Why can't magazines/communities aggregate content from other instances?

briongloid, 10 months ago

I believe that Lemmy should add the ability for an instance to self-aggregate, were an Admin bundles other instances communities into a /g/ grouping.

So instance.tld/g/community could include the whatever communities across the fediverse they felt it should.

Some instances would use it for general aggregation, others would be more strict as a way to merge identical communities.

But as for now, there is no feature set.

timbervale, 10 months ago

I was thinking more of a situation where we have community registrars, "DNS" like servers, etc. Still a distributed system sharing power, but far more structured than the email analogy that is always used. That said, it appears I had the wrong idea of the goals/functions of federation and the Fediverse in general. Oh well, at least I learned a bit more about it.

briongloid, 10 months ago

I think indexers are going to be a must, we need central servers to catalog even just all the community addresses for lookup.

Ada, 10 months ago

@briongloid Not admins. Users should be able to do it.

As an admin, there is no way I can be across all of the niche subtleties and naming schemes of communities I'm not involved in. If I have to group them, I'm going to get it wrong.

If it's going to sit anywhere above the individual level, it should be at the community mod level, not the instance admin level. But of course, many community mods aren't going to want to actively point people at other larger communities that overlap with theirs.

@timbervale

hemmes, 10 months ago

Yeah, I was saying this in another thread recently. I understand the fediverse just fine. I want to be able to group all my favorite communities of similar or same topics. Then when I view that group it should feel like any other community list, aggregating all posts from the group, sorting them based on my selected sort.

I_Miss_Daniel, 10 months ago

Maybe if G is common across the Fediverse, it'll help solve the difference in URL formats? (C vs M)

briongloid, 10 months ago

/c/ & /m/ is the same, /g/ would be a grouping of both.

stevecrox, 10 months ago

This could be achieved within the UI and seems like a good idea.

Each kbin/lemmy instance decides to follow magazines/communities from others through activity pub and stores it locally for the instance.

Having the UI retrieve all local posts with the same magazine/community name (e.g. m/star_trek@kbin.social c/star_trek@lemmy.world). Wouldn't be hugely difficult, I believe Kbin uses postgres database as the local store. The community/instance should be columns you can search for, it would be a small SQL change.

Even if that wasn't an option, there is a means to get all of the magazines/communities from the kbin UI and retrieve all posts for a specific magazine/community. So you could do it entirely in a web client.

The combined view wouldn't change how you comment on specific posts. The issue is where do you post and what view would take dominance (e.g. if a magazine had themed itself).

The solution here would be to default to the local instance if it exists or the instance providing the most posts/comments. Perhaps with a drop downso users can choose.

wagesj45, 10 months ago

You'd probably open yourself up to magazine poisoning that way. Would be easy enough for a troll to spin up a new community or entire new server that helpfully drops spam into magazines with the same name. I think I would prefer users be able to create meta-magazines that will aggregate posts from multiple federated/local sources.

posts, 10 months ago

How about something that works like this?

https://i.imgur.com/qDuT1oz.png

wagesj45, 10 months ago

looks good

timbervale, 10 months ago

Technically can't they do that even now?

wagesj45, 10 months ago

Sure, I guess. Truth be told there are probably lots of vectors for spam to come in until the moderation tools get a big overhaul.

admiralteal, 10 months ago

That's just a moderation tool. A community would simply need the ability to run a whitelist or blacklist of communities to aggregate.

Frankly, I think a more manual process as an option is better because it would help account for naming variations. It'd also allow a mod team to create a place SPECIFICALLY to aggregate, which strikes me as inherently useful even within an instance.

garrettw87, 10 months ago

This is how the Fediverse is. That said, I’m pretty sure there is functionality being worked on in some way to accomplish exactly what you are looking for.

BaldProphet, 10 months ago

Kbin magazines can sort of aggregate content through tags.

Kierunkowy74, 10 months ago

They do, but only for Mastodon and other microblogging.

static, 10 months ago (edited 10 months ago)

Join the biggest.

From the screenshot the local one is on top, but the main one is just below.

join https://kbin.social/m/startrek@startrek.website

dumples, 10 months ago

Yeah. Startrek.world is the shit

FaceDeer, 10 months ago

You're probably wanting something like Reddit's "multireddit" functionality. I know of this issue for Lemmy, with some links to related issues in the comments. Kbin has one here.

timbervale, 10 months ago

Unfortunately, not. Multi-reddit just lumped everything together, which allows for duplicates. Using my Star Trek analogy: if there was a new episode, and both communities had a thread for discussion, I'd have to go into both threads to talk about the latest episode. What I want is a single thread being posted to one community automatically gets pulled into the other, and comments can be posted on either site but appear on both. That's the way federation should work, but it doesn't currently work like that. That's my frustration. If I wanted to go to multiple communities to have the same conversation multiple times, I'd search for web forums that have existed ever since "Web 2.0" was a thing in the early 2000's. There's a reason people tend not to use those small forums anymore, and favor larger sites like Reddit. Hopefully it's a change that can come to the Fediverse sooner rather than later.

FaceDeer, 10 months ago

That's the way federation should work, but it doesn't currently work like that.

I would dispute that, actually. Sometimes people make separate communities because they want there to be separate communities. Over on Reddit that required you to make communities with different names, but here you can also do it by going to different instances. Maybe there's a startrek@lemmygrad.ml that's all about how awesome the Romulans are, and startrek@startrek.website wants nothing to do with them.

There's a reason people tend not to use those small forums anymore, and favor larger sites like Reddit.

If that's the case then your "problem" will be self-correcting, if there are multiple threads on the same subject in different communities people will tend to contribute to the larger one and it'll snowball at the expense of the others.

Some people might prefer the smaller communities and threads, though, and thanks to federation they can pick whichever one they want.

Leeks, 10 months ago

It sounds more like you want a cross posting feature. There is no reliable programmatic way to determine both threads are about the new show, and anything that’s not reliable and programmatic is just ripe for abuse.

