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The overhead of duplicated data across the network. Not reposts on different instances, but the software itself on those different instances needing to cache/store this one single post for their users locally
Donāt large services have many duplicates/caches spread across the globe to balance load and reduce latency? Couldnāt this be seen as a positive? It could also be seen as a redundancy layer.
Yes. Itās very common to cache content closer to the user, otherwise the site would be slow. Some services like Netflix and Facebook even provide custom caching servers to internet providers to install in their data centers. These are called Netflix Open Connect and Facebook Network Appliance respectively. They significantly reduces costs for the ISP, as Netflix and Facebook are generally two of the heaviest users of bandwidth on an ISPās network, and traffic entirely within their own network is effectively āfreeā for them.
This is a good part of federation IMO - if users join an instance physically close to them, their experience is going to be nice and fast, since everything is cached on their instance. Itās also pretty easy to spin up a new Lemmy instance in your country if one doesnāt exist yet.
Lack of centralized control.
Until thereās some kind of organizing central committee of servers that could mutually defederate problematic instances, every server is forced to play whack-a-mole to deal with fascists and pedophiles and the like. Every server can not be an island onto themselves, they should be in communication with each other and then collectively decide on the rules of the federation.
I forsee in the future federation boards, like servers that work together to vote on good/bad actors/instances and from those other instances could subscribe to their moderation. Still open moderation, you can still set up an instance that doesnāt adhere to group A or group Bās mod lists, but for the vast majority of people you could have a good experience.
For example, dunno how many saw but had to remove an anti-LGTBQ post in a LGTBQ community today. Iām sure Iām not the only mod who removed that from their instance today, itād be great if there was a way other instance admins could share that and āteam upā with moderation.
Like internet countries. Choose a virtual citizenship, vote for your moderator and wait to be disappointed
Poop
poopless like countries, but I would view that more like the federation UN, with each instance getting a vote and a majority passes. Youāre still in charge of your country, but you could say āI like how this group moderates, Iām going to auto apply moderation from them on hereā, maybe you could choose which communities are automoderated too. If I ever started disagreeing with that group I could unsubscribe and subscribe to a different groupās.
For example, the post I mentioned was not in a community that I host, but for my users I had to remove it too. Would just be nice to say āwhoever gets there first can remove itā
What if instances could āsubscribeā to the list of defederated instances of each other?
So for example. Letās say that Alice and Bob have their own instances, alice.ml and bob.ml. Bob trusts Alice, so he sets up the following rule in bob.ml: āif alice.ml defederates an instance, then bob.ml defederates it too.ā
Then Charlie starts charlie.ml. Itās a bad instance. Alice manually defederates alice.ml from charlie.ml. Bob wonāt need to do anything - bob.ml would do it automatically.
I feel like this idea would address the issue of playing whack-a-mole, since admins of multiple servers can split the busywork if they so desire, and only with whomever they desire. And thereās no risk of a central control going rogue, since thereās no central control on first place.
It could be even further refined with more complex rules on when to automatically defederate other instances. Such as taking into account if the other instance did it manually or automatically, or how many among X instances defederated it.
What you eventually get is a single global list that the majority of instances use, at which point every new instance must immediately agree to adopt the list lest they themselves are also immediately defederated.
From what I understand, there are already instances who operate this way.
Not necessarily. Defederating too many instances means that your own instance will get less content; admins know that, so good admins generally avoid doing it unless necessary for the goals of their instances. Couple that with dissenting points (for example: grotesque but morally acceptable content, porn, dumb/low-quality contentā¦), and the odds of said āsingle global listā popping up becomes fairly small.
Instead I expect to see a bunch of smaller lists, between instances with similar goals, and plenty unilateral subscribing (e.g. A subscribes to B, but B doesnāt subscribe to A).
Thatās good to know. If they do it automatically, this system could be already implemented across Lemmy.
I really really donāt like the idea of a central committee of liberals that will defed any instances that are more radical that āvote blue no matter who!ā
I really really donāt like the idea of a central committee of extreme right cultists that will defed any instances that are more radical that āvote red no matter who!ā
Point being, I think itās a plus to be able to decide for ourselves.
Thatās why the radical instances should
I see that as a pro and a con. If one narcissist manages to get to a position of authority, they canāt derail the whole network. That also means that people can form their own echo chamber islands of like-minded instances. There could be the main island of random interests and then a separate extremist island of all the instances that got defederated from all the big instances. Not an ideal solution, but itās still better than a fully centralized Reddit.
Itās interesting to see the mirror between Fediverse philosophies, and the history of international relations. For every person who believes every physical country should be an autonomous island unto themselves, youāll find someone else who believes every country should be policed by the standards of another country or group of countries.
The fact that we can have this debate on the internet is interestingā¦but I also find it interesting that the internet was already federated to begin with. And we all see how that turned out. The Fediverse is just an internet within the internet.
