this post was submitted on 28 Jun 2023
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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.
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As cool as it would be, currently federation doesn't work in this way
Basically the two communities you mentioned are [email protected] and [email protected]; notice that when I write it out like this, they have different full names.
If you post on either community from any instance it will federate to that community on all instances but not between each other as they are separate communities
Hopefully this helps, I'm not great at explaining these things π
No, that makes perfect sense, it just seems like a real limitation. The reason Reddit got as big as it did was because everyone was on the same platform, and I didn't need to go to 15 different forums just to have to participate in the same conversations 15 different times. I was kind of hoping the Fediverse would be a replacement for that, but instead it seems to dive headlong into the "15 small forums are better than 1 big forum, even though it's been proven time and again that (most) people don't want that".
Oh well. Back to using Reddit, I suppose. Thank you for the answer, though!
That's not at all how it works. There aren't going to be 15 different mini forums, one for each instance. Only one instance needs to have one, and the rest can connect to it.
That just doesn't stop people from starting duplicates on other instances, same as on reddit, someone can start another sub for the same thing with a slightly different name.
So you're saying that 14 of the 15 "mini forums" shouldn't exist, and everyone should use a single instance, but access it through their instance via the Fediverse (like subscribing to [email protected] on kibin)? If so, wouldn't that mean a consolidation of power for the [email protected] instance, and thus go against what federation is about in the first place? Or am I misunderstanding the whole purpose of decentralized social media? I thought the reason we wanted to use the Fediverse over Reddit was because Reddit had too much control over the content, but if one instance has all the content, doesn't that instance have just as much power as Reddit has now?
For any given community, yes, there must be a center. How else can there be admins and mods doing something as basic as keeping posts in a community on topic?
But we don't need to put all the communities, or users, on one server. Each server can be the hub for different things, or even different parts of the same thing. For example, anime communities for different series are spread out all over the place, but there's still generally only the one, each.
Right, but what about how websites work? Each website has its own server, but it connects via registrars for the domain names, other computers/servers learn about those domain names via distributed DNS servers, etc. I'm looking for a solution where I can access a giant collection of people/content all while using whatever site I want to use that fits my desires (or one that I spin up on my own). Right now, I'd have to access the largest instance if I want to have a large community, but then that one instance has all of the power over the content and users that use it, right? So basically the Fediverse is essentially akin to using a third-party app to browse Reddit: the app (in this case, the instance) grabs content from the API of Reddit (in this case the API of the host instance), and pulls it into its own database. I don't see how this is very different from what we currently have, though I'm trying to learn more about it and not just be a dick saying, "I don't get it, it's stupid, bye losers". Decentralized content is what I'm looking for, not just decentralized user accounts. Is that not a goal of the Fediverse?
The goal of federation is explicitly NOT decentralised content.
It DOES store content it in a decentralized way.
It DOES allow interaction in a decentralized way.
It DOES NOT decentralize control of the content. It can't. It shouldn't.
The admin of an instance, can control all content on it.
The top mod of a community, can control all content on it, across instances.
You are in control of your own content, across instances.
In a system that is truly peer to peer, truly decentralized, you could not edit. You could not delete. You couldn't even reliably take down content that breaks the law.
The point is not that no-one should be in control of anything. Quite the opposite. The point is that no one entity should be in control of everything.
In this, federation is completely different from other systems.
See, I was thinking decentralizing control was the primary goal of federation. Reddit having total control over the content is killer for any other website, so it makes sense for others to want to abolish that grip.
My thinking was like this: a community is made that every instance can join and post to, the posts would be shared across instances like a mailing list, and the community would be moderated on each instance by that instance's community (there would be a mod for [email protected] and a different mod for [email protected]), then each community on their own instances would moderate the content themselves, but it would just be a stream of content flowing into them for each instance to deal with itself. This would allow instances to moderate each community themselves according to their rules, as opposed to each community having rules that stretch across the Fediverse. This way a user would be able to post something to [email protected], and a moderation team for the [email protected] would be able to moderate the content coming from the greater "politics" topic according to their instance's rules and their own community's rules; I imagine users on kbin.social and users on teenagers.wtf to have very different ideas of what's acceptable within their communities. This kind of setup would allow a decentralization of users, content and control.
Obviously I was very wrong as to my assumptions of the Fediverse, and I appreciate the education on the subject matter.
Some form of aggregation may still be possible. Be it user by user, or server by server.
But like I said in another comment, for the fediverse to work the way you imagined, the total number of people doing content moderation would have to be orders of magnitude greater than even facebook's or twitter's.