A cross posting feature would be nice, but for something like “the new episode just dropped” without some serious coordination between the communities, you would still end up with a lot of threads.

timbervale, 10 months ago

Basically I want a mailing list feature, but one that mimics Reddit's UI. We already do this with websites (there are registrars and DNS servers that aren't controlled by any one organization), so why can't we do it with content? Share content with every instance as it's posted, as referenced by a "DNS server"-like setup, and bam, done. Each instance can moderate the content how they see fit, and if one instance decides to be dicks about it, users can switch to a different instance and have literally the exact same community and the exact same content as they had before the previous instance owners became dicks.

edtechdev, 10 months ago

Check out https://startrek.website/c/startrek

timbervale, 10 months ago

Yeah, that's by far the largest one. I'm just using Star Trek as an example, though I'm actually thinking of other communities that are even smaller. Good link, though.

briongloid, 10 months ago

This is the main Star Trek community incase anyone wasn’t sure.

Adama, 10 months ago

How do I, a user with a kbin.social account, create a post there?

garrettw87, 10 months ago

Just go to: https://kbin.social/m/startrek@startrek.website

And hit the + button at the top, followed by Add New Article, Add New Link, or whatever.

Adama, 10 months ago

Ahh. So what would be helpful then, for smaller communities that started here not knowing there was one someplace else would be to add some kind of post that points to the specific community.

As we’re still learning as we go here

MentalEdge, 10 months ago (edited 10 months ago)

I think you've misunderstood. Lemmy/Kbin absolutely DOES allow for one big forum to exists for a subject, across the whole fediverse.

It's just that people are creating communities on their own instances, because they don't know or care that one already exists on another somehwere, which they could be joining.

They are two separate communities. They are like if you had two subbreddits called r/startrek and r/alsostartrek.

They could be about the exact same thing, but they were started by different people. The second of which, either didn't check if one already existed, or wanted to make their own for one reason or another.

In the future, it might be possible to combine communities in some way (like multireddits), but for now, all they have in common is the subject matter.

And, while communities have a "home" instance they are not solely accessible by people on that instance. They are accessible by any user on any other federated instance. Making more communities for the same thing on other instances, is not how federation works. You're just making more "subbreddits" with similar names.

Basically, both communities exist on both instances. Only one is needed, on one instance, for there to be a community for a given subject on the entire fediverse.

You can view the Kbin magazine, of course: kbin.social/m/startrek

But you can also view the lemmy.ml community, still in Kbin: kbin.social/m/startrek@lemmy.ml

And the same works in reverse, the Kbin magazine, in lemmy: lemmy.ml/c/startrek@kbin.social

Basically, someone made a second one, even though only one is needed. They both exist for the entire fediverse, not just their respective instances.

Dark_Blade, 10 months ago

Much like people making copycat subreddits. As apps become more popular, the larger communities with better content and engagement will naturally consolidate into the more ‘dominant’ ones.

timbervale, 10 months ago

Doesn't that defeat the whole purpose of the Fediverse in the first place, though? Consolidation of users/power? If we're going to use a single instance for every topic, then why not just stick with Reddit?

FaceDeer, 10 months ago

Because there's multiple instances, and new ones can be spun up if the existing ones "go bad." It's completely different from Reddit, I don't see how you're considering them the same.

timbervale, 10 months ago

I can make a new website with a forum if Reddit goes "bad," too, but that doesn't change anything. All of the content and the users would be on that one specific instance. That's what people care about: content and a critical mass of users. There's a reason people are still using Reddit, and it's not because Reddit has wonderful ownership that cares about the users; it's because that's where the most people currently are. Migrating people from one site to another isn't easy, and that would be the exact same situation if a super popular instance were to go "bad," whether or not it's part of the Fediverse.

FaceDeer, 10 months ago

I can make a new website with a forum if Reddit goes "bad," too, but that doesn't change anything

It doesn't change anything on Reddit, because Reddit doesn't federate with anything and nothing can federate with Reddit. People on Reddit would have to create a new account to interact with your forum.

Here on the Threadiverse, if you start a new community on a new instance then the users who were using the community on the old instance can seamlessly move over to start using the new community instead. The content would remain available to both, the users would remain available to both.

Migrating people from one site to another isn't easy

On the Fediverse migrating people isn't necessary, since users on other instances can interact with each other.

This is ultimately the point of Federation. There isn't a "critical mass" for each instance because they all share the same userbase in aggregate. As soon as a new instance comes online they instantly have as many users that can post there as an instance that's been around for years.

timbervale, 10 months ago

My problem was that I have to subscribe to an instance in order to see its posts. If I'm subscribed to !startrek, and they decide to shut off access to the Fediverse for whatever reason, all the content would be gone to me here on kbin, right? Also: I would need to subscribe to a new Star Trek community, because I could no longer connect with the old community? What do you mean by, "the content would remain available to both"? If they shut off the Fediverse, or blacklist my instance, wouldn't that mean I no longer have access to their content, even old content that I posted?

And yeah, when I say, "migrate," I mean, "getting people to subscribe to a different instance, because the one they were using turned evil/shut down/disconnected from the Fediverse, etc." Wouldn't those scenarios still mandate action by the users in order to find a new community, and thus equate to migration? Just because a new instance has the same number of users that can post there, doesn't mean there will be the same number of users actively posting there. They will still be using the old instance, and it will take work to get them to start posting to the new instance. That's my point. From my understanding, the Fediverse decentralizes user accounts, but it doesn't decentralize content, and that's where I'm running into my expectations/wishlist issues.

FaceDeer, 10 months ago

My problem was that I have to subscribe to an instance in order to see its posts. If I'm subscribed to !startrek, and they decide to shut off access to the Fediverse for whatever reason, all the content would be gone to me here on kbin, right?

No, only new content would be gone. My understanding is that when you subscribe the content starts being mirrored to your instance, so that's why you don't see anything from before the first person on your instance subscribed to it. Presumably that means you would continue seeing the old content, just not new stuff.

This would be annoying, yes. But startrek.website would have absolutely no way to prevent everyone from switching over to startrek@lemmy.world, or startrek@kbin.social, or whatever other one ends up being the next-most-popular. The admins on startrek.website only have control over startrek.website. So it's not at all like Reddit, where the admins make decisions and everyone just has to take it.

Wouldn't those scenarios still mandate action by the users in order to find a new community, and thus equate to migration?

Sure, but that's no different from switching to a different subreddit, in the current case of Reddit.

The difference is that there are no admins with power over the fediverse as a whole.

They will still be using the old instance, and it will take work to get them to start posting to the new instance.

