this post was submitted on 19 Dec 2023
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Maybe a hot take, but if you want this big libertarian anarchist federated system you get all the pros and cons along with it. Not having a central authority means you have no real power to stop someone from coming in and taking it. It’s inevitable by design.
I'd argue the system is working quite well, every individual and/or community has the liberty to choose what to do about Meta.
That's what federation is all about, no central power taking decisions in behalf of everyone else.
Untrue. Users cannot decide which instances they see.
of course they can. if they don't like their instance's policies, they just have to move to another. or host their own.
there has been people in pro-threads instances that have moved to one that blocks threads and the other way around.
Sure, but the rhetoric behind it is my point. Trying to get everyone to do it is antithetical to the design of the system.
No, it is precisely the kind of action that we must take collectively in order to protect what we value about the fediverse. This is the work of maintaining a positive community space. If you don't agree that is fine, genuinely I think it is good there is a diversity of opinions here, but it is pretty obvious to me that if we don't have a lot of conversations about the importance of solidarity in defending the fediverse from corporate capture then history is just going to repeat itself.
....I am tired of history repeating itself, I like this place. I like you!
We can't stop a massive corporation from interacting with open source, but we can choose whether massive corporations are allowed to get away with pretending they are benign members of an open source, federated community. At the very least, it raises the dollar amount these corporations must allocate in trying to convince us they are benign doesn't it?
They have the money and time to convince us, even if you disagree with everything I say you can't argue it isn't a better strategy to be difficult to convince. Massive corporations will spend money and time up to the point marketing calculates the change in public perception is worth it and not a dollar further. They wouldn't be doing their jobs well if they behaved otherwise and judging by how desirable those jobs are I feel like at least some of those people are pretty good at their jobs...
Call me a pessimist, but people are caring way too much about the idealistic implementation of the technology and missing the fact that the tech doesn’t mean shit compared to the community. If you don’t care about the community growing, then that’s one thing. But if you do, Threads is the competition that you won’t be able to beat if they feel like putting in the effort.
You say well we have to be pragmatic because threads/meta has so much more power than us that we will be able to reach so many more people with their help (or they could destroy us equally as powerfully)…. I say but wait a minute if they have all that power why is it shitty open source software projects with several orders of magnitude less funding than Meta are providing the vision of the future AND the technology to get us there? I mean sure if we just had the vision that might make sense but we already built the tools too…?
Honestly stop and think about why that is. Meta could have easily funded side projects and paid programmers to rewrite the code for the entire fediverse and all its associated softwares… many times over. Given the amount of money it has it could have done this over and over and over and over again and still be only spending a tiny fraction of its R&D budget. You have to convincingly explain to me why we were the ones who had to do it, through basically entirely volunteer work, and what makes you think engaging with them now AFTER we put in most of the groundwork to build the technology is a good idea.
You say we could get us so much growth, but every single damn person they bring us will still be the product for their true customers (advertisers etc) and from those people’s perspectives nothing meaningful will have changed. The relationship between meta and its users will be essentially the same, meta has to ensure this to protect their bottom line. So people will have joined the fediverse without actually joining it, who cares at that point?
There are a million ways meta can extend and embrace the fediverse, we need to prepare for the extinguish.
And my entire point is you can't. The system is designed to allow anyone in, you can't decided to stop someone because they are a corporation. It's similar to people trying to stop the NSA from committing anything to the Linux kernel because you're afraid they're going to put in a backdoor. It can't be done by design.
My point is that you can, by raising awareness about what massive corporations ALWAYS attempt to do to public commons and by encouraging everyone to defederate with them.
Sure they can contribute to and use open source, doesn’t mean we have to treat them like they are actually well meaning members of the community?
How many family members have you convinced to stay off Facebook, Instagram, Snapchat, TikTok etc? How many are tired of you annoying them about it? Your statement isn't false, but it's also not new, and I'm arguing it's inevitable. You're not going to stop massive corporations by trying to group together a ton of individuals who all have to come to the same decisions. It's a Catch22 of sorts. You're only worried about it because people can't beat corporations. You can't overcome that because people can't beat corporations.
I don't like Meta either, and don't use any of their products. But you've invited them in already.
"No, it is precisely the kind of action that we must take collectively in order to protect what we value about the fediverse. This is the work of maintaining a positive community space."
But therein lies the problem. The fediverse isn't one homogenous entity. Although there seems to be an overall leftie tint to much of the fediverse, opinions on what is" valued" and "positive" vary quite a bit. The beauty of the fediverse is that you can choose your experience based on the instance you join. Trying to control the entire fediverse goes against the point of the fediverse imo.
