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.
He’s got an instance with a nail in it…
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.
imma have undercover alts everywhere for the sole purpose of getting all the cats communities in one page.
Your legend well be carved into the pages of history as the first person to complete the catalog!
My man !
A man or sheer will and and an unhealthy amount of love for cat photos on the internet
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.
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.
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99% of the content people post and interact with doesn’t have a reason for multiple copies of it’s conversation to exist. Most content is consumed not discusses.
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And the vast majority of the users consume the answers, not the discussion. They don’t ask the questions, hey look them up, and if no one asked, or no one answered, they can’t find anything and just give up. They don’t ask.
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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.”
That’s really freaking cool. I hope it plays out like that
I don’t get how this is insightful… The internet already has 4chan, okbuddyretard, whatever, people will always form communities
Damn, this actually made me feel chills. This is actually a universe in the making. It’s new life.
There is nothing better than a good old tribe war.
One of the oldest human pastimes, hating people who are different from you in some way, no matter how inconsequential.
“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
Nothing drives down real estate prices like a good old-fashioned gang war.
Ah shit they should bring back tribes, I miss that game.
Goddam you made me nostalgic. Wonder how slow i would be today… Sloooooow
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.
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.
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.
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).
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.
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We can keep playing this until some bad actor is pretending to be me typing this right now.
But this is why moderators work in teams, and why there is an admin as well. A solo mod who’s a bad actor is not going to develop a very appealing community, and whole scam shitpile instances can always be defederated.
It’s why I’ve made fediseer.com to prepare for this inevitability
So I went to the website. It explains what it does, but not much how… Or maybe I’m too dumb to get it. Could you explain how the verification happens? How does this system work?
Did you read the devlog? I got into more detail there. Just so I don’t explain everything from scratch
I had not. I see it now. Looks real cool! I hope it works.
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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.
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
How would an instance grow if it’s auto blacklisted by everyone? Doesn’t make sense
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.
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.
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.
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.
Welcome back to IRC. :)
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
Ya there probably will be, but in the end it doesn’t matter which is the beauty of this platform.
Cause I tried so hard …
And got so far
But in the end
Lemmy.ml sucks
It doesn’t even matter
c/lemmysings
I had to fall
No… No. No. NO!
Goddamit, the chains have returned
Singing chains are inevitable
True, and now that i’ve tried this, the “corporate” social networks feel primitive somehow.
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Already happening. Have you heard of Beehaw?
Competition is good. Competition keeps us strong.
what about beehaw? i’ve seen it around, but know not of any instance wars.
Beehaw defederated from a lot of servers and nobody knows why.
Nobody? They posted an explanation lol
It made no sense.
It made no sense to you.
Did it make sense to you?
Yes. How I understand it they’re trying to run a curated safe space over there but are finding current moderation tools insufficient to moderate the influx of users on certain instances. I believe it was connected to those with no registration verification.
They’ve said they don’t want to do it, and once they’re feeling able to take better control they will re-federate.
And, that’s entirely their call. If their users want access outside of their walled garden they can make an account elsewhere. If people currently defederated from them wants access, join an instance still federated.
It’s because they’re lame.
It’s not a war…
I swear people here have no damn idea what they’re talking about…
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It wasn’t ever intend as a competition either. If they’re feeling overwhelmed and want to separate from big instances for a while, then they should be able to. Everyone’s taking it super personal when it’s not meant to be.
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You can host your own instance too.
Forgive my ignorance but if you federate an instance, does that instance have to federate you back? In order for you to comment/upvote/see posts etc?
I’m not the right person to ask.
Nope, assuming the default settings - that is, they’ve not explicitly decided to allowlist selected servers or block yours - there’s nothing that instance has to do if you subscribe to a community on it.
They’ll push content to you and it just magically works.
TLDR: federation is basically a push from the origin server (the one the community belongs to) to any server that subscribes to that community.
If I made my own instance with only me as a member and I only subscribe to showerthoughts.lemmy.fmhy.lm then that’s the only community/push update my instance would get?
Yep, you’ll only get content that someone on your instance has subscribed to, so if that’s the only subscription that’s the only content that’ll show up.
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Where could I go to learn how to host my own instance? I’d be interested if I could control my own up time and be the only user so I didn’t have to worry about moderating other users.
Go to https://join-lemmy.org/ and click on
Run a ServerI’d start googling.
As long as there are individuals, groups will be sought after and created based on the need of belonging and the need to different from another group
Good. This is what free speech looks like contrary what the muskmen think. Anyone can start and share but no one’s entitled to be listened to.
Pretty grandiose to refer to discussions with a bit of trolling as a war.
Or, more likely, trolling with a bit of discussion.
You want a war, bruh? I’ll fite you right now!!
I think it would be better if everybody selfhosted a instance of their own. Make it super hard and complicated to find communities but, keep things nice and clean
Yeah we need an opt-in central registry of communities and people.
The fact that all instances talk to each other, makes me think we likely won’t have wars.
I mean I’m subscribed to beehaw and kbin communities. And everything in between.
So I shouldn’t make a post asking which is the best lemmy community under 1k? I am tempted to create like 10 accounts and just hang out in these local “slow” communities.
I don’t know, but that’s what i did my friend. I come from a pretty small instance.
For the most part, you can browse different instances from any of them. You can make accounts on others if you particularly like the community or interface, but you don’t get much of an advantage.
