So, are we saying we want more people to create accounts on Meta’s Threads?
That’s what defederation would imply: people who want to interact with Meta’s folks and be in touch with Meta’s community would end up creating accounts there. We’d be handing users to Meta by doing that.
Clearly, Meta has tons of resources to invest. If they have half a braincell among them, they’ll be able to create some value with those resources. Given that they’re launching Threads with or without federation, we now have two options:
We let Meta enhance the value of all instances.
We lock out Meta, and all their value created remains their own.
What are we even talking about here? A ton of people put in a ton of effort and work to create a platform where the whole point is to have different organizations be able to inter-operate without any one instance gaining too much power. As soon as someone with actual resources wants to contribute, we shut them out? Folks, if a single organization could bring down the fediverse, then the “decentralize so that no one can gain too much power” model is proven wrong, and it was bound to fail anyway.
If we become an echo chamber where the only one who can be part of the “fediverse” are people without resources, then what’s even the point? Who wants an email service that can’t send emails to Gmail and Hotmail, but only YourFriendlyLocalInstance.com?
The way I see it, we should absolutely not defederate. I’d prefer to see Google or Twitter also join the fediverse, and have them competing amongst each other to make sure we have enough competition to keep any of them from wanting to defederate.
We care about the vision of a “fediverse”, where all instances’ users can talk to one another if they choose. If that’s what we care about, there’s no choice here: federate, or you’ve already broken the vision.
Look, no one is saying that programming.dev should promote Meta’s content on their home page. Let’s beef up our moderation/content filtering tools:
Let users block all Meta communities and all Meta users if they choose.
Let users set that none of their posts should federate to Meta.
Let community mods block all posts from Meta users.
Let community mods decide never to let Meta users see any of the posts on their community.
Let the instance owners decide never to feature a Meta user’s post or a Meta community post on “all” or “local”. Make it so that the only way to find a Meta post/user is by actively searching for it or subscribing to their communities.
That’s all well and good.
But defederation is worse than that. What defederation really means is: “Even if programming.dev users want to see Meta content or post there, we won’t allow it. Go create an account there instead.” As soon as you do that, it’s not a fediverse anymore.
I’m also interested in the same. But honestly even if Facebook is operating in bad faith, such is life. We shouldn’t abandon our core concept even so. In my eyes, we’re testing the “hardness” of the fediverse to operate even if individual instances, howsoever large, operate with self interest.
Yeah I mean I agree that the phenomenon described by that “paradox” exists, but I’ve come across it before and I have very little respect for that idea.
My opinion is that this “paradox” has a simple resolution:
Intolerant ideas (including messages and posts) should be allowed, considered, and countered with better ideas. Should be easy, since intolerant ideas are generally shitty ones.
Intolerant actions (and I’m differentiating against speech from action here) should be prevented.
I say that pretty much covers it. “Intolerant people” isn’t a useful thing to talk about. Either they’re holding intolerant ideas in their head and we should respectfully convince them to reconsider, or they’re doing intolerant actions (again, not including speech/posts/comments) which should be prevented.
The “paradox” just seems like an excuse to justify people’s own intolerance, so I don’t like it.
I appreciate your engaging with me on this, though you haven’t convinced me yet :)
I’m in agreement with you that Meta absolutely intends to exploit “the fediverse” for their own benefit: to gain users by making their platform valuable.
But… my take on this is: so what? If the fediverse can only operate when all actors are benevolent and selfless, then it won’t last very long at all. And, even if it does, it’s not as valuable to me that way, so I’ll be leaving. What’s the value of a fediverse if it doesn’t even federate with any of the major players that have the most resources?
This would be even worse if we defederate later, once it turns out that Meta is trying to do something that really warants a defederation.
I honestly don’t think that anything ever justifies defederation, aside from technical limitations. If you want to run a gated forum, fine, but then don’t call it a “fediverse”. It’s just a forum. Would we say that it’s fair for Google to say “From now on, Gmail will not send emails to @republican_party.org email addresses because we don’t agree with them”?
