solrize@lemmy.world
on 12 Sep 2024 06:24
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I don’t know what Cohost was but I’m pessimistic about Lemmy these days. Note that the link is to an article moaning about the centralization of sites like Reddit and that Cohost (whatever that was) failed because it was run by the same type of people. At first I didn’t click on the link because it says “audio” so I expected it to be audio and I didn’t feel like listening to one. It’s a written article though.
Why? The userbase is quite stable, and new platform are emerging (Piefed, Mbin), and more people are probably going to come the next time Reddit messes up
Kecessa@sh.itjust.works
on 12 Sep 2024 11:05
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The instance system is confusing for new users and they might not even realize that they’re missing out on a lot of content by signing up to the wrong instance.
In the end it’s just a bunch of centralized websites sharing content if the admins feel like it and sure you can create your own instance but another admin can decide to defederated from yours anytime they feel like it, that’s still a lot of power in the hands of a single person…
Both front and back end need to be decentralized and also separated from each other. Make all content available to all and have people develop a UI to access it, let the users curate their feed.
This way people sign up on one page and can use the same credentials no matter what page they go to, the competition for front end devs is to offer the best UI, the development for the hosting part is what’s done as a community on GitHub or whatever…
Blaze@feddit.org
on 12 Sep 2024 11:20
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I always point new users to Lemm.ee nowadays.
another admin can decide to defederated from yours anytime they feel like it, that’s still a lot of power in the hands of a single person…
All of the top 20 instances ask feedback from their communities before defederating. They know that if they don’t, people will switch instances in two clicks.
Kecessa@sh.itjust.works
on 12 Sep 2024 11:55
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Most people won’t switch though, they won’t want to lose their username, their feed and so on, we’re creatures of habits…
Hell, trolls could go around and recreate accounts on the top 100 instances with the same username users have on other instances to prevent them from reusing the same username elsewhere, just that is a weird concept to explain “Oh yeah, someone else can create an account and pretend to be you and unless people notice that the instance they’re from isn’t the same, there’s no way to know it isn’t you!”
You’re sending users to Lemmy.ee but in the end it’s an instance controlled by one person paying the hosting fees and with the last word on what goes on on their server.
Blaze@feddit.org
on 12 Sep 2024 12:28
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Most people won’t switch though, they won’t want to lose their username, their feed and so on, we’re creatures of habits…
You can keep your username, export and import your subscriptions and block list in two clicks from the settings.
Hell, trolls could go around and recreate accounts on the top 100 instances with the same username users have on other instances to prevent them from reusing the same username elsewhere, just that is a weird concept to explain “Oh yeah, someone else can create an account and pretend to be you and unless people notice that the instance they’re from isn’t the same, there’s no way to know it isn’t you!”
“You are bob@gmail.com, but someone could create bob@outlook.com and pretend to be you”
Also, this kind of impersonating would probably get the trolls banned.
You’re sending users to Lemmy.we but in the end it’s an instance controlled by one person paying the hosting fees and with the last word on what goes on on their server.
Kecessa@sh.itjust.works
on 12 Sep 2024 13:16
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That’s 5 admins out of how many users?
In the end Lemmy is centralized, just in a different way, someone can wipe out a huge part of the content in a single click.
rglullis@communick.news
on 12 Sep 2024 14:08
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The content itself is harder to be deleted, because federation means that every post comment gets duplicated on all instances.
You do have a point regarding identity, and this is something that bluesky has solved already in a more elegant way. But this is also fixable with activitypub: as Takahe already showed it is possible to efficiently serve different domains with the same server. And on the extreme case, you can run your instance.
Kecessa@sh.itjust.works
on 12 Sep 2024 14:16
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Did you see the scramble when feddit.de went offline for weeks and all its content became unavailable?
If there’s going to be duplicates anyway, why not do as I said (decentralize the hosting separately from the front end and make it available to all) and just really duplicate everything so there’s always a real backup and no one can wipe anything by shutting down their server?
rglullis@communick.news
on 12 Sep 2024 14:37
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Like I said, the content did not become unavailable. My instance still has the data from every community being followed.
The only unrecoverable problem with feddit.de is that the domain was lost. If the owner had given the domain to someone else, one could (theoretically) get all the identities back. They would need new keys, but the accounts would still be salvageable.
As for “separate frontend”: this is already possible and like I said it is a matter of improving the existing clients. We don’t need a fundamental change in the protocols to get what you want, we just need to get more resources available to developers so that they can continue working and improving on what we have.
Kecessa@sh.itjust.works
on 12 Sep 2024 17:07
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But if a new instance is created after one was deleted, the new instance users will never have access to what was on that instance that got deleted.
We have “separate front ends” at the moment (guessing you’re referring to apps, otherwise people log in through their instance’s website), but the content the users have access to and the people they can interact with still depends on the instance they sign up on, I’m talking about eliminating that completely and letting the users be the ones that decide who and what they can interact with.
I’ll never be able to check what’s going on on beehaw or hexbear as long as my instance is the one I’m on, but no one should have the power to decide that for me or the other users I’m interacting with.
rglullis@communick.news
on 12 Sep 2024 17:34
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You are always free to run your own instance, and this is absolutely no different than “decentralizing” everything. The federation model where all users distrust each other degenerates into a fully p2p network.
Kecessa@sh.itjust.works
on 12 Sep 2024 17:46
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And then admins from other instances can decide they don’t want to federate with my instance, see how it doesn’t solve anything?
SorteKanin@feddit.dk
on 12 Sep 2024 18:06
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If you follow that logic, people should never be able to block or ban you? That makes no sense. Of course anyone should be allowed to block anyone else for whatever reason they choose. That’s what defederation is as well. If you don’t have the option of blocking or banning, stuff degenerates really badly and really quickly.
Kecessa@sh.itjust.works
on 12 Sep 2024 19:24
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No, by my logic only users should be able to decide to ban me entirely and only mods should be able to ban me from specific communities, admins shouldn’t exist at all, that’s real decentralization, Lemmy is an half-measure.
rglullis@communick.news
on 12 Sep 2024 19:38
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“real” decentralization was never the goal of Lemmy or any project in the Fediverse.
Again, it seems like you are either stating the obvious or complaining that the people designing the applications have made different trade-offs that you would like.
SorteKanin@feddit.dk
on 12 Sep 2024 19:45
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only mods should be able to ban me from specific communities
As I stated elsewhere, I don’t really see how you can even have mods without admins.
But how is admins banning you from an instance any different than a mod banning you from a community? Why are you okay being banned from a community by a mod but not okay being banned by an admin from an instance? Isn’t it the same conceptually speaking, just on a different moderation/administration level?
