this post was submitted on 26 Mar 2024
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Federation isn't the magic bullet you make it out to be. In fact I disagree with pretty much everything you said, but we probably agree on some fundamental concepts. I just believe federation isn't democratic, not even a little bit, it's just silos of control.
I think we need distributed platforms where data is owned through encryption and signatures. Think gossip protocol with PGP encryption and web of trust based moderation. It's still not democratic, but it puts control in the hands of individual users, not instance admins.
Similar to what Churchill said of democracy, Lemmy/ActivityPub is the worst form of social media, except for all the others. Federation isn't the goal imo, decentralization is. It just turns out that a ActivityPub and Lemmy are available today, which is why I'm here. Reddit was the best option before now (open source frontend, friendly API, etc), but that changed so now I'm here.
So no, don't enshrine a particular solution into law, focus on the principles of privacy and decentralization.
Yeah, there we really have to agree to disagree.
You will always have silos of control and that is a good thing. The fact that makes it democratic is that you have access to it. If you dont like the rules of the instance, you move or spin up your own.
What you‘re saying is just everyone for themselves, diverting the already thinly stretched attention of fedi-capable folks even more.
Again, I think its okay to disagree. I‘m just saying „but i want“ is not a valid reason to reinvent the wheel imo.
Our problem is not a system, it is certain behavior of certain people corrupting the system until itself becomes the problem. The solution is not bringing down the system but outlawing the behavior (the dark triad) because although I consider myself a leftist and close to anarchism, I recognize that we have a lot of narcissists and psychopaths in that space as well. Those who are willing to take any measure to bring the current people in power down to take power themselves. Bullying people into submission is no different than being rich and paying them for it.
I'm not suggesting that at all. What I want is the next logical step after federation, which is basically data being distributed.
Basically, I want BitTorrent, but for social media. So there would be no instances, only communities (so no community@instance, just community). Right now, if lemmy.ml goes down, all of the communities hosted there go down and people would need to migrate elsewhere. With a distributed system, if someone drops out, the community goes on because it doesn't live on any one system. Lemmy could mitigate that with a feature to move a community, but you still have the fragmentation issue.
The tricky part is moderation, but I'm thinking that could be done through votes and reports/blocks. Basically, if you vote the same way as someone consistently, you'll start to trust their votes, reports, and blocks more than other uses, and you could enable automatic moderation to hide stuff based on someone else's moderation.
So you would no longer need to rely on a centralized set of mods for a community, you'd instead pick mods yourself based on who you agree with. So you and I could have a separate set of "mods" for the same content. At any time, you could inspect the moderation to see if you agree with it, and your account would learn what you like and don't like. This kills the "power hungry mods" issue that kills so many communities (i.e. I've left subreddits purely because of mods), though I'm a little worried it'll push people even more into echo chambers.
The important thing, though, is that it puts the control directly into the hands of the users, with a set of tools to customize it. And there could be multiple competing clients to handle the moderation differently. I think it's a bit more democratic than what Lemmy provides.
I absolutely agree.
My point is that I see federation as a stopgap to something better, not the destination, and it's totally reasonable to disagree. I just think federation will have similar problems as centralized services, and that it's inevitable once it grows to a certain size.
I agree. Federation isnt the end. But right now, we have to build this up and abolish the old, not abolish the new imo. Thats why I say federation everywhere now, concentrate everything on making this work and worry about the next thing afterward.
The reason I say this is also because I founded a couple of very successful businesses because my autistic brain has a very significant advantage: intense focus. Focusing your efforts on one thing is insanely important and the only way to really get somewhere.
Have you ever wondered why there are better systems, fairer systems but they never take hold? The reason imo isnt (only) because the 1% actively fight them and lead the rest to fight them as well but because the anarchists and leftists cant agree on a goal to pursue.
They burn themselves out without much to show for it. Constantly shaming each other for not being leftist enough, voting, not voting, etc. Thats the only reason why autocracy works. Right wingers have one enemy: leftists. Leftists have hundreds because they’re all different shades of left.
If we actually for some reason got the idea to ask what our smallest common denominator is, we would actually het somewhere. But the little narcissist in most of us doesnt want that because their idea was „better“. Its the old curse of „too smart for your own good“.
Maybe you're just using this as an example, IDK, but I've seen a lot of people here on lemmy seem to conflate technology and political ideology. Technology can be a means to a political end, but equating the two just encourages dogmatic loyalty, and discourages diversity of thought.
But maybe I'm projecting here, IDK.
And yeah, I totally get the concern over splitting the community with too many different ideas (i.e. the Standards XKCD). My concern is that federation won't scale. Users have demonstrated that they'll largely join a handful of big instances, and those instances are poorly funded (often run by some generous benefactor) and fairly expensive to run. And that's with just 50k or so monthly active users, imagine what's going to happen if it ever gets to Reddit scale...
