Fediverse

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This magazine is dedicated to discussions on the federated social networking ecosystem, which includes decentralized and open-source social media platforms. Whether you are a user, developer, or simply interested in the concept of decentralized social media, this is the place for you. Here you can share your knowledge, ask questions, and engage in discussions on topics such as the benefits and challenges of decentralized social media, new and existing federated platforms, and more. From the latest developments and trends to ethical considerations and the future of federated social media, this category covers a wide range of topics related to the Fediverse.

founded 2 years ago

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If ActivityPub can't survive Meta, it was never going to succeed in the first place (kbin.social)

submitted 2 years ago* (last edited 2 years ago) by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

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Corporations don't just sit out on new technologies, and no matter how hard you try you can't force them to. Defederating from Meta's new project preemptively is naive, and will not do much of anything.

Protocols are going to be adopted by corporations, whether we like it or not. SMTP, LDAP, HTTP, IP and 802.11 are all examples of that. If it ends up that meta is able to destroy the fediverse simply by joining it, that is a design flaw on OUR end. Something would then clearly need to be different in order to prevent future abuse of the protocol.

FOSS is propped up by corporations. By for profit corporations. If you want to stop those corporations from killing projects, you put safety guards up to make sure that doesn't happen. You don't just shut them out and put your head in the sand.

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[–] [email protected] 19 points 2 years ago (1 children)

It will follow the EEE flow along with their normal anti-competition tactics. First, they embrace: their interest in federation is only to give them the access to content that will make their platform not look empty, allowing them to put their coffers to work on drawing the majority share of users. Then they will extend: they will make sure their platform is compatible with ingesting other server content but others will be unable to federate their content (they will become "incompatible" later, due to "features"). Then they will extinguish competition: they'll cut off what little engagement is left with those (inbound only) federated servers because they no longer need them and the majority of the remaining users will move to their platform because that is where the activity is.

Then Kbin/lemmy will be just like all the other random phpbb instances that no one really uses. Being naive won't make things any less likely, yet there will always be gullible people who argue that "of course they will embrace the technology" and that everything else is just non-sense/wouldn't have worked anyway/blah.

It doesn't take long for the largest servers to have operating costs that they will happily allow Meta to burden in exchange for nearly any concession. The main problem is that, while Kbin/Lemmy is federated, it is federated in a manner that still places content in silos and allows single servers to "own" those spaces. It hasn't really fixed the problem yet, it just spreads the problem out over a few more servers. Until spaces are universal (every server owns a slice of that community, spreading out the community instead of just the users), it will remain ripe for EEE.

[–] [email protected] 7 points 2 years ago (2 children)

Completely agreed on the concept of needing to federate out entire spaces (magazines / communities) - this is a huge gap currently, especially on kbin where nearly every community (and nearly every user) is on kbin.social .

My thought is that Lemmy and kbin, after fixing and updating core functionality (easier said than done), need to jump on the idea of instances having magazines/communities that pull from multiple other sources, rather than federating each community independently - e.g. I could have an @android which is pulling from @android , @android , etc, and the experience is relatively seamless - if someone drops out, yes we lose a lot of content, but others pick up the slack.

This would require more overhead from admins and instance owners to manage which other communities their own communities are pulling from, but I think it would be worthwhile for a better overall user experience and to help decentralize these communities in general.

[–] [email protected] 6 points 2 years ago (1 children)

I can't edit and have my edits federated out (edits federate if someone is following you, not if you are following them) so I want to point out that those links are somehow pointing to users instead of communities, whoops. I was referring to e.g. https://the.coolest.zone/m/android being a collection including contents on that magazine, contents from https://kbin.social/m/android , contents from https://lemmy.world/c/android , etc.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 2 years ago (1 children)

... so I could host an instance with a magazine that is essentially a digest of federated instances, and I can add/remove based on whatever aligns with my principles?

I don't think I have that right, sorry but if you could explain it a little differently, I'm still trying to understand how the fediverse is.

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

So, as an example. I am on the.coolest.zone which is where my account is registered. I have a magazine on it called [email protected], which is where I am viewing this thread. In fact, you will be able to view it here: https://the.coolest.zone/m/[email protected]

I have only three actual magazines on my own instance - random (this is necessary for all kbin instances to collect uncategorized posts), BestOfBlind, and Android (which was my attempt to create a magazine that collects threads based on hashtag, but it's not working right). Everything else is a magazine which is actually a federated version of either a kbin magazine from another kbin community or a Lemmy community from a Lemmy instance.

The couple of things that seem to be missing or broken right now:

As stated, trying to get a magazine going based on hashtag does not seem to be working.
There's no way to collect up multiple communities into one, so I have separate magazines for android (kbin.social) and android (lemmy.world). That's a little annoying!
As far as I can tell, you can't delete a magazine yet. If I federate a magazine / community and decide I actually don't want it on my instance anymore (or I created m/android to test the hashtag and found it doesn't work right), tough luck it seems - I'm stuck with it.
Hosting costs - Of my 80GB VPS, I appear to have used about 60GB so far just in federating other content to me. This is going to become a problem within this week! I don't know what to do about that or whether there's a way to prune old content or what! (I don't want to re-host everyone's memes, as dank as they are!)

kbin and Lemmy are both very new applications, so these will likely shake themselves out over time, but it's a bit of a rough experience right now. 😅

[–] [email protected] 4 points 2 years ago

especially on kbin where nearly every community (and nearly every user) is on @kbin.social .

But kbin.social is fully compatible with Lemmy with almost the same number of users and many more communities (dozen of them has more subscribers than most-subscribed /kbin magazine). Maybe /kbin as a platform is much centralised. Threadiverse, not so much.