Kecessa@sh.itjust.works
on 12 Sep 2024 19:53
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An instance ban or defederation is a high level decision that has an impact on thousands of users at once, in a single click the admin can decide that tens of thousands of people don’t connect with each others anymore or that a single person doesn’t have access to hundreds of thousands of communities.
Moderators on the other hand have control over a single community, the amount of damage they can do is minimal.
SorteKanin@feddit.dk
on 12 Sep 2024 20:00
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Indeed - that is why you should consider at least a little bit which admin you want to sign up with (i.e. which instance you choose). Choose an admin that wouldn’t just do that willy-nilly (except maybe in cases where abuse/bad actors is obvious), but would only do it after careful consideration and maybe even with involvement from their users.
This is not an argument against the fediverse model of admins owning instances. It’s just an argument for choosing good admins.
Kecessa@sh.itjust.works
on 12 Sep 2024 20:05
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You can choose the best admin in the world, the admin from another instance has the power to make it so you can’t see what’s on their server just because they don’t like how your admin manages their part of the fediverse.
SorteKanin@feddit.dk
on 12 Sep 2024 20:53
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Again, then choose an admin or an instance that doesn’t get defederated a lot. And as said elsewhere, you (or at least most people) don’t want a scenario where you can’t block other people or whole instances. Defederation is an important moderation tool.
Kecessa@sh.itjust.works
on 12 Sep 2024 21:49
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What I’m suggesting wouldn’t prevent people from blocking other users or communities, just like on Reddit, instances wouldn’t exist at all, which would solve the main issue with Lemmy.
SorteKanin@feddit.dk
on 12 Sep 2024 21:56
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Reddit does have an instance, in that sense. There’s just only one. Reddit has admins too. They can even ban entire communities and you can’t go to another instance to make the community again.
Also again if there are no instances I’m really at a loss for where these communities are hosted and who is legally responsible, for instance, to remove illegal content.
Kecessa@sh.itjust.works
on 12 Sep 2024 22:14
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Backend: The hosting is a database, people provide servers, host content, filter what they don’t want on their own servers but if it’s hosted by someone else on another server then it’s available to users. In the end it works the same way as hosting any website except that you’re not dealing with AWS or another such service, it’s just people like you and me providing space on their servers to host chunks of the database and you back up everything so no one can wipe their server and make part of the database disappear
Frontend: The database is 100% public, if you create a website to access it all you’re doing is providing the UI for users to see what’s in the database and interact with it, you don’t host the content itself
If you’ve ever played with crypto the principle is similar, the ledger is public, anyone can create a website to let people see the transactions on it and to push transactions to it
SorteKanin@feddit.dk
on 13 Sep 2024 05:48
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It sounds like nostr. Why don’t you just use that?
That said, it’s not realistic to have everything be public. But whatever, I’m not going to argue this any more.
rglullis@communick.news
on 12 Sep 2024 18:12
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Yeah, that’s exactly the point! How do you think that a decentralized system is any different?!
If everything is “decentralized”, you still must have a way to get rid of bad actors. Even nostr is set up in a way that you can not force your node into anyone else’s relay.
Forgive my bluntness, but the more you try to argue you point the more it seems you have no clue what you are talking about. There are plenty of things to criticize about Lemmy and ActivityPub in general, but you are missing the mark on all of them.
Kecessa@sh.itjust.works
on 12 Sep 2024 19:26
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Getting rid of bad actors is the job of the users (from their feed) and the mods (from the communities they moderate), no one should have the authority the admins have.
rglullis@communick.news
on 12 Sep 2024 19:32
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Admins still need to have control over what goes into the servers. If you are running a server and someone pushes content that is illegal in your jurisdiction, you can not go around asking users to please stop it for you.
Kecessa@sh.itjust.works
on 12 Sep 2024 19:49
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No, but you can delete the illegal content from your server and other server owners can do the same on their side.
The way it works currently is no different for that, the person who controls the server can block IPs if they want.
What I’m saying is that if some servers are ready to host your content then it’s the users’ and moderators’ decision to block it on their side.
rglullis@communick.news
on 12 Sep 2024 20:23
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As a matter of governance, I agree with you: my instance is only blocking one instance and that’s because they got reported for hosting CSAM. As an admin, I believe that my users are mature enough and smart enough to know how to filter out what they want to see.
But if you acknowledge that server admins can censor content on their servers, your complaint is only about the way that this is done, not the principle, and you agree that there needs to be an established hierarchy.
Kecessa@sh.itjust.works
on 12 Sep 2024 21:52
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They can block content on their server, but as long as one server hosts the content, it would be available to anyone who wants to see it, which isn’t how things work on Lemmy unless you want to sign up to a bunch of instances to make sure you have access to everything.
rglullis@communick.news
on 12 Sep 2024 22:06
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If you just want to see the content, you don’t need an account. You can just pull the data, like opening up a different website.
What you want is the ability for some other server to push content to a server that the admin might have chosen to say “no, I do not want to have data from them, and I do not want to have my resources used by these users”.
I’ll never be able to check what’s going on on beehaw or hexbear as long as my instance is the one I’m on, but no one should have the power to decide that for me or the other users I’m interacting with.
Well, that’s a choice Beehaw made. Shouldn’t they be allowed to defederate?
Quite a few people left Beehaw because of that, which is a sign that the decentralized model is working.
In your model, how do you deal with spammers, CSAM, trolls etc. ? Should every user do their own moderation for the 47k Lemmy monthly active users? Or should people create shared moderation lists? But then you still come back to the trust issues: do you trust someone else to add a user to a block list?
Kecessa@sh.itjust.works
on 12 Sep 2024 17:50
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Allow NSFW content at your own risk, same for users and hosts.
Block users and communities as you see fit, why should a centralized authority decide for the users? It’s the same thing as Reddit except that there’s a bunch of centralized authorities instead of one.
I can create my own instance but other instances can decide to not federate with it.
If admins were the problem on Reddit we should work on making a platform where admins don’t exist at all, not one where there’s just more of them.
Blaze@feddit.org
on 12 Sep 2024 18:05
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Allow NSFW content at your own risk, same for users and hosts.
I am not talking about NSFW, I’m talking about CSAM. There were a few CSAM attacks last year, some mods had to see some disturbing pictures of pedo pornography, that’s probably not something you want your average user to have to deal with.
It’s the same thing as Reddit except that there’s a bunch of centralized authorities instead of one.
Have you ever had a look at Nostr? It only has moderation at the user level, so that might be what you are looking for.
Kecessa@sh.itjust.works
on 12 Sep 2024 19:19
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And those CSAM attacks weren’t prevented by the way it works at the moment so that point is moot…
rglullis@communick.news
on 12 Sep 2024 19:43
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That people will upload illegal content is basically inevitable, the important thing is that there is someone (other than the original poster) with the authority to remove it.