Scalability. Most federated Lemmy instances are hobbiest run projects started by every day joes and privacy advocating sysadmins. These instances can handle a modest amount of activity. Lemmy.world is slowing to a crawl and barely working due to being overloaded. At the scale of tens of thousands of active users you NEED proper infrastructure and a dedicated team. These are not things that come easy when the instance generates no revenue besides meager donations. Lemmy.world is looking for on call system operators willing to contribute 5-10 hours per week. Good help is rarely cheap let alone free.
You are exactly correct.
I posted this in response to the DDOS attacks a few weeks ago. Same idea.
"ā¦ This is a shame. Hosting a high visibility server is no joke, and I donāt envy the admins and the very difficult work they do. Itās simultaneously an argument for and against decentralization. For - a single instance can get knocked out without talking out the whole fediverse. Against - it seems as though high visibility communities are potentially fairly easy to target and take down.
I think that decentralization wins out here in the end, but it does feel like there may be a need for some sort of fallback mechanism to be in place at an instance/community level. I suspect this might evolve somehow over time. It would require some way to expand trust between instances and or portability of communities (which could be fraught with user trust/data integrity issues).
If things donāt evolve it could grow into a whack-a-mole game for bad actors, or there might need to be more investment into server infrastructure (which could work against decentralization if only because of economies of scale).
Or maybe thereās no issue after all? Iām just imagining potential implications of a scaling fediverse - itās fascinating and exciting stuff! ā¦"
Everyone is a lot safer, faster and less vulnerable by being on smaller servers.
Itās not possible to ddos thousands of smaller instances in the same way. And if communities were spread out, taking a few instances down wouldnāt even be noticeable.
Theoretically, yes. Practically, maybe not so much as a ton of these smaller instances are consolidated on a just a handful of hosting providers.
I expect as federation becomes more common weāll see patterns like user servers, community servers, archive/redundancy servers, and eventually itāll be less clustered. My instance that this version of me is on is much snappier than lemmy.world but itās also federated differently and thatās very obvious when searching or browsing all
Yeah Iām not exactly clear over why federation differs either. Its designed not to differ I assume?
The person hosting lemmy.myserv.one is trying to acquire more users because they want to take some of the load off of lemmy.world.
If you want something less burdened than lemmy.world, you should make an account over here. Do your Lemmy browsing from here, you know?
What youāre describing is a problem with doing centralization in the fediverse. If you instead federate in the fediverse, it scales fine.
I heard 0.18.4 has performance improvements.
One downside/senario Iām worried about is what happens when something really bad happens. Like illegal authorities-get-involved bad? Like leaking sensitive government information or a homegrown r/ jailbait situation that the media catches wind of. Stuff canāt be permanently deleted, at least not without nuking everything around itā¦which people might be tempted to do. And thatās basically turning anything seriously incriminating into essentially an infohazard that could get you nuked because youāre in an instance where someone else from it commented on the thing or something. And any attempt to and defederation from the offending parties probably isnāt the hard shutoff that the authorities would be demanding in such a situation. Even if nothing effectively happens to the greater Federation, it would be a PR nightmare that would probably kill any future attempts of evangelising the platform in the future, especially to bigger communities looking for a new place to stay.
Places like Reddit have mods and admins that worst case scenario, can be the scapegoats. Lemmy doesnāt really have that layer of protection because of how esoteric it is to the layman.
In the same way that itās part of the fediverse specs to copy info from another instance when a user requests it, itās also part of the specs to delete info when an instance requests it. Goes both ways. The only way it becomes a problem is if your instance deliberately disables certain functionality, or otherwise fails to moderate.
Of course if a user copies the info locally and holds a copy thereās no stopping them, but reddit would have the same issue there.
Sure this is the case? Because Mastodon had that problem before. I thought every federated platform had permanent deletion implemented by now? And federation of the deletion and cached dataā¦
Yeah this happened to some guy in Australia hosting a tor exit node if I recall? I saw it on Lemmy, but didnāt save the link. Since he wasnāt behind a corporation, I think he got held personally liable. Best bet in hosting an instance is probably to form a corporation for some legal protections.
Democracy. All people want it, but many people struggle with it. The comments up in this thread are all basically talking about this topic: People have to agree on what their society should be about. And that
canis hard work. It means reconcile and debating. It is not very different from every other Federation like the EU or Germany with its 16 states. Here is an Example:During COVID, Germany - as a Federation of 16 states - all had to decide on what is the best way to recognize the threat, mitigate it, and build up protections. In the Federal Republic of Germany, that meant that the Goverment took over some aspects, but many things were left to the states (Instances). People had a hard time seeing how this is a good thing. Many people - esspecially conservatives - ask for a strong man and are not able to hold long discussions. They want pragmatic decisions even if it will not guarantee the best outcome in the long run.