Not really. No more work than posting on a different community on the same instance. Subscribing to communities on other instances from your "home" instance is pretty seamless (aside from the occasional bugs and rough patches, which are simply a result of the current newness of this stuff rather than inherent in the design).

timbervale, 10 months ago

Sure, but that's no different from switching to a different subreddit, in the current case of Reddit.

Which doesn't really happen. The mods of r/news are idiots, but only a tiny number of users actually care about that. Most people either just stop using r/news, or deal with it. That's not exactly a ringing endorsement of how things should be. Hell, the only time I've seen people switch subreddits is when everyone went from r/antiwork to r/workreform after that disaster of a TV interview; even then, the former currently has 2.6 million subscribers, the latter has 700k, so it appears even that migration was a failure. I can't imagine this is seen as a good solution.

Not really. No more work than posting on a different community on the same instance.

People don't want to post in two communities that cover the same topic. Duplicating work like that leads people to seek out a single solution, even if it's the worse solution. Reddit is so popular because it has a giant number of people posting content to subreddits all the time, meaning even niche topics have a healthy amount of fresh content. If you fragment users into multiple instances (even if they don't have to worry about creating new user accounts for each one), then it just leads to problems. Eventually they will move towards a single mega-instance, but then you run into the problems above: people won't leave that instance for a new one until they absolutely cannot stand to be there anymore, and some people are going to have lower tolerances for bullshit than others, which means most people are still going to be using the old instance for a very very long time, splitting content between multiple instances. In other words: why go to !worldnews when there's so many more users, and so much more fresh content on https://reddit.com/r/worldnews?

FaceDeer, 10 months ago

There are plenty of news subreddits. I greatly preferred /r/anime_titties, for example.

On Reddit, since there's only one "instance" and can never be any others, there can only be a single community named "news." If the name is really so important then the ability to "reuse" the name on other instances gives an advantage to the Fediverse.

People don't want to post in two communities that cover the same topic.

Then don't. I really don't understand what you think is going on here. If there's one community you prefer, stick with that.

If you fragment users into multiple instances

They are not fragmented. In what way are they fragmented? Everyone can participate in communities on every instance, no matter where they are.

people won't leave that instance

People don't need to leave that instance.

In other words: why go to !worldnews when there's so many more users, and so much more fresh content on https://reddit.com/r/worldnews?

Because Reddit's admins suck? Why else are you here?

timbervale, 10 months ago

There are plenty of news subreddits. I greatly preferred /r/anime_titties, for example.

r/news has 26.34 million users. r/anime_titties has 0.47 (even you even somehow stumble upon r/anime_titties being a news/politics subreddit, as I didn't even know it existed until just now, and even then I didn't think "news" when I saw the name of it). Those are two drastically different experiences. Do you at least agree on that?

Then don't. I really don't understand what you think is going on here. If there's one community you prefer, stick with that.

I feel like you're not following the train of logic, here... we're discussing what happens when you can't/won't "stick with that".

They are not fragmented. In what way are they fragmented? Everyone can participate in communities on every instance, no matter where they are.

They are fragmented. Just because they can post somewhere doesn't mean they will. It's why !startrek has 4,870 subscribers, 190 threads, and 3,180 comments, and yet !startrek only has 810 subscribers, 10 threads, and 17 comments. If having the ability to post in multiple places meant people actually did post in multiple places, then !startrek would be a whole log more active, wouldn't it?

People don't need to leave that instance.

You're right, but they would need to start posting to whatever community/magazine I'm subscribed to, or else the community/magazine I'm subscribed to wouldn't have any content, and then why would I bother being subscribed to it?

Because Reddit's admins suck? Why else are you here?

If your only reason was because Reddit admins suck, you could have just quit the internet all together, but you came to kbin for a specific reason. You moved away from Reddit because of the admins, but you moved to kbin because of the content. Now imagine if there were no places with any content; you'd have nowhere to move to, and quitting the internet would be a more appealing option than posting in a magazine with 10 threads over 2 weeks.

FaceDeer, 10 months ago

The suckiness of Reddit's admins is adversely affecting the content. It's preventing me from browsing it with my chosen tools, it's crippling the ability of mods to keep their big giant communities running, and so forth.

I've come to the Fediverse to see content that's free of those restrictions. Unlike you, I don't see inherent value in having millions and millions of people subscribed to a given community. Small communities can still have plenty of interesting content. And these small communities are growing, if there's not enough content to your tastes right now then you can either contribute some or come back in a while to see if there's more.

The earlier suggestion about multireddit-like functionality helps, too, by splicing together the content of multiple smaller communities. At the user's discretion.

I feel like you're not following the train of logic, here

Oh, the irony.

we're discussing what happens when you can't/won't "stick with that".

Then you go to a different community. On the Fediverse it's super easy. As I've been saying.

Dark_Blade, 10 months ago

I don’t really get why the size of a community even matters beyond a certain point. As we’ve seen with default subs, vs more niche alternatives, communities generally go to shit once they get too big.

timbervale, 10 months ago

It's because below a certain threshold the amount of content posted is low. I don't think you can argue that a news sub is worse off for having more people posting news as it happens.

Dark_Blade, 10 months ago

It would be worse off if there’s too many duplicates though. Plus, different platforms tend to have wildly different communities, and while these platforms are interconnected quite a bit, they are different.

I won’t lie though, your idea has merit and, if they pull it off well, it could be a massive boon to the Fediverse.

MentalEdge, 10 months ago

Except on the fediverse all the old content would still be accessible, and your new site would be connected to the existing network.

Most users would just have to sub to a new community, and thats that. Only users on the instance that went down would have to make entirely new accounts.

timbervale, 10 months ago

Wait, how? I thought the content stayed with the old instance?

If people migrate to !startrek, and use it for 10 years, then they go bad, I can start a new instance and pull in all 10 years of content from the other instance?

MentalEdge, 10 months ago

No. But all the instances on which users were subbed, would retain archival data.

Moving communities between instances may become possible, though.

Dark_Blade, 10 months ago

It’s because nothing’s gonna centralize into one instance. There’s gonna be communities that thrive on one instance, and communities that thrive on others. So, if one instance goes to shit, it doesn’t bring down ALL of the Fediverse; just those communities.

It’s almost like diversifying you investments.

timbervale, 10 months ago

But if all instances connected to a distributed set of content, then an individual instance can go to shit but people will still have the content and users, instead of having to start over with a new community entirely, hoping that everyone jumps to the same instance you jumped to, or else you would have no content to view/interact with.