Kecessa@sh.itjust.works
on 12 Sep 2024 19:54
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That’s the server owner’s job, it doesn’t mean they should also have the authority to decide who the users are federated with.
rglullis@communick.news
on 12 Sep 2024 20:04
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Holy crap, the point is going completely over your head.
If having absolute power over the communication channel is so important to you, you can only do that by owning everything. This is not an issue you are going to solve with changes on Lemmy, or Mastodon, or ActivityPub, or XMPP, or anything.
You are arguing where the line is drawn, but the line is not going to go away. Unless you go full blockchain, there is always some aspect of internet communication that it’s mediated: the server, the internet provider, the domain registrar.
Kecessa@sh.itjust.works
on 12 Sep 2024 21:57
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If you decentralize the hosting and make it a
“public database” where everything is backed up on multiple servers then yes, you can in fact have people hosting the content they want to host without having actual control over the website itself. If they don’t want to host NSFW content then they can filter it, someone else will host it and people can pull it from the database when they browse the website from their favorite front end.
rglullis@communick.news
on 12 Sep 2024 22:03
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You are describing nostr. Why not just use it then?
Blaze@feddit.org
on 12 Sep 2024 22:23
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Yes, I’m surprised too, I mentioned it in a previous comment, and they even mentioned crypto in another comment, seems definitely like something they should try.
Kecessa@sh.itjust.works
on 12 Sep 2024 22:25
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I’ll go take a look and if it’s what I’m talking about then I don’t know why it wasn’t the solution people jumped on when Reddit admins started fucking up instead of leaving to go on Lemmy where admins are still a thing…
Blaze@feddit.org
on 12 Sep 2024 22:30
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I don’t know why it wasn’t the solution people jumped on
Some people still want to be able to cut themselves from other people. If you ask Beehaw what they would think about Nostr, they would probably tell you that for them being able to defederate is a must.
Kecessa@sh.itjust.works
on 13 Sep 2024 01:49
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Sure and I have a huge block list on here and I would never advocate for a solution where you can’t choose to block someone or where mods can’t block people from the communities they moderate, it’s the person above that I have a problem with.
On Reddit I got blocked from a community (bread tube), I contacted the mod for an explanation and told them I didn’t see why I would get blocked for an honest question (What is the alternative to cops when people get robbed if we get rid of cops?) from someone who is a progressive but who just isn’t informed on that subject, they contacted the admins and I got banned from Reddit altogether. That’s my problem with having admins at the top, one mod didn’t like me questioning them, I had no issue in any other communities I took part in, bam, locked out of the whole place.
rglullis@communick.news
on 12 Sep 2024 22:36
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Please do take an honest try and let me know what you think of the UX.
Word of warning: the “no admin to censor you” also means “no one to help you in case you lose your account”.
SorteKanin@feddit.dk
on 13 Sep 2024 07:50
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I don’t know why it wasn’t the solution people jumped on when Reddit admins started fucking up instead of leaving to go on Lemmy where admins are still a thing…
One reason is that Nostr is filled with crypto-bros who think cryptocurrencies is the future. The whole Nostr space is filled with bitcoin news and deranged people yelling “HODL”. Not surprising coming from a social media that makes it harder to ban you and encourages more absolute free speech.
I think the UX on Nostr is also just worse. You need to keep a private key for yourself I believe and that’s just a technical hurdle and annoyance that most people don’t want to deal with.
Another reason is that people like having admins. People want moderated places. People don’t want to bother moderating stuff themselves. People don’t want douchebags calling them stuff all the time and having to block stuff. Admins and moderators provide that service and users like that.
I get that you’re frustrated that the admins at Reddit were mistreating you. The answer to that is not “abolish all admins” but rather “choose better admins”, if you ask me at least. The good thing on the fediverse is that you can go to another place if you feel the current place isn’t run by reasonable people.
SorteKanin@feddit.dk
on 12 Sep 2024 19:54
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there’s a bunch of centralized authorities instead of one
I mean sorry but that’s just what decentralization is, unless you want a fully peer-to-peer protocol which is not realistic at all.
Kecessa@sh.itjust.works
on 12 Sep 2024 20:06
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Or, as I keep suggesting, you make the authority figures have as little power as possible, i.e. the only people with authority are mods so they only have control over communities and don’t have the power to prevent tens of thousands of people from communicating with each other.
SorteKanin@feddit.dk
on 12 Sep 2024 20:58
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They really have as little power as they can given the constraints. If you don’t want an admin to have power over a lot of people, join a small instance and advocate others do the same.
It really sounds like you just want to be your own admin though. Maybe a personal instance would be a way for you.
Kecessa@sh.itjust.works
on 12 Sep 2024 21:48
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But other admins still have the power to cut you off, so no, that’s not a solution.
SorteKanin@feddit.dk
on 12 Sep 2024 21:54
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Well other admins should be entirely in their right to cut you off. Same as anyone should be able to block you. If another admin decides to cut you off, that’s up to them, you can’t stop that and shouldn’t be able to. That is anyone’s freedom.
But usually it is not a problem, as long as you are reasonable. Why would another admin block you if you are reasonable?
Kecessa@sh.itjust.works
on 12 Sep 2024 22:03
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And what I’ve been saying from the get go is that no one should have that kind of power. That you can get banned from a community is one thing, that you can get banned from all content available on one instance and that one person can decide you’re unable to communicate with tens of thousands of other users just because they don’t like your face? Well that means that Lemmy is no better than Reddit.
Post on a community moderated by Lemmy’s main dev to share a political opinion he doesn’t agree with? Say goodbye to all Lemmy.ml users, you’re banned from the whole instance mother fucker! No one should be able to do that in a decentralized system and if that’s what people want from Lemmy then they should stop pretending it’s decentralized because it’s not.
SorteKanin@feddit.dk
on 13 Sep 2024 05:46
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I think you’re totally misunderstanding how decentralization works. It sounds like you think it should be a free for all and everyone should be free to access everything. But again, the fediverse is about choice. It’s totally okay for an admin to be able to cut off another instance. It’s their instance, that’s up to them. Nobody wants absolute free speech.
If you don’t like that, go to another instance that doesn’t do that and if you get cut off from another instance by another admin, maybe consider joining that instance or another instance that isn’t defederated.
And consider also that this power is great motivation for everyone to stay nice and well moderated. If you are mean or spammy or whatever, you get defederated. So you better be nice! That’s a great feature if you ask me.