Additionally the way it works is not mutually exclusive with differing ideas, only, in the way it actually works, instances that agree on moderation policy, can pool their efforts. Only where there are differences, are different communities and different moderators, needed.
He's saying that 14 or 15 "mini forums" don't have to exist. "Shouldn't" doesn't enter into it, there are no rules about this kind of thing.
It only means consolidation of power in the [email protected] instance if everybody prefers to go there over the alternatives. If the moderators or admins there go mad with their moderate amount of power and the community there starts sucking, everyone can switch over to a different startrek on a different instance.
An instance only has power over its own self. If lemmy.world's administrators suddenly pull off their masks to reveal that they were Reddit's admins all along, everyone can just switch to using a different startrek community on a different instance.
Isn't that still a consolidation of content/users, though? I thought the Fediverse was about decentralization, whereas I keep hearing that it's okay to centralize content/users on individual instances if it happens naturally. Wouldn't that just lead to situations where the mega instance could control the contents/users? Migrating users to an entirely new instance is hard, I mean just look at how hard it is to get people to leave Reddit. It just feels like either I'm missing something, or the Fediverse is just a new technical way to recreate a system that we already have and complain about. If a single instance has total control over the content and users (not the user accounts, just the fact that a huge number of users would be following that specific instance), then how is it decentralized?
No, it would not, I and others in this thread keep telling you that. There's no need for users to have an account on that "mega instance" in order to interact with the community there, and if that community or instance goes sour it's no effort at all for the users to switch to interacting with a different community on a different instance.
Yes, I think so. It feels like the same things are being said back and forth repeatedly, so we're probably talking past each other.
You may have an idiosyncratic definition of "decentralization", perhaps. There are multiple ways of decentralizing stuff. In the case of the Fediverse, you still have communities "centralized" in that their content is located on a particular instance, but the users can interact with that community from any instance. This is hugely different from Reddit, which has only one instance that's completely and forever under their control, where users can never interact with anything outside of it.
Migrating a user to a new instance is hard, yes, but you don't have to.
How does an instance have "total control" over users from other instances? It has no control at all. At worst it can defederate, which would just hurry along their migration to a new community that's on some other instance.
Look at Reddit: it's gone bad, and yet millions still use the site. So much so, in fact, that content on many subreddits is posted every few minutes, whereas the same communities here on kbin see hours or days between posts. That's what I mean: people are used to the solution they like, so if a community becomes "bad" enough to make me move to a different instance, it might not be bad enough for everyone else, and so I'd be stuck moving to a smaller instance while the majority of users continue using the "bad" instance. Just because I don't need to create a new account doesn't change that fact.
If I don't want to use Reddit, all of the content and users that I benefit from are still over on Reddit. No matter how much I'd like everyone to switch over to kbin, they don't think Reddit is as big of an issue as I do. Clearly. So what am I supposed to do if that happens with [email protected] in a few years? Do I have to put up with a bad site as long as everyone else puts up with it, too? Or do I have to move to a smaller community on a different instance just so I don't have to deal with the problems of the original instance?
Because they are trapped there. A user account on Reddit remains on Reddit, it can't access communities outside of Reddit.
If Reddit were magically part of the Fediverse then I, [email protected], could have been posting on [email protected]. Then when Reddit goes bad and [email protected] starts sucking, I can just start posting on [email protected] instead. No need to create a new account or "migrate" anywhere. The friction is minimal.
Since Reddit is not part of the Fediverse, then the only way I could be posting to [email protected] would be if I was using the account [email protected] and if Reddit goes bad then [email protected] cannot interact with [email protected]. [email protected] is "trapped" there, and I would have to create a whole new account to get off it (as I did).
You don't need to move to a different instance. I'm not sure where this miscommunication is coming from. You can continue using [email protected] if [email protected] "goes bad" and instead go hang out on some other startrek community without having to create a new account.
Move to the smaller instance. Everyone else can move too. It's just as easy for them as for you. Then it becomes the bigger instance.
If it's "bad enough" for you to move but not for them to move, perhaps you're being more sensitive to the badness than everyone else is. Maybe it's not so bad. If it is that bad, then why aren't they moving?
Creating a new account on kbin here was not exactly hard. Is your argument that millions of people still use Reddit because they can't type in a couple of data fields?
Right, but then all of the other users that post interesting content that you went to [email protected] for are still on [email protected], not on your new instance. Now, your new instance gets zero posts because it's new, but the old instance still has millions of people posting to it every second of every day. Yeah, you have a new place to post to, but all of the content that you went to [email protected] for in the first place is still over there. Federation did nothing to help that problem.
