If the descentralization of social networks continue, we will have to prepare for the eventual rise of the instances wars, where people will start to fight about which instance is better and which one is weird to be in and so on, but that’s for the future of us all.

  • Pseu@kbin.social
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    1 year ago

    And that’s exactly what’s supposed to happen. Instance wars and eventual defederation and fragmentation are important moderation tools, and will progress the culture and feel of instances and regions of the Fediverse. Many instances will form federated cliques that are highly connected and have similar vibes and cultures, and some will be federated with multiple cliques, showing users a variety of cultures and situations.

    If the Fediverse reaches a large enough number of people, it can support multiple independant cliques, and enable users see entire mini-universes with different communities and vibes.

    • oyenyaaow@lemmy.zip
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      1 year ago

      imma have undercover alts everywhere for the sole purpose of getting all the cats communities in one page.

    • henfredemars@infosec.pub
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      1 year ago

      One benefit that people don’t talk about enough is it naturally tends towards smaller community sizes than in a centralized system which is a better fit for our tribal human brains.

      We’re not great with speaking into a room with 1,000 people in it, much less a million.

      • DMmeYourNudes@lemmy.world
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        1 year ago

        The problem is that it’s worse for keeping topics centralized and fragments communities for external reasons. It’s antithetical to the idea of a link aggregator where you centralize all of your news if you need to use several of them to make it work. Defederation should be a last resort to protect the admins from legal action, content manipulation, or brigading, not because beehaw thinks open signups harm their safe space. Making the internet a safe space is how we got to this point with Twitter/Google/meta/reddit, and everyone wants to do it all over again to rebuild their echo chambers.

    • Andy@slrpnk.net
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      1 year ago

      I agree, and I’ve already seen this happen!

      One popular instance, Beehaw announced that they defederated from lemmy.world and shitjustworks to protect itself from an onslaught of new folks. Beehaw’s admins say that lemmy.world and shitjustworks have let in a lot of folks who aren’t well vetted and are the focus of most moderation action, so they’re restricting access from those two instances.

      And I’m over here on an instance with 600 users like, “Hm. That’s a pity. Glad I’m not as basic as those poor folks.”

    • julesiecoolsie@lemmy.world
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      1 year ago

      I don’t get how this is insightful… The internet already has 4chan, okbuddyretard, whatever, people will always form communities

    • macisr@lemmy.fmhy.mlOP
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      1 year ago

      Damn, this actually made me feel chills. This is actually a universe in the making. It’s new life.

    • samus12345@lemmy.world
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      1 year ago

      One of the oldest human pastimes, hating people who are different from you in some way, no matter how inconsequential.

      • Logh@lemmy.ml
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        1 year ago

        “You ever notice that? Any time you see two groups of people who really hate each other, chances are good they’re wearing different kind of hats. Keep an eye on that, it might be important.” - George Carlin

    • Klear@lemmy.world
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      1 year ago

      Nothing drives down real estate prices like a good old-fashioned gang war.

  • jrs100000@lemmy.world
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    1 year ago

    The big problem is going to be when someone decides to start spamming and vote manipulating with bot populated private instances that automatically re-spawn themselves under a new name whenever they are blacklisted. Eventually, the standard will have to move to whitelisting over blacklisting, and once that happens the whole premise of federation starts to fall apart.

    • scarabic@lemmy.world
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      1 year ago

      It’s not harder than what we’ve had to do with e-mail spam. Which has been enormously successful, with 99% of it not even getting delivered to your spam folder but just dropped entirely.

      Instances will het as much visibility as they’ve earned through successful engagement across instances. The visibility of a new instance’s posts will increase over time.

      This is why yes, there needs to be a feed algorithm. “Just show it to me chronologically” is the most naive thought, and people still have it all the time. There are just so many fundamental things that need to go into a sorting algo. We’re not even talking about personalization.

      • Kaldo@kbin.social
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        1 year ago

        E-mail spam filter is funded by google and other multibillion megacorporations though, and they just outright block or rate limit unknown providers. I’d say it’s not gonna be as easy to do it with fediverse.

        This is why yes, there needs to be a feed algorithm. “Just show it to me chronologically” is the most naive thought

        Agreed 100% but again, I wonder if we have enough resources to actually make it good while also keeping it free, both in terms of monetization and in terms of outside influence and biases. Twitter and others spend a lot of manhours on it and mastodon still doesn’t have it either for example, it’s not even being worked on afaik (or nobody talks about it).

        • scarabic@lemmy.world
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          1 year ago

          The trick is to find out how to leverage the community for quality signals, and just support that with good foundations.

          Spam filtering is done by corporations but they’re not all mega tech companies like Google. A lot of it is done at the network level, too.

          DNS has also always been the prime example of a federated service that works so well we can rely on it as a public utility. Why hasn’t it been taken over by bad actors rapidly recycling their identities? It’s not because big tech has thousands of human agents monitoring it at great expense.

    • ShrimpsIsBugs@feddit.de
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      1 year ago

      I think these problems might be solvable with auto blacklisting instances based on their age, how their users behave and what % of comments and posts of them are flagged as spam

        • Wander@yiffit.net
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          1 year ago

          One thing that is feasible is for established instances to give votes from new instances a lower weight. So, no blacklisting, but until they have been around for a little while to be able to calculate that their activity corresponds to their size and that nothing is off, upvotes and dowvotes could be ignored or given a lower weight.