All the feddit.de content is still available on lemmy.world/c/dach@feddit.de and all the other instances which where federated.
lambalicious@lemmy.sdf.org
on 13 Sep 2024 03:52
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Hell, trolls could go around and recreate accounts on the top 100 instances with the same username users have on other instances to prevent them from reusing the same username elsewhere, just that is a weird concept to explain
Yes but that doesn’t mean you should get automatic dibs on a name everywhere. It’s just a name. If you are Joe Bill at lemm.ee, that does not give you any rights over the name Joe Bill all across the world. Statistically speaking, there’s at least 18 thousand other Joe Bills around at this very moment.
Like, this is something that is already solved by the instance’s moderators.
mke@programming.dev
on 12 Sep 2024 16:09
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This isn’t an absolute rule. Of course they don’t (and shouldn’t) ask for feedback before cutting off Nazi instances, but it’s not always so clear.
.world defederated from fosstodon and I’m still unsure why.
No, thanks for suggesting. I saw a thread by other curious users and checked fediseer. Might be an admin issue, but I didn’t see clear evidence.
Don’t think it was spam as, unless I’m misunderstanding, that seems unlikely from fosstodon.
SorteKanin@feddit.dk
on 12 Sep 2024 18:03
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I always point new users to Lemm.ee nowadays.
Most people are not interested in moderating their own feed. Leading people to an instance that does very little moderation on the defederation side of things could push them away. In that situation, they are likely to just leave the fediverse altogether and less likely to go to another instance I would say. I respect lemm.ee as an instance but I would not recommend it as a “gateway drug” to the fediverse.
There is Lemmy.zip, but they are also very light on defederation. Lemmy.dbzer0 blocks lemmygrad but still federates with hexbear
Do you have any other suggestion?
SorteKanin@feddit.dk
on 12 Sep 2024 18:58
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Yea… I get what you mean. There isn’t really an instance that is “not zero defederation”-moderated and general enough for all people if you take out lemmy.world. That’s honestly kind of surprising, it feels like a niche that more players could fill. But I guess that’s how lemmy.world got as big as it did.
If you had to give one suggestion, maybe. But still, any instance matching geographical location or a specific of your interest would be better.
Linus_Torvalds@lemmy.world
on 12 Sep 2024 15:14
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Interesting read!
mke@programming.dev
on 12 Sep 2024 16:00
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What you’re describing sounds closer to how atproto is supposed to work, but it’s yet unproven in regards to decentralization.
SorteKanin@feddit.dk
on 12 Sep 2024 18:01
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In the end it’s just a bunch of centralized websites sharing content if the admins feel like it
The whole point of the fediverse is having a choice of admin. That democratizes the space because people can choose where to go. The point is not to rid yourself of admins entirely (or at least not without just becoming your own admin, but then there is still an admin, it’s just yourself).
Make all content available to all and have people develop a UI to access it, let the users curate their feed.
Sorry but the vast majority of users are not interested in curating their feed. Most people don’t want to also be moderators. I mean fuck it’s difficult to even recruit mods for even medium-sized communities. Most people don’t like “absolute free speech” and want some level of moderation. Making all content available is not a path towards healthy platforms - it runs into the nazi bar problem instantaneously.
I won’t even comment on the herculean technical challenge of doing it in the way you describe, but even if it was possible, I don’t think it’s actually desirable. It sounds good on the surface, but that’s about it.
Kecessa@sh.itjust.works
on 12 Sep 2024 19:12
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Communities would still have their moderators though, there just wouldn’t be someone at the top that can decide that tomorrow you don’t have access to the content from another instance anymore unless you switch to another instance yourself…
SorteKanin@feddit.dk
on 12 Sep 2024 19:43
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If there are no admins, who can ever decide who is a moderator? How do you decide that? The way it is currently decided is via admins granting mods powers on communities on that admin’s instance. If you don’t have admins, I don’t see how you could possibly have mods.
Kecessa@sh.itjust.works
on 12 Sep 2024 19:44
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Create the community > you’re the mod, if people aren’t happy with your moderation they create their own community
SorteKanin@feddit.dk
on 12 Sep 2024 19:49
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I suppose communities would not have unique names then - otherwise I’ll just go ahead and create communities from all the words in the dictionary and then I control all communities.
So if they don’t have unique names, how in the world do we refer to them? By some opaque UUID or something? I mean I guess it’s possible, maybe.
Who’s hosting this new community you just made? Where does it live? The description of the community, you know the side bar in a Lemmy community, where is that physically speaking?
Kecessa@sh.itjust.works
on 12 Sep 2024 20:03
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You realize the way things work currently doesn’t prevent that, right?
As I said from the beginning, front end and back end are separate.
Ok, let me put it another way. Reddit’s content is decentralized already (everything isn’t hosted on a single server, everything is backed up on multiple servers in multiple locations) but all its content is available from a single web page.
What I’m suggesting is that the hosting is “done the same way” just handled by anyone who wants to provide servers instead of dealing with a service like AWS. Now contrary to Reddit, that content is then made publically available so anyone can develop a front end for it. There could be a default option (Lemmy.com or whatever) but it would give users access to the exact same thing as any other website that offers access to the database via a UI. No defederation bullshit, no admins that can decide to wipe out part of the site (everything is backed up, you wipe your server, no one cares, all that content is pulled from another server instead), just a huge decentralized database anyone can access.
SorteKanin@feddit.dk
on 12 Sep 2024 20:25
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You realize the way things work currently doesn’t prevent that, right?
It totally does prevent it because every community has a unique name, when you include the instance domain. Which is the whole point. The instance is where the community lives.
Kecessa@sh.itjust.works
on 12 Sep 2024 21:50
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Ok, but you can still go ahead and create the same community on every instance so you control all the communities with that name.
SorteKanin@feddit.dk
on 12 Sep 2024 21:57
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No! That’s exactly what you can’t do, because if you tried you’d get banned by the admin! In your scenario, there are no admins to stop such a bad actor. But ultimately admins control what communities are on their instance, so you can’t just hijack all communities like that.
Blaze@feddit.org
on 12 Sep 2024 07:54
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This will all keep happening until we decide we have been tricked one-too-many times by centralized platforms. The only way to escape the hellish state of the current internet is to pursue options that drag the network back towards its decentralized state; a state where corporations are unable to control who we talk to, what we see, where our attention is for five or more hours a day, every day.
This will keep happening until we abandon centralization and choose and free, open source, decentralized future. Or else the beatings will continue until morale improves.
SorteKanin@feddit.dk
on 12 Sep 2024 18:14
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Honestly that’s why email has stuck around. Can you imagine if one company controlled email? That would’ve enshittified and shut down years ago lol
_NetNomad@fedia.io
on 12 Sep 2024 12:43
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last week i was in a conversation with a few people about social media. i guess they were finally leaving xitter and wanted to know where to go. cohost came up and they all made accounts immediately. then i mentioned mastodon and was immediately rebuffed because "sometimes those instances shut down"
whoops!
poVoq@slrpnk.net
on 12 Sep 2024 14:47
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It’s super easy to migrate accounts on Mastodon. Even works fine to move an account from Mastodon to Akkoma for example.