The good thing about a Federation is/was, that you have 16 āWorking groupsā running to the same goal, trying to find their best solutions. Some come up with great ideas on their own, some get inspired how the neighbors do it, some take an international approach and look into europe and some are just overwhelmed with the given task and struggle. People were really put off how āEveryone does his own soupā and some were really angry why there was no central plattform. Like China. Where one man said what to do. Not realizing that this could mean, that this one person has either the right solution, or is ending up locking down whole cities and incarcerating people into camps. For Years. People thing highly of centralized approaches, but do not see how bad it can go - and Germany went to that in a very bad example not only 80 years ago. Yet, we still struggle to see the benefit in Federation as soon as problems arise. In normal times they love Federation.
So my point would be: Federation is great, but the huge downside will be, that we have to talk a lot. Maybe even include a voting tool. Make it secure enough that it can not be abused too much (because it will the bigger the instance gets). We have to define or at least trust certain people, that they will take care of our instances, that we can get behind. And if not, - contrary to living in a Federated country - we are at least able to move to the next instance without a pain (if the instances support account moving one day). But people will get tired of talking too much. They want action. They want a simple and easy solution and continue their life. Some will invest a lot of time into making the instance bearable for many, while some users will just sit in a soft crib, not contributing anything and not understanding why those people āin the glas palastā will not come up with the right solutions. Because they are not debaters. They want pragmatism and will accept more authoritarian instances, if it can make them feel like they are getting lead in a strong way - disregarding if it will play nice with others or not.
In the end, Federated Systems will be a mirror of our societies, closer than what plattforms were ever be able to reflect. But this will come with the exact same problems. I can see a bright future for federated systems if enough people invest their time in it to design the experience what was previously done by worker in multi billion dollar corporations. Now people are given the tools to create their own federated experiences in a digital place. Die instances will prosper by it. Some instances will lose. Some software will burn. Some instances will be too small to have a solid team to answer all this. Some users will be appalled by all of this. But if a critical mass of people can survive and is willing to carry the stick and some form of general consent can be reached via a declaration and a living and growing and changing body of rules, that will adapt to the new challenges of time, it will be THE BEST system out there.
Except if you think a communistic/chinese approach with a central figure and a central single party is the best, that will tell you what the right thing is to do and if you do not follow, your are an deviationist and must be handled/expelled. Some people people love that shit. interestingly, mostly only if they were born into this and were indoctrinated into such a system. There is not a single country in the last 50 years where the people where asked and they willingly decided for themself, that they want such a system. Those systems were always created above the heads of the people - as it is their nature of those systems.
A good approach would be several Cartas that can be nested/cascaded that define what people share as a general consent. Two Instances agreeing into a strong bond of the same value. Another one that wants to join them. Some instances might group as The United Instances of the Fediverse with some basic rights that are not debatable and some views that might change over time. Some communities maybe want to be a left alone and do their own thing with a unorthodox decision tree. Some will not share this carta, so they will come up with their own what would lead to interesting paradoxes or even expose some fallacies in some communities.
Time will show how much strength and endurance we have and how worth it will be for us, to govern our self: Put some things in the hands of the Software we want to use (Government), keep some rules to us (instances) and decide for our own where we want to live as a user. In reality - at least in Germany - it took decades to grow organically. Police and Schools is in the hand of the state, for them to decide what to teach (to some degree) and and when to neglect a criminal/unwanted behavior (to some degree) e.g. for what amount of canabis/hatespeech he can be picked up. In the same way will the instances in the Fediverse define for themself where to draw the line and people will move to those places that give them the best balance of having enough freedoms to life a fulfilling life, but not too much freedom that it will end in anarchy. Basically Democracy.
TLDR:
Pro: Democracy
Contra: Democracy.
š
Good thing is we can learn from past lessons and implement things better. And we have quite a few technical solutions and additional abilities, that donāt apply to real world political systems.
For example we can implement more complex voting systems than a simple majority election. The Debian project uses a variant of a Concordet method. We can vote often and for details because the process is cheap(er).
We can shield users from each other and have fewer dependencies to other things. We can strive for different goals at the same time and sometimes use technical tools to make opposing things possible.
I think the most important thing is, we need a protocol that is as flexible as possible to allow for every scenario. And good/excellent tools for moderation and political stuff. Thatād be a good foundation.
In examining the intricacies of federation and centralization within the context of a democratic society, weāre faced with a rich tapestry of challenges and opportunities. The Federal Republic of Germanyās response to COVID-19, with its 16 federated states, serves as an illustrative example of a model that facilitates diverse approaches towards a common goal. Itās a demonstration of what can be described as decentralized centralization, allowing for creativity, adaptability, and the potential for mutual learning.
However, the attraction towards centralized leadership, particularly when vested in a single figure, reveals a tendency that should be approached with caution. It often leads to the erosion of democratic principles and individual liberties, a phenomenon not unknown in various historical contexts.
