☆ Yσɠƚԋσʂ ☆
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Joined 5Y ago
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Cake day: Jan 18, 2020

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I think that being human scale is largely the appeal of the Fediverse. Each instance isn’t meant to grow to the size of a centralized platform, but to be a relatively small community of people with some shared interests. I look at it similarly to the way IRC channels worked back in the day. You tend to have a group of people whom you interact with frequently and that’s how you know they’re human. If some bot enters the community then it becomes obvious very quickly.



Oh I haven’t seen the EFF one, thanks for linking. We absolutely do have to fight for public forums to be open and publicly owned.


Fundamental problems with privately owned social media platforms
We must remember who owns these platforms and whose interests they ultimately represent. These are not neutral and unbiased channels that allow for the free flow of information. The content on these sites is carefully curated. Views and opinions that are unpalatable to the owners of these platforms are often suppressed, and sometimes outright banned. When the content that a user produces does not fit with the interests of the platform it gets removed and communities end up being destroyed. Another problem is that user data constitutes a significant source of revenue for corporate social media platforms. The information collected about the users can reveal a lot more about the individual than most people realize. It's possible for the owners of the platforms to identify users based on the address of the device they're using, see their location, who they interact with, and so on. This creates a comprehensive profile of the person along with the network of individuals whom they interact with. This information is shared with the affiliates of the platform as well as government entities. For example, a leak from [RCMP](https://thetyee.ca/News/2020/11/16/You-Have-Zero-Privacy-RCMP-Web-Spying/) shows how this kind of information is used to spy on Canadian citizens. It's clear that commercial platforms do not respect user privacy, nor are the users in control of their content. While it can be useful to participate on such platforms in order to agitate, educate, and recruit comrades, they should not be seen as open forums. Open source platforms provide a viable alternative to corporate social media. These platforms are developed on a non-profit basis and are hosted by volunteers across the globe. A growing number of such platforms are available today and millions of people are using them already. From that perspective I think that open platforms like Lemmy and Mastodon should be the focus. Instead of all users having accounts on the same server, federated platforms have many servers that all talk to each other to create the network. If you have the technical expertise, it's even possible to run your own. One important aspect of the Fediverse is that it's much harder to censor and manipulate content than it is with centralized networks such as BlueSky. There is no single company deciding what content can go on the network, and servers are hosted by regular people across many different countries and jurisdictions. Open platforms explicitly avoid tracking users and collecting their data. Not only are these platforms better at respecting user privacy, they also tend to provide a better user experience without annoying ads and popups. Another interesting aspect of the Fediverse is that it promotes collaboration. Traditional commercial platforms like Facebook or Youtube have no incentive to allow users to move data between them. They directly compete for users in a zero sum game and go out of their way to make it difficult to share content across them. This is the reason we often see screenshots from one site being posted on another. On the other hand, a federated network that's developed in the open and largely hosted non-profit results in a positive-sum game environment. Users joining any of the platforms on the network help grow the entire network. Having many different sites hosted by individuals was the way the internet was intended to work in the first place, it's actually quite impressive how corporations took the open network of the internet and managed to turn it into a series of walled gardens. Marxist theory states that in order to be free, the workers must own the means of production. This idea is directly applicable in the context of social media. Only when we own the platforms that we use will we be free to post our thoughts and ideas without having to worry about them being censored by corporate interests. No matter how great a commercial platform might be, sooner or later it's going to either disappear or change in a way that doesn't suit you because companies must constantly chase profit in order to survive. This is a bad situation to be in as a user since you have little control over the evolution of a platform. On the other hand, open source has a very different dynamic. Projects can survive with little or no commercial incentive because they're developed by people who themselves benefit from their work. Projects can also be easily forked and taken in different directions by different groups of users if there is a disagreement regarding the direction of the platform. Even when projects become abandoned, they can be picked up again by new teams as long as there is an interested community of users around them. It's time for us to get serious about owning our tools and start using communication platforms built by the people and for the people.
fedilink






aww muffin so sorry you’re still seething western color revolution failed


I imagine that the dynamic here is reminiscent of the western media’s self-censorship. Western journalists learn to conform to certain standards and topics because they understand what kinds of articles are more likely to be published and advance their careers. This is largely influenced by the preferences of media company owners and advertisers, creating a selection pressure for content producers to conform to these expectations.

In contrast, in China, censors strive to identify potentially politically sensitive content and tend to err on the side of more aggressive censorship. This is due to the understanding that being overly cautious in such matters will not result in negative consequences, encouraging a more conservative approach to content regulation.


A distributed knowledge base is indeed an excellent concept since it enhances resilience against potential disruptions or manipulations compared to a centralized database like Wikipedia. By distributing servers across numerous countries and legal jurisdictions, it becomes more challenging for any single entity to censor the content. Furthermore, the replication of data through federation ensures higher durability and reliability in preserving valuable information. Kudos on making it happen!


The fact that the issue exists after 4 years clearly shows that you are in fact blowing it out of proportion. Actual issues that affect large numbers of people running servers end up being addressed by people contributing to the project. Lemmy is an open source project that anybody can contribute to, and fix the issues that are affecting them. The fact that this hasn’t happened shows that this issue is not as high priority as you want to make it out to be.

This doesn’t mean this isn’t a real issue that should be fixed at some point, but it’s simply not the show stopper you paint to be.

So yeah, you are absolutely doing a hack job here.


I’d recommend mirrorless, there’s pretty much no advantage to DSLR at this point. Mirrorless are smaller, lighter, and faster.


that cardinal is not impressed







Very much agree with all that. The main reason centralized git providers emerged was due to the fact that they made discoverability and contribution easy. Federation directly addresses these issues, and it’s really encouraging to see that Forgejo is starting to get some serious usage. I think another big aspect federated hosting could address is censorship, if you have servers hosted in different jurisdictions, and mirroring content then it becomes very difficult to remove content from the network.






It actually does matter for the individual instances because the amount of content and interactions grows regardless which server users join because servers federate with each other. This is a fundamentally different dynamic from commercial walled gardens where each platform competes for users with every other.


sure, but it’s still an indicator of growth and some percentage of users does stay active


I completely agree, the total number of users isn’t really that important. The three things that count are having enough users to generate interesting content, developers who can develop the ecosystem, and people hosting instances. As long as these three things can be done sustainably then the Fediverse will be around indefinitely, and will likely outlast all the existing commercial platforms.

Too much rapid growth can also be a negative because it can disrupt the existing culture and normalize negative behaviors on mainstream platforms. When the growth is gradual then new people are more likely to adjust to the existing community norms.


Most likely, and this works well because it allows time for server capacity to grow and for wrinkles to get ironed out gradually. Fediverse would have a hard time absorbing millions of people all at once, but a gradual trickle of users allows things to grow organically.


Reddit is doing the Fediverse a huge favor
While I don't expect there's going to be any meaningful impact on Reddit once the dust settles, I do think this will bring a lot of new users to the Fediverse. Reddit losing a few hundred thousand users is a drop in a bucket given their user base, but it is a significant boost for us.
fedilink




I completely agree. The goal for the Fediverse is to be sustainable. There’s no point worrying that it’s not growing as fast as commercial networks, or that it doesn’t have the same mainstream penetration, or whatever it is people worry about. The only thing that really matters is that there are enough people to develop platforms and enough users to produce interesting content. This is already the case today, and things will only be getting better going forward as the Fediverse grows.

Maybe Bluesky will get more popular than the entire Fediverse and attract a huge number of users, and maybe it won’t. However, I can guarantee that the Fediverse will be around long after everyone forgot what Bluesky was.