I don’t think that’s even desirable and also legally questionable. But anyways, these posts are not gone with an instance shutting down and thus I don’t really see a problem. You can always add a link to a mirrow of those old posts in your profile.
schizo@forum.uncomfortable.business
on 12 Sep 2024 19:04
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thus I don’t really see a problem
Except you no longer can edit, delete, etc. the posts.
You’ve lost complete control over your data, and there’s no way to get it back if your instance vanishes.
Can you do that with a letter once it is send? And the instance admin of the mirroring server can delete posts if that is legally required for some reason.
And how would that even work technically? Bulk import posts and spam other instances with mass updates? That would immediately detected as a spam-wave and blocked. And back dating technically new messages is also not exactly a great thing to allow.
Other implementations of nomadic identity like Hubzilla get around this by letting you run two accounts in parallel and syncing them from your main account, but they will also not back-port old messages before you linked up the secondary account.
Basically anyone with some experience with federated systems agrees that importing old messages in bulk on account migration will never happen, and I don’t really see an issue with that, since messages are not lost.
SorteKanin@feddit.dk
on 12 Sep 2024 18:11
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This should hopefully get better over time as some instances stick around for longer. You’ll be able to point to instances that have stuck around for a while, which means they’ll probably stick around for some time longer. The problem right now is that the fediverse and many instances are still young, and something that started yesterday is not too likely to still exist tomorrow.
i just have such a hard time wrapling my head around why the fedi is under that level of scrutiny to begin with while everyone assumed cohost would be forever. i had an account there but stopped using it years ago because half the time i tried to log in it was down! come october there will be a plethora of mastodon instances that both predate and have outlived cohost
I agree with the overall spirit, but this is a bit shallow, no? Not much of an attempt to argue its points. It makes some claims, refuses to elaborate, then leaves. Feels written for people who already think the same.
Because of this as well as poor financial management, Cohost will pass out of internet culture with little impact
Would decentralization have helped it make a much greater impact? Would it have helped Cohost survive? Seems to me that financial issues would’ve killed it regardless.
SorteKanin@feddit.dk
on 12 Sep 2024 18:08
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Would it have helped Cohost survive?
Well in theory if cohost was decentralized, the instance that is now shutting down would just be one of many. As it is, it’s one of one, the only one.
Plenty of Lemmy instances have shut down, some less abruptly than others. One cohost instance shutting down is not that remarkable, all things considered. It’s only remarkable cause there’s just one instance.
In theory, I doubt development would continue. For a federated cohost to survive long term, it would also need to be open source, with a developer community that could fork the project and carry the torch. That’s a very different cohost we’re envisioning, even excluding required UX changes to make it possible.
At that point, one might as well imagine a cohost that explored better ways to make money, or attracted more users, or ran a tighter ship. Both scenarios lead to this discussion never happening.
threaded - newest
I don’t know what Cohost was but I’m pessimistic about Lemmy these days. Note that the link is to an article moaning about the centralization of sites like Reddit and that Cohost (whatever that was) failed because it was run by the same type of people. At first I didn’t click on the link because it says “audio” so I expected it to be audio and I didn’t feel like listening to one. It’s a written article though.
Why? The userbase is quite stable, and new platform are emerging (Piefed, Mbin), and more people are probably going to come the next time Reddit messes up
The instance system is confusing for new users and they might not even realize that they’re missing out on a lot of content by signing up to the wrong instance.
In the end it’s just a bunch of centralized websites sharing content if the admins feel like it and sure you can create your own instance but another admin can decide to defederated from yours anytime they feel like it, that’s still a lot of power in the hands of a single person…
Both front and back end need to be decentralized and also separated from each other. Make all content available to all and have people develop a UI to access it, let the users curate their feed.
This way people sign up on one page and can use the same credentials no matter what page they go to, the competition for front end devs is to offer the best UI, the development for the hosting part is what’s done as a community on GitHub or whatever…
I always point new users to Lemm.ee nowadays.
All of the top 20 instances ask feedback from their communities before defederating. They know that if they don’t, people will switch instances in two clicks.
Most people won’t switch though, they won’t want to lose their username, their feed and so on, we’re creatures of habits…
Hell, trolls could go around and recreate accounts on the top 100 instances with the same username users have on other instances to prevent them from reusing the same username elsewhere, just that is a weird concept to explain “Oh yeah, someone else can create an account and pretend to be you and unless people notice that the instance they’re from isn’t the same, there’s no way to know it isn’t you!”
You’re sending users to Lemmy.ee but in the end it’s an instance controlled by one person paying the hosting fees and with the last word on what goes on on their server.
You can keep your username, export and import your subscriptions and block list in two clicks from the settings.
“You are bob@gmail.com, but someone could create bob@outlook.com and pretend to be you”
Also, this kind of impersonating would probably get the trolls banned.
Lemm.ee had 5 admins. The main one has been very clear that he keeps defederation to a minimum: lemm.ee/post/35472386?scrollToComments=true
Of course you need to trust him and his team.
If you prefer a paid model where you have a customer relationship with the admin, you might to have a look at communick.com/services/lemmy/
The owner is @rglullis@communick.news , who commented below
That’s 5 admins out of how many users?
In the end Lemmy is centralized, just in a different way, someone can wipe out a huge part of the content in a single click.
The content itself is harder to be deleted, because federation means that every post comment gets duplicated on all instances.
You do have a point regarding identity, and this is something that bluesky has solved already in a more elegant way. But this is also fixable with activitypub: as Takahe already showed it is possible to efficiently serve different domains with the same server. And on the extreme case, you can run your instance.
Did you see the scramble when feddit.de went offline for weeks and all its content became unavailable?
If there’s going to be duplicates anyway, why not do as I said (decentralize the hosting separately from the front end and make it available to all) and just really duplicate everything so there’s always a real backup and no one can wipe anything by shutting down their server?
Like I said, the content did not become unavailable. My instance still has the data from every community being followed.
The only unrecoverable problem with feddit.de is that the domain was lost. If the owner had given the domain to someone else, one could (theoretically) get all the identities back. They would need new keys, but the accounts would still be salvageable.
As for “separate frontend”: this is already possible and like I said it is a matter of improving the existing clients. We don’t need a fundamental change in the protocols to get what you want, we just need to get more resources available to developers so that they can continue working and improving on what we have.
