There is a lot of criticism on the #Fediverse for people who won't leave Twitter/X. And, indeed, there are plenty of good reasons for leaving that platform, or for any other commercialized social media platform for that matter.
However, we need to remember that while these platforms are not safe for marginalized people, neither is #Mastodon and the #Fediverse by default. The user base is still overwhelmingly white and European and North American.
And, all other things being equal, this user base tends to be wealthier than other demographic groups, and has more free time as well.
This is important, as running and moderating Mastodon instances is a non-trivial investment in money and time - things that marginalized people are more likely to lack. And given how they are more likely to be subject to discrimination, marginalized people need even more and better moderation - and they likely have to do it themselves, as others are unlikely to even recognize many forms of harassment.
So, stick to Twitter/X and experience lots of harassment... or move to the Fediverse where you will also experience a lot of harassment unless you spend lots of time and resources on moderation? Time and resources you might not have in the first place?
When put that way, it's not such an easy choice to make. Especially if the vast majority of your community is still on Twitter/X, and is unlikely to move to Mastodon without a clear demonstration that the Fediverse is better for their community.
I don't have a solution for this dilemma. But we can't find a solution without recognizing the problem in the first place.
Now that for-profit tech companies are beginning to implement #ActivityPub, I think it's important to establish what we want with the #fediverse and whether federation with #Threads, #Flipboard, Tumblr, and the like bring us closer to or further from those goals.
With that in mind, I've come up with a few statements (in no particular order) that describe what I think is an "ideal fediverse" — a fediverse that's not necessarily realistic but that we should aim for:
No actor controls a large portion of visible activity.
Users can move between instances without penalty.
Creating and running an instance requires minimal effort.
People on or entering the fediverse understand the variety of available options.
There is no downside to using free and open-source platforms over proprietary ones.
These definitely aren't comprehensive, and if you have anything you'd add, let's discuss that! They're currently helping me reassess my stance on Threads now that Flipboard is also entering the stage, and I hope they're helpful for others as well.
I'll elaborate on these five statements in the comments.
No actor controls a large portion of visible activity.
This is important for instances to be able to defederate from those with bad moderation, harmful values, etc. If a person or group controls a big portion of the content that people see on an instance, then that instance will lose a lot of that content should they defederate. That person or group would essentially be able to do whatever, and instances would find difficulty defederating because they'd lose so much visible activity and thus users.
If a single entity gets enough dominance over activity, they could make defederation from them out of the question for a ton of users. Furthermore, that entity could cripple the fediverse by simply leaving it, taking a bunch of users from other instances with them. This is a big concern many people have with Threads; if 90% of the activity you see on mastodon.social comes from Threads, then Meta would be able to nab a ton of mastodon.social users by leaving the fediverse, facing those users with the choice of either losing a ton of their connections & follows or jumping ship to Threads.
But you don't even need a supermajority of content to cause that much harm. For example, take the threadiverse (Lemmy/Kbin). A large portion of visible activity is controlled by the admins of lemmy.world. Thankfully, they seem to nice people, but if they were to start (for example) being more lax with hate speech, other Lemmy/Kbin instances would either have to deal with it or lose access to a large portion of the activity pool. If any threadiverse instance were to defederate from lemmy.world — even if the lemmy.world admins started acting against the interests of the fediverse and its users — that instance would lose a dangerous number of users.
Users can move between instances without penalty.
One of the main benefits of the fediverse is that you can move to a different instance and still be able to view the same content. If the admins of your instance start making moderation decisions you disagree with or you just decide that you want to be on an instance that you yourself run, you're able to move and still interact with the content pool. Thus, as long as the platform your destination instance uses (e.g., Firefish, Kbin, Mastodon) supports the same type of content as your old one, you should be able to move without any downsides. The more penalty there is for moving, the more people will feel trapped on an instance even if they want to leave.