        • jrs100000@lemmy.world
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          1 year ago

          Thats the problem. It would be very difficult to get a new instance off the ground unless you were an insider or had inside connections. If you have a cabal of existing admins acting as gate keepers you could keep outsiders from abusing the system easily, but you are also walking right back into the centralized control federation is supposed to prevent.

        • zygo_histo_morpheus@programming.dev
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          1 year ago

          Well non-federated forums can grow by word of mouth and similar. Being federated does lower the barrier of entry for interacting but it’s still possible to visit the instance the old fashioned way. You probably still need to rely mostly on word of mouth anyway, even if you are federated.

        • ShrimpsIsBugs@feddit.de
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          1 year ago

          Yes, age alone shouldn’t lead to getting blacklisted. But if an instance is two days old, already 50+ accounts from there were banned on your instance for being bots and besides that there was no real contributions coming from that place, this might be a candidate for auto-blacklisting.

    • Kaldo@kbin.social
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      1 year ago

      Maybe we’ll move to a system where only upvotes from that home’s instance matter. After all karma is meaningless anyway and is just used for short term discoverability, maybe kbin1.social doesn’t care how kbin2.social votes on kbin1.social threads (or any lemmy example instance)? If you subscribe to kbin1.social then you hope that they will upvote their content appropriately the same way you expect them to self-moderate appropriately. Dunno, just thinking out loud

    • orientalsniper@lemmy.world
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      1 year ago

      and once that happens the whole premise of federation starts to fall apart.

      Will it? Even if we get to the point where there’s a whitelisting system, major instances will still be federated. There could be even a transitional small instances federation.

  • Bosa@lemmy.world
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    1 year ago

    Ya there probably will be, but in the end it doesn’t matter which is the beauty of this platform.

  • platysalty@kbin.social
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    1 year ago

    I mean, we already see small skirmishes here and there.

    As long as there are more than two humans left, we’ll always find something stupid to argue about

  • lemming007@lemm.ee
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    1 year ago

    The biggest problem with lemmy and decentralization right now is that for optimal performance you need to spread out the load relatively evenly between instances. The problem is that users tend to go where other users are (otherwise why go there) and that naturally leads to clumping on one or few instances which causes it to overload.

    The way to solve it is to avoid having generic “anything goes” instances and instead have instances be focused on a specific topic. For example, have gaming instance, a personal finance/investing instance, all things home ownership and improvement instance, etc. You can have multiple communities per instance as long as they stay within the same general topic. This way users will naturally spread out by subscribing to different instances based on topics they’re interested in. And that will solve the performance issue we’re seeing with lemmy.world or other popular instances.

  • Snapz@lemmy.world
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    1 year ago

    “Instance wars” sounds like the way “the consequences of my own actions” will be framed at a point.

    The far right instances dripping with hate, bigotry and recycled propaganda will be in an “Instance war” with the mainstream instances talking about regular human being stuff - stuff like beans.

    Grab your samurai swords, mall ninjas… and inventory your powdered eggs, theocratic fascist doomsday preppers… The instance wars are coming for your unvaccinated, homeschooled, incel butts!

  • gthutbwdy@lemmy.sdf.org
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    1 year ago

    Email is federated as well, but I never saw anything I could call email instance wars. You can use whichever you want, no one really cares.

  • doopen@lemmy.world
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    1 year ago

    What if there was an app that let you log in to multiple lemmy accounts at once, aggregated the lot into one seamless feed, and used the relevant account for each interaction? Maybe even going as far as to automatically cross-post any submission to duplicate communities and aggregate that too.

  • GenderNeutralBro@lemmy.sdf.org
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    1 year ago

    This will likely follow a similar pattern to email, since it’s starting from a very similar position.

    At some point people will begin to assign identities to instances and imagine (rightly or wrongly) that being on an instance says something about a person. People do that with cars, shoes, and yes, even email domains.

    From a technical perspective, right now Lemmy is as anonymous as can be — I’ve yet to see an instance that requires ANY kind of verification. I didn’t need to provide an email address, phone number, or any other identifying information to sign up. Didn’t even need to solve a captcha. I just choose a name and set a password and BOOM! I was in.

    Once upon a time, email worked this way, too. Then came the spammers, scammers, and other bad actors, and this was deemed untenable. Nowadays, any email provider that allows anonymous signup is likely to be blocked by most of the email-using world. You won’t be able to use them to sign up for other services, and you might not even have your mail accepted by other providers.

    This will definitely become a problem as Lemmy becomes popular, and instance admins will need to crack down, lest they be overrun and defederated by the rest of the world.

    I’m not sure what the answer is. This is a problem that has not been adequately solved, IMHO. A few bad apples spoil the bunch. That’s been true since long before the Internet.

  • Odusei@lemmy.world
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    1 year ago

    This very much feels to me like the beginning of a Civ game, where we’re all fresh nations with different starting conditions that are exploring our territories and building up armies…

    The first schism is gonna be fairly dramatic, I’ll bet.