But if a new instance is created after one was deleted, the new instance users will never have access to what was on that instance that got deleted.
We have “separate front ends” at the moment (guessing you’re referring to apps, otherwise people log in through their instance’s website), but the content the users have access to and the people they can interact with still depends on the instance they sign up on, I’m talking about eliminating that completely and letting the users be the ones that decide who and what they can interact with.
I’ll never be able to check what’s going on on beehaw or hexbear as long as my instance is the one I’m on, but no one should have the power to decide that for me or the other users I’m interacting with.
You are always free to run your own instance, and this is absolutely no different than “decentralizing” everything. The federation model where all users distrust each other degenerates into a fully p2p network.
And then admins from other instances can decide they don’t want to federate with my instance, see how it doesn’t solve anything?
If you follow that logic, people should never be able to block or ban you? That makes no sense. Of course anyone should be allowed to block anyone else for whatever reason they choose. That’s what defederation is as well. If you don’t have the option of blocking or banning, stuff degenerates really badly and really quickly.
No, by my logic only users should be able to decide to ban me entirely and only mods should be able to ban me from specific communities, admins shouldn’t exist at all, that’s real decentralization, Lemmy is an half-measure.
“real” decentralization was never the goal of Lemmy or any project in the Fediverse.
Again, it seems like you are either stating the obvious or complaining that the people designing the applications have made different trade-offs that you would like.
There you go, a fully p2p reddit alternative. Now go away and be useful instead of complaining for the sake of complaining.
As I stated elsewhere, I don’t really see how you can even have mods without admins.
But how is admins banning you from an instance any different than a mod banning you from a community? Why are you okay being banned from a community by a mod but not okay being banned by an admin from an instance? Isn’t it the same conceptually speaking, just on a different moderation/administration level?
An instance ban or defederation is a high level decision that has an impact on thousands of users at once, in a single click the admin can decide that tens of thousands of people don’t connect with each others anymore or that a single person doesn’t have access to hundreds of thousands of communities.
Moderators on the other hand have control over a single community, the amount of damage they can do is minimal.
Indeed - that is why you should consider at least a little bit which admin you want to sign up with (i.e. which instance you choose). Choose an admin that wouldn’t just do that willy-nilly (except maybe in cases where abuse/bad actors is obvious), but would only do it after careful consideration and maybe even with involvement from their users.
This is not an argument against the fediverse model of admins owning instances. It’s just an argument for choosing good admins.
You can choose the best admin in the world, the admin from another instance has the power to make it so you can’t see what’s on their server just because they don’t like how your admin manages their part of the fediverse.
Again, then choose an admin or an instance that doesn’t get defederated a lot. And as said elsewhere, you (or at least most people) don’t want a scenario where you can’t block other people or whole instances. Defederation is an important moderation tool.
What I’m suggesting wouldn’t prevent people from blocking other users or communities, just like on Reddit, instances wouldn’t exist at all, which would solve the main issue with Lemmy.
Reddit does have an instance, in that sense. There’s just only one. Reddit has admins too. They can even ban entire communities and you can’t go to another instance to make the community again.
Also again if there are no instances I’m really at a loss for where these communities are hosted and who is legally responsible, for instance, to remove illegal content.
Backend: The hosting is a database, people provide servers, host content, filter what they don’t want on their own servers but if it’s hosted by someone else on another server then it’s available to users. In the end it works the same way as hosting any website except that you’re not dealing with AWS or another such service, it’s just people like you and me providing space on their servers to host chunks of the database and you back up everything so no one can wipe their server and make part of the database disappear
Frontend: The database is 100% public, if you create a website to access it all you’re doing is providing the UI for users to see what’s in the database and interact with it, you don’t host the content itself
If you’ve ever played with crypto the principle is similar, the ledger is public, anyone can create a website to let people see the transactions on it and to push transactions to it
It sounds like nostr. Why don’t you just use that?
That said, it’s not realistic to have everything be public. But whatever, I’m not going to argue this any more.
Yeah, that’s exactly the point! How do you think that a decentralized system is any different?!
If everything is “decentralized”, you still must have a way to get rid of bad actors. Even nostr is set up in a way that you can not force your node into anyone else’s relay.
Forgive my bluntness, but the more you try to argue you point the more it seems you have no clue what you are talking about. There are plenty of things to criticize about Lemmy and ActivityPub in general, but you are missing the mark on all of them.
Getting rid of bad actors is the job of the users (from their feed) and the mods (from the communities they moderate), no one should have the authority the admins have.
Admins still need to have control over what goes into the servers. If you are running a server and someone pushes content that is illegal in your jurisdiction, you can not go around asking users to please stop it for you.
No, but you can delete the illegal content from your server and other server owners can do the same on their side.
The way it works currently is no different for that, the person who controls the server can block IPs if they want.
What I’m saying is that if some servers are ready to host your content then it’s the users’ and moderators’ decision to block it on their side.
As a matter of governance, I agree with you: my instance is only blocking one instance and that’s because they got reported for hosting CSAM. As an admin, I believe that my users are mature enough and smart enough to know how to filter out what they want to see.
But if you acknowledge that server admins can censor content on their servers, your complaint is only about the way that this is done, not the principle, and you agree that there needs to be an established hierarchy.
They can block content on their server, but as long as one server hosts the content, it would be available to anyone who wants to see it, which isn’t how things work on Lemmy unless you want to sign up to a bunch of instances to make sure you have access to everything.
If you just want to see the content, you don’t need an account. You can just pull the data, like opening up a different website.
What you want is the ability for some other server to push content to a server that the admin might have chosen to say “no, I do not want to have data from them, and I do not want to have my resources used by these users”.
Well, that’s a choice Beehaw made. Shouldn’t they be allowed to defederate?
Quite a few people left Beehaw because of that, which is a sign that the decentralized model is working.
In your model, how do you deal with spammers, CSAM, trolls etc. ? Should every user do their own moderation for the 47k Lemmy monthly active users? Or should people create shared moderation lists? But then you still come back to the trust issues: do you trust someone else to add a user to a block list?
Allow NSFW content at your own risk, same for users and hosts.
Block users and communities as you see fit, why should a centralized authority decide for the users? It’s the same thing as Reddit except that there’s a bunch of centralized authorities instead of one.
I can create my own instance but other instances can decide to not federate with it.
If admins were the problem on Reddit we should work on making a platform where admins don’t exist at all, not one where there’s just more of them.
I am not talking about NSFW, I’m talking about CSAM. There were a few CSAM attacks last year, some mods had to see some disturbing pictures of pedo pornography, that’s probably not something you want your average user to have to deal with.
Then it’s not the same. You have communities like !yepowertrippinbastards@lemmy.dbzer0.com or !fediverselore@lemmy.ca used to document abuse from admins and mods, and modlogs are public, it’s a drastic change from Reddit.