Is that really a problem? It's not trying to "control" anything. It's a voluntary pact meant to conserve the non-corporate fediverse, as it is right now.
This is never going to change. If you just don't like the intent behind the fedipact, no problem - the majority of the fediverse will be talking with threads. You get the personal choice of which instances you make accounts on. Hell, you can make your own instance.
There is no problem here.
I don't know exactly what the fedipact is, but I know of a collection of instances with arbitrary mods without accountability who have sworn to collectively create a block list and block instances based on what opinions those instances allow etc. Instances can even be blocked for not blocking another instance. I see that as a problem for the fediverse because it can grow and create an unnecessary rift of the verse.
Also, yes it's great that you can chose instance and jump wherever you want, but an even better thing would be to put more emphasis on user controlled blocks. We can ourselves block instances from our feeds and we should make that the norm (and perhaps make those blocks more powerful and configurable if need be), and have the instances focus more on blocking straight up illegal things.
And force your instance maintainers to deal with the amount of bigoted content they won't be able to moderate? There's already a huge amount of stuff any other instance would be blocked with no hesitation.
Why would the instance maintainers have to deal with it if the norm is that the users block the individuals and instances they want no part of? You see shitty content - block the source, either the user or instance. There could be a feature where an instance blocks something if a certain percentage of its users block it.
"Yeah, just block every bigot in existance and you will achieve a somewhat good experience"
Spammers also exist, and they can go long ways to avoid blocking by e.g. creating many accounts. There are people out there who could do this just to troll and harass a single user. If you're fine with blocking every piece of shit there are - good for you. But it doesn't mean it should be a norm.
This isn't rocket science. First, let instance maintainers handle bigots, spammers etc. on their own instance. If you still find that instance contributing with too much crap in your feed - block those users or the entire instance. I've blocked several accounts and a couple of instances. It's very easy to do.
And again, there could be a number of tools and features created to help users block stuff. Use your imagination. A user with an orange warning triangle is harassing you? Well that triangle means that user is in one or more block lists for problematic behavior - do you want to use any of those block lists? Click a button. Or whatever. Just let the users decide and prevent instances from creating a cascading instance-blocking that puts the fediverse at risk.
If you want a place where admins are not allowed to block communities and instead leave moderation of all but the most egregious, illegal content, up to individuals, there are places like that already in X and Threads.
This is the fediverse, where admins are expected to look after their members. If they don't, the members will leave. I don't want to block every toxic user or instance on my own - I already spend too much time blocking normies from lemmy.world.
I don't think trying to control is the best way of looking at it. There's a hive mind about the fediverse that has a purpose, that wants to protect it as part of the identity of it. So a collective of instances banding together to keep that intact seems right up its alley.
This is demonstrating the exact opposite. Community organization is valid.
But... the majority are federated? And if counted by affected users I don't even know how large they federated majority is since the biggest instances are all federated iirc.
Either way I think it's good that we can at least choose our own experience by selecting which instance to join.
We’ll see. I don’t think you can beat a 100 Billion dollar company with 3 Billion users if they are motivated enough.
I mean they haven't infiltrated the private phpbb forum me and my friends have been running since 2008, for the simple reason that they aren't invited.
Same difference with the fediverse. I have no problem going back down to pre-2019 levels where it's just a few hundred of us, chatting and sharing #caturday pictures. The fedipact means we can easily find those networks of like-minded communities to federate with.
Mark Zuckerberg smiled to himself. Nobody knew that he was DarkWolf47.
IRC did do that on a few cases, where one federated IRC network had irreconciliable differences with another and you had a split, with a new IRC network forming.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/EFnet
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Undernet
How do you know about DW?
anti-meta activism is not a bad thing at all. The billionaire corps have their marketing teams, individuals and communities have their activism. Everyone can listen to both and take an informed decision.
They are just that, activists, informing everyone about a possible issue. There's nothing wrong with that. They are not enforcing anything on anyone.
The worst that can happen is that if your instance admin decides to ban Threads and you want to federate with Threads, you'll have to switch instances. Not a big deal. You'll still be able to interact with the Fediverse, it's not like you were in Twitter, you had to leave and now you've lost all your contacts there.
Honestly, the lack of cross-instance account portability is one of the major issues that I think the Fediverse has today.
I'd rather have some sort of public-private key system to permit for moving across instances and being able to associate accounts.
between Mastodon instances it's quite easy and painless. everything else is kind of a mess.
that would be very useful and a fairly good solution.