This is partially a matter of robust systems for moving accounts, but it's also a matter of having good options available. Mastodon has a ton of active, stable instances, so if you ever want to move (e.g., because your instance is or isn't defederating from Threads), you can do so and still be able to use Mastodon. However, the only such instance on Kbin is kbin.social (not counting instances that run Mbin, a fork with different features & development). If you want to move from kbin.social to another Kbin instance, you don't really have a lot of options. And if you're on something that's closed-source, you'll be forced to move to a different platform entirely, which may not be great for the user — an important reason why free and open-source software should be prominent on the fediverse.
Obviously, this is something that might be impossible to achieve. But even if we can't eliminate the strings attached to moving to another instance, we should try to minimize them.
People can create and run their own instances to their liking with minimal effort.
If a user wants to, they should be able to control their interactions on the fediverse through running their own instance, and doing so should require as little effort as is feasible. Many people have already set up single-person instances for the purpose of having more control over their data. If people can't do that, then they're forced to put their account and content under the control of other people. Of course, most people are fine with this provided that they trust their instance admins, but the option to be your own admin should be as available as possible.
This is part of why it's so important to have prominent open-source platforms. If Mastodon weren't open-source, then anyone who likes Mastodon but wants to control their content would be out of luck. If you like the Threads interface but don't want to be on an instance run by Meta, you just don't have that option.
With Meta beginning to test federation, there's a lot of discussion as to whether we should preemptively defederate with Threads. I made a post about the question, and it seems that opinions differ a lot among people on Kbin. There were a lot of arguments for and against regarding ads, privacy, and content quality, but I don't...
You are taking this massive “if” and building a whole policy of preemptive panic around it:
I don't see how it's a "massive 'if'." If it was just some fringe possibility, I wouldn't be so concerned, but the thing is that I don't see any realistic scenario where we don't become dependent on Meta for microblog activity. If 99% of microblogs come from Threads, that's exactly what's happening. To give an example that's more relevant to the thread aggregation side of Kbin, if Reddit were to federate and we didn't defederate, Reddit would make up 99% of the thread activity we see, we'd get used to that, and we'd be completely dependent on them to maintain that. With how desperate people seem to be for a quick boost in activity that they'll just take whatever Mark Zuckerberg offers as if there are no strings attached, I don't see how we just end up fine if Threads is to ever leave in the future. If Threads becomes most of what we see, we'll be dependent on them, and if Threads then leaves (which they have incentive to do), much of who we have right now on these platforms will join Threads after getting used to the activity, and getting new users will be much more difficult.
And if we don’t and we defederate, we’ve just cut off potentially interesting conversations with interesting people based on ideology.
That's definitely true. Again, What Meta is essentially offering is free activity on a silver platter. What's completely nonsensical is to act like there aren't any strings attached when there are obviously strings attached. Meta is trying to maximize profit. Anyone who thinks that Zuckerberg suddenly cares about an open fediverse even though its values (people being on multiple instances, everything being transparent, no one person or group having too much control, etc.) go directly against his goal is either delusional or very misinformed about what these for-profit tech companies do. It strongly benefits him to take users from Mastodon, Firefish, Misskey, Kbin, etc., and allowing ourselves to depend on him for fediverse activity puts him in a prime position to do it.
What's completely nonsensical is to act like there aren't any strings attached when there are obviously strings attached.
Let's look at the strings
Meta is trying to maximize profit. Anyone who thinks that Zuckerberg suddenly cares about an open fediverse even though its values (people being on multiple instances, everything being transparent, no one person or group having too much control, etc.) go directly against his goal is either delusional or very misinformed about what these for-profit tech companies do.
That's all true. But that's not really a string - it's just a fact of any for-profit organisation that sets up an instance
It strongly benefits him to take users from Mastodon, Firefish, Misskey, Kbin, etc., and allowing ourselves to depend on him for fediverse activity puts him in a prime position to do it.
