Y’all should know about BOINC. It’s one of the world’s largest distributed computing networks used for “volunteer computing” where people donate computing time to scientific research. It’s federated/permissionless/open and anybody can create a BOINC project. !boinc@sopuli.xyz

Also check out #DeSci, lots of people working on interesting incentive mechanisms to fix scientific publishing. There’s a whole bunch of projects listed here http://desci.world/

Nostr vs Mastodon on Privacy & Autonomy:

• Relay/instance admins can choose which content goes through their relay on either platform
• On nostr, your DMs are encrypted. In Mastodon, the admin of the sender and receiver can read them, as can anybody else who breaks into their server
• On nostr, a relay admin can control what goes through their relay, but they can’t stop you from following/DMing/being followed by whoever you want since you are typically connected to multiple relays at once. As long as one relay allows it, signal flows. Nostr provides the best of both worlds: moderated “public squares” according to your moderation preferences, autonomy to follow/dm/be followed by anybody you want (assuming that individual user hasn’t blocked you).
• On mastodon, your identity is tied to your instance. If your instance goes down, you lose your follow/followee list, DMs, etc. On Nostr, it’s not, so this doesn’t happen. Mastodon provides some functionality to migrate identity between instances but it’s clunky and generally requires to have some form of advanced notice.
• Both have all the same functions as twitter: tweet, reply, re-tweet, DM, like, etc.

Why I think nostr will win https://lemmy.ml/post/11570081

I don’t care so much if my personal info is posted to a website like kiwifarms or someone’s private blog, because those websites are harder to find in search results

So is most of Lemmy

Big companies have a desire to protect themselves from prosecution for hosting illegal activity.

So do Lemmy instance hosters, the hosting companies they use, and the other instances which federate with them.

They specifically hire people to moderate content and reduce their liability.

Once can expect lemmy instances to do this once they reach a certain size. If you don’t moderate sufficiently, you get de-federated, and your users won’t want to use your instance, so lemmy instances which want to grow will keep a handle on good moderation,

But she can run a Lemmy instance that will federate with the entire rest of the fediverse and expose her content to potentially thousands of people.

If she posts it to a lemmy community the mod that community or instance will remove it. If she hosts her own instance for the purposes of doxxing people nobody will even see the post (since it’s not getting upvoted across fedi) and other instances will de-federate.

Ultimately, if you are at high risk of doxxing, the best measures to protect yourself are mostly based not around which platforms you trust or not, but around engaging with those platforms in a way which protects your privacy. Might want to check out the surveillance self-defense guide. https://ssd.eff.org/

Any joe shmoe can spin up an instance, post your personal details (or personal details they made up), and bada bing bada boom, your identity is compromised forever.

Replace “instance” with “website” and that’s how the internet works. There are avenues in the legal system to combat this, but generally people can post speech (illegal or not) very easily with the internet, having rapid, free, open communication is a net positive for society even if occasionally there are downsides.

Lemmy can’t solve doxxing or other forms of abuse any better than a centralized service can, which they don’t do particularly well as it is. What Lemmy does do it put control over what content is promoted into the hands of users and instance admins, as opposed to a few execs at Meta. If an instance has poor moderation, it will be ‘de-federated’ by other lemmy instances, which means content from their instance won’t travel across the fediverse. So in general, I think you can expect good moderation. Unlike centralized services, instance admins are not incentivized to shove polarizing content and misinformation into your feed. That pipeline of increasingly polarizing content is the root cause of many situations which involve doxxing in the first place.

You do lose your identity though. If your instance suddenly disappears you have to start from step zero. You have no followers, you follow nobody, and nobody knows you exist. By social graph I mean your connections to others which mastodon facilitates (a list of people you follow and the connection so that others follow you) plus the entirety of the content you have posted since you started your account, your DMs, etc. Losing your social graph isn’t an inconvenience, it’s losing the totality of the features mastodon gives you as a user all at once. Social media connections are important for people socially, in the job market, etc. Those connections are meaningful. On a network-wide level, it’s frustrating for users to be following people and then just have those people vanish off the face of the earth because their instance died. It’s terrible UX.

You can no longer tweet as the “old you” and as far as anybody else knows, “new you” is a different person pretending to be “old you” unless they authenticate you in some other way and that’s a major pain.

I don’t think the ultimate solution is just “pick a stable instance”. All instances will eventually experience instability or close, what happens to those users when they do? An account should be 100% portable between instances. And ideally, a somewhat automatic mechanism should be in place so that recovering from an instance loss isn’t hard.

I know this fediverse stuff is in its infancy, I know we’ll get all these problems figured out in time.

It seems there would be some easy-to-implement solutions to this problem. Like having a link to an alternate account in every mastodon profile so that if your server does suddenly disappear or if a single instance bans you, your followers can seamlessly follow you to a new server. It doesn’t solve the issue of migrating all your content or your followees though, but perhaps that’s just a matter of regularly backing those things up somehow. Instances could automatically designate a “failover” instance run by another party and could automate this function as part of the sign-up process so users only had to register once.

