from Sackeshi@lemmy.world to fediverse@lemmy.world on 20 May 23:31
https://lemmy.world/post/29981620
Decentralization is obviously the big thing about the Fediverse but is it TOO decentralized to gain traction?
There is no reason why they have to be fully separate domains in the same branch. You can set up a system of fully independent moderation and extreme levels of customization while having them all on one site with a front page that allows everyone to see whats popular.
A front page wouldn’t prevent individual subgroups from requiring approval to join, it wouldn’t prevent subgroups from banning those it doesn’t want. It doesn’t prevent users from blocking subgroups that it doesn’t want to see on the front page.
What would be most useful is that now someone could create an account on the Reddit, Twitter, Facebook(?) alternatives and give them access to every community, and then allow each community to set its own rules, and customize its own to be unique while having a unified product to “sell” and get people to move.
Hot take? Blue Sky should be worked with to join the Fediverse as the twitter alternative and Mastodon should work to be the Facebook alternative
TLDR: One front page and general site for Lemmy, Mastodon…and to sign up and see whats popular and then have fully independent subgroups.
threaded - newest
Google Chat or whatever uses to be federated via XMPP, but then they slowly started making incompatibility changes. Due to it being such a dominant chatting service, the real federated versions died out.
Basically I’m saying it’s not worth it. If you want to support Threads or Blue Sky as a central front page to the Fediverse then go for it, but they don’t actually need your support.
It would give an enormous power to who controls this “front page”. This page could restrict any user arbitrarily, lock them out, spy on them, etc. And because this page would be unique, they would have no alternative. This is exactly why federation is a key to freedom.
That can be worked out, have power shared by say 10 people who have to agree to any changes they make to it. or use AI (I know not ideal).
IMO, it isn’t decentralized enough. The federated model is better than centralized corporate services, of course, but it still suffers many of the same pitfalls in microcosm. We need private, encrypted friend-to-friend connections that enable friend-of-a-friend onion routing to those outside one’s personal social circle to effectively mimic how real human social networks actually work. The only middlemen we need are the friends we made along the way.
From my perspective, that’s not something I’d use, or at least, it wouldn’t have been much use to me when I was a young closeted queer person in small town Australia. It wouln’t have been much help finding my peers
It could have been, there’s nothing preventing such a network from providing a degree of anonymity by leaving your signature out of a post and adding a few increments to the distance on its onion route to obfuscate the source.
And in any case, you’d only need to make one remote friend to reach an entirely different segment of the network.
If you can stomach bitcoin bros, check out Nostr, it works more like this.
I cannot, and they can’t stand me either because I’ve deleted more bitcoin than most of them will ever see and I’ve personally killed about $5million in crypto scams before they could pull out the rug. XD
But who would control this front page?
A group of people who would all need to agree before action, a mini government of sorts, maybe elected idk but its the only way to gain a real foothold. The people running it are only supposed to act if illegal activity is going on and they are contacted by authorities in the appropriate jurisdiction.
which is the “appropriate” jurisdiction?
what if it’s legal in my country, but it is illegal in the country where the server is? I have no other choice of server, you’re taking away our ability to join servers in our own countries
Ideally it would be hosted in the EU and thus only things illegal there would be enforced.
Which EU country? Who’s to say that’s the ideal? That sounds biased. Also the “ideal” (if there is such a thing) could change over time with global politics.
any country in the EU
Including Germany, which has draconian laws against criticizing Israel’s genocidal actions and fascist regime, as demonstrated by the recent drama over feddit.org?
Laws aren’t identical across the EU. If you are aggregating content from a bunch of instances, there will be content aggregated that’s illegal in one place and not another.
Still too problematic, as what is legal and not in the EU depends on the trendy neo-nazi party du jour. Check Germany, for one, where apparently showing any disapproval of Israel gets you Gestapo’d, or that’s what Lemmy administrators in Europe seem to fear. Or Italy / Spain, where any attempt to liberate sports transmissions gets half the internet shut down.
Oh, did I even mention Turkiye?
Honestly, I’ve always been of the opinion that projects that are intended to be truly international need to build up to some sort of “all humanity” jurisdiction or international waters jurisdiction. Since it’s not like the UN is going to provide any sort of aid here.
Switzerland is probably the country most likely to leave everyone alone lol. Because they’re a direct democracy and extremely decentralized. Plus internationally neutral.
Which further emphasizes the question. If things are bad enough in Switzerland that you have to consider leaving, where to?
It won’t get bad there it’s the richest country and has direct democracy, CHF 5,430 post tax median salary. There’s nothing for an authoritarian party to say to convince voters who are the wealthier people (actual citizens) of Switzerland
Also the average assets for adults is over $700K they’re too rich to fall to power hungry parties
Why on Earth would you want it to take over the social media space? Have you not seen what those places are like?
Because social media is controlled by big corporations and thats why they are such shit. Once Reddit, Twitter and Facebook falls and if it falls to the fediverse it will be controlled by the average joe not political money motivated operatives
Ah yes. The ‘average joe’. :|
So that the rest can be free with us.
But I don’t like them and don’t want them in my feed.
Mass-market slop troughs exist for a reason.
Just defederate simple as that, no need to wish others isolated just because you don’t want them, that’s the beauty of the Fediverse
I feel like the current Lemmy, if it grew to be as big as Reddit, would immediately defederate from a large section of Lemmy itself, creating many separate communes rather than the one (or two) we have right now
There is that advantage.