Dark_Blade, 10 months ago

I guess that’s a fair point, but it does still raise questions about stuff like moderation and curation. If a certain community has a certain culture that’s being diminished by posts flooding in from another community with worse moderation, then it could lead to people demanding defederarion.

Rhaedas, 10 months ago

The redundancy that is being complained about is a problem, but it's also one of the fediverse's greatest assets. What happens when a group of discussion is forced or becomes more dominant in just one place and something happens to that place (whether it be corruption, data loss, just cut off from other places)? I think rather than creating a desire or necessity to congregate in one place, having tools for similar groups to distribute topics among themselves is a much better solution for everyone.

timbervale, 10 months ago

If we can decentralize users, we can surely decentralize content, can't we? I don't want content to be restricted to one instance, and that's my problem. I was looking to have the same community and its content to be on all instances at the same time, removing the power of one instance to shut out the Fediverse and control all access to the content. If !startrek decides to shut down all traffic to/from kbin, for example, then that would leave kbin users in the dark as it currently stands, right?

MentalEdge, 10 months ago

The old content would not disappear. Federated content is in fact stored on every server, and is not fetched from the "main" server every time someone wants to interact with it. Only changes are transmitted to and fro. Defederation entails the ceasing of this synchronization.

If startrek.website had genuine reasons for shutting your instance out, you probably don't want to stick around on it either.

If it didn't, that will mean people likely wont want to stick around on it.

The third option is something like what happened with beehaw, where an instance was unable to deal with the moderation load of large outside instances. In these cases, the defederation is likely to be temporary.

Either way, the content moves around a little... Establishes new homes on new instances... And you're back to business as usual after a bit of turmoil. A lot less of it than with a commercial centralized services going down though.

timbervale, 10 months ago

Oooh, okay. So if I subscribe to !startrek, then kbin would store that data, and I would be able to point everyone to !startrek and we'd all be able to pick up where we left off? Still an issue of getting users to change where they're posting to, but that's better than I thought, at least.

Also, I imagine the problem with how difficult it is to migrate away from commercial centralized services is that it's hard to spin up a new version of that site with the code and database. Being quick to spin up a new kbin instance or Lemmy instance helps immensely, though the issue of directing the users to those new instances would be just as difficult.

MentalEdge, 10 months ago

In a federated system, once up and running, "jumping ship" is much, much easier. Changing entire sites goes from new accounts, apps, and people, to just seeing where the users go, and following.

A community is its users, and in the fediverse, when a site goes bad, the users don't have to go with it.

timbervale, 10 months ago

I would argue that a community is the content and its users. People don't use a new site/instance unless it's active with content to their quality standards (it's why so many people refuse to use new options that the far-right creates). The only exception is when there are major events like Musk purchasing Twitter to get Mastodon going, or the API changes leading to kbin/lemmy getting more popular. As an example: I'm still using https://reddit.com/r/worldnews because they have the daily update thread on Ukraine, but !worldnews doesn't.

You are very right with the apps, though. Creating a new account is easy, but having to install new apps and set them up is a royal pain. Another pain point is having to learn an entirely new interface, whereas I can spin up my own instance of kbin after using it for a couple of years and feel comfortable with the interface of the new instance, as opposed to going from Twitter to Mastodon which is quite the adjustment.

MentalEdge, 10 months ago (edited 10 months ago)

There's one more benefit.

In a federation, you can join the new less shitty version, AND stay in the old one going downhill.

You can vote for the new thing, without giving up on the old. You simply switch which one you post to.

Imagine if you could have Reddit and Lemmy, in the same app, seamlessly intermingling, but actively reduce how much you contribute to reddit, while actively increasing how much you contribute to lemmy.

You could contribute to that change and improvement, with ZERO trade-offs. How many more people would support the next thing, if they could adopt the new without discarding the old?

timbervale, 10 months ago

That is an entirely valid point, and one I do like. The worst part of that is having to wade through duplicate posts, which isn't the end of the world, I suppose.

Well said.

mounderfod, 10 months ago

As cool as it would be, currently federation doesn’t work in this way

Basically the two communities you mentioned are !startrek and !starktrek; notice that when I write it out like this, they have different full names.

If you post on either community from any instance it will federate to that community on all instances but not between each other as they are separate communities

Hopefully this helps, I’m not great at explaining these things 😅

timbervale, 10 months ago

No, that makes perfect sense, it just seems like a real limitation. The reason Reddit got as big as it did was because everyone was on the same platform, and I didn't need to go to 15 different forums just to have to participate in the same conversations 15 different times. I was kind of hoping the Fediverse would be a replacement for that, but instead it seems to dive headlong into the "15 small forums are better than 1 big forum, even though it's been proven time and again that (most) people don't want that".

Oh well. Back to using Reddit, I suppose. Thank you for the answer, though!

Dark_Blade, 10 months ago

Keep in mind that Lemmy/kbin are still figuring things out. Most likely, whichever community emerges as ‘the most popular’ will just become the ‘default choice’. This shit happened on Reddit too, back when subreddits became a thing.

Hobovision, 10 months ago

I don't understand a small thing about this new place, better just leave.

timbervale, 10 months ago

More like:

I don't understand something I am having trouble wrapping my head around, and so I should ask the community that would best be able to answer my question. I'm not going to switch from Reddit to Instagram, because Instagram doesn't fulfill my needs; why should my evaluation of kbin be any different?

If kbin/Fediverse doesn't work for me, that's okay. It's a really well put together platform, and it's an exciting technology. I hope you guys have lots of fun here for many years to come. That said, if it's not a fit for me, why would I continue to use it?

Hobovision, 10 months ago

Well it seems I was wrong, you're still here and it seems like you are genuinely interested in the way this all works. However, I hope you can see how the phrasing "oh well, back to reddit" could be taken perhaps not quite how you may have intended it.

It is true that this is not identical to reddit. In fact, I think most of us here hope it will become something better than reddit. Keeping the best parts, excising the worst. Adding new features and interacting better with the wider internet.

I hope that as we get more users, the benefits of instances emerge, but right now there's just not quite enough activity to make it work too well. But the vibe I'm getting from a lot of your comments (I haven't read them all, so I could be off-base) is that you are looking for justification for not liking something about this place, rather than having an open mind.