So that's why I'm interested in distributed social networks, they scale really well with lots of users, in fact, they can work even better the more users they get (e.g. BitTorrent). So if we're looking for a grassroots tech stack, it should be distributed. I'd really like someone else to build it (hence why I bring it up, to hopefully get someone to do it), but I'll hack on it in the meantime because I find it fun.
That said, lemmy is good enough for now, hence why I'm here. I just don't see it as a long term solution.
Thats a very insightful and well formulated comment. Thank you for this. It was very easy to read ans touched a pot of points.
The standards xkcd is pretty iconic, ngl.
My point with mixing politics in is that most of us have common goals but we dont talk about them. I‘d imagine most of us want to be free from (corporate) control, which isnt by design political but in fact only really lived by the highly progressive and so on. But yes, I used politics as an example for splitting effort.
The idea of distributed spcial networks in itself isnt bad but saying it will work when we have no signs for it kinda is. Bittorrent is great and all but it works to overcome many problems that normal downloads at the time had and doesnt have any of the limitations what social media has (need for moderation, need for linked actions, etc)
Finally, the reason I think we have large instances is that running a social network is no joke. I have my own instance with just a handful of friends and there are technical, legal and moderation issues. These wont go away. People wont learn to host a server and open source wont make it dead easy tomorrow. It will take years until a next lemmy is easily deployable.
And the reason that lemmy isnt easily deployable is that making a social network is no joke either. the devs get a lot of hate for things that arent their fault. I donated a (for me) large chunk of money to them for their efforts because I am the change I want to see.
So, I agree, we will need to evolve further and further but we arent evolving in anything (it feels like) except the fediverse. So instead of pushing the one fhing that is actually progressive to break itself, I‘d use my energy to push voting to become federated, to push banking to become federated (as in think about a successor to crypto or get a standard to form that is clearly superior).
I hope my intension is clear here. I‘m pushing hard for the fediverse to succeed and see big scares along the way (corpo intervention for example) and I know how burnout and attention spread work against us so although I agree that progress is important, many people who havent lived through burnout dont get the need for nuance.
Have a good one.
I'm actually working on a proof-of-concept, but I honestly would prefer to not head the project. I don't think I can commit long term to a project like that, I hate being the center of attention, and honestly I think someone else would do a better job pushing it forward. But I'm intrigued by the tech, so I'm trying my hand at building it.
If I have something to show, I'll post it here. But at least from the initial work I've done, I think it should scale nicely. I'll probably get tired of it before "finishing," but I guess time to tell.
I do like lemmy and the fediverse, I just want to be prepared for it falling apart. I think it's seeing some uptake issues because of fundamentals of the fediverse (needing to understand federation just to join communities, for example), and that will limit its mainstream appeal. But I'll keep using it until there's a credible alternative.
What exactly do you mean by this?
Honestly, I think crypto is fine, and I'm particularly interested in privacy coins like Monero. The main issue they have is speculation, but honestly, that happens with fiat currencies as well, and if people start using something like Monero regularly that speculation will likely end up in the noise.
That said, I wouldn't say no to something like GNU Taler getting picked up by a privacy-friendly organization. I'd love to see Mozilla integrate it so I could use Taler for payments to various online services.
You too!
Its good to hear that someone does something besides talking, I‘ll give you that.
But imagine, you‘d do so much good making PRs for the existing fedi and not having the attention and pressure while working on the now.
If we prepare for it falling apart before it even matured, we‘re dooming it. You could instead make a pr for a new search function (because its insanely easy to search through all dederated servers on your server, we just need it to be the default) and by working on something different with no momentum while depriving the thing that has momentum is a bad idea imo. Sorry.
Voting, as in you vote for something to happen. Democracy. We should federate it so everyone can do it, probably cryptographically or some other way.
Now you‘re contradicting yourself. You‘re making an alternative to the fediverse because of issues you cant be bothered to solve but speculation isnt worth to call crypto worthy of a successor. Do you see how that is illogical? Also, reinventing the wheel is why we have corporate control. We need to work on one thing and make it good.
I have actually made a few PRs when I first came to lemmy. I fixed a few bugs that bothered me, implemented a feature I wanted, and took a couple extra bugs from the issue tracker that bothered others. I thought about making my own client, but decided to try patching the existing ones first, and that ended up being easier.
I've stopped being active though since I'm satisfied with the platform as it is. I've considered hosting my own, which might get me to optimize the BE a bit, so I guess we'll see. But I really do think the project is solving the wrong problems, so I prefer to spend my hobby time experimenting with P2P apps since I think that's what we'll ultimately want, but I'll absolutely help if there's any project that's remotely close to what I want.
I don't have anything to show yet since it's rough and I don't want to publish anything without a good moderation story, but hopefully I'll have something later this year.
I almost did, but the current one (new since I was originally interested) is good enough. Maybe I'll add it to Jerboa or something since it completely lacks post/comment search AFAIK (should be easy now), but searching on my mobile browser works well enough.
