Genuine inquiry . Maybe I am not experienced enough with the various federated platforms but I am an avid user of matrix, and have dabbled in lemmy. From what I have seen is federation is on the path to decentralization but not fully there. It creates fiefdom, little kingdoms . Great yes you may find one that suites you better, but users now can end up isolated to their island, switch island sure but now you are isolated for the previous island and maybe others. Its stupid. On matrix you need to know the other island(server) to even find its rooms(communities). Some rooms block users from one server while others block users of other servers. You either have to run multiple accounts or accept the limits. Add in you are at the mercy of your home server, you can lose your account have it immitated, and more. The performance is horrible not sure why, but content is slow to update and spread. Matrix has the problem because of its design most people are on the matrix.org server and so the point of federation is largely lost. They are moving to p2p where it seems the solutions for federation now dont apply.
Anyway why is federation not stupid? Are these problems only with Matrix? Cause I look at lemmy and it seems far worse.
P2P is probably better for direct communication, but I hardly see how a P2P publishing platform (forum, microblogging, …) would work. As far as I understand, this would involve a permanently running home server storing at least your full history, right?
Indeed, the main criterion to choose an instance (server) should be that you trust the people who run it. If no existing instance fit that criterion (or any other of your criteria, for that matter), you are free to create one.
… which is also a criterion to look for an instance (server). Some look for a broadly federated network, others for a “safe space” kind of experience. Servers exist for both use-cases.
which makes sense when one considers moderation. If you are running a “safe space” instance, you don’t probably don’t want your users to be exposed to less moderated content, and you certainly cannot moderate one by one all the sensible content from across the federation. So it makes perfect sense to federate only with instances who have a reasonable code of conduct.
Note that there’s another solution allowed by the following property: an instance can be federated with two instances who are not federated with each other. Concretely, this means that you can create an instance who both has a CoC for its own content strict enough to federate with safe space ones, and federates with instances who have a less strict CoC to access their content.
Thanks for your well written reply
The Matrix p2p project is not even alpha. You should join the p2p room @matrix.org if you have some curiousity. Problems like storing distributing the data are not fully solved. I think you will have a mix of devices including heavier servers. They are trying to integrate each device as another home server but thats not ideal I think.
I do think p2p can be done and for forum type platforms. These are just not solved problems because as is said among dencentralizers centralization is easy! federation seems a natural stepping stone to p2p, after all instances or servers are really peers or nodes themselves it’s just when you push out to lowerpower devices and so many of them things become a bit different. I surpose that is why the Matrix’s p2p dev Neil is working on the server now.
I think p2p will need content to be distributed among nodes. I am looking forward to ipfs intergration on matrix as the media performance is horrible.
You have lost me a bit on this. So are you saying one of the duplicate instances acts like a filter to interact with the other safe spaces instances?
If that is the case this is the beginnings of what can just naturally exist on discussions.app
Ok my first sentence was very naive and due to my ignorance on p2p data storage. I do understand from your answer that it’s nontrivial.
About those instances things, say there are 3 instances. One instance A that is huge, where a lot of people that you know are, but is very laxist on its CoC. One instance B who aims at being a safe space for its users, and hence is not federated with instance A. Then you have instance C, who has the same CoC as instance B, so it can federate with it. Instance C can also federate with instance A. Hence my statement : one instance C can federate with two instances A abd B who don’t federate with each other.
Note that instance C is not a duplicate of anything, it is just an instance whose users are open enough to the sensible content of instance A and polite enough to not publish anything that would be offensive for the instance B users. Note that I don’t know about the details on how comments/mentions between instances A and C are perceived by instance B.
Can you say more about how content moderation and codes of conduct work on a p2p network?
So I am wondering that too. How does content interacted with on A by C affect B. I know how B would want that which is not to see it. To me all these server to server rules are not ideal and should instead be the users themselves organizing on the platform setting the rules. I know you have that with each community but I am talking also platform wide. The instance does that with its blocks but thats very authoritaian and lacks nuance.
I know how I would do it and how matrix is planning to do it. Matrix is planning to keep it the same as rooms currently do it which is the same as communities here. Server based blocking becomes quite pointless in p2p I think which leaves me wondering how matrix will handle spam as their current main method is to block servers. In p2p you can potentially have new servers continually appear and attack you so…
I would use a moderation approach as like discussions.app is trying but that also really needs to also use how they organize content. The advantage is the approach is grassroots and nuanced with everyone getting the most unique moderation you could expect outside say some wonder ai doing it personally for everyone.
Maybe to simplify the discussion let’s talk about a platform who is not subdivised in communities, like mastodon or facebook. Communities are already some kind of federation.
Ok but nobody has the power to enforce the rules right? How do you deal with trolling and spamming? Does every user have to block every troll one by one?
which is?
This is an excellent interpretation. On federated platforms there is federations inside federations. Its superfluous really, but it gets worse where communities get repeated.
Well it could depend on what you mean by enforce. There is moderators and they can enforce rules, it’s just each user is put kind of in an admin position to pick and choose the moderators. You can also have groups of moderators controlled by other users for any user to use, which is some part of how discussions.app is doing their ‘communities’ the other part is each community chooses what #tagged content to use. Aswell the instance could enforce certain moderators and infact some moderators must be set as default to keep the platform clean. The idea is these could be changed individually or with lists of moderators, or users just live inside the curated communities. The other thing is different instances could do it differently with a different set of default moderators.
The whole point of this type of platform/moderation is to solve problems seen on others. You won’t be able to own a topic or community ‘as such’ as users must consent for you to have power. The reality is people are lazy, stupid and will consent to crazy thing as seen from the last year. So because moderators provide a service stopping spam and abusive behavior then people will use them and they will have power. What this really prevents is moderators being bad actors and also people not having good moderation or situations with no moderation when its needed. Because anyone can moderate there should be a much higher supply of moderation and types of moderation. The types of moderation I think is where things can get interesting because there is a heap of behaviours that could be hidden and platforms would be much nicer places, but really it’s up to the users what they want and how they experience things.
Wait, if there are globally set modarators, how is this not a centralised network ? I mean ok it uses p2p technology so the data is not physically centralised on a single server. But the network itself, the graph of interactions, it is a single blob where every node is connected to every other. Or do I miss something?
Moderators are globally set just on that one instance (or really it’s an interface or frontend), but also changeable by the users but also depending how the instance is setup. The way they are doing the data it is all shared in blockchains so in that sense it is a blob, but depending on each user and how they have that content curated would change the interactions user to user. In theory you will have groups oblivious to other groups but users within them that cross over between and become social bridges. The network is the people. My idea is that these human bridges will eventually lower barriers between users blocking each other and change minds. The end result is a more connected less divided social platform and so too society. Following the axiom that communication solves all problems. By putting the barriers to communication into the users hands instead of third parties he will have control to remove them.
Ok I’m not sure whether I understand how to mods are set.
Do you agree with the above classification? If yes, which one is it?
Maybe my question is equivalent to the following : what is the power of the mods?