EDIT 1: I haven’t made my point very clearly. Am currently editing this message to make it clearer.
EDIT 2: Left the comment the way it was. Am struggling to express myself properly-- this is the best I can do at the moment.
Hey everyone! Ive made a third bot for the instance called Linker. This bot will automatically detect when you try to reference a certain community and then give both relative and direct links to it in a comment for people to check out....
Hey folks! Just realized something that makes Lemmy different from Reddit. Because of the federation, your votes are not technically anonymous on Lemmy. At least, I think....
But the implications are still interesting. One might (big might) trust Reddit as an organization not to use this data for evil, but with federation, there’s nothing stopping an instance from simply releasing all users’ voting history to be public.
Of course, my instance didn’t even ask for an email to sign up, so my entire account is anonymous that way.
I wonder if there are technical ways to federate votes anonymously?
I think this issue is overblown. Instances of Lemmy might run modified code and choose to save things that the user intended to delete, of course, but the default setup of Lemmy seems reasonable to me in terms of how it treats deletion.
Currently it keeps deleted posts forever to allow users to un-delete if they choose, but deleting your account clears everything. And I believe there’s work in progress to discard deleted posts after 30 days. Details here: https://github.com/LemmyNet/lemmy/issues/2977
Good on you for actually checking and not blindly assuming like me! Hahaha glad to see my assumptions bore out this time.
But yeah, even if lemmy doesn’t aggregate it, it would be possible to set up a bot pretending to be an instance which collects and aggregates vote histories.
Yes, true, the current system does allow that. But the current system also doesn’t allow users to accidentally vote twice (and it remembers your vote)— this is the feature I think would be more challenging to implement if we were to hash & salt the user's ID.
Lemmy and Kbin are two different systems that talk to each other. Like how Gmail and Outlook are two different systems, but you can still send emails between them.
So you can make posts over there on Kbin and I can upvote them from over here on Lemmy.
Yes, that’s a fair point. Just because you send a “I have deleted this message” signal out into the universe doesn’t mean that everyone will receive or obey it.
I assumed that was understood.
But that’s very different from instances intentionally and malevolently keeping data despite indicating to users that it was deleted, which is what I think folks’ privacy concerns are about.
EDIT: What I mean is that the federation model is inherently non-private in a certain sense (but in the same sense that someone could take a screenshot of your Reddit comment and your deleting your comment won’t delete their copy). But Lemmy is not egregiously misusing data.
I appreciate your commitment to this privacy consideration. I personally don’t think it’s the hill I’d prefer to die on, but I welcome your contributions.
I actually disagree! I think I like that there can be multiple communities. I expect (if this whole federated thing works out) that they'll naturally start to merge as people realize which one is better run/moderated.
What I would like is the ability to browse multiple communities at once, like how reddit lets you do https://reddit.com/r/technology+python, for example.
Should programming.dev defederate from Meta if they implement ActivityPub?
I’m not suggesting anything, just want to know what do you think....
Flowchart to help Git Newbies understand what's happening (programming.dev)
cross-posted from: programming.dev/post/223663...
Flowchart to help Git Newbies understand what's happening (programming.dev)
cross-posted from: programming.dev/post/223663...
Question: isn’t Federation inherently more susceptible to bots?
Instances, of course, have some bot-mitigation tools which they can use to prevent signups, etc....
New Community Bot - Linker
Hey everyone! Ive made a third bot for the instance called Linker. This bot will automatically detect when you try to reference a certain community and then give both relative and direct links to it in a comment for people to check out....
Why are the comments I made in feddit communities from my lemmy.world account not there?
Probably stupid question, if this is wrong here please let me know....
Interesting difference from Reddit: Upvotes/Downvotes are not anonymous
Hey folks! Just realized something that makes Lemmy different from Reddit. Because of the federation, your votes are not technically anonymous on Lemmy. At least, I think....
Hello from Lemmy! How’s life there over on the other side on Kbin?
Attempt #2