But this gets back to the core design decisions. It can't search stuff it doesn't have cached locally, and abusing ActivityPub to broadcast search would have a risk of enabling amplification attacks.
The proper solution to search, imo, is a separate service that indexes as much of the fediverse as possible. That's a massive project, and about on the scale of building a replacement, not to mention hosting costs. I could probably build it as a P2P app though, but at that point I might as well continue with my project since it has other benefits as well (e.g. single namespace, almost no hosting costs outside a few relays, etc).
Right, but how does that actually work? Every proposal I've seen for distributed voting systems has issues, and federating it won't solve them. Here are a few off the top of my head:
I'm satisfied with the current system in my area, which is mail ballots with a barcode so voters can see whether their vote was counted. That's good enough, to the point where I'm going to put my efforts toward getting better voting systems (i.e. ranked, approval, or STAR voting) instead of more cryptography.
I'm making an alternative because the issues I want to solve are fundamental to federation, namely:
I can't submit a PR to fix those, because if I try, it'll just be a hack that's going to have repercussions. Those are design decisions we'll just have to live with for now.
So I'm addressing it with a personal research project, and here's briefly how I'm solving them:
The hardest part is moderation, which is also the biggest selling point, at least until lemmy instance admins can no longer afford to keep hosting.
I think I can make an ActivityPub bridge as well, and I may end up having it act like a lemmy instance to help seed with data. But that's not in the initial goals, I just want to see if client-side moderation based on votes and whatnot can actually work well.
Awesome!
I would say this is far too generalized. Since you seem very smart you might want to reflect on this. The issues that lemmy solves are still prevalent outside of it and you are speaking from a place of privilege imo since you (as am I) are educated enough to make it here, build stuff and change things. We are the minority and we should not go running away before the world can catch up.
I disagree, respectfully though since you make good points. I think it is already enough to index the servers you have federated with. For example, my own instance federates with world. I want to be able to see all communities, not posts or comments, that are on world, together with a rought member and post count. That way I can make an informed decision. I think you are making this too much a low level decision. The reason we are all here and the ultimate goal of lemmy and the fediverse imo is agency, nothing else. And that is what we should be striving for.
I have to run but I might come back to this later to answer the rest. I think we're pretty constructive together. Maybe we should connect on github or something. I'm working on another fediverse thing.
See ya later. Feel free to send me a dm if you like.
Oh, I'm not saying the issues it solves aren't important, I'm saying it's focusing on the wrong goals.
What I want out of lemmy is a credible Reddit alternative (so link aggregator with comments), that will be around long term with minimal disruption. It succeeds as a link aggregator, I'm worried about longevity based on its design.
Lemmy also had a goal of being on ActivityPub. Link aggregators (I assume) have a ton more shared data than something like Mastodon. But I don't know for sure, I haven't hosted either, it's just a hunch. Likewise, people already complained about having to deal with a ton of instances on Mastodon, which seems to be an adoption issue for new users. Those aren't solveable with lemmy as designed since they're quirks of federation, but it was probably a faster way to get something out.
Ok, that's pretty reasonable. I'm not sure how syncing those statistics would go without subscribing, but it's probably not a ton of work.
But isn't that essentially what [Lemmy Explorer] (https://lemmyverse.net/instance/lemmy.world/communities) is for? You get all of that info, and can narrow by instance if you want, even if your instance doesn't federate with it.
Not sure if it was you, but there's an issue for it with generally positive responses. I agree with Nutomic's concern that this could be a lot of data (world alone has >10k communities), but as another user mentioned, we could filter by active communities and drastically reduce that.
That's pretty vague IMO.
I'm here because I want Reddit, but Reddit made some choices I strongly disagree with, such as:
I honestly don't care about federation or ActivityPub, I'm just here because it replaces a service I like but refuse to use. Maybe that's what you mean by agency, but for me personally, I'd just not use any social media if lemmy didn't exist (or maybe I'd go back to hacker news).
So that's the lens I'm seeing things through. I see Lemmy as a temporary stopgap, and I'd really rather not invest a bunch of time into something I think needs to be replaced. But I do believe in cleaning up my corner of the world, so I'll contribute here and there, and I hope to donate to my instance once they accept donations (I've asked).
Perhaps. I'll save this comment so I can come back later if interested. I'm not in a position to really commit to anything right now, but perhaps starting a Matrix channel for like-minded people would be interesting.
I'd much rather keep discussions in some publicly accessible medium than over DMs, so hopefully someone else can pick up the torch when you or I inevitably lose interest.
That said, once I have a working project, I'll post it on a few relevant communities for review (probably under an alt). So you'll at least hopefully see that. I work primarily in Rust and plan to build my MVP with Tauri and Iroh, but I'm fairly comfortable in a variety of languages (Python and Typescript at my day job, lots of years with Go, looking into Haskell because FP rox and I want to study SimpleX chat).
If you want help on a project, post about it and I'll take a look. I'm comfortable with most fullstack stuff (databases, React, Docker, etc).