It's not miscommunication, it's just that I'm removing the option of changing to a different community/magazine on the same instance. If I can no longer stand being part of [email protected], I'm not going to start posting to [email protected], I'm going to the next largest community, which is, at this time, usually on a different instance all together, like [email protected]. I'm not talking about my user account, I'm talking about the community/magazine itself. If a mod on [email protected] goes crazy and starts banning people for talking about Star Trek: Discovery, I'm not going to want to be there, even if my account hasn't been banned, yet. As a result, I would need to find a new Star Trek community to post in, which is what I mean when I say I'd have to move to a different instance (because why would I switch to a different community/magazine on the same instance? And, also, there are a million scenarios where switching to a different community/magazine on the same instance would be a bad idea/impossible). Note that when I say community, I mean the equivalent of kbin's magazine, as Lemmy calls it a community.
The entire reason I would subscribe to a community/magazine is because I enjoy interacting with the community there, and seeing/interacting with the content they post. If I switch to a smaller community/magazine, that content becomes exceedingly rare, and the number of people I can converse with drops dramatically. There are 315 subscribers to [email protected], but 241,000 subscribers to https://reddit.com/r/electricvehicles. Clearly, the experience of posting to one vs. the other is drastically different, wouldn't you say? Why would I go to a place where I have just a few people to talk with, when I could stay on the old site that has thousands upon thousands of people? The same applies to if it were 5 years from now and [email protected] has 241,000 users but [email protected] has 315: no one will want to switch if the mods of the larger community/magazine turn into assholes.
So now it's, "if most people don't move, it's not really that bad, or it's your fault for thinking it's bad"?
Creating the account is not the only burden in this process, it's a whole other website you need to go to. All those objections you've been raising about "migrating content" and "migrating users" and whatnot that don't actually apply between federated instances do apply between the Fediverse and Reddit.
The scenario you originally proposed is that the current "main" community has gone bad in some way.
Has it, or has it not, "gone bad"? If it has then people will want to leave it to go someplace that hasn't "gone bad." The Fediverse makes that easy. Reddit makes that hard.
You're not talking about federated instances, then. I'm talking about the Fediverse, and you seemed to claim to be talking about the Fediverse, but it really seems like you're not. I assumed that this was because you were failing to understand something that we were telling you, but at this point I'm really not sure any more. You appear to have some imagined version of the Fediverse that you're discussing that doesn't correspond to reality and you're refusing all correction that you're getting to this.
Look, if you really want to stick with whatever is the biggest community regardless of how "bad" the admins have become, then just stay on Reddit. You don't need to come here. Stay on Reddit, endure whatever the admins decide to do with the site, because it's the biggest and that's all that matters to you. That's fine, everyone has different priorities.
The reason people are migrating to the Fediverse is because it frees them from Reddit's admins, and will prevent future admin abuse by making it easy to interact with any instance from any other instance. Nobody's trapped on just one instance here, meaning nobody is stuck with dealing with just one set of admins.
Pretty much. What's wrong with that statement? Different people have different values and priorities and will consider different things to be "bad." There are people who use Reddit's official app and like it just fine. There are people who don't mind if their favourite subreddits are overrun with trolls or are lacking the best content because the good mods have all been driven away. That's fine, they can stay with Reddit if they want. Reddit doesn't have to die for the Fediverse to live.
Do you want to come here? I've explained how it works. If you don't like how it works, don't come here. It's really quite simple.
More like:
If kbin/Fediverse doesn't work for me, that's okay. It's a really well put together platform, and it's an exciting technology. I hope you guys have lots of fun here for many years to come. That said, if it's not a fit for me, why would I continue to use it?
Well it seems I was wrong, you're still here and it seems like you are genuinely interested in the way this all works. However, I hope you can see how the phrasing "oh well, back to reddit" could be taken perhaps not quite how you may have intended it.
It is true that this is not identical to reddit. In fact, I think most of us here hope it will become something better than reddit. Keeping the best parts, excising the worst. Adding new features and interacting better with the wider internet.
I hope that as we get more users, the benefits of instances emerge, but right now there's just not quite enough activity to make it work too well. But the vibe I'm getting from a lot of your comments (I haven't read them all, so I could be off-base) is that you are looking for justification for not liking something about this place, rather than having an open mind.
I suspect he just straight up logged out and went off into the sunset...
Nope, still trying to understand things. I want to get away from Reddit, but if this isn't made for users like me, then that's okay, it's not made for users like me. I don't blame kbin, nor want it to change what it is; I'm just trying to understand the Fediverse and all things related to it, that's all. Trying to find a good home for the future that isn't Reddit.