In the digital realm of the Fediverse, we find an interesting parallel. The absence of dark money can be seen as a safeguard against the undue influence of concealed financial interests. It fosters an environment that encourages open dialogue, collaboration, and community-driven decision-making. Yet, the tension between the need for extensive discourse and the desire for immediate action presents a challenge thatās emblematic of democratic processes.
The proposal for the creation of Cartas is an ambitious pursuit, one that seeks to balance the freedoms and responsibilities that define our existence, and in doing so, constructs a framework for a more equitable and humane digital landscape. Itās a path that demands careful consideration, relentless effort, and a commitment to the ideals that underpin the very essence of democracy.
http://hyperboleandahalf.blogspot.com/2010/04/alot-is-better-than-you-at-everything.html
Thereās much less control about the software.
In a federated system you have no control about wheter remote instances are running up-to-date software or even the same type of software (think Lemmy vs Kbin), which makes breaking changes really hard to impossible, since you never know what ancient version another instance might run.
This is part of the reason why e-Mail works the same now as it did in the 80s. If e-Mail was a centralized service, it would be a full communications- and office-suite now, but since itās federated itās still separate messages in folders and stuff like grouping messages by thread are considered innovative.
No unnecessary bloating features and very slow implementation of new stuff seems like a plus to me
If you subscribe to the old Unix mantra of āone tool, one purpouseā, then yes.
If you prefer convenience and the ability to accomplish things, then no.
Using eMail for video chat isnāt really an option.
Hope would email for video chat work?
Have a look at basically any other text-only messenging service/app. Slack, Signal, Threema, WhatsApp and dozens of other similar services started out as text-only and added voice/video chat afterward. None of their protocols were originally designed vor video chat and none of them supported it initially.
Thereās even an IRC extension that allows video chat over IRC.
Lol. Thatās not how anything works. You also cannot use a hammer to replace the SSD in your computer. Sometimes you need to pick up a screwdriver instead.
What you want is the āeverything appā. Go ahead and talk to Elon Musk. See how that is progressing š
You canāt use You canāt use Slack for Video Calls? Or Teams? Or Signal? Or Threema? Or WhatsApp? Or Facebook Messenger? Or almost any other 1:1 chat app/protocol that survived long enough?
All of my examples were originally text-only messengers meant for sending text messages, pretty similar to email.
And even email didnāt stay completely āpureā, as, over time, it evolved file attachments.
By this logic you would be using email for video calls if you just patch in a Jira widget in your email client
Those are all apps that implement multiple different protocols to do chat/audio/video. Also none of those are federated to my knowledge, you canāt chat as a teams user with someone on whatsapp. Lemmy and kbin can talk to each other, just like outlook and Gmail and Hotmail can.
Yes, now please check the title and content of the OP.
The whole discussion is about the downsides of federated protocols/apps/systems vs non-fedreated ones.
And my point was that itās much easier to expand non-federated software.
Iām not sure you can make that argument. Itās more about having a dedicated developer base than federation. FOSS has almost always been behind corporate development, thatās not really a downside of federation itself.
The whole system behind eMail (all the protocols involved and all the software implementing it) has been built by FOSS and non-FOSS, commercial and non-commercial entities.
Over the decades there were enormous amounts of money and enthusiast labour on it.
And still itās really hard to make sure that the address in the āFrom:ā field is actually the one that sent the email. And if you try to do something trivial like sending an encrypted message to a random email user, chances are almost zero that that user is actually able to read the encrypted email, because it requires additional configuration.
There were >40 years of time, millions of man hours and billions of dollars have been invested in the eMail system, and yet trivial things that pretty much every major messaging service has are still outlandish for eMail.
And not even Gmail, with all their money, managed to fix these issues.
So people never accomplished anything on Unix?
How many people do you know who still run actual Unix? (Unix, not Unixoids, which, for the most part, donāt follow that old Unix mantra)
I still want to see a proof that there isnāt a technical solution for this.
There are things like versioned APIs, backwards compatibilityā¦ You can make your network protocol modular and extensibleā¦ Think of XMPP and some other examples.
E-Mail is somewhat alright and has a few good design choices. Thatās why itās still around today. With the additional lessons learned since then, todays knowledge and tools, I bet we can design some technical solutions to the upgradeablility-problem.
Itās absolutely just a skill issue, matrix has made breaking changes without significant issues.
Turns out that if you just design a protocol with changes in mind you can simply reserve a version namespace for all but the most fundamental functionality and crank the number up for every breaking change.
But extensions are no good if most people donāt use them. Take end-to-end encryption in eMail. Itās a good feature that has been around for multiple decades, but most people donāt use it. Since most people donāt use it, thereās no point in using it. So you have the network effect right inside your system.
When e.g. WhatsApp made every chat end-to-end encrypted it took a single update and went so smooth and easy that most people wouldnāt have noticed if it wasnāt for a big modal telling the useres that it was introduced.
