The only threat to this burgeoning community is the same old divide & collapse nonsense that separates citizens under their overlords everywhere.
I would create accounts and start calling to defederate instances which allow non-polite (or politically incorrect or otherwise offensive) communities.
We didn’t just survive the trolls on reddit. We thrived amongst them. We can handle them. We can block them.
I want curatorial tools to curate my own feed. I absolutely 100% do NOT want any admins telling me what I can’t read. And going to another instance is no solution if that instance is blocked.
I don’t want to be on a purely polite ecosystem, or a purely right-wing-idiot ecosystem. I want access to everybody, and the tools to curate that experience.
The trolls do NOT have the power to take us down. But the admins definitely do.
Welcome to the Defediverse.
I understand that it’s a technicas issue that we have to have instances with a lot of people on them right now so that the more technically inclined people can set up the software so that the others can just use it. But the problem is that when it is like that then there are two sides of the problem, users have no control over their content and what they can consume and admins can be responsible for things the users do/post.
I really hope that in the future there will be some technology which would be able to live without central sevrers but instead it would be a p2p sollution which would replicate itself onto your devices where you want to have it. Only then we’ll be able to be autonomous enough.
We have bittorrent with the magnet links which are only a couple of bytes big, back in the day I kind of suspected that on top of something like that we would build p2p social networks, but it never happened, I’m not sure why.
I would love to see an actual protocol like email or torrents replacing all social media. Then we wouldn’t have to rely on admins to protect us from the baddies, or graciously allow us access to each other. We could just block rude people, and subscribe to interesting people.
Email is probably the technology where admins have to do the most to protect you from the baddies.
The problem is really inherent in any technology that allows anyone to contact anyone else without pre-screening (like an add to friendslist feature most messengers have).
Yeah I was just about to say. What do they think a spam filter is but admins protecting you. This isn’t even talking about the trust system within emails where you can’t email someone al all basically if your email server isn’t trusted and configured correctly.
Wait, email is basically exactly lika ActivityPub, it also relies on servers like outlook, gmail and so on. And those servers have to have admins and those admins do block other servers because of all the spam.
Exactly. While lemmy does need better tools to help mitigate the problem on a more granular level, at the end of the day if you have a lot of spam coming from one instance then defederating from that instance will always be a valid option.
They block spam, they don’t block servers just because people are emailing shitposts or being politically incorrect.
Blocking spam servers is totally different from blocking “problematic” servers.
It’s data cost. Private torrent sites are the exception, but most people who torrent don’t continue to seed for a long time, which means that availability is low and the bandwidth cost is usually split among just a handful of users with a seedbox, which is basically getting back to the idea of a server. How do you motivate people to use up their bandwidth and pay for the extra electricity to keep the availability and speed reasonable?
The most similar thing I can think of to what you’re talking about is i2p, but that comes with all the speed and connnectivity problems that are commonplace for the dark web, and the vast majority of mainstream users have no interest in engaging with a complicated P2P network that serves content at speeds that make you feel like you’re living in 2003.
Unless the mindset of the general computer user changes, we are unlikely to see any system take off that doesn’t rely on a central team of motivated people to do the backend work that the users simply don’t want to worry about.
Instead of defederating whole servers, I would like admins to have an “opt out” or “un-default” button, then each user can browse the list of servers that have been opted out and individually opt in again instead of having to move their username to a different server.
I would grudgingly accept having the ability to op-in to “problematic” instances or communities. As long as I’m not denied any functionality. It’s an acceptable compromise.
instead of having to move their username to a different server.
IMO this is a separate problem; I’d like the ability to move my account between servers and preserve my comment history and subscriptions.
The comment history migration will not happen. It’s not feasible with the way fedi software works. Subscription migration tools exist but are limited, and I am sure they will grow more prolific in the future, because the tools for it are getting better.
It’s not feasible with the way fedi software works.
I admit it’s more complicated than it first seems, and I’m not deeply familiar with the ActivityPub protocol, but could you elaborate on why it wouldn’t be feasible to extend AP to support user account migration?
I’m not necessarily calling them psy ops (because we all know that corporations are too wholesome to do anything so sneaky). But I am 100% saying that they play into the hands of meta and google etc.
Did you read about meta reaching out to the Mastodon folks, seeking to host a private talk?
Do you think Google saw XMPP as a threat?
Edit: “threat” isn’t the right word. I should have said “potential revenue stream.” And once something is a (potential) revenue stream, a business will try to maximize that revenue. Just look at what reddit is doing with its API…
I’m pretty sure this is what caused beehaw to defederate lemmy.world and sh.itjust.works. Several pro-reddit people posted to reddit (on a sub that is now private) about doing just that. It worked and took 48 hours or less for beehaw to defederate them. But there was a lot of discussion about the situation across several servers and it doesnt really seem to have worked to fracture the community other than isolating beehaw which already wanted to be fairly isolated to begin with.
Do you have a recommend server? I just joined the latter one, does that mean I won’t be able to participate in certain communities?
The first thing I saw on this site was “you’re a N*”** F***" which isn’t a great sign…
I tried signing up to multiple different instances I guess? The first few were full. I’m new here and just want to make sure I’m at the right place, not loving that the first thing I see is pretty racist and homophobic
If you don’t want to see any kind of offensive content, I recommend signing up to Beehaw. It’s a self proclaimed “safe space”. This means that they actively delete offensive content, they do not allow nsfw, and they defederate from any instance they see as a danger to this safe space.
You can also browse instances from join-lemmy.org and look at their blocked instances. If you see instances that block many or some major instances that are right wing or promote things you don’t like, you’ll know you found the right place that will disallow offensiveness in your feed. :)
Try joining smaller instances. It’s nice if they are run by people with good reputation in the libre world. I’m in lemmy.sdf.org and it’s pretty good.
How about embrace and enshittyfy like Google Talk did with XMPP?
I’m okay with blocking corporate instances because they’ll find a way to do top-down domination. But I don’t want some admin stepping between me and other posters.
Now let’s have a good and narrow definition of corporate instance and we might agree on that.
Right, if they’re clever they’ll pretend to be just another group of nerds looking to create a new instance.
But if they create an official Meta instance and start advertising it, then we will know who to block. And if they want to really dominate I think they’ll make it official.