My understanding is that in nostr, you run the same risk of “relay suddenly disappears” if you only have your content on a single relay. You don’t lose followers but you may lose people you follow. Or perhaps that is stored at the client level and not the relay level? idk

Agreed. The lack of self-hosting ability really comes down to the refusal of the wider web to upgrade away from SMTP. If you follow all the latest backwards-compatible protocols (DKMS etc) you can still get a decent outbound delivery rate.

There were many, many elegant solutions proposed to stop spam but none of them got implemented to avoid breaking backwards compatibility with SMTP. Then again, at this point, most people have moved away from e-mail to other forms of communication anyways due to e-mails problems (spam included). Unless the younger generation gets a sudden, renewed interest in e-mail, it will probably not really exist in another 50 years.

I do think blockchain will probably solve the issue of assigning senders a “spam score” universally once and for all instead of our current system which is a grab bag of blocklists plus each provider’s secret sauce. Once you have a universal blocklist every e-mail provider can use and contribute to, it becomes easy to identify most senders as “safe” and new senders will just have to spend a bit of time earning their trust.

Not really. If you are a ban-worthy user on mastodon, other instances may ban your user id, or ban your entire instance if they think your instance’s mod actions aren’t enough generally. I imagine a “common blocklist” like currently exists in e-mail, mastodon, and other federated networks would emerge so that the actions of one mod can be done more-or-less automatically by mods on other relays.

E-mail is federated and much less moderated than fediverse and even though spam exists it seems like a manageable signal to noise ratio. Anti-spam tools are pretty effective.

It’s my understanding that nostr relays can make moderation choices much like lemmy or mastodon instances do. But the scope is different. In mastodon or lemmy, if a mod takes an issue with you, they can remove you from that instance (and any followers you had following you on that instance). If a nostr relay operator doesn’t like you, they can ban you from that relay, but your followers can follow you via other relays. This is because your identity is tied to your public key, not your relay or instance.

You are right about worsening economic conditions leading to the rise of far right movements. I was more speaking to their digital footprint. If you remember early Facebook, it was nothing like what people use today.

yes, precisely. if normal instances federate with the nazi ones, this won’t be true any longer because their content WILL flood the feeds of many people. this will have disastrous consequences for lemmy as a platform.

If lemmy A is federated w lemmy B (the nazi one), it means:

• Users on Lemmy A can subscribe to communities and users on Lemmy B and vice versa
• Users on Lemmy A can comment on communities on Lemmy B and vice versa

It does not mean:

• Posts from lemmy B show up on Lemmy A (except in the “global” view on main page, which is non-default, and likely won’t show up their either due to massive downvoting). I would imagine, in time, that the global tab actually gets entirely removed since you have a problem where a single lemmy instance can massively inflate their vote count to make their votes the top voted posts across the whole network. You can’t enforce instances to follow the rules on this and you can’t audit their compliance. There are certainly some solutions to this involving blockchain but that’s an aside and those are at least a few years away afaik. 90% of users never do the “non-default” option in whatever app they’re in.

So this flooding the feeds scenario, I just don’t see it. In user-moderated platforms, vocal minorities don’t show up anywhere, they get moderated out basically automatically except in their own little enclaves. There is no scenario in which Lemmy as a federation provides a good platform for them (outside of their own nazi-friendly instance), because Lemmy doesn’t work like other social media works.

deleted by creator

You would be free to do that, just as you can make filters in gmail. But the difference is who gets to make that decision.

Not sure why nobody in the comments is distinguishing between blocking a community on an instance (removing /c/piracy) and defederating instances (saying your users can’t subscribe to otherinstance.com/c/piracy). They are very different things. We should be very skeptical of defederation.

Removing a community because it violates the rules of your instance is A-OK and every instance should do this. Anybody can run an instance, and anybody can set their own rules, that’s the whole idea of federation.

De-federating other instances because you find their content objectionable is less ok. Lemmy is like e-mail. Everybody registers at gmail or office365 or myfavoriteemail.com. Every email host runs their own servers, but they all talk to each other through an open protocol. You would be pissed to find out that gmail just suddenly decided to stop accepting mail from someothermailprovider.com because a bunch of their users are pirates or tankies. Or blocked your favourite email newsletter from reaching your inbox because it had inflammatory political content.

Allowing your users to receive e-mail, or content from subcommunities on other lemmy instances is not a legal risk like hosting the content yourself is (IANAL etc). Same way Gmail is not liable if somebody on some other e-mail server does something illegal by emailing a gmail user. That’s why you can register at torrentwebsite.com and get a user confirmation email successfully delivered to your inbox. Gmail is federated with all other e-mail services without needing to endorse them or accept legal liability for them.

Lemmy’s strength, value, and future comes from being the largest federated space for link-sharing and other forms of communication.

De-federation is bad.