Introducing breaking changes or new features to a federated system with lots of hosts and lots of different software implementations is certainly not impossible, but itās much more difficult than on a centrally managed system.
You could argue itās a good thing that no entity is able to force everyone into using every new extension. But true. You then have issues with people and politics. You could just do a lookup on a keyserver and do opportunistic encryption. That wouldnāt harm anyone. (If done right.) Gmail could implement that and a major part of email users would have e2ee overnight and benefit from that.
Regarding WhatsApp. I remember shaking my head about WhatsApp when people started using it. As far as i remember (i might be wrong) It was widely open, unencrypted and everyone could impersonate anyone they had the phone number of. I donāt remember why it got so popular. But Iām glad they implemented encryption and fixed that.
With email Iām at least theoretically able to do something myself. With WhatsApps issues, there is no way to do anything about it. You just have to accept itās quirks, because only Meta could implement something. For example Iād like to use it on my computer. And have a different identifier than my phone number. And stop it leaking metadata to Meta. How does a non-federated platform like WA help me with that?
For a new and federated protocol you could start with mandatory end to end encryption. And you then design the protocol so that changes wonāt be breaking. And if you do it right itāll be okay if people donāt adopt extensions. Things will still work. Maybe someone canāt do video calls or show emoji reactions. Maybe the cutting edge AR or VR stuff doesnāt work. But at least you have a fallback to send encrypted text data or arbitrary data-files. That should be enough.
The thing is that for some features to have any benefit you actually need everyone on board. Security is just that.
If you have to basically have a fallback-backdoor built right into your system to deal with those who donāt participate in the security system, an attacker just needs to force the fallback and nothing is secure anymore.
And sure, Gmail could just force encryption, but then (a) would everyone complain about one big actor abusing their market power, as happens a lot e.g. with Chrome and (b) the whole point of using email is that itās a service thatās super stable and ājust worksā. If I canāt send an email to my dentist about an appointment, then itās worthless. So something like that could hurt Gmailās market share.
But all in all, my point was that open systems with lots of actors with the power to decide stuff makes implementing important changes more difficult, because you have to convince much more people to follow suit.
Yeah. I get it. Youāre right. If there is only one actor, they can make decisions more easily. If there are multiple actors involved like with federated stuff, you add additional overlay by having to agree and have methods like voting, consensus etc.
My point is: It is possible. I donāt disagree that takes extra work. But we live in a democraty, not a monarchy. We have technical solutions. You keep saying we need consensus between every instance of a federated software and 100% solutions. But that simply isnāt true. We donāt need consensus. We donāt need everyone to agree. You could just expel everyone from the network that hasnāt updated their server for 3 years from the network. You wonāt even notice the <1% users that go missing. You could implement text, audio, video, group chat mandatory encryption and minimize metadata. Make it performant and extensible and a backwards-compatible protocol. You might only be 95% of the way. But isnāt that better than anything currently available? Itāll probably stay that way for some time if you did it right. Just forget the last 5% to make it a theoretically perfect solution.
With the encryption: As with everything security related, it depends on your specific thread model. My example would help against everyone casually reading everyone elseās mail. It wonāt help against a targeted attack IF you could force the fallback triggering and there wasnāt such a thing like certificate pinning. But itās a thousand percent better than not doing anything at all because it could be curcumvented in an edge case. But I donāt want to argue in emailās favor. email is old. the only reasonable option is to start over. and force reasonable encryption this time.
Regarding the network effect: Nothing new is going to happen in the world if we donāt fight it. Many people are conservative. We buy the stuff weāre familiar with instead of something better. We want the things everyone has despite there being better alternatives. Americans keep using the vastly inferior imperial system. We sometimes need to get done with tasks and use that thing that is compatible with people we want to interact with. Like the messenger, the social media platform everyone uses. Microsofts office software to interact with clientsā¦ I understand. But again, there are ways around this. You could establish something nice and better in your small community and stop caring for the rest of the world. You could use something like a bridge that connects old and new technology. You can be a country and make laws that force something into existence. You can be a big corporation and just foist the the new thing on your users. Like the Instagram accounts that kickstart Threads. I donāt say itās necessarily easy to do. But possible.
Email today still works through 7 bit ASCII, with various methods to encode modern text that can be nested (and need to be for some software). Itās lack of sender authentication has led to a situation where SPF+DKIM+DMARC still doesnāt prove that the from: address you see in your mail client is actually the one that the email is coming from. The whole thing is kind of a mess these days.
We use email because itās the industry standard, the protocol itself is a real pain to deal with if you actually want your email to be read by real world mail servers.
XMPP was designed during a time when encrypted group chats werenāt really a thing. A client supporting all chat extensions would be an amazing chat client and there are actually a few of them out there. Nobody uses XMPP, though, because of the network effect of better advertised messengers.