Have you ever had a look at Nostr? It only has moderation at the user level, so that might be what you are looking for.
And those CSAM attacks weren’t prevented by the way it works at the moment so that point is moot…
That people will upload illegal content is basically inevitable, the important thing is that there is someone (other than the original poster) with the authority to remove it.
That’s the server owner’s job, it doesn’t mean they should also have the authority to decide who the users are federated with.
Holy crap, the point is going completely over your head.
If having absolute power over the communication channel is so important to you, you can only do that by owning everything. This is not an issue you are going to solve with changes on Lemmy, or Mastodon, or ActivityPub, or XMPP, or anything.
You are arguing where the line is drawn, but the line is not going to go away. Unless you go full blockchain, there is always some aspect of internet communication that it’s mediated: the server, the internet provider, the domain registrar.
If you decentralize the hosting and make it a “public database” where everything is backed up on multiple servers then yes, you can in fact have people hosting the content they want to host without having actual control over the website itself. If they don’t want to host NSFW content then they can filter it, someone else will host it and people can pull it from the database when they browse the website from their favorite front end.
You are describing nostr. Why not just use it then?
Yes, I’m surprised too, I mentioned it in a previous comment, and they even mentioned crypto in another comment, seems definitely like something they should try.
I’ll go take a look and if it’s what I’m talking about then I don’t know why it wasn’t the solution people jumped on when Reddit admins started fucking up instead of leaving to go on Lemmy where admins are still a thing…
Have a look, based on the discussion, you’ll probably like it: nostr.how/en/why-nostr
Some people still want to be able to cut themselves from other people. If you ask Beehaw what they would think about Nostr, they would probably tell you that for them being able to defederate is a must.
Sure and I have a huge block list on here and I would never advocate for a solution where you can’t choose to block someone or where mods can’t block people from the communities they moderate, it’s the person above that I have a problem with.
On Reddit I got blocked from a community (bread tube), I contacted the mod for an explanation and told them I didn’t see why I would get blocked for an honest question (What is the alternative to cops when people get robbed if we get rid of cops?) from someone who is a progressive but who just isn’t informed on that subject, they contacted the admins and I got banned from Reddit altogether. That’s my problem with having admins at the top, one mod didn’t like me questioning them, I had no issue in any other communities I took part in, bam, locked out of the whole place.
Please do take an honest try and let me know what you think of the UX.
Word of warning: the “no admin to censor you” also means “no one to help you in case you lose your account”.
One reason is that Nostr is filled with crypto-bros who think cryptocurrencies is the future. The whole Nostr space is filled with bitcoin news and deranged people yelling “HODL”. Not surprising coming from a social media that makes it harder to ban you and encourages more absolute free speech.
I think the UX on Nostr is also just worse. You need to keep a private key for yourself I believe and that’s just a technical hurdle and annoyance that most people don’t want to deal with.
Another reason is that people like having admins. People want moderated places. People don’t want to bother moderating stuff themselves. People don’t want douchebags calling them stuff all the time and having to block stuff. Admins and moderators provide that service and users like that.
I get that you’re frustrated that the admins at Reddit were mistreating you. The answer to that is not “abolish all admins” but rather “choose better admins”, if you ask me at least. The good thing on the fediverse is that you can go to another place if you feel the current place isn’t run by reasonable people.
Well put
I mean sorry but that’s just what decentralization is, unless you want a fully peer-to-peer protocol which is not realistic at all.
Or, as I keep suggesting, you make the authority figures have as little power as possible, i.e. the only people with authority are mods so they only have control over communities and don’t have the power to prevent tens of thousands of people from communicating with each other.
They really have as little power as they can given the constraints. If you don’t want an admin to have power over a lot of people, join a small instance and advocate others do the same.
It really sounds like you just want to be your own admin though. Maybe a personal instance would be a way for you.
But other admins still have the power to cut you off, so no, that’s not a solution.
Well other admins should be entirely in their right to cut you off. Same as anyone should be able to block you. If another admin decides to cut you off, that’s up to them, you can’t stop that and shouldn’t be able to. That is anyone’s freedom.
But usually it is not a problem, as long as you are reasonable. Why would another admin block you if you are reasonable?
And what I’ve been saying from the get go is that no one should have that kind of power. That you can get banned from a community is one thing, that you can get banned from all content available on one instance and that one person can decide you’re unable to communicate with tens of thousands of other users just because they don’t like your face? Well that means that Lemmy is no better than Reddit.
Post on a community moderated by Lemmy’s main dev to share a political opinion he doesn’t agree with? Say goodbye to all Lemmy.ml users, you’re banned from the whole instance mother fucker! No one should be able to do that in a decentralized system and if that’s what people want from Lemmy then they should stop pretending it’s decentralized because it’s not.
I think you’re totally misunderstanding how decentralization works. It sounds like you think it should be a free for all and everyone should be free to access everything. But again, the fediverse is about choice. It’s totally okay for an admin to be able to cut off another instance. It’s their instance, that’s up to them. Nobody wants absolute free speech.
If you don’t like that, go to another instance that doesn’t do that and if you get cut off from another instance by another admin, maybe consider joining that instance or another instance that isn’t defederated.
And consider also that this power is great motivation for everyone to stay nice and well moderated. If you are mean or spammy or whatever, you get defederated. So you better be nice! That’s a great feature if you ask me.
All the feddit.de content is still available on lemmy.world/c/dach@feddit.de and all the other instances which where federated.
Yes but that doesn’t mean you should get automatic dibs on a name everywhere. It’s just a name. If you are Joe Bill at lemm.ee, that does not give you any rights over the name Joe Bill all across the world. Statistically speaking, there’s at least 18 thousand other Joe Bills around at this very moment.
Like, this is something that is already solved by the instance’s moderators.
This isn’t an absolute rule. Of course they don’t (and shouldn’t) ask for feedback before cutting off Nazi instances, but it’s not always so clear.
.world defederated from fosstodon and I’m still unsure why.
Have you asked on !support@lemmy.world ? Could be spam issues too
No, thanks for suggesting. I saw a thread by other curious users and checked fediseer. Might be an admin issue, but I didn’t see clear evidence.
Don’t think it was spam as, unless I’m misunderstanding, that seems unlikely from fosstodon.
Most people are not interested in moderating their own feed. Leading people to an instance that does very little moderation on the defederation side of things could push them away. In that situation, they are likely to just leave the fediverse altogether and less likely to go to another instance I would say. I respect lemm.ee as an instance but I would not recommend it as a “gateway drug” to the fediverse.