But he can do that anyway. And in fact people who who want to interact with the 140million ish Threads users currently have one option - join Threads. With federation I can communicate with Threads users without joining Threads. That needs to be factored in.
Once content dependence is established, there is no turning back.
Everyone who is on the fediverse has already made that choice. They are intentionally on a network with less content because of the other benefits And a huge portion of the discussion of Meta joining the fediverse is made up of ppl who are saying they will block Threads on day 1.
the latter will make it impossible to grow again.
That's what everyone was saying back when the fediverse was even smaller, or even before it existed. "How can you compete with giants like G+, twitter, and facebook?" There will always be groups of people who will not participate in corporate social media. And there will always be people who like the convenience of corporate social media but get fed up with it and seek alternatives. And there will always be people who bounce between services.
Tons of people will leave platforms like Mastodon to go to Threads
They're only here because they left corporate social media. If they were going to leave for Threads, why wouldn't they do it now? They've heard all the warnings about some supposed EEE and assume that Threads won't connect to the fediverse forever so why would Threads adding ActivityPub support suddenly change their mind? Going to threads now puts them in the same state as going to threads later in some hypothetical future where the fediverse is too small to matter.
If we want a fediverse with the values we care about to grow...
I don't care about Meta and I'm not relying on them for anything. When they join the fediverse, individual instance owners will still have all the power. User on the fediverse will still be able to control their own feeds. But there are people who use Threads and being able to communicate with them would be nice. I don't think any of the fears about Meta on the fediverse are justified and I think the fediverse will continue on just like it has for more than a decade.
Framasoft, the French non-profit organisation for open source software such as PeerTube, says that after 5 years, Mobilizon has reached maturity. In December 2018 the organisation announced their plans to develop Mobilizon, with the goal of creating an alternative to Facebook Groups and events.
Over the years, they have added multiple updates, such as federation in 2020 and searching across Mobilizon instances in 2020. This month, they are releasing their final update, v4, with a variety of new features.
Event administrators can now send private announcements to attendees, allowing them to contact all people who have registered for an event directly. This announcement is a one-way communications channel, intended for organisers to broadcast information. Besides that, a chat system for attendees is also implemented, which federates with the rest of the fediverse.
Another new feature is the ability to import and synchronise events from other platforms, such as Meetup and EventBrite. Framasoft created an import tool that allows you to import and synchronise event information from these platforms into Mobilizon. iCal event feeds are support too, so this even works with most calendar tools.
The big platform for importing events from is Facebook. Here, Framasoft has done the work to get it to work, and the ball is now in Facebook’s court to approve and validate. Framasoft is clear that they do not have a timeline how long this will take, and that they are unsure if Facebook will do so.
While Framasoft sees Mobilizon has having completed their vision, it is far from over for the project. Framasoft will hand over the keys to the French association Kaihuri, who has been maintaining a Mobilizon presence for a while. Kaihuri recently got funding from NLnet to continue development work on Mobilizon, focusing on the user experience and improving interoperability. Meanwhile, Framasoft is betting big on PeerTube for next year, and is currently organising their yearly donation drive.
Mastodon has the responsibility to promote diversity in the Fediverse
I love the Threadiverse. Compared to the microblogging Fediverse’s sea of random thoughts, Lemmy and kbin are so much easier to navigate with the options to sort posts by subscribed, from local instances or everything federated. You can also sort by individual community, and then there are the countless ways to order the posts and comments (which are stored neatly under the main post, by the way). That people can more easily find the right discussions and see where they can contribute also means that the discussions tend to be more focused and productive than elsewhere. Decentralisation also makes a lot of sense, since it is built around different communities. All that’s needed is users.