MentalEdge, 10 months ago

I suspect he just straight up logged out and went off into the sunset...

timbervale, 10 months ago

Nope, still trying to understand things. I want to get away from Reddit, but if this isn't made for users like me, then that's okay, it's not made for users like me. I don't blame kbin, nor want it to change what it is; I'm just trying to understand the Fediverse and all things related to it, that's all. Trying to find a good home for the future that isn't Reddit.

MentalEdge, 10 months ago (edited 10 months ago)

Federation means centralized decentralisation. It aims to strike a balance.

Each community still needs to have an admin, a creator, and moderators. In the future, it will likely become possible for a community to pack up and move between instances, but things still have to have a "source". This is what enables centralised control, moderation, within a decentralised system. The "home" instance is in control of any given community, but it is in fact hosted on ALL servers that it is federated with.

But this isn't peer to peer, each copy is just a copy, only the "real" community gets to be a "legit original", this is how it can delete stuff. This is how you can delete your own stuff. Or edit it, for that matter. Every community has a "center" somewhere on the network, and all others are "spokes" to that "hub". But each server can be both the hubs and spokes for different things, spreading out the load on the system, and providing redundancy. When a server goes offline, the other "spokes" of any communities on it keep working to a limited extent, however, the "spokes" can no longer talk to each other without the "hub" so comments and posts stop syncing.

If any given server goes to shit, yes, there will be loss, but the system as a whole survives. And it wont be long before the communities that were lost set up new "hubs". Additionally, the old spokes don't go anywhere, they will still show up in search, be visible in your user history, available in full as an archive. It just wont be an interactive one.

Without this, you just get peer to peer, along with all it's suitabilities for illegal activity. In a federation, there's still someone in control, who can purge criminal or simply unwelcome users. Or to just keep things on topic, to prevent a star trek community from being flooded with bots posting star wars.

timbervale, 10 months ago

See, that must be my confusion. I was thinking that each instance moderated the content that was being ingested by the server from whatever instances its users subscribed to. Like, if I subscribed to !startrek, then it would create a community here on kbin where the moderators of that magazine (I'd assume I would be assigned as the moderator if I were the first to subscribe to that source) would then moderate that magazine based on the kbin instance's rules. Like a: the instance pulls all the content from the external instance, but it's up to the instance's users to moderate the ingested content themselves, kind of deal. I'm learning that I have waaaaay too high expectations for the Fediverse given how young it still is.

MentalEdge, 10 months ago (edited 10 months ago)

This would be monstrously inefficient. No, each community is moderated by its top mod, and any additional mods that they appoint.

Worth noting, is that you can mod communities that are on other instances, an account does not need to be on the "home" instance of a community, in order to be a mod on it.

This way, content does not need to be moderated multiple times, for every instance it is on.

Could you imagine subscribing to a community you like, and suddenly being saddled with the responsibility of monitoring everything that comes through just because you accessed it off-instance? Or worse, having to review the entire history of a community because you just added it from a new instance? No, this would never work.

timbervale, 10 months ago

I don't know about, "this would never work," as it's basically how news forums work today. The news is posted by websites such as CNN.com, Reuters, etc., and then individual forums/websites moderate that content based on their rules. It would be less efficient for small instances to subscribe to big topics, but then there could be a solution about layering moderation (an option to ingest the feed as it gets moderated by a different instance, or to ingest the raw feed, or some other option I didn't think of in the few seconds I gave it thought).

MentalEdge, 10 months ago

I mean, it could work, but having moderation be centralised, with the option to start up communities on the same subject with different modding policies, just makes more sense efficiency-wise.

What would be the benefit of every server modding everything that comes in compared to that? And they CAN still do that, by appointing instance mods.

timbervale, 10 months ago

The benefit would be the content. Imagine you post to a magazine with 300,000 users, with new posts every 5 minutes, and hundreds of comments per article; that kind of an experience would be more desirable than posting to a magazine with 500 people, with new posts every 12 hours, and maaaybe 10 comments on the more popular posts, wouldn't it?

The benefit of every server moderating everything that comes in would be that a post that isn't suitable for one instance could be perfectly fine for another. Imagine the topic of politics: for some people, discussing abortion might be too sensitive, but others might be totally fine with allowing it. We wouldn't want to stifle conversations about that subject, though, so maybe it gets through to the individual instances to handle it as they see fit. This way a user can continue interacting with a large community that's interested in politics, instead of fragmenting that community into half a dozen smaller communities; sure, some posts might be hidden by some instances, and those threads would be less active than thread about more agreeable subjects, but that's still a lot better than every thread being less active, isn't it?

MentalEdge, 10 months ago

But this means there needs to be someone monitoring posts, not just every five minutes, but every five minutes, for every server.

This is completely untenable. An off-instance sub might not even have enough subscribers on that other server, to count on both hands. Yet someone has to mod it? For small communities, there might just be one or two subscribers to it per server.

You're giving examples with massive usercounts, which wouldn't work, due to that massive usercount. But low usercount examples also don't work, due to the low usercount.

MentalEdge, 10 months ago

That's not at all how it works. There aren't going to be 15 different mini forums, one for each instance. Only one instance needs to have one, and the rest can connect to it.

That just doesn't stop people from starting duplicates on other instances, same as on reddit, someone can start another sub for the same thing with a slightly different name.

timbervale, 10 months ago

So you're saying that 14 of the 15 "mini forums" shouldn't exist, and everyone should use a single instance, but access it through their instance via the Fediverse (like subscribing to !startrek on kibin)? If so, wouldn't that mean a consolidation of power for the !startrek instance, and thus go against what federation is about in the first place? Or am I misunderstanding the whole purpose of decentralized social media? I thought the reason we wanted to use the Fediverse over Reddit was because Reddit had too much control over the content, but if one instance has all the content, doesn't that instance have just as much power as Reddit has now?

MentalEdge, 10 months ago

For any given community, yes, there must be a center. How else can there be admins and mods doing something as basic as keeping posts in a community on topic?

