Imagine a world without platform lock-in, where no ban or billionaire could take down your social network. That’s what ActivityPub has planned.
I have my skepticisms about this whole thing. While I know the answer is “they will be defederated”, what if one of the big ones, like lemmy.world or lemmy.ml get huge, then sell out to something like Meta?
We lost 3rd party apps and we are morning the biggest breakup we’ve ever had with reddit. Say the server you’ve had your account on for so long and all your content gets taken over by a giant with strategically placed adds that are upvoted by bot armies for visibility. They may get defederated, but that means Meta just came in and destroyed a huge chunk of users accounts while gaining some ad revenue for a bit until the community dies. Everyone has to actively pack up their shit and move to another instance. I guess the loyalty to an account is less with a lack of account karma so it wouldn’t burn as bad.
You would lose all your subscribed communities when you are forced to move out. That would suck. Too bad you couldn’t export like a .db file from your account on the way out and upload it to another account on another instance. Possibly some sort of encrypted key so you can auto add as a mod to any community you were modding on your previous account. No clue if that makes any sense. Kinda Like a lemmy “Go-Bag”?
I don’t know, just thinking ahead of the shenanigans that’s going to happen if this really starts making a dent in huge corporations user counts.
Mastondon does allow you to export your profiles and set them up on a different instance; I reckon some folks will figure out a solution on how to easily jump ship.
This is one of the biggest things I think Lemmy needs. You should be able to create a backup of your profile and export/import it into another instance. That way if something happens or you have a problem with the instance admins you can migrate with no loss or minimal loss to your account.
i’ll be honest hearing lemmy while being on kbin threw me into a loop, made me wonder if i was in a lemmy community and not a kbin magazine lmao. i gotta get used to this.
But yeah, both Lemmy and Kbin need the same flexibility of Mastodon. The more easily one can move, the less likely megacorps will see value in gobbling up instances. Long-term goal might be cross-platform profile compatibility, but right now that’s a pipe dream.
I think one limiting factor that has yet to be addressed is that you can move your profile, but you can’t move your content. Another is identity. How do you know which Mastodon server has an authoritative (i.e. “blue-check”) profile for a given person/entity?
edit: Search indexing is also a huge problem. While it’s possible to create a search index over all content local to a given server, maintaining an index over all content on all servers that you federate is a much bigger problem.
Mastodon has the seeds of this authority in that you can put links on your profile and then have them flagged by putting code on the website. So my Mastodon account could have a link to kazuyadarklightofficial.com and the flag proves I own/control that site. So if you know/can determine that site is THE KazuyaDarklight site, then you know you have the right Mastodon account.
I guess for the privacy conscious and content creators, one solution of this would be to host your own instance just for yourself. You control the domain and what’s hosted. I could setup @thorned@rose.social and store my content on my server. In much the same vein as custom emails - hello@rose.social could be my email (technically I could have thorned@rose.social but that could be confusing with only a dropped @ but anyways).
Obviously this is not going to be a solution for everyone and it would be good to have a way to backup your content and be able to move it between servers. But in the mean time, it’s a workable solution for those who find it important enough to go down that route. 🤷🏻♀️
I’ve been online for close to 30 years now.
I’ve lost count of the number of forums I’ve had to leave because they went to shit.
I always find another one.
That’s why we need to decentralize. If there’s 100 communities over 50 servers, then it doesn’t matter which website goes down or defederates. It’s only if everyone stays on one or two instances that the fediverse breaks.
Over on mastodon, big instances have gone down, people notice but it isnt the end of the world.
I mean I can’t be the only one who doesn’t enjoy the idea of setting up a new account if the ship you picked in the beginning sinks a few years later. You make it sound so simple but at least to me it would be a huge drag.
This is why having frictionless one-button migration seems really important to me. Imagine that your Lemmy client keeps a constant backup of your profile so that if and when your instance go down, you can set up shop somewhere else super easily. Or when an instance get too big, or then you feel like it, you can instance-hop super simply. This is the future I’d want. You control your profile, noone else.
I have a vision of what’s to come so I’ll throw it out here.
When things truly take off there’ll likely be companies selling cloud hosted instances, the server requirements aren’t massive for a small group so it’ll be cheap.
That’d solve the issue of losing accounts or small communities, but huge communities would have to be hosted on huge servers just to handle the amount of content coming in.