Things were going quite well for a while when Reddit killed third-party apps, prompting many to leave and find the Threadiverse. However, it is quite difficult to entertain a crowd that has grown accustomed to a constant bombardment of dopamine-inducing or interesting content by tens of millions of users, if you only have a couple hundred thousand people. This is causing some to leave, which of course increases this effect. The active users have more than halved since July, according to FediDB. The mood is also becoming more tense. Maybe the lack of engagement drives some to cause it through hostility, I’m not quite sure. Either way, the Threadiverse becoming a less enjoyable place to be, which is quite sad considering how promising it is.
But what is really frustrating is that we could easily have that userbase. The entire Fediverse has over ten million users, and many Mastodonians clearly want to engage in group-based discussion, looking at Guppe groups. The focused discussions should also be quite attractive. Technically we are federated, so why do Mastodonians interact so little with the Threadiverse? The main reason is that Mastodon simply doesn’t federate post content. I really can’t see why the platform that federates entire Wordpress blogs refuses to federate thread content just because it has a title, and instead just replaces the body with a link to the post. Very unhelpful.
The same goes with PeerTube. There are plenty of videos on there that I am quite sure a lot of Mastodonians would appreciate, yet both views and likes there stay consistently in the tens. Yes, Mastodon’s web interface has a local video player, but in most clients it is the same link shenanigans, may may partly explain the small amount of engagement. This is also quite sad, because Google’s YouTube is one of the worst social network monopolies out there, if not the worst.
And I know some might say that Mastodon is a microblogging platform and that it makes sense only to have microblogging content, but the problem is that Mastodon is the dominant platform on the Fediverse, its users making up close to 80% of all Fedizens. It has gone so far that several Friendica and Hubzilla users have been complaining about complaints from Mastodonians that their posts do not live up to Mastodon customs, and of course, that people frequently use “Mastodon” to refer to the entire Fediverse. This, of course, goes entirely against the idea of the Fediverse, that many diverse platforms live in harmony with and awareness of each other.
The very least that Mastodon could do is to support the content of other platforms. Then I’d wish that they’d improve discoverability, by for instance adding a videos tab in the explore section, improving federation of favourites since it is the dominant sorting mechanism on many other platforms, and making a clear distinction between people (@person) and groups (!group), but I know that that is quite much to ask.
P.S. @feditips , @FediFollows , I know that you are reluctant to promote Lemmy and its communities because of the ideology of its founders, but the fact is firstly that it’s open source and there aren't any individual people who control the entire project, and that the software itself is very apolitical. In fact, most Lemmy users both oppose and are on instances that have rules against such beliefs, so I highly encourage you to at least help raise awareness on the communities. Then, of course, there’s kbin, which isn’t associated with any extremism at all. As a bonus, it has much better integration with the microblogging Fediverse, but it is a lot smaller and younger, and still very much under development.
Anyways, that was a ramble. Thanks for hearing me out.
Mastodon has the responsibility to promote diversity in the Fediverse
I love the Threadiverse. Compared to the microblogging Fediverse’s sea of random thoughts, Lemmy and kbin are so much easier to navigate with the options to sort posts by subscribed, from local instances or everything federated. You can also sort by individual community, and then there are the countless ways to order the posts and comments (which are stored neatly under the main post, by the way). That people can more easily find the right discussions and see where they can contribute also means that the discussions tend to be more focused and productive than elsewhere. Decentralisation also makes a lot of sense, since it is built around different communities. All that’s needed is users.
Things were going quite well for a while when Reddit killed third-party apps, prompting many to leave and find the Threadiverse. However, it is quite difficult to entertain a crowd that has grown accustomed to a constant bombardment of dopamine-inducing or interesting content by tens of millions of users, if you only have a couple hundred thousand people. This is causing some to leave, which of course increases this effect. The active users have more than halved since July, according to FediDB. The mood is also becoming more tense. Maybe the lack of engagement drives some to cause it through hostility, I’m not quite sure. Either way, the Threadiverse becoming a less enjoyable place to be, which is quite sad considering how promising it is.