But we don't need to put all the communities, or users, on one server. Each server can be the hub for different things, or even different parts of the same thing. For example, anime communities for different series are spread out all over the place, but there's still generally only the one, each.

timbervale, 10 months ago

Right, but what about how websites work? Each website has its own server, but it connects via registrars for the domain names, other computers/servers learn about those domain names via distributed DNS servers, etc. I'm looking for a solution where I can access a giant collection of people/content all while using whatever site I want to use that fits my desires (or one that I spin up on my own). Right now, I'd have to access the largest instance if I want to have a large community, but then that one instance has all of the power over the content and users that use it, right? So basically the Fediverse is essentially akin to using a third-party app to browse Reddit: the app (in this case, the instance) grabs content from the API of Reddit (in this case the API of the host instance), and pulls it into its own database. I don't see how this is very different from what we currently have, though I'm trying to learn more about it and not just be a dick saying, "I don't get it, it's stupid, bye losers". Decentralized content is what I'm looking for, not just decentralized user accounts. Is that not a goal of the Fediverse?

MentalEdge, 10 months ago

The goal of federation is explicitly NOT decentralised content.

It DOES store content it in a decentralized way.
It DOES allow interaction in a decentralized way.

It DOES NOT decentralize control of the content. It can't. It shouldn't.

The admin of an instance, can control all content on it.
The top mod of a community, can control all content on it, across instances.
You are in control of your own content, across instances.

In a system that is truly peer to peer, truly decentralized, you could not edit. You could not delete. You couldn't even reliably take down content that breaks the law.

The point is not that no-one should be in control of anything. Quite the opposite. The point is that no one entity should be in control of everything.

In this, federation is completely different from other systems.

timbervale, 10 months ago

See, I was thinking decentralizing control was the primary goal of federation. Reddit having total control over the content is killer for any other website, so it makes sense for others to want to abolish that grip.

My thinking was like this: a community is made that every instance can join and post to, the posts would be shared across instances like a mailing list, and the community would be moderated on each instance by that instance's community (there would be a mod for !startrek and a different mod for !startrek), then each community on their own instances would moderate the content themselves, but it would just be a stream of content flowing into them for each instance to deal with itself. This would allow instances to moderate each community themselves according to their rules, as opposed to each community having rules that stretch across the Fediverse. This way a user would be able to post something to !politics, and a moderation team for the !politics would be able to moderate the content coming from the greater "politics" topic according to their instance's rules and their own community's rules; I imagine users on kbin.social and users on teenagers.wtf to have very different ideas of what's acceptable within their communities. This kind of setup would allow a decentralization of users, content and control.

Obviously I was very wrong as to my assumptions of the Fediverse, and I appreciate the education on the subject matter.

MentalEdge, 10 months ago (edited 10 months ago)

Some form of aggregation may still be possible. Be it user by user, or server by server.

But like I said in another comment, for the fediverse to work the way you imagined, the total number of people doing content moderation would have to be orders of magnitude greater than even facebook's or twitter's.

Additionally the way it works is not mutually exclusive with differing ideas, only, in the way it actually works, instances that agree on moderation policy, can pool their efforts. Only where there are differences, are different communities and different moderators, needed.

FaceDeer, 10 months ago

He's saying that 14 or 15 "mini forums" don't have to exist. "Shouldn't" doesn't enter into it, there are no rules about this kind of thing.

It only means consolidation of power in the startrek@lemmy.world instance if everybody prefers to go there over the alternatives. If the moderators or admins there go mad with their moderate amount of power and the community there starts sucking, everyone can switch over to a different startrek on a different instance.

I thought the reason we wanted to use the Fediverse over Reddit was because Reddit had too much control over the content, but if one instance has all the content, doesn't that instance have just as much power as Reddit has now?

An instance only has power over its own self. If lemmy.world's administrators suddenly pull off their masks to reveal that they were Reddit's admins all along, everyone can just switch to using a different startrek community on a different instance.

timbervale, 10 months ago

Isn't that still a consolidation of content/users, though? I thought the Fediverse was about decentralization, whereas I keep hearing that it's okay to centralize content/users on individual instances if it happens naturally. Wouldn't that just lead to situations where the mega instance could control the contents/users? Migrating users to an entirely new instance is hard, I mean just look at how hard it is to get people to leave Reddit. It just feels like either I'm missing something, or the Fediverse is just a new technical way to recreate a system that we already have and complain about. If a single instance has total control over the content and users (not the user accounts, just the fact that a huge number of users would be following that specific instance), then how is it decentralized?

FaceDeer, 10 months ago

Wouldn't that just lead to situations where the mega instance could control the contents/users?

No, it would not, I and others in this thread keep telling you that. There's no need for users to have an account on that "mega instance" in order to interact with the community there, and if that community or instance goes sour it's no effort at all for the users to switch to interacting with a different community on a different instance.

It just feels like either I'm missing something

Yes, I think so. It feels like the same things are being said back and forth repeatedly, so we're probably talking past each other.

You may have an idiosyncratic definition of "decentralization", perhaps. There are multiple ways of decentralizing stuff. In the case of the Fediverse, you still have communities "centralized" in that their content is located on a particular instance, but the users can interact with that community from any instance. This is hugely different from Reddit, which has only one instance that's completely and forever under their control, where users can never interact with anything outside of it.

Migrating a user to a new instance is hard, yes, but you don't have to.

If a single instance has total control over the content and users (not the user accounts, just the fact that a huge number of users would be following that specific instance), then how is it decentralized?

How does an instance have "total control" over users from other instances? It has no control at all. At worst it can defederate, which would just hurry along their migration to a new community that's on some other instance.

timbervale, 10 months ago

How does an instance have "total control" over users from other instances? It has no control at all. At worst it can defederate, which would just hurry along their migration to a new community that's on some other instance.

Look at Reddit: it's gone bad, and yet millions still use the site. So much so, in fact, that content on many subreddits is posted every few minutes, whereas the same communities here on kbin see hours or days between posts. That's what I mean: people are used to the solution they like, so if a community becomes "bad" enough to make me move to a different instance, it might not be bad enough for everyone else, and so I'd be stuck moving to a smaller instance while the majority of users continue using the "bad" instance. Just because I don't need to create a new account doesn't change that fact.

If I don't want to use Reddit, all of the content and users that I benefit from are still over on Reddit. No matter how much I'd like everyone to switch over to kbin, they don't think Reddit is as big of an issue as I do. Clearly. So what am I supposed to do if that happens with !startrek in a few years? Do I have to put up with a bad site as long as everyone else puts up with it, too? Or do I have to move to a smaller community on a different instance just so I don't have to deal with the problems of the original instance?

FaceDeer, 10 months ago

Look at Reddit: it's gone bad, and yet millions still use the site.

Because they are trapped there. A user account on Reddit remains on Reddit, it can't access communities outside of Reddit.