Federation means centralized decentralisation. It aims to strike a balance.
Each community still needs to have an admin, a creator, and moderators. In the future, it will likely become possible for a community to pack up and move between instances, but things still have to have a "source". This is what enables centralised control, moderation, within a decentralised system. The "home" instance is in control of any given community, but it is in fact hosted on ALL servers that it is federated with.
But this isn't peer to peer, each copy is just a copy, only the "real" community gets to be a "legit original", this is how it can delete stuff. This is how you can delete your own stuff. Or edit it, for that matter. Every community has a "center" somewhere on the network, and all others are "spokes" to that "hub". But each server can be both the hubs and spokes for different things, spreading out the load on the system, and providing redundancy. When a server goes offline, the other "spokes" of any communities on it keep working to a limited extent, however, the "spokes" can no longer talk to each other without the "hub" so comments and posts stop syncing.
If any given server goes to shit, yes, there will be loss, but the system as a whole survives. And it wont be long before the communities that were lost set up new "hubs". Additionally, the old spokes don't go anywhere, they will still show up in search, be visible in your user history, available in full as an archive. It just wont be an interactive one.
Without this, you just get peer to peer, along with all it's suitabilities for illegal activity. In a federation, there's still someone in control, who can purge criminal or simply unwelcome users. Or to just keep things on topic, to prevent a star trek community from being flooded with bots posting star wars.
See, that must be my confusion. I was thinking that each instance moderated the content that was being ingested by the server from whatever instances its users subscribed to. Like, if I subscribed to [email protected], then it would create a community here on kbin where the moderators of that magazine (I'd assume I would be assigned as the moderator if I were the first to subscribe to that source) would then moderate that magazine based on the kbin instance's rules. Like a: the instance pulls all the content from the external instance, but it's up to the instance's users to moderate the ingested content themselves, kind of deal. I'm learning that I have waaaaay too high expectations for the Fediverse given how young it still is.
This would be monstrously inefficient. No, each community is moderated by its top mod, and any additional mods that they appoint.
Worth noting, is that you can mod communities that are on other instances, an account does not need to be on the "home" instance of a community, in order to be a mod on it.
This way, content does not need to be moderated multiple times, for every instance it is on.
Could you imagine subscribing to a community you like, and suddenly being saddled with the responsibility of monitoring everything that comes through just because you accessed it off-instance? Or worse, having to review the entire history of a community because you just added it from a new instance? No, this would never work.
I don't know about, "this would never work," as it's basically how news forums work today. The news is posted by websites such as CNN.com, Reuters, etc., and then individual forums/websites moderate that content based on their rules. It would be less efficient for small instances to subscribe to big topics, but then there could be a solution about layering moderation (an option to ingest the feed as it gets moderated by a different instance, or to ingest the raw feed, or some other option I didn't think of in the few seconds I gave it thought).
I mean, it could work, but having moderation be centralised, with the option to start up communities on the same subject with different modding policies, just makes more sense efficiency-wise.
What would be the benefit of every server modding everything that comes in compared to that? And they CAN still do that, by appointing instance mods.
The benefit would be the content. Imagine you post to a magazine with 300,000 users, with new posts every 5 minutes, and hundreds of comments per article; that kind of an experience would be more desirable than posting to a magazine with 500 people, with new posts every 12 hours, and maaaybe 10 comments on the more popular posts, wouldn't it?
The benefit of every server moderating everything that comes in would be that a post that isn't suitable for one instance could be perfectly fine for another. Imagine the topic of politics: for some people, discussing abortion might be too sensitive, but others might be totally fine with allowing it. We wouldn't want to stifle conversations about that subject, though, so maybe it gets through to the individual instances to handle it as they see fit. This way a user can continue interacting with a large community that's interested in politics, instead of fragmenting that community into half a dozen smaller communities; sure, some posts might be hidden by some instances, and those threads would be less active than thread about more agreeable subjects, but that's still a lot better than every thread being less active, isn't it?
But this means there needs to be someone monitoring posts, not just every five minutes, but every five minutes, for every server.
This is completely untenable. An off-instance sub might not even have enough subscribers on that other server, to count on both hands. Yet someone has to mod it? For small communities, there might just be one or two subscribers to it per server.
You're giving examples with massive usercounts, which wouldn't work, due to that massive usercount. But low usercount examples also don't work, due to the low usercount.
Keep in mind that Lemmy/kbin are still figuring things out. Most likely, whichever community emerges as βthe most popularβ will just become the βdefault choiceβ. This shit happened on Reddit too, back when subreddits became a thing.