I don’t see moving instances as this simple thing that everyone else does. Until I can bring my comments and subscriptions over instantly it’s a huge waste of time. Regular users aren’t going to do that. I’m on my third instance already and almost didn’t make the third jump due to the annoyance of adding them all again.
I meant on Mastodon, where it is that simple. After all, it makes more sense since they are both microblogging.
In Lemmy it's a bit of a hassle, but the devs were working on it.
Haven’t really done much with Mastadon, I always liked following topics over people, and when I last tried it was still firmly people based.
Not at all. Instances are free to ask other instances to not federate with Threads. And the other instances can tell the original instance to fuck off or agree with it.
And then instances start fighting and decelerate from each other and it becomes this annoying game of will I be able to see the content I want to tomorrow? We’ll see how it turns out. Needing to keep moving instances isn’t my idea of a good thing like everyone else seems to think it is.
If that is the case, then the Lemmy will start to shrink or straight up die, but that is life.
That's the risk of the federation. But I much prefer that than a monolithic black box controlled by a mega corpo.
I just want to find the content I like, the content that helps me solve problems, and a way to interact with it without being forced to see ads. I'm not going to use a worse product just because it's not controlled by a corporation and I don't think I'm alone in that across most of the population.
Then maybe Lemmy isn't for you then. The way the fediverse is structured at its core seems to be a problem for you.
I don’t see it as a problem. If my instance starts walking off the content I like, then it’s a problem. But it’ll be a slow burn where I just use it less and less.
Yes.
I think a fully p2p system with a community, a user, and a post being identified by a key and connected via asymmetric cryptography, and then a reputation system yielding a number between, say, -100 and +100, would work better.
That reputation system wouldn't be like karma, it would possibly also affect whether we store something below -50 score, to then share.
It should be relative - we may attribute an evaluation to a thing, which would affect its children. Or we may attribute an evaluation to a user, and then derive score for a thing from that user's evaluation of it. Or maybe all of the described.
Maybe something like that is going to be easier to build on Locutus when it becomes operational.
I don't think that any single score is going to make everyone happy.
Maybe if there are multiple user-scoring systems run by various sources, and I can choose which score I want to use as a metric.
Like, I think that the Marxist-Leninist crowd on some of the left-wing instances is bonkers, but I imagine that they'd say the same thing about me or other people who subscribe to mainstream economics in general. You're not going to find a Single Source of Truth on that matter.
Eh, that was the whole point. Do not leave moderation to other people or at least make that easy.
Which means that the score of anything would be derived from 1) what you directly set, 2) what another user sets, modified by what you set for that user, 3) what a user sets, modified by what is set for him by another user, which has a value set by you attributed ...
One can even make a logic where you see high score for things disliked by people you dislike.
There is some computative difficulty, but nothing big for our times.
You're touching a sore topic. Hence the downvotes, many that have bought into the fediverse, believe (in a religious cult way) that its architecture won't be taken advantage of by bad actors. Even though history has proven the opposite.
Reminds me of this comment by one of the Lemmy devs: https://lemmy.ml/comment/6744852
Technology won't save us if we allow unethical companies to mess with us.
Spot on... but we have very little power to stop them, unless you are comfortable with the size of Lemmy today.
I get that cult feeling for sure. There is a lot less nuance here. I’d be curious of the average demographic because I see a lot of naivety that’s probably linked to age & experience.
That's such a reductive sweep of a whole userbase. It's not because you have a negative outlook that everybody has to be like you.
People are thrilled to try and build something new and people like you come and shit on them to try to recreate reddit.
At the very least, people are trying to take back a part of the internet that corporations controlled for more than a decade. So it's normal that when a megacorp come and try to muddle the water, people are refusing that because they know their M.O.
I'm not stopping you. If you want to re-lean the lessons of the past because you ignore those that experienced them, feel free. You can't design a system ripe for corporate takeover and act shocked when it happens.
You are advocating for Lemmy to be exactly that, a takeover from a big corporation. This is the exact reason why people don't want to federate with Meta.
You want to redo the same exact thing that we did 10-15 years ago, expecting a different result.
No, I am pointing out that you developed a great open system with the false idea that individuals will be in power and little to no real consideration on how to stop corporations from taking it. Lemmy doesn’t exist in a vacuum. All the problems we have in real life with corporations gaining power is true in the fediverse, but worse because there are no courts to limit their power. Make no mistake about it, if Meta is motivated enough, they will steamroll everyone else. Not that many people are going to be loyal to the platform if the content isn’t there. If the content migrated to Threads so will 95% of the user base. Defederating one-by-one is not going to stop them and will fragment and make what we have now worse. I don’t believe it’s the answer, but am happy to be proven wrong.