If Reddit were magically part of the Fediverse then I, FaceDeer@kbin.social, could have been posting on startrek@reddit.com. Then when Reddit goes bad and startrek@reddit.com starts sucking, I can just start posting on startrek@startrek.website instead. No need to create a new account or "migrate" anywhere. The friction is minimal.

Since Reddit is not part of the Fediverse, then the only way I could be posting to startrek@reddit.com would be if I was using the account FaceDeer@reddit.com and if Reddit goes bad then FaceDeer@reddit.com cannot interact with startrek@startrek.website. FaceDeer@reddit.com is "trapped" there, and I would have to create a whole new account to get off it (as I did).

so if a community becomes "bad" enough to make me move to a different instance

You don't need to move to a different instance. I'm not sure where this miscommunication is coming from. You can continue using timbervale@kbin.social if startrek@startrek.website "goes bad" and instead go hang out on some other startrek community without having to create a new account.

Do I have to put up with a bad site as long as everyone else puts up with it, too? Or do I have to move to a smaller community on a different instance just so I don't have to deal with the problems of the original instance?

Move to the smaller instance. Everyone else can move too. It's just as easy for them as for you. Then it becomes the bigger instance.

If it's "bad enough" for you to move but not for them to move, perhaps you're being more sensitive to the badness than everyone else is. Maybe it's not so bad. If it is that bad, then why aren't they moving?

timbervale, 10 months ago

Because they are trapped there. A user account on Reddit remains on Reddit, it can't access communities outside of Reddit.

Creating a new account on kbin here was not exactly hard. Is your argument that millions of people still use Reddit because they can't type in a couple of data fields?

Then when Reddit goes bad and startrek@reddit.com starts sucking, I can just start posting on startrek@startrek.website instead. No need to create a new account or "migrate" anywhere. The friction is minimal.

Right, but then all of the other users that post interesting content that you went to startrek@reddit.com for are still on startrek@reddit.com, not on your new instance. Now, your new instance gets zero posts because it's new, but the old instance still has millions of people posting to it every second of every day. Yeah, you have a new place to post to, but all of the content that you went to startrek@reddit.com for in the first place is still over there. Federation did nothing to help that problem.

You don't need to move to a different instance. I'm not sure where this miscommunication is coming from. You can continue using timbervale@kbin.social if startrek@startrek.website "goes bad" and instead go hang out on some other startrek community without having to create a new account.

It's not miscommunication, it's just that I'm removing the option of changing to a different community/magazine on the same instance. If I can no longer stand being part of !startrek, I'm not going to start posting to !startrek2, I'm going to the next largest community, which is, at this time, usually on a different instance all together, like !startrek. I'm not talking about my user account, I'm talking about the community/magazine itself. If a mod on !startrek goes crazy and starts banning people for talking about Star Trek: Discovery, I'm not going to want to be there, even if my account hasn't been banned, yet. As a result, I would need to find a new Star Trek community to post in, which is what I mean when I say I'd have to move to a different instance (because why would I switch to a different community/magazine on the same instance? And, also, there are a million scenarios where switching to a different community/magazine on the same instance would be a bad idea/impossible). Note that when I say community, I mean the equivalent of kbin's magazine, as Lemmy calls it a community.

Move to the smaller instance. Everyone else can move too. It's just as easy for them as for you. Then it becomes the bigger instance.

The entire reason I would subscribe to a community/magazine is because I enjoy interacting with the community there, and seeing/interacting with the content they post. If I switch to a smaller community/magazine, that content becomes exceedingly rare, and the number of people I can converse with drops dramatically. There are 315 subscribers to !electricvehicles, but 241,000 subscribers to https://reddit.com/r/electricvehicles. Clearly, the experience of posting to one vs. the other is drastically different, wouldn't you say? Why would I go to a place where I have just a few people to talk with, when I could stay on the old site that has thousands upon thousands of people? The same applies to if it were 5 years from now and !electricvehicles has 241,000 users but !electricvehicles has 315: no one will want to switch if the mods of the larger community/magazine turn into assholes.

If it's "bad enough" for you to move but not for them to move, perhaps you're being more sensitive to the badness than everyone else is. Maybe it's not so bad. If it is that bad, then why aren't they moving?

So now it's, "if most people don't move, it's not really that bad, or it's your fault for thinking it's bad"?

FaceDeer, 10 months ago

Creating a new account on kbin here was not exactly hard. Is your argument that millions of people still use Reddit because they can't type in a couple of data fields?

Creating the account is not the only burden in this process, it's a whole other website you need to go to. All those objections you've been raising about "migrating content" and "migrating users" and whatnot that don't actually apply between federated instances do apply between the Fediverse and Reddit.

Now, your new instance gets zero posts because it's new, but the old instance still has millions of people posting to it every second of every day. Yeah, you have a new place to post to, but all of the content that you went to startrek@reddit.com for in the first place is still over there.

The scenario you originally proposed is that the current "main" community has gone bad in some way.

Has it, or has it not, "gone bad"? If it has then people will want to leave it to go someplace that hasn't "gone bad." The Fediverse makes that easy. Reddit makes that hard.

It's not miscommunication, it's just that I'm removing the option of changing to a different community/magazine on the same instance.

You're not talking about federated instances, then. I'm talking about the Fediverse, and you seemed to claim to be talking about the Fediverse, but it really seems like you're not. I assumed that this was because you were failing to understand something that we were telling you, but at this point I'm really not sure any more. You appear to have some imagined version of the Fediverse that you're discussing that doesn't correspond to reality and you're refusing all correction that you're getting to this.

Look, if you really want to stick with whatever is the biggest community regardless of how "bad" the admins have become, then just stay on Reddit. You don't need to come here. Stay on Reddit, endure whatever the admins decide to do with the site, because it's the biggest and that's all that matters to you. That's fine, everyone has different priorities.

The reason people are migrating to the Fediverse is because it frees them from Reddit's admins, and will prevent future admin abuse by making it easy to interact with any instance from any other instance. Nobody's trapped on just one instance here, meaning nobody is stuck with dealing with just one set of admins.

So now it's, "if most people don't move, it's not really that bad, or it's your fault for thinking it's bad"?

