One of the biggest issues with the fediverse imo is moderation. People will literally create blacklists of sites, and if you don't follow the blacklist you'll get added to it. You end up in these situations where there are completely separate versions of the fediverse and the largest instances will often not be able to talk to each other.
At least before Elon bought Twitter I know the most active (depending on how you count metrics) site was poa.st, and this was on a mastodon.social blacklist, which was one of the other major sites, and every site had their own list. I know people would sometimes have 4 or 5 accounts so that they could talk to everyone they wanted or as insurance in case the current admin got bored and closed the site.
I of course support the idea of a federated reddit, but there are a lot of problems that exist in the community
> People will literally create blacklists of sites, and if you don't follow the blacklist you'll get added to it.
This is why the Fediverse cannot work. More precisely, it can work, but only in the same way as the thing it tries to replace.
It's always the same story: The largest communities impose their rules on everyone else, under threat of exclusion from those communities. This creates power structures that are almost indistinguishable from the ones found on commercial networks. In one case, it's business interests that drive culture, in the other, it's the egos and personal ideologies of the most powerful community members.
Why would you not expect egos and personal ideologies to affect both admins and mods somewhere like Reddit, they're people just like Fediverse volunteers? Aren't they both the same on that side, meaning the only difference is that one of them also has commercial interests in the mix?
The absolutely do. I'm sure there are feuding subreddits about the same topic. But reddit as a platform allows them both (because it's their business interest), so with one account you can see both.
Which is exactly why the Fediverse doesn't solve anything. It's the most powerful trampling over everyone else – just like on Reddit, Facebook, and Twitter. The Fediverse is yet another middleman brokering communication between individuals, with all the associated problems.
However, the worst that can happen to you is that you stop interacting. This is as opposed to Reddit, where you can get removed from the platform as a whole, so it's still an improvement.
Lemmy and general Fediverse centers the workflow of spinning up your own community even against the will of the entire rest of the ecosystem. This is in complete opposition to Twitter, Reddit etc.
Usually ego is worse. Money is inclusive - anybody can have money. If the decisions are made purely on money (this never happens in reality, but speaking theoretically) then any community of considerable size can find a home - it's money, so somebody would want to take it. When egos and ideologies come in, then splintering and exclusion runs rampant.
That's not an issue, that's the intent of federation. It's IRC/Forums etc but at a larger scale where you can more easily connect to similar channels and forums. You either accept that communities have the right to self-police whom they can talk to or not, or accept that you want a central authority to do that for you.
> That's not an issue, that's the intent of federation
People keep on comparing Mastodon to email.
But, have you ever tried to send someone an email and had the email rejected with an error from your email provider saying "You can't talk to that domain because it insufficiently polices hate speech" or even "You can't talk to that domain because it lets its users talk to domains that insufficiently police hate speech"? Yet my impression of Mastodon is it is just like that.
Which makes Mastodon in practice a very different type of federation from email.
Big e-mail providers are actually worse, they usually go like "so, a neighbour of yours sent something that somehow triggered our anti-spam system ages ago, so fuck your messages and fuck you, 221 Bye!"
At least on Mastodon you get the chance to talk to someone and try to solve the conflict.
Big e-mail providers are primarily concerned with spam–which is defined by the volume and unsolicited nature of the messages, rather than the opinions they express. Sometimes their attempts at stopping it impose collateral damage, and their response to that collateral damage can be arbitrary and capricious–but that's a different issue from what we are talking about with Mastodon coordinated de-federation, which is much more intentional than collateral.
The terms of service of those big providers say that they can ban people for "hate speech", but in practice they rarely do that, and on the rather rare occasions they do, it is usually a particularly egregious case of it.
By contrast, the big Mastodon instances seem to be very keen on banning "hate speech" – and defining that term in a much broader way than most other platforms do. See https://joinmastodon.org/covenant point 1
> But, have you ever tried to send someone an email and had the email rejected with an error from your email provider saying "You can't talk to that domain because it insufficiently polices hate speech" or even "You can't talk to that domain because it lets its users talk to domains that insufficiently police hate speech"? Yet my impression of Mastodon is it is just like that.
That's how it is on Reddit too no? You visit and post a comment on subreddit A, somehow mods in subreddit B will find out and pre-emptively ban you.
On this Lemmy thing I guess the solution is to just maintain multiple accounts - each on a server connected to a particular cluster of servers.
> That's how it is on Reddit too no? You visit and post a comment on subreddit A, somehow mods in subreddit B will find out and pre-emptively ban you.
