Ask Lemmy

26903 readers

1547 users here now

A Fediverse community for open-ended, thought provoking questions

Please don't post about US Politics. If you need to do this, try [email protected]

Rules: (interactive)

1) Be nice and; have fun

Doxxing, trolling, sealioning, racism, and toxicity are not welcomed in AskLemmy. Remember what your mother said: if you can't say something nice, don't say anything at all. In addition, the site-wide Lemmy.world terms of service also apply here. Please familiarize yourself with them

2) All posts must end with a '?'

This is sort of like Jeopardy. Please phrase all post titles in the form of a proper question ending with ?

3) No spam

Please do not flood the community with nonsense. Actual suspected spammers will be banned on site. No astroturfing.

4) NSFW is okay, within reason

Just remember to tag posts with either a content warning or a [NSFW] tag. Overtly sexual posts are not allowed, please direct them to either [email protected] or [email protected]. NSFW comments should be restricted to posts tagged [NSFW].

5) This is not a support community.

It is not a place for 'how do I?', type questions. If you have any questions regarding the site itself or would like to report a community, please direct them to Lemmy.world Support or email [email protected]. For other questions check our partnered communities list, or use the search function.

Reminder: The terms of service apply here too.

Partnered Communities:

Logo design credit goes to: tubbadu

founded 1 year ago

MODERATORS

[email protected]

What is the most important unanswered question about the Fediverse? (lemmy.world)

submitted 3 weeks ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

65 comments fedilink hide all child comments

There are a large number of unanswered questions about the Fediverse. I don't just mean questions that users may have, but questions for which no suitable answer exists yet. Some are extremely abstract and existential like "will the Fediverse survive the next decade?" Other questions are very concrete like, "What is the copyright status of a federated post?" or "What are the moral implications of federating content that may be harmful or recording a crime?"

I wonder, for those of you who stay up nights thinking about the Fediverse, which question is the most important to you?

you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments

[–] [email protected] 6 points 3 weeks ago* (last edited 3 weeks ago) (3 children)

There are a number of features that make them different, but the major one that makes me favour ATProto is that it gets around the centralization problems of the Fediverse.

I'm @[email protected] on ActivityPub, this means:

My identity is linked to pawb.social. That means that if someone falls out with my admin over something, I get blocked as fallout.
Likewise, if my admin falls out with someone else and blocks them, I have to follow those decisions.
My data is stored on pawb.social. That means that if the server gets shut down, even with warning, poof! My data is gone.

In addition, there isn't any way to transfer data between ActivityPub instances. Sure you can set up redirects in Mastodon, but there's no way to actually transfer information or history.

There's really no reason these three things all need to be managed by the same entity (pawb.social in my case).

Under ATProto:

My identity is handled by DNS. I control my domain name, so I control my identity and reputation.
While this isn't battle tested yet, ATProto (or at least Bluesky) has much better support for blocklists. Individual users can create their own blocklist and share them with others. So Bluesky itself doesn't need to ban other instances unless they start doing really illegal things.
My data is stored on Bluesky's servers, but I can easily move it to another server if I need to without breaking anything (I think? ATProto nerds, is this true?).

If I don't like the way Bluesky is going I can just... Leave. I can move my data to another platform and log in to another frontend. All without my followers even noticing a difference or losing any content.

It also has some cool features. For example, there's this thing which allows you to just set up pronouns so that they are visible on your own profile to other people that use the list. https://bsky.app/profile/pronouns.adorable.mom All implemented without any protocol extensions.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 3 weeks ago

Dumb backend, smart frontend?

Basically, have hosts replace services like AWS but don't make them have any power (except for choosing if they agree to host NSFW content or not) and make the data they host public so anyone can develop a frontend to access it, a single account giving you access to everything, administer your own experience, mods have control over the communities they moderate but there's no admin that can decide you don't have access to a big chunk of the content because they don't want to be federated with certain instances.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 3 weeks ago

FYI: There is a draft about implementing DIDs in ActivityPub: https://codeberg.org/fediverse/fep/issues/209

[–] [email protected] 1 points 3 weeks ago

You can also run your own instance.