Pretty much. What's wrong with that statement? Different people have different values and priorities and will consider different things to be "bad." There are people who use Reddit's official app and like it just fine. There are people who don't mind if their favourite subreddits are overrun with trolls or are lacking the best content because the good mods have all been driven away. That's fine, they can stay with Reddit if they want. Reddit doesn't have to die for the Fediverse to live.

Do you want to come here? I've explained how it works. If you don't like how it works, don't come here. It's really quite simple.

retronautickz, 10 months ago

Because they're two different communities/magazines hosted in two different servers from two different platforms

Federation makes it posible for you to participate in both

timbervale, 10 months ago

I understand they are two different communities, I was just hoping it was a bug with Lemmy and kbin not talking to each other properly. The reason Reddit/Facebook/et al are so huge is because people want to have a single community to talk with, not 15 little communities all having their own discussions. I get the appeal of that, but if I wanted to join a small forum I'd go to startrekforum.com or something like that. We already have sites that offer small communities; what we needed was a replacement for Reddit. For the moment, it appears that Reddit is still the best way to be part of a large community, and that's sad for people like me that just want a large community without having to rely on one website to host that community. Oh well.

retronautickz, 10 months ago

We already have sites that offer small communities; what we needed was a replacement for Reddit.

The thing is neither Lemmy not kbin were made to be Reddit replacements.

The reason Reddit/Facebook/et al are so huge is because people want to have a single community to talk with

They're also centralised and their respective servers can tolerate much more content being shared/posted onto them than a fediverse server can. Having different communities allows for a given server not to be saturated.

Idk why there are so many general use instances when the threadiverse would be a great place for themed instances to exist. But even with thematic instances you can't avoid similar communities existing (because multiples servers could exist for the same topic/fandom/etc.

Something that connects communities about the same topic from different servers into a "macro-community", so everything posted in any of the communities can be read when you click one of them, without putting to much pressure into a sole server, would be cool. But I don't think is posible with AP alone.

FaceDeer, 10 months ago

Idk why there are so many general use instances when the threadiverse would be a great place for themed instances to exist.

I would suspect that it's because when these instances were coming online a week or two back there weren't any other instances around, so having them be general-purpose was good. The Threadiverse can't "afford" special-purpose instances until there's already a large number of people around.

timbervale, 10 months ago

It also could be that people want their instance to be the instance for that community, or they want to be in control of the community, not someone else. It's also one of the concerns I have about user impersonation (having a @timbervale, a @timbervale, and a @timbervale could lead to a whole bunch of confusion).

FaceDeer, 10 months ago

It doesn't matter if an instance wants their instance to be "the" instance for a community, they don't get to decide that for the whole Fediverse. It's up to the users.

It's also one of the concerns I have about user impersonation

Usernames should be interpreted in the same context as email address. I am FaceDeer@kbin.social, the "@kbin.social" part is as much a part of my username as the "FaceDeer" part.

The UI should probably be displaying it more prominently than it is, that's a bug that Kbin should resolve at some point.

timbervale, 10 months ago

You're right, but the current tradition and momentum are towards using short display names; virtually every service that has a public-facing feature uses display names (even most email clients put the first and last name of the users instead of their actual email addresses).

We definitely should be using the full bit on kbin/lemmy, though, as it's so critical to the idea of the Fediverse, you're 100% correct on that.

FaceDeer, 10 months ago

The current tradition may simply have to change when it comes to the Fediverse, because the Fediverse doesn't work that way. It can't work that way because instances are independent of each other. There's no central authority that can decide which one gets to have the "startrek" community name or the "FaceDeer" username.

If you want there to be a central authority to decide that stuff, then you don't want the Fediverse.

snooggums, 10 months ago

I want to narrow down the topics I'm looking for without needing to search and subscribe to each instance. So instead of going from All to Subscribed, which have a lot of non-startrek content, I want to view all of the startrek subs across all federated instances even if I haven't subscribed.

This sounds like what the OP is asking about, although I would actually love to just pick some strings of text and save it as a subgroup. If I don't like one or two of them I can remove them from the list, but while browsing my startrek subgroup I get to see content from newly created startrek magazines without needing to regularly search and add them manually.

That would result in seeing content across instances at the same type for the same topic without needing to keep up with new instances. And to be honest, I don't care about instance specific rules. I just want to browse and interact in a respectful way and if some instance has silly rules they can let me know I broke a silly rule and I'll bow out of theirs.

timbervale, 10 months ago

Kind of, but not exactly. I'm asking for a solution where kbin.social and lemmy.world and startrek.website all post to the exact same community, but in a way that doesn't require me to be subject to the whims of the mods of any specific instance.

If a mod on !startrek (currently the largest Star Trek community instance) were to go on a power trip and ban anybody who mentioned Star Trek: Discovery, I wouldn't want to be part of that community, anymore. Most people wouldn't care, though, and just wouldn't post about Star Trek: Discovery. So, fine, I go subscribe to another instance where they allow Star Trek: Discovery, but if !startrek has 20 million subscribers, and the next biggest instance only has 40 thousand, the experience of using that next biggest instance is going to suck in comparison. That's the problem I'm trying to find a solution to: a situation whereby a specific instance doesn't control the content for everybody, but instead they only control the content for their specific instance.

retronautickz, 10 months ago

It's having different communities/magazines (and also groups) that allows you not having to be subjected to the whims of mods, because you can decide which one of those to subscribe to.

We cannot centralise communities because this is not a centralised platform.

Not even in Reddit there's only one subreddit per topic. It's just that centralisation allows you to ignore the existence of those subreddits you don't follow...

What could be done is:

• Having some kind of nomadic identity a la Hubzilla, but for communities. Anything about a topic is immediately copied on any community/magazine about that topic and. This way, if the hosting server of any of those communities dies, the content in the communities hosted there could migrate to similar communities/magazines across different instances on the threadiverse. (This would require adding Zot protocol. I'm not sure this can be done with AP)

• The ability to curate your feed by tags. That way one could see the threads and posts on a topic across instances by following a tag rather than by having to follow different communities/magazines on the same topic. You could also avoid seeing post containing certain tags by blocking/hiding tags.

timbervale, 10 months ago

So your argument is that we aren't subject to the whims of mods because we can just move to a different community? Isn't that true of Reddit, too? We can just move to a different subreddit and we wouldn't be subjected to the whims of the original mods, right? That feels like a bad argument for federation, because that solution already exists.

And does each post need to be tagged for the tagging thing to work, or just the community/magazine?