Which means money will play a role somehow, imagine a community with millions of visitors every day. Could a server relying on donations sustain that? Or better question is could they sustain that better than a huge tech conglomerate?
I hope I’m wrong, but… I think network effects could lead to a single instance becoming dominant and therefore vulnerable to such a takeover/sellout. I’m less sure about this, but perhaps non-technical users don’t understand the concept of federated instances and flock to a single one. Perhaps there are other tangible benefits of everyone being on a single instance. Just because the protocol allows for decentralization, doesn’t mean it will naturally happen. E.g. How many email users are on Microsoft exchange/outlook, Gmail, and Yahoo?
I love the concept of your own data being portable, but am afraid there might be other factors that somehow naturally lead to centralization. Please change my mind!
The biggest risk is if all the most active communities end up centralized on a handful of the biggest instances like they seem to be right now, that means a bad actor would only have to buy up those instances to control almost all discussion on lemmy / kbin.
However, it would much easier for mods to migrate their community to an uncompromised instance than it would be to migrate to a new site completely. Jumping from reddit to lemmy / kbin, users have to abandon their old reddit accounts, move to a completely new website with a completely new interface, and start over from scratch. Jumping from one lemmy / kbin instance to another, users would just have to unsubscribe from the old community and resubscribe to the new one.
I think you are right for the most part. I assume that some big servers will take most of the users and that the cost of maintaining the fediverse will become quite high in one way or the other as the network grows and the malicious actors gain incentives to interact with the network.
I think the fediverse is more like the old web. I don’t really consider my data very portable, but my ways of consuming and interacting with the content is. I for one don’t really care if my posts go with me if i move somewhere else. If my home server defederates, then I can move to another kbin instance and my experience remains much the same. The monolithic singular identity that I can take with me wherever I go isn’t something the fediverse delivers on right now, but that is fine.
@Guy_Fieris_Hair I doubt that lemmy.ml or lemmy as a whole would sell-out to Facebook as they are Tankies.
Why do I keep seeing people say this in passing without any sort of evidence. Feels like reddit/Twitter type of culture
I don’t think lemmy as a whole can be sold out to Facebook since it’s open source, right? (Also why it’s not a total dealbreaker for me that the original devs are tankies, since they won’t be profiting off us using it.)
I don’t think lemmy as a whole can be sold out to Facebook since it’s open source, right?
Yes, but lemmy is even more resilient. It is licensed as AGPL-3.0.
That is a copyleft license which requires anyone using the code publicly (e.g. to run a proprietary server) to make their code public and permit free usage of it. And they must not change the license.
I don’t see the point of buying something which is already freely available to everybody, especially since you are not allowed to hide it, even partially, or modify the free nature of it.
What could more reasonably be sold is data, visibility and userbase (big, active instances).
I feel there will at some point be a “this is why we can’t have nice things” moment with ActivityPub and Federation in general.
Karma is probably pretty easy to farm using fake home servers or botted accounts, and other kinds spam is probably going to be an issue if this platform reaches any level of mainstream popularity.
I think many parallels can be drawn between ActivityPub and E-mail, here. E-mail works, but not without a lot of gatekeeping, blocking and spam. Its really hard not to get blocked as a self hosted email server today, you are probably going to be mostly blocked by default until you build somewhat of a reputation for your server, etc. I foresee similar levels of maintenance being needed in the future in order to keep servers federated.
As far as moving your account, some things are easier than others to deal with. Things such as subscriptions and likes is probably a lot easier to move to a new account than entire post histories and such.
Popular pieces of software that’s part of the fediverse usually give you either:
- Export options - manual export options intended for GDPR-Compliance and peace of mind
- Account Move options - Mastodon is best known for this, as you can migrate your profile (but not your posts and followers) to another instance. Anyone which then visits your old page will have it blurred out, linking to your new one.
#2 could be expanded in the case of Kbin and Lemmy to also include subscribed communities/magazines, settings and some other things where Federation allows for it.
Search indexing is also a huge problem. While it’s possible to create a search index over all content local to a given server, maintaining an index over all content on all servers that you federate is a much bigger issue. And that’s before we get to the problem of migrating associated content when a profile moves from one server to another.
Maybe there’ll be a standard for threadiverse that each software like Lemmy and Kbin will eventually follow. A standard that lets us migrate from Lemmy to Kbin and others easily. Then, if at some point some software becomes GPL-licensed, we don’t have to be worried about software overtake like MS did with Minecraft.