But what is really frustrating is that we could easily have that userbase. The entire Fediverse has over ten million users, and many Mastodonians clearly want to engage in group-based discussion, looking at Guppe groups. The focused discussions should also be quite attractive. Technically we are federated, so why do Mastodonians interact so little with the Threadiverse? The main reason is that Mastodon simply doesn’t federate post content. I really can’t see why the platform that federates entire Wordpress blogs refuses to federate thread content just because it has a title, and instead just replaces the body with a link to the post. Very unhelpful.
The same goes with PeerTube. There are plenty of videos on there that I am quite sure a lot of Mastodonians would appreciate, yet both views and likes there stay consistently in the tens. Yes, Mastodon’s web interface has a local video player, but in most clients it is the same link shenanigans, may may partly explain the small amount of engagement. This is also quite sad, because Google’s YouTube is one of the worst social network monopolies out there, if not the worst.
And I know some might say that Mastodon is a microblogging platform and that it makes sense only to have microblogging content, but the problem is that Mastodon is the dominant platform on the Fediverse, its users making up close to 80% of all Fedizens. It has gone so far that several Friendica and Hubzilla users have been complaining about complaints from Mastodonians that their posts do not live up to Mastodon customs, and of course, that people frequently use “Mastodon” to refer to the entire Fediverse. This, of course, goes entirely against the idea of the Fediverse, that many diverse platforms live in harmony with and awareness of each other.
The very least that Mastodon could do is to support the content of other platforms. Then I’d wish that they’d improve discoverability, by for instance adding a videos tab in the explore section, improving federation of favourites since it is the dominant sorting mechanism on many other platforms, and making a clear distinction between people (@person) and groups (!group), but I know that that is quite much to ask.
P.S. @feditips , @FediFollows , I know that you are reluctant to promote Lemmy and its communities because of the ideology of its founders, but the fact is firstly that it’s open source and there aren't any individual people who control the entire project, and that the software itself is very apolitical. In fact, most Lemmy users both oppose and are on instances that have rules against such beliefs, so I highly encourage you to at least help raise awareness on the communities. Then, of course, there’s kbin, which isn’t associated with any extremism at all. As a bonus, it has much better integration with the microblogging Fediverse, but it is a lot smaller and younger, and still very much under development.
Anyways, that was a ramble. Thanks for hearing me out.
I hear you, kinda, but… Is it Mastodon’s job to promote other services? Mastodon doesn’t even implement ActivityPub to specification, so why would you expect them to hold hands and sing kumbaya?
I will say this though, a.gup.pe and chirp.social both should’ve probably switched and became Lemmy instances. As someone that follows !Firefox from my mastodon, I can tell you the user experience for the two kinds of groups wouldn’t get worse, but only better. Especially with 0.19.x and the changes made to Markdown support. Users would be able to access the groups via both Mastodon and Lemmy and not be limited to the Mastodon UI seems a no brainer to me, especially since it’s a drop in replacement.
Edit: I will add that dickheads are dickheads. That has nothing to do with how active somewhere is. Also it takes time for a community to grow. Things will go up and down, but the general direction remains that there’s more users here than a year ago.
Right now, downvotes (reduces) don't federate to (and from?) Kbin instances. This lack of federation makes the downvote counter really inaccurate—a comment that looks like it's +10 might be -15 when you look at it from lemmy.world....
Like you mentioned, that could be interesting for specialized instances used by a small group of people, but that wouldn't work for any general instance due to the vote counters being really unintuitive. If an instance were to do that, I imagine they'd also want to have something you can click that shows how many votes were local, how many were from other instances, how many were blocked, etc.
@Doll_Tow_Jet@kbin.social I don't know if that's the official word for it but I'm using "backfilling" to refer to loading the history of a person or group after first federating with it.
the outbox is a special collection (list in activitypub speak) that's intended to work kinda like an old school email outbox where you put messages to be delivered and it would deliver them to the inboxes of people (and servers that were offline at that time would later pull them in from the outbox)
or, well, that's what the spec says. nobody uses it like that in reality because activity pub was intended for a completely different kind of social media than how it ended up being used (it seems to expect more "everything apps", including an entire client api that would completely abstract away the instance into nothing more than a dumb pipe for activities unlike the current reality where instance software dictate what you can do)
this probably confused you even more but it's getting pretty late here so I can't words good, sorry!