Matrix was designed more recently and has better native group support, but that too is only used by enthusiasts. At least open source projects have taken up the protocol as an alternative to IRC (which was also federated, by the way!) but itās still not the universal federated messenger we all crave.
With the upcoming MLS and MIMI standards, I hope weāll soon see better interoperability between services that will allow federated services to integrate seamlessly into the bigger app ecosystems. The EUās DMA will soon force bit tech companies to open up and integrate, so who knows what the future may hold!
Yeah. You can tell Email is old. very old. The internet has exploded since then. There are so many more nodes and users out there than anyone would have imagined in the early 80s. Also technology has advanced together with how we use it. 7-bit is madness by todayās standards. Of course Antispam and E2EE hasnāt been baked in because it wasnāt a thing back then.
But things are different today. I donāt think there will be another āexplosionā so that the requirements to such a protocol and itās usage will change as quickly and fundamentally.
Funny thing is, the resource usage of my mailserver or XMPP server is so much less than for example my Matrix server or any of the other āmodernā federated things i triedā¦ And we should learn from XMPPās history. Both good and bad things. Itās a complicated story and there is more to the story than just network effect or technical issues. And I love and hate Matrix. Iām glad itās there but i also wasted several hours looking for good client for linux that isnāt element and uses all of my RAM. And fought with encryption in some python libraries. Sometimes matrix just isnāt fun. Especially the encryption bit.
I donāt care for the network effect. I have used both XMPP and Matrix. There was a time I could reach all my friends via XMPP. Back in the days when both Facebook and GMail had XMPP and WhatsApp wasnāt there yet. As of today. I use Matrix. And the few people I talk to most frequently also use Matrix. And thatās enough for me. I donāt care if 99% of other people use something different. (Also there are bridges to other protocols). Itās the same with Lemmy. I wouldnāt be here if it was important to me to be on a platform with 1.5 billion other users.
I think we have an opportunity to do it right. And to design something that will last for quite a while. Of course there are issues to solve on several levels. Unfortunately back in the days, protocols were invented by scientists and to connect universities. Todays platforms are implemented by mega-corporations and their motive is to gather data and sell advertisement. So we probably need regulations and politics to force something like interoperability into existence. And of course there is the age-old question of reform vs. revolution. Iterative change sometimes isnāt good enough. Iād consider email a case where we need revolution. Iād happily use some free sucessor. Even before the network effect or regulation kicks in.
There are so many issues with email that are not fixableā¦ And federation, dispite all the advantages it has, is the main reason why itās entirely unfeasible to actually fix the issues in the system.
Federation, same as every other concept, has advantages and downsides.
Having looked into the Lemmy code and the discussions on Github sadly doesnāt bode too well. It looks like a mostly quick-and-dirty project and I fear itās going to get only more troublesome as it grows. I am not sure if it could ever scale to Reddit-dimensions.
Part of that can already be observed with all the desynchronisation between instances, because there is no guaranteed eventual consistency or any other mechanisms like that, even though that would be fundamentally important for a distributed system like Lemmy.
Pedantic but email is more like a protocol and not a software. Outlook is the software. Itās not a valid example.
We were talking about federated software, based on a shared protocol but with many different implementations vs centralized software (as in run by one entity, not as in non-distributed).
Your pedanticts are what the whole discussion was about. So your pedantics arenāt valid.
I get where you are coming from but you clearly equated email to software which is wrong. Itās not a software. The rest of your points are valid. No need to get pissy.
And if eMail (the whole system) wasnāt federated but instead would be run by a single company, then it would be: yes, a single software implementation.
Pro tip: any comment that begins with āto be pedanticā usually adds nothing to the discussion and has the sole purpouse to make the pedant feel superior over everyone else. Itās a good way to annoy everyone else in the discussion.
You seriously need to pull your head out your ass.
Email is not a software. Itās a horrible example. Itās no different than saying SNMP is software. Itās fundamentally wrong.
Now I was nice. Yes it was stupid to bring up but not everyone is in IT so not everyone would know your example of email as a software is wrong. That is why I, quite nicely, brought it up. Not to hate simply itās a bad example and it still is.
Yet here you are doubling down on aggressive bullshit for being politely advised your example was shit.
Dude, you are the only one who doesnāt get what this thread was about and who is only here to purpously misunderstand the topic. Nobody claimed that email is a software and actually I wasnāt talking about software or protocols but about systems/ecosystems.
If you have a look at what I said in the first post, I referenced email as a āsystemā not as software and said, that federated systems are harder to manage because you have much less control about the software that is used in that system. Email is a system, and the software that I referenced were implementations of software that handles emails. So not only are you rude and pedantic, but your whole point hinges on you misreading the first post and not understanding what the word āsystemā means.
And you know what, email isnāt even a protocol. There is no protocol named āemailā. There are SMTP, POP3, IMAP and some other protocols, but there is not a single protocol named āemailā. Because email is a system, where different software implementations (servers and clients) communicate over a set of protocols.
