everyone comes to them anyway.
I would like to see kbin succeed, and I don’t trust Meta. Whatever kbin decides to do I will be here for it, but I’m definitely a Meta skeptic.
To put my own skin in the game, I quite like the microblogging side of kbin. I like that I can swap between the thread and blog sides, I like that I can combine them into one view if I choose, and I like that I don't need a separate account to use either service. Using kbin's microblog was the first time I ever blogged, period. I'd hate to see that stream be overwhelmed by Threads users.
Exactly one of the reasons why I remain a skeptic.
I don’t want sound too much like I’m complaining about “Eternal September” but I quite like how kbin’s microblog is right now. Having millions of threads users suddenly flood it with random… crap… would change it forever.
I haven’t used instagram in more than half a decade. When I hopped on to see what it was like recently, I hardly recognized it and all the content was completely irrelevant. I would hate to see that happen to the microblog.
Now, I am on the can we ban Threads train, I wasn't at first because they hadn't gotten involved in actually joining the rest of us, now they are and they've admitted they want all our information too, I just don't want any part of that.
Things collected from fediverse participants that interact with Meta users...
- Username
- Profile Picture
- IP Address
- Name of Third Party Service
- Posts from profile
- Post interactions (Follow, Like, Reshare, Mentions)
They've never met a piece of data they didn't want to mine, have they?
That’s the point and always was and I can’t believe people thought this would be different. Facebook isn’t going to play nice and share this they are eventually going to ruin it or own it because it’s a threat to them anyway and we can’t have that.
I would have thought only the instance you’re visiting would be able to get your IP address? If you reply to a Meta user they should only get the IP address of your instance.
I don't understand the point of this article at all. How would an instance federate without processing these information? (And I think the IP cannot be collected; not sure why the author indicates so without source.)
Not sure if the author understood anything about the fediverse, either. Feels like an AI-generated article, honestly...
The point of the article is to appeal to people's hatred of Meta (which is well-earned, admittedly), not to actually say anything meaningful.
Having observed conversations about Threads here and on Lemmy, it's a pretty dependable tactic. I completely understand not wanting to associate with Meta and not trusting their intentions, but there are plenty of things to criticize them for without trying to whip up a fury over what's objectively not problematic. But this is the internet and people like being in a fury, so whip one up they will.
@BraveSirZaphod Hey, I'm the guy that wrote this. While I absolutely hold negative bias towards Meta, the point of the article was not to produce a piece of propaganda, but instead illustrate that their policies have updated to acknowledge the existence of third-party accounts on other servers, that they will be collecting data, and that this is likely a sign that federation may be happening sooner than expected.
Not everybody is happy about that, and some developers are working on hardening their applications to protect against unauthorized access for edge cases related to this.
I think the implication is that threads/meta is going to use it for different purposes than your average fediverse application/server owner would.
However, it is kind of a silly argument to bring up in the context of fediverse since everything you share publicly online is, well... public info from that point onwards - even more so in the fediverse that by design sends and stores it to countless other, privately owned and maintained, servers beyond your control. This comment is public and any other individual or company can get it whether they do it through activity pub or by just scraping it off any of existing (or their privately owned) instance.
The real risk threads poses is competition and taking away content creators from mastodon, indirectly pushing everyone else under the facebook's corporate umbrella again. I want FOSS to take over but if there's nobody actually using it and everyone is still creating content elsewhere then there's few reasons to stay.
Keep in mind most of this is public too. Just search for yourself on a search engine and look at the public facing web view of your account. Lot of stuff there. One does not use lemmy for privacy. It is a public posting platform. Anyone can read and scrape data. Why I use lemmy is to get away from all the other other enshitification of R$, not for privacy.
Kbin collects all of that same info from Lemmy and vice versa (except for IP, which I don't think would ever be shared to begin with?).
The literal entire point of the fediverse is to share content in a public and interoperable way, so why are you surprised that a fediverse client would be collecting profile pictures and posts, when that's exactly what you'd need to do in order to display them?
Like, if you simply have no trust in Meta at all and refuse to interact with them, that's fine, but just say that and don't pretend it's because of the horror of displaying usernames.
Collecting profile pics, posts, likes, and so on, is basically what is needed to federate. If they don't collect that, they can't display things from other instances.
And guess what our instances will collect the same data from Threads to be able to display stuff from there...
Nah they’ll find a way to protect their data. Maybe create a virzual user for each post or just federate only comunities hosted on other servers, e.g. don’t show communities created on Threads for ‘moderation’ or ‘privacy’ reasons.
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