When I first joined Kbin I posted threads due to being a reddit refugee but have started posting microblogs as time went on. I have also noticed some magazines have more threads while others have more microblog posts. For example kbinmeta has more threads while the most active magazine I moderate has mostly microblogs.
Microblogs on /kbin are essentially short-form posts. There are times where microblogs revolve around a specific topic, but this is not always necessary. On /kbin, they are generally associated with keywords (hashtags) that allow a microblog to be sent to a magazine that targets/accepts the tag, which then appears in the microblog feed. However, on Mastodon/Twitter, you can simply write posts that get grouped with the posts of other users or your own previous posts without replying to a specific original post.
Writing microblogs and utilizing tagged keywords allows people to search for the information the writer deems fundamental to the topic they're writing about. This enhances discoverability and reduces noise, as you are able to quickly browse any and all posts that are specifically tagged with those keywords. Furthermore, microblogs may generally incorporate multiple identifying topics as you group together these keywords/tags.
For example, the @cats magazine will have an influx of posts on Saturdays from Mastodon instances which are tagged with #caturday. Writing microblogs in this way makes it so creating a thread every Saturday in @cats isn't necessary. This has a nice side effect of minimizing the need for megathreads that were found on Reddit.
Additionally, you can also search for (and click on) #japanesepractice to review exercises that I have completed in the past. There are additional posts in the @learnjapanese magazine that would not include this information. By using this tag, you can access the posts that specifically pertain to my studies.
This is in contrast to /kbin threads, where the content of the thread is the centralizing topic of discussion as opposed to the keywords.
For example: our replies are centered around what the OP has asked instead of any keywords in the original post or subsequent replies. However, /kbin is more unique than typical forums, as we can #tag the comments to achieve a similar functionality to microblogs. Honestly, I would like to see this feature be utilized more, but ç'est la vie.
Hey, #Fediverse experts. Is there is simple way to Boost a Kbin/Lemmy post I like onto my #Mastodon?
I know I can look up the #KBin / #Lemmy poster on my Mastodon instance and boost from their timeline.
But, that's a bit difficult, I have to translate the KBin/Lemmy user URL into a remote Mastodon user URL, and then I have to manually match up the KBin post URL with the contents of a toot in the timeline.
Hmm ... not sure you have to do all of that ... if you find the post on your masto instance you should be able to just boost that.
Otherwise, yes, there is a painfully lacking degree of interop. From what I've gathered, mastodon needs to do better at representing group based structures. Lemmy/kbin federate just fine, but masto can't represent and manage the content in any way that is useful, which is hampering the growth of the fedi IMO.
Mastodon is a lot harder to enshittify being as it's decentralised and uses an open protocol.
If it looks like an instance has gone down the path of corporate enshittification, other instances will stop federating with it.
The software itself could be a target, but it's open-source. Even the original instance created by the software creators (mastodon.social), turns to the dark side, someone will inevitably fork the last open-source version of the software and other instances will then update from the most popular fork.
As long as the underlying protocol remains the same, it doesn't really matter what happens.
Heck, kbin is totally different software but uses the same protocol to federate with the various Lemmys, other kbins, and, yes, Mastodon instances too.
Consider what happened a number of times with Reddit where various groups left and used the last open-source version of the software to set up their own Reddit clones. It wasn't particularly successful for them, but one or two of them are still out there.
If there had been a large number of them all sharing content and posts like Mastodon etc., maybe they would have been more popular. (For better or worse).
a political philosophy, movement, or regime (such as that of the Fascisti)
Could be leftists, conservatives, or any other political group.
that exalts nation and often race above the individual
Well that excludes conservatives, because conservatism celebrates rugged individualism.
