Nah you’re just attached to the old idea of the One Big Marketplace of Ideas, where all the saints and sinners of all the world gather 'round and hash it out. I get it. But it didn’t work out, specifically because corpos put profit over community well-being, so that’s why I’m here.

I’m sure there will be bridging or collating tools for people like you who don’t want to give up precious content just because it comes from a problematic source. Personally, I think wanting it all misses the point of real community.

So they have to sift through instances until they find one that federates exactly how they would? Lol. Or do they have to compromise because they don’t actually have the power to choose who they federate with?

You can see the blocklist of any mastodon instance without joining it. You can and should read their policies before joining.

Hosting their own instance makes them admins.

This makes no sense. You are saying that just because you’re the admin of an instance you can’t be an user?

You can have a single user instance of your own and be done with it. If you don’t like someone else choosing what instances defederate, you have that possibility.

If that is the case, then the Lemmy will start to shrink or straight up die, but that is life.

That’s the risk of the federation. But I much prefer that than a monolithic black box controlled by a mega corpo.

Yes.

I think a fully p2p system with a community, a user, and a post being identified by a key and connected via asymmetric cryptography, and then a reputation system yielding a number between, say, -100 and +100, would work better.

That reputation system wouldn’t be like karma, it would possibly also affect whether we store something below -50 score, to then share.

It should be relative - we may attribute an evaluation to a thing, which would affect its children. Or we may attribute an evaluation to a user, and then derive score for a thing from that user’s evaluation of it. Or maybe all of the described.

Maybe something like that is going to be easier to build on Locutus when it becomes operational.

You’re touching a sore topic. Hence the downvotes, many that have bought into the fediverse, believe (in a religious cult way) that its architecture won’t be taken advantage of by bad actors. Even though history has proven the opposite.

You say well we have to be pragmatic because threads/meta has so much more power than us that we will be able to reach so many more people with their help (or they could destroy us equally as powerfully)…. I say but wait a minute if they have all that power why is it shitty open source software projects with several orders of magnitude less funding than Meta are providing the vision of the future AND the technology to get us there? I mean sure if we just had the vision that might make sense but we already built the tools too…?

Honestly stop and think about why that is. Meta could have easily funded side projects and paid programmers to rewrite the code for the entire fediverse and all its associated softwares… many times over. Given the amount of money it has it could have done this over and over and over and over again and still be only spending a tiny fraction of its R&D budget. You have to convincingly explain to me why we were the ones who had to do it, through basically entirely volunteer work, and what makes you think engaging with them now AFTER we put in most of the groundwork to build the technology is a good idea.

You say we could get us so much growth, but every single damn person they bring us will still be the product for their true customers (advertisers etc) and from those people’s perspectives nothing meaningful will have changed. The relationship between meta and its users will be essentially the same, meta has to ensure this to protect their bottom line. So people will have joined the fediverse without actually joining it, who cares at that point?

There are a million ways meta can extend and embrace the fediverse, we need to prepare for the extinguish.

Is that really a problem? It’s not trying to “control” anything. It’s a voluntary pact meant to conserve the non-corporate fediverse, as it is right now.

The beauty of the fediverse is that you can choose your experience based on the instance you join

This is never going to change. If you just don’t like the intent behind the fedipact, no problem - the majority of the fediverse will be talking with threads. You get the personal choice of which instances you make accounts on. Hell, you can make your own instance.

There is no problem here.

I don’t think trying to control is the best way of looking at it. There’s a hive mind about the fediverse that has a purpose, that wants to protect it as part of the identity of it. So a collective of instances banding together to keep that intact seems right up its alley.

I mean they haven’t infiltrated the private phpbb forum me and my friends have been running since 2008, for the simple reason that they aren’t invited.

Same difference with the fediverse. I have no problem going back down to pre-2019 levels where it’s just a few hundred of us, chatting and sharing #caturday pictures. The fedipact means we can easily find those networks of like-minded communities to federate with.

between Mastodon instances it’s quite easy and painless. everything else is kind of a mess.

I’d rather have some sort of public-private key system to permit for moving across instances and being able to associate accounts.

that would be very useful and a fairly good solution.

I meant on Mastodon, where it is that simple. After all, it makes more sense since they are both microblogging.

In Lemmy it’s a bit of a hassle, but the devs were working on it.

It really is terrible for building a community here, I’ve been trying to decide the best place to even start and it’s so difficult to know where when most people won’t be able to find it even if they are federated because the discovery system is so weak then there’s the possibility of it not lasting or either defederating or been defederated from…

I think it’s also especially bad for creating insular groupthink communities which are totally closed to other opinions, seriously look at the moderation logs sometime, the mods are really pushing their bias heavily in a lot of places and it’s pushing away anyone that doesn’t conform.

I hope better systems emerge that allow this to be what it was intended but honestly at the moment it just feels like it’s getting more closed.

I was going to use communities as my examples due to the relatively small size of each, but decided country was a better metaphor due to each instance’s ability to fully control their own rules or “laws”, where as communities in the real world are usually beholden to the higher laws of their countries.