I kinda like the fediverse as is. We keep slowly growing our services. We don't need to be social media.
We can be social sure but without the need to be ever growing. I would rather us concentrate on the people and giving us power rather than huge orgs that are going to do huge org things.
I just like that it’s smaller. Like, you can actually have conversations (or slapfights :sigh:) and can actually recognize people. Kind of like something bigger than a small town but smaller than a huge city.
I’m not opposed to growth, and it would definitely be a good thing in the long run, but I like that it’s not just shouting into the void here.
Thanks totally agree. And appreciate the comment.
I feel like this is still a community and less people trying to influence. Or less so at least.
Lol slapfight.
Growth is a long way away, we already lost 30% of the people that first came on board (couldn’t stand having to create their own content smh)
Hey,
Hope you’re doing well!
As well as can be expected, all things considered. Hope the same to you.
Gateways that ease the pain of entrance to the fediverse are a good thing. A single, centralised gateway that defacto controls all access to the fediverse is exactly what I’m trying to get away from
Just to be clear each site, Lemmy, Mastodon… Would have it’s own front page under this idea.
Most platforms have their “join lemmy” or “join Mastodon” equivalents already
I know but having a reddit style front page or trending like Twitter would look more engagefull.
Peertube and pixelfed have that built in to the individual instances. It is something I’d like to see more widespread
Unless peertube has a way to properly monetize and at a much higher rate it’s not beating YouTube which in conjunction will sponsors and patreon is doing great for creators. pixelfed has potential
Unless you want to talk about transphobia, racism, LGBTQ rights etc, etc, in which case, you live on the edge constantly wondering when YT is going to demonetize you
Who (which single entity) would host this new front page?
You've just described the goals of Mbin. I congratulate you.
You know what's exactly as decentralized as fediverse? Email. Do you know anyone who doesn't use email?
Email is a utility 💀 not a social platform
It was before chat services arrived.
Remember when we had mailing lists that basically acted like forums and group chats with your various friend groups that consisted of these long email chains?
Not really, i grew up in the AOL era, so for me it was chat rooms, and sometimes (but not often) actual forums. Then it was myspace after that.
Damn kids, get out of my yard
I’m sorry, I was just seeing if you wanted to be friends.
Welcome! Thanks for the suggestion, I’m happy with having multiple sites and not one team having absolute say on content over the rest.
While not being exactly what you are proposing, you could consider mastodon.social and lemmy.world the de facto front page for each service. They are by far the largest and best-known instances in their respective networks. Many new users start at those instances, get their toes wet, and then branch out.
I’m not arguing that’s how the network should be structured, though.
For mastadon, it’s like 85% mastadon.social, Lemmy has it better with only 50%
Then make the “one true frontpage” for Lemmy or whatever (implement ActivityPub, maybe borrowing some code from the Lemmy codebase itself, or kindof making a fork of Lemmy), and if it’s good, it’ll be used. If not, it won’t.
But then, it might well fall victim to this phenomenon:
<img alt="XKCD #927: Standards" src="https://imgs.xkcd.com/comics/standards.png">
Lemmy has lots of competing “front pages.” How will one more change anything? A more generic domain name or something?
Lemmy.com Mastodon.com … If those were the front pages that curated the top 25 posts and top 25 sub groups in the last 24 hours and it was a space where you could search for the groups you fit into or are interested in. No more confusing mess.
PieFed can group communities (including Lemmy’s federated communities) by interest, it’s just not mature enough replacement but I’d wage on it being a lot more convenient for people less knowledgeable about tech to use it than Lemmy, when it gets mature enough
The top 25 posts in the least 24 hours would probably mostly show politics, news and tech memes, which aren't the most attractive content for potential new joiners.
I personally block this type of content, and I'm probably not alone.
??? Why should Mastodon become an entirely different kind of site when there's already Facebook alternatives for the fediverse?
What’s the Facebook alternative? Also blue sky is by far the closest to replacing Twitter with millions of users
Friendica is designed to be a facebook alternative. Not too familiar with it though.
I, and a lot of other fedizens, don’t want the type of people who use BlueSky and Facebook in my ActivityPub fediverse.
Fedi is cool because it’s small, weird, and highly enriched with people I’m actually interested in communicating with. I don’t need or want the pool to be diluted with an ocean of piss.
As much as I love the fediverse, its control structures can’t scale. If it ever became truly popular, bad actors would overwhelm it almost immediately.
I never understand people comparing Mastodon to Facebook, it feels more like a proper modern evolution of what Twitter used to be than of Facebook, you can’t have communities on Mastodon which is a key thing Facebook has that Orkut also had which when it closed down there was a huge exodus to Facebook, not to say it’s like wow so important but they both also had integrated games be that Flash games or Unity Web (no longer a thing either of the two but Flash games can be played safely through emulation with Ruffle (which is open-source) and not enough games yet but there’s ongoing QoL development for web game export with Godot) again games are not that important and communities feature is a huge thing, people using fediverse thinking who wants communities will join forumverse platforms like Lemmy is not being realistic with your target audience if you want to keep talking about exodus of all kind of people to fediverse platforms, there are a lot of people who barely understand what domains or directories are