Leftism, by contrast, embraces groups above individualism. This is what conservatives usually refer to as neo-Marxism. It's also known as identity politics. It's this idea that we're all members of a group, and that group gives us our identity. Then with intersectionality, you have multiple groups defining identity.
Two caveats:
Christians are the exception to the rule, where many conservatives do embrace an identity that can be defined as a group.
Leftists do exalt groups above the individual, but those groups are not normally the nation (at least not in the US).
and that stands for a centralized autocratic government
Yes, in general, conservatives support small government, while leftists prefer government regulations over private business, government handouts for the poor, government taxation of the wealthy, and government control of every little thing in life — basically big government.
Centralized? In the US, centralized means federal control whereas decentralized means State and local control. Leftists generally prefer the former, whereas conservatives generally prefer the latter.
headed by a dictatorial leader
Not applicable in the US, but I wouldn't put it past the Left in the near future.
severe economic and social regimentation,
Yep, see this thread for instance. Leftist love regimented control over what we're allowed to think, and they love silencing the opposition.
and forcible suppression of opposition
Oh, you mean like when Biden has his primary opponent, Trump, tied up in court with accusations and a threat of imprisonment? Or, you mean like this very thread where leftists are trying to silence the TERFs? Yes, leftists absolutely love the forcible suppression of their opposition.
In conclusion, no, it's not a perfect fit for leftists, but it's loosely close — and it certainly doesn't fit conservatives even slightly.
I was thinking about how there are similar communities on different instances. In some cases that is desirable/ok but maybe it would be cool to have another option....
I don't think this is a good idea. Keep in mind that different instances have different policies, moderators, and users. This leads to different rule enforcement, culture, and federation status. Even if a magazine/community has the same name and the same discussion topics does not mean it's the same group of people reading those posts (some might be, due to cross-instance federation, but not all will be). In short, they are different groups and cannot be treated as the same without pissing off people.
The proper solution is to let each community just evolve until one naturally emerges over time as the go-to community or they all differentiate themselves enough to be considered different (albeit with similar names). Adding a bot to cross-post content just slows that process down and makes the problem persist for longer. If a topic is truly small enough that getting enough people for critical mass is difficult (like your DIY cobbling example), then it shouldn't be hard to start a discussion in each of the separate communities to suggest assigning one as the "main" one and then just stop using the others. This is something that should be driven by the communities, not the software.
A lot of us are pretty new to the fediverse and we've arrived just in time to grapple with what is easily the biggest federation/defederation controversy ever to hit it. I've put this thread together to hopefully help communicate some of the more complex ideas that we're trying to get our heads around....
The first one that comes to mind is that defederation DOES stop your posts from going to Meta's platform when combined with the AUTHORIZED_FETCH server setting, while a simple user-level block may not. Depending on your server's settings, your posts may or may not be available on the open web where Meta could scrape the data - but this is still very different from them appearing in the feed or search results of, say, the transphobic, racist, or antisemitic groups that call Meta home.
This has serious implications for user safety and should not be overlooked. In fact, user safety is one of the biggest issues I have seen people mention when advocating for defederation.
Second: it's not yet clear if threads will allow their users to follow people on Lemmy or Kbin servers. But if they do, their users - including, for instance, the millions of followers of some big celebrity or politician - would be able to uprank posts and influence what you end up seeing. You might have LibsOfTikTok tell their users to brigade any posts critical of them, who knows. Meta's own algorithms could end up surfacing certain posts to their users, making the post rankings here largely a reflection of what Meta wants their users to see.
In other words, there's a lot more to the story than just 'blocking their content' when it comes to why you would want full defederation.