The issue is that
There is Lemmy.zip, but they are also very light on defederation. Lemmy.dbzer0 blocks lemmygrad but still federates with hexbear
Do you have any other suggestion?
Yea… I get what you mean. There isn’t really an instance that is “not zero defederation”-moderated and general enough for all people if you take out lemmy.world. That’s honestly kind of surprising, it feels like a niche that more players could fill. But I guess that’s how lemmy.world got as big as it did.
If you had to give one suggestion, maybe. But still, any instance matching geographical location or a specific of your interest would be better.
Indeed, but the thing is generally, people just one want URL, and that’s it.
Latest example to date: old.reddit.com/…/map_of_2000_lemmy_communities/
You’ll see a comment on how to join Lemmy, in this kind of scenario I just give one link
The issues are describing are real, but can be solved with better clients.
Interesting read!
What you’re describing sounds closer to how atproto is supposed to work, but it’s yet unproven in regards to decentralization.
The whole point of the fediverse is having a choice of admin. That democratizes the space because people can choose where to go. The point is not to rid yourself of admins entirely (or at least not without just becoming your own admin, but then there is still an admin, it’s just yourself).
Sorry but the vast majority of users are not interested in curating their feed. Most people don’t want to also be moderators. I mean fuck it’s difficult to even recruit mods for even medium-sized communities. Most people don’t like “absolute free speech” and want some level of moderation. Making all content available is not a path towards healthy platforms - it runs into the nazi bar problem instantaneously.
I won’t even comment on the herculean technical challenge of doing it in the way you describe, but even if it was possible, I don’t think it’s actually desirable. It sounds good on the surface, but that’s about it.
Communities would still have their moderators though, there just wouldn’t be someone at the top that can decide that tomorrow you don’t have access to the content from another instance anymore unless you switch to another instance yourself…
If there are no admins, who can ever decide who is a moderator? How do you decide that? The way it is currently decided is via admins granting mods powers on communities on that admin’s instance. If you don’t have admins, I don’t see how you could possibly have mods.
Create the community > you’re the mod, if people aren’t happy with your moderation they create their own community
I suppose communities would not have unique names then - otherwise I’ll just go ahead and create communities from all the words in the dictionary and then I control all communities.
So if they don’t have unique names, how in the world do we refer to them? By some opaque UUID or something? I mean I guess it’s possible, maybe.
Who’s hosting this new community you just made? Where does it live? The description of the community, you know the side bar in a Lemmy community, where is that physically speaking?
You realize the way things work currently doesn’t prevent that, right?
As I said from the beginning, front end and back end are separate.
Ok, let me put it another way. Reddit’s content is decentralized already (everything isn’t hosted on a single server, everything is backed up on multiple servers in multiple locations) but all its content is available from a single web page.
What I’m suggesting is that the hosting is “done the same way” just handled by anyone who wants to provide servers instead of dealing with a service like AWS. Now contrary to Reddit, that content is then made publically available so anyone can develop a front end for it. There could be a default option (Lemmy.com or whatever) but it would give users access to the exact same thing as any other website that offers access to the database via a UI. No defederation bullshit, no admins that can decide to wipe out part of the site (everything is backed up, you wipe your server, no one cares, all that content is pulled from another server instead), just a huge decentralized database anyone can access.
It totally does prevent it because every community has a unique name, when you include the instance domain. Which is the whole point. The instance is where the community lives.
Ok, but you can still go ahead and create the same community on every instance so you control all the communities with that name.
No! That’s exactly what you can’t do, because if you tried you’d get banned by the admin! In your scenario, there are no admins to stop such a bad actor. But ultimately admins control what communities are on their instance, so you can’t just hijack all communities like that.
Honestly that’s why email has stuck around. Can you imagine if one company controlled email? That would’ve enshittified and shut down years ago lol
last week i was in a conversation with a few people about social media. i guess they were finally leaving xitter and wanted to know where to go. cohost came up and they all made accounts immediately. then i mentioned mastodon and was immediately rebuffed because "sometimes those instances shut down"
whoops!
It’s super easy to migrate accounts on Mastodon. Even works fine to move an account from Mastodon to Akkoma for example.
Your content stays behind, though, and some shut down without warning.
Content is mirrored on all federated instances and it is very rare for an instance to shut down without notice.
I meant that it’s not directly associated with you as the owner through your migrated account.
Edited comment (many to some).
I don’t think that’s even desirable and also legally questionable. But anyways, these posts are not gone with an instance shutting down and thus I don’t really see a problem. You can always add a link to a mirrow of those old posts in your profile.
Except you no longer can edit, delete, etc. the posts.
You’ve lost complete control over your data, and there’s no way to get it back if your instance vanishes.
Can you do that with a letter once it is send? And the instance admin of the mirroring server can delete posts if that is legally required for some reason.
And how would that even work technically? Bulk import posts and spam other instances with mass updates? That would immediately detected as a spam-wave and blocked. And back dating technically new messages is also not exactly a great thing to allow.
Other implementations of nomadic identity like Hubzilla get around this by letting you run two accounts in parallel and syncing them from your main account, but they will also not back-port old messages before you linked up the secondary account.
Basically anyone with some experience with federated systems agrees that importing old messages in bulk on account migration will never happen, and I don’t really see an issue with that, since messages are not lost.
This should hopefully get better over time as some instances stick around for longer. You’ll be able to point to instances that have stuck around for a while, which means they’ll probably stick around for some time longer. The problem right now is that the fediverse and many instances are still young, and something that started yesterday is not too likely to still exist tomorrow.
i just have such a hard time wrapling my head around why the fedi is under that level of scrutiny to begin with while everyone assumed cohost would be forever. i had an account there but stopped using it years ago because half the time i tried to log in it was down! come october there will be a plethora of mastodon instances that both predate and have outlived cohost
I agree with the overall spirit, but this is a bit shallow, no? Not much of an attempt to argue its points. It makes some claims, refuses to elaborate, then leaves. Feels written for people who already think the same.
Would decentralization have helped it make a much greater impact? Would it have helped Cohost survive? Seems to me that financial issues would’ve killed it regardless.
Well in theory if cohost was decentralized, the instance that is now shutting down would just be one of many. As it is, it’s one of one, the only one.
Plenty of Lemmy instances have shut down, some less abruptly than others. One cohost instance shutting down is not that remarkable, all things considered. It’s only remarkable cause there’s just one instance.
In theory, I doubt development would continue. For a federated cohost to survive long term, it would also need to be open source, with a developer community that could fork the project and carry the torch. That’s a very different cohost we’re envisioning, even excluding required UX changes to make it possible.
At that point, one might as well imagine a cohost that explored better ways to make money, or attracted more users, or ran a tighter ship. Both scenarios lead to this discussion never happening.