this post was submitted on 21 Oct 2024
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There are a large number of unanswered questions about the Fediverse. I don't just mean questions that users may have, but questions for which no suitable answer exists yet. Some are extremely abstract and existential like "will the Fediverse survive the next decade?" Other questions are very concrete like, "What is the copyright status of a federated post?" or "What are the moral implications of federating content that may be harmful or recording a crime?"

I wonder, for those of you who stay up nights thinking about the Fediverse, which question is the most important to you?

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[–] [email protected] 3 points 6 days ago

If it's so decentralized, where are all the local communities? I know, I know, it needs to get bigger, but still. The lack of niche and local communities and even localized instances is a major weakness.

[–] [email protected] 59 points 1 week ago* (last edited 1 week ago) (4 children)

I'll never stop wondering why this guy was trying to not poop for 3 days.

That mystery still keeps me up at night sometimes. Looks like that account got deleted so it will probably remain unanswered.

[–] [email protected] 14 points 1 week ago (1 children)

And it coincided with the small scale mutiny by Wagner against Putin.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 1 week ago

Did it also coincide with Hajj?

[–] [email protected] 13 points 1 week ago (1 children)

God, what a wonderful thread that was. I've decided to follow and star @[email protected] so I can follow up on their future exploits.

Sadly, it doesn't appear that they've posted in quite some time. Hopefully they'll come out of hiding one day and ask more ridiculous questions.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 week ago* (last edited 1 week ago)

It seems they deleted their account. But yeah that thread was really funny, the responses were good too

[–] [email protected] 5 points 1 week ago

I'm going with fuck-tent

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[–] [email protected] 27 points 1 week ago (1 children)

Scalability. Federation adds overhead that increases as the number of instances increases. It is unclear to me when we will hit a wall but it's probably not far off.

How will we pay the bills. Some instances get enough donations to pay server costs but none get enough to pay for staff or developers.

Both of those are only really problems if the fediverse grows, which it hasn't for a while now. But that could change at any moment.

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[–] [email protected] 22 points 1 week ago (3 children)

Who is actually funding lemmy.ml?

[–] [email protected] 12 points 1 week ago (2 children)
[–] [email protected] 13 points 1 week ago (1 children)
[–] [email protected] 4 points 1 week ago

So the lmy devs make less than minimum wage

[–] [email protected] 7 points 1 week ago (1 children)
[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 week ago (2 children)
[–] [email protected] 1 points 6 days ago (1 children)

So is TikTok... China funds lots of things that are banned there.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 6 days ago (1 children)

TikTok is not banned in china.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 6 days ago (1 children)

Excuse me, TikTok is "unavailable" in China

[–] [email protected] 0 points 6 days ago* (last edited 6 days ago) (1 children)

That's not true either...

tiktok is completely allowed in china

it's called douyin and is the same thing owned by the same company

[–] [email protected] 1 points 6 days ago* (last edited 6 days ago) (1 children)
[–] [email protected] 0 points 6 days ago* (last edited 6 days ago) (1 children)

It's owned by the same company and is the same app with a different name...

tiktok just has a different name in china...

[–] [email protected] 1 points 6 days ago (1 children)

It is factually not, it is a version of the app that is separate and goes through the Chinese censors. If they were the same you'd just be able to use the same app.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 6 days ago* (last edited 6 days ago)

it is factually just different brand-name.

Everything in china goes through the chinese censors, nobody is saying that china isn't heavily censored, but that's tiktok and it's available in china. Who cares about the name? So many things have different names by country.

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[–] [email protected] 4 points 1 week ago (3 children)

Why is this a burning question? I see a lot of people complain about ml, but I haven't had any issues with users or their communities; though the latter I've had sparing interactions with.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 1 week ago

They advocate voting abstinence and voting third party a lot. That's a view that has been connected with Russian propaganda ops designed to put Trump in the White House.

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[–] [email protected] 19 points 1 week ago* (last edited 1 week ago) (3 children)

Is it part of the same dynamics as mainstream social media? Meaning, can we make it substancially better than Twitter, Reddit & Co or do we always have some baseline negativity and not so great group dynamics?

[–] [email protected] 12 points 1 week ago* (last edited 1 week ago) (1 children)

I'd wager that enshittification is inevitable, but the Fediverse can "live on" between cycles because instances or even entire systems can go down while new Fediverse ones take their place.

[–] [email protected] 8 points 1 week ago (1 children)

Plus, fediverse clusters can break apart like tectonic plates and become continents if any serious barriers need to happen. It might happen over time if any instances start to specialize. Never know.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 1 week ago (3 children)

I'd be a shame if it really broke apart. I mean that would be more a De-Fediverse. Like all the Discourse forums where I need to open up every single one of them to read what's new, because they're specialized and not interconnected in practice. I'd advocate for the instances to still interconnect while doing whatever they want. And giving more control to the individual user. Ultimately... it's complicated. We have things like (instance) local timelines in some federated software. And it'd be great to have distinct Lemmy places/instances. One for political debate and news, one dedicated to Free Software... That's kind of what communities are for. But it's the same people in all larger ones. And the instances all look the same, and topics and interests are not part of the onboarding process. So people currently end up on some random instance.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 week ago* (last edited 1 week ago) (1 children)

What's to stop people from making "tunnel" instances, maybe even with reposts?