Here are a couple of blog posts that go into more detail around some of the data & privacy issues with federation:
@pollodiabolo - this user is a karma whore of epic proportions and they have made a shit load (10-15+) accounts on kbin that boost and upvote each other while sometimes mass downvoting others that have posts trending towards the top - all to farm karma....
This all seems needlessly complicated, and worse, it is custom-tweaked to just one specific scenario. I would much rather simply have the details of who voted for whom remain public and then allow each instance to handle that however they wish.
Spotting karma whores who operate like this, with a group of mutually-upvoting and downvoting bots, will be a trivial pattern for automatic detection. Rather than simply trying to give them an ever-more-complicated "game" to play, just identify them and block them and be done with it. Admins won't want their instances to become known as havens for such behaviour so they'll likely wipe users like that.
I’m a Reddit refugee who was on that platform for 10+ years. I saw not just a tremendous amount of controversies, but attempts at introducing alternatives to Reddit during all of them. The 2015 blackout saw a ton of alternatives suggested, and if you go back and look at them many have either not survived or never achieved...
I am extremely grateful to everybody involved with Lemmy. That includes you!
cross-posted from: lemm.ee/post/26272438...
Welcome to Lemmyvision! 🎙️ (jlai.lu)
cross-posted from: jlai.lu/post/4818729...
Combating spam on kbin - some thoughts (kbin.social)
Have been thinking about what kbin can do to combat spam accounts, which are currently on the rise again on kbin.social....
A case for preemptively defederating with Threads (kbin.social)
With Meta beginning to test federation, there's a lot of discussion as to whether we should preemptively defederate with Threads. I made a post about the question, and it seems that opinions differ a lot among people on Kbin. There were a lot of arguments for and against regarding ads, privacy, and content quality, but I don't...
What's the plan for downvote federation? (kbin.social)
Right now, downvotes (reduces) don't federate to (and from?) Kbin instances. This lack of federation makes the downvote counter really inaccurate—a comment that looks like it's +10 might be -15 when you look at it from lemmy.world....
Missing search results when looking for federated communities (at Lemmy) (kbin.social)
Hi all,...
What are your thoughts on Microblogs vs threads? (kbin.social)
When I first joined Kbin I posted threads due to being a reddit refugee but have started posting microblogs as time went on. I have also noticed some magazines have more threads while others have more microblog posts. For example kbinmeta has more threads while the most active magazine I moderate has mostly microblogs.
Mastodon makes a major move amid Musk’s multiple messes (www.theregister.com)
Federated social network adds n00b-friendly features to the 'Fediverse'
Are TERF-centric magazines allowed on this insurance? (kbin.social)
https://kbin.social/m/modernmisogyny...
idea for discussion: federation of individual communities across instance (kbin.social)
I was thinking about how there are similar communities on different instances. In some cases that is desirable/ok but maybe it would be cool to have another option....
Defederation, Threads and You (kbin.social)
A lot of us are pretty new to the fediverse and we've arrived just in time to grapple with what is easily the biggest federation/defederation controversy ever to hit it. I've put this thread together to hopefully help communicate some of the more complex ideas that we're trying to get our heads around....
Kbin.cafe on Blocking Meta's New Threads App (kbin.cafe)
For those who aren't aware, Kbin Cafe is a Kbin instance I run. Cross-posting our stance on Threads for visibility....
Call out post for a particular karma farmer on kbin.social (kbin.social)
@pollodiabolo - this user is a karma whore of epic proportions and they have made a shit load (10-15+) accounts on kbin that boost and upvote each other while sometimes mass downvoting others that have posts trending towards the top - all to farm karma....
What I think kbin needs to do to survive, and why I think it has a better chance than any other Reddit alternative I've seen yet. (kbin.social)
I’m a Reddit refugee who was on that platform for 10+ years. I saw not just a tremendous amount of controversies, but attempts at introducing alternatives to Reddit during all of them. The 2015 blackout saw a ton of alternatives suggested, and if you go back and look at them many have either not survived or never achieved...