So before being pedantic and obnoxious, please first
You failed on all of these points.
If you seriously think your agressive discussion style is polite, then thereās nothing to add.
Evangelizing.
If I want to share a cool link with someone who has an account but is not yet active, I have to:
On centralized platforms I can hit the āshareā button the moment I find something interesting. When I do, I will receive a single link that will work for all users of the service.
Granted (because the platform then harasses the user who follows the link, trying to annoy them into getting an account and/or logging in so that it can more accurately harvest their data) itās not a ton better centralized.
But it does make it extra difficult to evangelize this way. I convinced a friend to get an account, and yet when I shared a link with him (without taking the above steps), he sent back a screenshot of the banner telling him he wasnāt logged in.
Iād like an easier way to pull the uninitiated into a conversation occurring on this network of sites.
I get itās some form of tracking and that scares people here, but I keep on thinking there must be a way to set up cookies or whatever the right term is so that when you click on a link youāll automatically get sent to the Lemmy post through your specific instance. I would suggest an extension but Iām personally of the opinion that any site that needs a third party extension (like say, RES or Xkit) to fully work isnāt a well designed site (not to mention it makes evangelising harder because now you gotta sign up for a new confusing thing and download this extension)
Like everyoneās screaming āuse smaller instances!!!1!ā But like, this issue pretty much tells you āyou should be using the same big instances for the best sharing/viewing experienceā
Thereās not a great solution to this and itās a real problem. The easiest way is an app or browser extension that could recognize lemmy domains and swap in your preferred instance. That gets into problem territory with defederation though.
Another way would be federating identity, people would still get log in messages at least the first time per instance, but they could log in as user@myinstance and get a logged in experience then. This is a huge technical pain in the ass, and still not great for user experience though.
You could also share links in a Url shortened style and use that redirect to let someone select an instance or log in to another service to know where to send links. This also isnāt great.
The ideal would be a site that asks you for your instance once, saves it as a cookie, then automatically redirects you.
You would have to select it for each device, but that would work for most people that only use their phone.
I am unsure wether I understood you right. If I want to share your comment for example, I hit āshare linkā, and it gives me this https://lemmy.myserv.one/comment/1133028
Thereās no āyou arenāt logged inā showing up for me when I open it in a browser
It used to be a banner above the comments. Now it seems to be in the sidebar. Thatās a good design choice. Itās an improvement. It might not have scared my friend so much.
Hereās the screenshot he sent me a couple of weeks ago. Iāve thrown it onto some image pastebin called āpasteboardā.
These days, apparently (I followed the link to your comment, https://feddit.de/comment/2020091), itās on the sidebar and says:
This is actually a massive improvement. It gives directions, and the earlier one didnāt. Itās friendlier than the earlier version too.
However, this evolution badly needs to continue (since I donāt see how asklemmyās front page is going to tell you anything about the federated instance signup process or enough about the āhome instanceā concept for them to know they need to go to their home instance.) If I was given a link to your comment, and I wanted to upvote your comment, I would still need to 1) navigate to my home instanceās search tool and 2) paste your commentās URL into that search tool. And thatās still a complicated process for a lot of people.
I do really appreciate the direction the web app is going here,
These are all very good developments.
But they need to continue. We need to tutorialize stronger.
From running multiple accounts across multiple instances, Iāve found that each instance feels like a separate forum of posts. Sure some of the big ones federate with each other, but that still doesnāt lead to being able to see the same federated content when you log into infosec.pub or lemmy.world. I think a lot of the differences in content lie with which instances federate with which other instances.
Yep itās important to pick an instance that doesnāt block many other instances, if you want as much content as possible.
This is good and bad to me. I like the idea of a series of little neighborhoods. You know your home well, and have a place of comfort if you donāt feel like dealing with the wider world, but itās all still very accessible (or ideally very accessible. Discovery is an ongoing issue without for you algos). Forums were nice, but it was always annoying if you were on more than one proboards (or what have you) and you were switching sites to see your variety of friends. Discord solves the same problems, but I also donāt trust that company at all.
Reddit gave you that comfort zone for certain topics, but only if itās not a popular or contentious one. And like itās nice to be able to have my comfort zone be more diverse than my 5 favorite topics.
Identity theft. Not as serious as the real life version but imagine that I make an account with your username on another instance, maybe under a domain thatās very similar to yours, and start stirring up trouble. If youāre someone people recognize I could hurt your reputation or scam people.
Identity theft is not a joke Jim!
Hey! Iām Jim!
mastodon has a solution to this, where you can verify yourself with a website
You have duplicate communities, posts, etc.
Itās hard to find communities.
Duplicate communities also existed on reddit, though. There were just so many people, it was a feature.
r/dgdag and r/dogs_getting_dogs are an example
True, but itās more complicated wiht Lemmy since the duplicate communities arenāt as obvious because of the multiple instances.
