Good question! By and large, some of the following would count as a "strike":
Poor moderation
Excessive spam
Most importantly: Making non-backwards compatible changes to the ActivityPub specification that may lead to the classic "Embrace, extend, extinguish" situation
No trying to be explicitly contrarian, but the EEE strategy (embrace, extend, extinguish) is well known by this point and it always ended up with the open standard not being used anymore and falling into irrelevance (as it happened to XMPP after google and Facebook embraced).
I do think it is a design failure, but it’s one that is necessary for it to be open: anyone can enter the space and build features on top of it. So they bring a lot of people, with features exclusive to them and then lots of people migrate because the experience feels broken if you can’t “florp” a post from someone else. It’s the nature of open source vs closed platform that enables the strategy to exist.
It may not happen this time, and I surely hope you’re right, but it would be a shame for the monopoly to win one more time when we had the chance do to something about it but we didn’t. Bringing more people do the fediverse sounds like a dream, but I’m not holding my breath expecting everything will work for the best. There’s a reason they’re doing this, it’s not because they need more users, they already have all of them.
In all seriousness, Google needs to get on providing an easier way to specify that a search should hit the Fediverse. site:reddit.com works for Reddit, but there is presently no analogous operator on Google's search for a distributed system that spans many domains.
I mean, it's great that you've made this, don't get me wrong, but they really should do that as well.
This isn't "the fediverse." This is one instance. "The fediverse" is a network of interoperable instances, each one owned and maintained separately.
Personally, I think the best way to interact with the fediverse is to maintain accounts on multiple instances. I have a dozen or so accounts total, and regularly use four or five of them. They're all under the same name, so they're all "me," but they're spread out instead of everything being on one account on one instance.
The main reason I prefer that is that every instance is different. Even though they're all interacting with the same broad pool of content, they each have a different userbase with different preferences, which means that they each have a different set of federated instances and subscribed communities. There's a fair amount of stuff I'll see on one instance but not on another, and it follows the overall focus of the instance. So whatever my mood might be or I might be interested in, I have an account on a suitable instance to match it.
Another advantage though, and directly on topic, is that I always have an alternative if one of them is having problems. Since each instance is privately owned and maintained rather than being owned by a corporation and maintained by its staff, there's any number of quirks and difficulties and failures. And that's just the way it is - the people running these instances are just ordinary people who are basically donating their time and resources, and they don't owe us anything. We get whatever we get, and have no right to demand any more than that.
With accounts on multiple instances, it doesn't matter if one or another of them has difficulties at the moment, or even if one shuts down completely (as two of my favorites have), since i can just switch to a different instance any time.
Kbin is special. It's an entirely different piece of software from Lemmy (and a better one in many ways). But it was written primarily by one person - Ernest - and he's also the owner of this instance. And while he's a great guy, he's also a single individual with other interests and responsibilities, and with some health issues. So it's a great place running on a great piece of software, but it has some difficulties and is often slow and/or glitchy. That's fine - I still like it here, so it's one of my most-used accounts, and I can always use a different one on a different instance if this one is too much of a problem.
Nice post but hard to read. How about using tables?
head 1
head 2
body 1
body 2
like this:
<span style="color:#323232;">| head 1 | head 2 |
</span><span style="color:#323232;">| --- | --- |
</span><span style="color:#323232;">| body 1 | body 2 |
</span>
Edit: are we sure the data is correct? For example; Lemmy.ml has 16 communities over 10k. Which are linux, memes, asklemmy, technology, worldnews, privacy, opensource, gaming, fediverse, unixporn, linux_gaming, reddit, science, lemmy, selfhost, jerboa.
There's something like 50 million Threads users. Chances are there's at least a few people out there who would be happy to be able to connect with at least some of those 50 million people, without having to use Threads themselves.
As an academic, I would just be happy if I could reach my peers on Mastodon. I don't really give a fuck which platform they choose to use - I've chosen mine, and that's enough for me.
Furthermore, what's even the point of open standards if you don't want them to be adopted.
@sab If Threads plays by the rules, they're welcome, but if they fail to meet our moderation standards (as they likely will), we shouldn't give them any special treatment.
Also, federating with Threads might not be as big a prospect as we originally thought. Daily active users had fallen by 80% last summer when Meta stopped releasing official numbers. It could be that the numbers have improved since, but then why not make a big deal over it?
Absolutely - if they federate and it turns out to be a problem, there's no reason one should be more patient with Threads than with any other poorly moderated instance. But in all likelihood the slimy parts of Threads will very rarely make it to the feeds of anyone not actively looking for it.
@sab I think the concern is more about tens/hundreds of thousands of toxic bros from Threads jumping into conversations on the fedi. We'll know enough not to follow them, but they'll be able to find us.
The fedi already has every kind of hate and -phobia and -ism present, of course, but if the wrong people from Threads get involved, that could go up by an order of magnitude and push us past a tipping point where our network of volunteer moderators just can't keep up.
If a threads user is so hellbent on finding and ruining conversations over at Mastodon or whereever, it would probably be easier for them just to sign up for a Mastodon instance in the first place. I don't think Threads federating is going to make it all that much easier for the trolls.
This makes no sense whatsoever. You could want Meta to use ActivityPub, say it's a good thing that they use an open standard, and still say you have no interest in communicating with them and stick to services where they are defederated.
You don't have an obligation to read every email you receive just because it's an open standard.
There's no logical connection between services using activitypub and you bring forced to connect to them. So I guess at least that's a point to your free speech example.
The only reason I use WordPress is for the free web hosting. WordPress itself is shit. Things that would be very easy in real html and javascript are hard in WordPress.
Just because it's not tailored to your personal preferences doesn't make it "shit". For anyone who doesn't want to manage code, Wordpress is worth considering.
Personally, I'd like to maintain Wordpress locally and offline. Then each update exported to the server as a static site. I just haven't found a thorough enough tutorial online yet.
I'm not at my computer, so please excuse any mobile issues. I'm in favor of the move, because it will help to simultaneously connect and decentralize communications across the platforms. Say what you will about Facebook (you're probably right), but if they're that bad, then it seems logical to me to connect to their federated service even more aggressively.
The more we push our content (and by extension the Fediverse content that kbin aggregates), the less impact their algorithm can have. The more we go out of the way to expose their content, the harder we make it them to curate/censor/suppress any voices. And if, when comparing two Fediverse instances or softwares, we find that what's been pushed to them is different, we the users can call it out to news organizations (or make it public ourselves).
And yes, I know I'm making the arguments for supporting private companies in adopting open-source. It's about being able to audit what companies we don't trust are doing.
In addition to that, I'm currently a Threads user. Anecdotally, there's a lot of wholesome content on there that I appreciate, and what limited advertising is there is nowhere near as obtrusive as Reddit or the main Facebook platform.
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