Almost no one runs a personal instance. Most people have accounts on multi user instances. This is unlike reddit, where accounts are global and independent of subreddits. On reddit, mods from subreddit B can preemptively ban you after they learn that subreddit A doesn't like you. But they can't ban entire subreddit, say C, so that every user that's subscribing to C can no longer interact with anyone subscribed to B. This is the scenario that plagues Mastodon - not individual blocks, but defederating whole instances.
> That's how it is on Reddit too no? You visit and post a comment on subreddit A, somehow mods in subreddit B will find out and pre-emptively ban you.
I've been avoiding Reddit recently, but when I used to use it – I never agreed with that kind of behaviour, and any subreddit which does it is one I don't want to be part of.
However, that said, that's community-level not instance-level, and so I'm not sure what that has to do with federation.
IRC and forums have nothing to do with federation. Maybe IRC if you look at the channel level, but there's still network-wide rules you need to follow or get banned, just like forums have one or more admins with a final say. The fediverse is just random scattered kingdoms having fragile connections.
There have been so many attempts at it for the past 20 years or so, but people just don't want to accept that it cannot ever work. This is not the 90s where most people online were academics and you could get away with everyone building their own Killfile over time.
> The fediverse is just random scattered kingdoms having fragile connections.
Indeed. And each "kingdom" has the exact same problem with power centralization that the Fediverse supposedly solves. And the more popular an instance becomes, the bigger this problem gets. And the more popular an instance becomes, the more people will join it. And boom, we're back to zero.
Neither of you seem to get it. You're talking about 'power centralization' in a completely different and orthogonal way from how the federation works, which makes me think you have a fundamental misunderstanding of centralization or federation.
If you're banned from a popular instance you're not banned from the platform as a whole. Because there is no single authority dictating where you can and cannot post, unlike Reddit. It's similar to being specifically banned from a subreddit.
Reddit is a kingdom whose king delegates power to various fiefdoms, but ultimately still controls the land. You are at their whims, as evident by the fact that they're removing mods that disagree with their API policy. Federated instances are multiple kingdoms that share borders which they keep open for the sake of trade. But those borders can close depending on how their neighbors interact.
It's like I said, a return to forums or IRC style governing except the authority is the forum or channel itself, and they can link to other forums/channels as they want in a seamless fashion. In order for systems like these to work communities need a way to defederate and control who they connect to, because inevitably bad instances will rise whose sole purpose is spam, harassment etc.
> If you're banned from a popular instance you're not banned from the platform as a whole.
The most popular instances are the platform. Yes, you can run your own instance, with only yourself as a user. Unless others choose to federate with you, that's the equivalent of calling your blog a social network. And if the biggest instances impose their own rules on others under threat of severing federation, the freedom to run your instance as you wish exists only in theory.
Whenever you get a bunch of people together you have to have rules or you get the inevitable mentally ill person who starts to troll or try to spread racism. Think 8chan or 4chan on steroids. It just has to be done. Hopefully the rules are permissive enough to allow reasoned debate on topics between diverse opinions. However I don't need to know your political leanings in all caps while discussing the latest news so pitch that guy off. If I'm being rude or ranting pitch me off.
But then federated services operate on the level of a single subreddit, not that of reddit. That's fine, but they will never replace social networks (which unfortunately means we'll have to live with big corps running those).
How do people feel about having some of the open-source LLMs offloading some of the moderation burdens? I understand it sounds rather dystopian, but I also feel if the model is developed transparently, it may offer a solution to the moderation problem.
Decentralization is a loosely connected network of peers not reliant on one or the other. The loss or gain of a peer or peers is of no significant consequence to the peers at large.
Centralization is a network of peers all connected to one hub, reliant on the hub to provide spokes to other peers at large.
The "fediverse" as far as I can tell is a collection of many separate networks that refuse to speak with other networks (for ideological reasons at that, rather than technical), each network acting as a hub and providing spokes to their peers.
It's centralization ("Lemmy", et al.) within a centralization ("fediverse") within a decentralization (internet).
At least before Elon bought Twitter I know the most active (depending on how you count metrics) site was poa.st, and this was on a mastodon.social blacklist, which was one of the other major sites, and every site had their own list. I know people would sometimes have 4 or 5 accounts so that they could talk to everyone they wanted or as insurance in case the current admin got bored and closed the site.
I of course support the idea of a federated reddit, but there are a lot of problems that exist in the community