That aside, ultimately, we're at the mercy of whoever is paying for the instance, and their interests. So if everything does fragment, it's just kinda the nature of the hosts.

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[–] [email protected] 3 points 1 week ago (1 children)

Conflating Xitter with the R-site seems a bit harsh. One is a bubbling morass of incivility and lying, an infernal radicalization machine, the world's virtual toilet wall. The other is a generally successful community whose control structure is excessively private and centralized. That's the way I see it, anyway.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 1 week ago* (last edited 1 week ago)

Sure. X is a toxic mess. And has been for quite some time. Whereas I kinda liked the community on Reddit. Quite some nice people there and good conversations. Unfortunately the company behind it likes to F their moderators and users. Kicked them out for speaking up, made the platform worse and Apps don't work anymore. And they put in a decent amount of effort to specifically F us over, so I left. But I get what you say. That's not the community's fault.

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[–] the_artic_one 11 points 1 week ago

When will the amount of spam and astroturfing outpace the glacial development of moderation tools and destroy the whole thing?

[–] [email protected] 10 points 1 week ago (1 children)
[–] towerful 5 points 1 week ago

"Lemmy Plays Doom".
Doom runs for 0.5 seconds and the video is uploaded to the LPD community.
Most upvoted action in the comments after a day gets applied to the game and the next 0.5s of gameplay video is uploaded to a new post.
Repeat until WR is achieved.

Might need some moderator discretion to normalise comments to in-game actions (or fuck it, send it to an LLM)

[–] [email protected] 9 points 1 week ago (1 children)

If the current leading theory of dark matter being a fundamental particle means that there were "two big bangs" why would the dark big bang have to appear second?

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[–] [email protected] 6 points 1 week ago (5 children)

A big one is "How does an instance change their underlying implementation?". Like how could a lemmy instance decide to migrate to become a Mastodon instance?

Currently that's just not possible, but it seems important for the long term survival of an instance. It seems naive to think that an instance will stay the same implementation forever. But ActivityPub basically makes this impossible.

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[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 week ago

Getting to nomadic identity, and the equivalent for magazines/communities (i.e. being able to change what instance your account is based off of, as well as the instance that hosts a given community).

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 week ago (4 children)

Will the Fediverse switch away from ActivityPub to ATProto?

[–] [email protected] 8 points 1 week ago (1 children)

ATProto is what Bluesky uses, right? It'd be nice if someone could give a quick summary of the features and what differentiates it compared to ActivityPub.

It seems like it would be a pretty big task to switch from ActivityPub, because each fediverse project would have to implement that independently.

[–] [email protected] 6 points 1 week ago* (last edited 1 week ago) (3 children)

There are a number of features that make them different, but the major one that makes me favour ATProto is that it gets around the centralization problems of the Fediverse.

I'm @[email protected] on ActivityPub, this means:

  • My identity is linked to pawb.social. That means that if someone falls out with my admin over something, I get blocked as fallout.
  • Likewise, if my admin falls out with someone else and blocks them, I have to follow those decisions.
  • My data is stored on pawb.social. That means that if the server gets shut down, even with warning, poof! My data is gone.

In addition, there isn't any way to transfer data between ActivityPub instances. Sure you can set up redirects in Mastodon, but there's no way to actually transfer information or history.

There's really no reason these three things all need to be managed by the same entity (pawb.social in my case).

Under ATProto:

  • My identity is handled by DNS. I control my domain name, so I control my identity and reputation.
  • While this isn't battle tested yet, ATProto (or at least Bluesky) has much better support for blocklists. Individual users can create their own blocklist and share them with others. So Bluesky itself doesn't need to ban other instances unless they start doing really illegal things.
  • My data is stored on Bluesky's servers, but I can easily move it to another server if I need to without breaking anything (I think? ATProto nerds, is this true?).

If I don't like the way Bluesky is going I can just... Leave. I can move my data to another platform and log in to another frontend. All without my followers even noticing a difference or losing any content.

It also has some cool features. For example, there's this thing which allows you to just set up pronouns so that they are visible on your own profile to other people that use the list. https://bsky.app/profile/pronouns.adorable.mom All implemented without any protocol extensions.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 week ago

Dumb backend, smart frontend?

Basically, have hosts replace services like AWS but don't make them have any power (except for choosing if they agree to host NSFW content or not) and make the data they host public so anyone can develop a frontend to access it, a single account giving you access to everything, administer your own experience, mods have control over the communities they moderate but there's no admin that can decide you don't have access to a big chunk of the content because they don't want to be federated with certain instances.

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[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 week ago (3 children)

How can I make it not feel empty? (And why I can't find any good posts on it?)

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 week ago

I think one way is writing more comments. If people (can) engage with you it does not feel as empty. Sometimes however it feels stupid to be the only commenter.

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