Its kind of a bug and a feature since itās how decentralized services work but it will likely keep Lemmy from growing (at least to the extent that reddit did).
Itās also hard to find active communities that arenāt just reposting from another source, like another lemmy community on another lemmy site, or reddit or something. Itās kind of weird here.
I wish they had multi-āredditā support so I can aggregate common communities between instances. I suppose clients could do this but I havenāt seen the option yet.
1: Anything thatās federated is public (to instance admins) and canāt be reliably deleted.
For ActivityPub, thatās pretty much everything except user account.
For email (SMTP) thatās sender, recipient, subject, and usually body.
Etc. Instance admins can log whatever they want. Laws like the GDPR or CCPA donāt apply to all instances.
2: User signup is much harder because choice paralysis over which instance to join often sets in. That in turn leads to default recommendations, resulting in centralization in a few instances. E.g. lemmy.world, beehaw.org, sh.itjust.works, lemmy.ml for lemmy, Gmail, Apple mail, MS Live email, AWS email options for email.
For your point 1) The same applies to any other social media or good old phpBB forums that some clubs still use. GDPR still apply as soon as you log personal data of an European user. So if an instance admin does shit with the data they can be charged.
GDPR isnāt that complicated, tons of small non profit structure (e.g a sport club) deal with personal data without any issue. If you donāt spy your user and do the minimum needed amount of data processing your data privacy policy can hold in a couple of lines. It get huge because big social media spy us
Old-school forums have single points of contact. Theyāre no more private than ActivityPub, but a takedown to the admin is a takedown of all instances. Obviously public data can be cached or archived, so as always you have to send takedowns to every archival service, search engine, and any CDNs too.
The GDPR āappliesā whenever an EU residentās data is stored. The enforcement requires some presence in the EU by the entity storing the data. For multinational companies that means if they have any banking services there (e.g. taking payments from EU customers) they have a presence. For individual fediverse admins, thatās not necessarily a concern. At worst their instanceās domain would get blacklisted to EU users.
Itās a bit like the United States. Everyone is made to be a stakeholder in each other. However, not everyone is trying to make things move in the same direction. So some stakeholders will be naturally opposed - and the wider the network, the more this effect scales. It is a network effect that naturally limits the size of communities, and it is pervasive on popular social media.
Now we may look at a situation and agree one party is ārightā in their desire to reach on the far side of the network and implement a change. Thatās quite likely to occur - in small networks and large. The downside is that after a certain size, good actors cannot implement change and actors who only need to disrupt organization and cohesion will rule.
What I would expect to see evolve, is that one primary federated network will rule until lemmy as a whole hits a critical mass. At which point, fractures will occur and smaller discrete federations will share popularity. In the short term there is a risk that unfavorable groups capture the orthodox federation. After the mitosis, multiple ideologies would maintain visible platforms. Eventually the largest federation may come to dominate.
I would also expect that, being a reasonable and honest user, one would see various āgood timesā and ābad timesā over the course of that timeline as power swung like a pendulum. The best countermeasure to bad times, I think, would be to minimize the feedback mechanics that could lead to a single network developing an abusable amount of power. Federation is invaluable for community extension and defederation is invaluable for protecting users from unwanted content. However, I donāt believe it is desirable for federation to be related to authority/legitimacy/power or anything that could lead to exploitable imbalances among federations. Domination of the codebase, of the public eye, of conversation - these things are undesirable to enable within the federation system, to the extent that it can be managed. So long as that is prevented federation should operate beneficially, as intended.
More of a wish than a challenge but federated identities would be awesome. Home instance offline? No problem, just switch servers. No need to try and sync settings and subscriptions between accounts.
Blockchains already do this with public key cryptography. Your ālogin and passwordā would just be a Mnemonic Phrase. The fediverse just distributes the public information to use that phrase.
Agreed, portability of accounts should be much higher priority that it currently seems to be on either mastodon or lemmy. But also, that limitation is not an option at all on non-federated platforms.
I just did this kinda. Lemmy.world has been a yoyo for weeks.
Thereās thisā¦ https://github.com/aidandenlinger/lasim/blob/main/README.md
Which could be improved to make this happen without user interaction.
It is difficult to control users, to ban them permanently etc. It is difficult to make money with federated software. You could maybe show ads. But nothing thatād make you rich.
To be fair if nobody can get rich from it the fediverse is probably going to stay a much nicer place than the rest of the internet. Profit motives are fine when youāre dealing with strangers but they always add an element of dishonesty to communities of people you intend to stick around with in my opinion, thereās no good faith when my presence is being monetised any more than a farmer has the best interests of their livestock in mind.
That second point is a feature, not a bug.
Instances being defederated over things like petty drama. Unless itās one thatās actively allowing nasty content or people, I donāt think that should be the first course of action like some admins seem to treat it as.