anji

Yeah, this happened to Mastodon (aka the microblogging part of Fedi) also. I was on Mastodon on-and-off for years before the Twitter exodus, and it was a very different place back then. I can see why people miss the overall community on a platform before it became popular, but then I feel like ActivityPub gives us the tools to shape the communities we want, so we have to engage with it and be more selective than we were before.

Oh, yeah in that case I guess Lemmy propagates this information so other instances can show the “banned” information on a user profile.

I think some people reacted a bit too quickly to that sublemmy appearing though… Give admins some time to evaluate and resolve the situation before impulsively defederating an entire 6000-user instance.

Those must be bans from communities, I assume. A community is linked to a single instance so it can control who is banned. But banning a user from an instance is only meaningful on that single instance. At least that’s my understanding…

We’re just like the big commercial social media sites then. Sweet success!

The “subscribe & push” model is practically fundamental to ActivityPub. There’s pros and cons to this design, but ultimately I think it’s confusing and cumbersome for users…

Of course. Here’s a quick one:

Pros:

• You don’t depend on anyone else’s funds or time
• Always available and snappy no matter how busy some parts of the Fediverse get
• You choose who to federate with. Want to talk to both puppy-lovers and puppy-haters? No problem.
• It’s a social media account you really, in every sense of the word, own. Nobody can take it away from you. The lemmy.ml admins could accept the billions* they’re surely being offered right now for their instance, but my account is still mine.

Cons:

• Hosting costs some money, knowledge, and time.
• Unless you subscribe to specific communities (or people, in the cast of Mastodon) those posts will never reach your server. So you don’t really have a “Federated” timeline

*I’m joking about the billions. Probably.

I haven’t noticed at all, because I follow communities on lemmy.ml and beehaw.org from my own instance. I had this experience when Mastodon.social kept going down during major Twitter exodus phases. Federation is awesome.

Reddit has a strategy for this which works quite well. I’m not sure how it works, but I suspect it’s something like sorting posts in each subreddit you’ve subscribed to, scoring them based on their popularity inside the subreddit (irrespective of the absolute # votes), and then mixing these posts together on your feed. So an unusually popular post in a niche 100 subscriber subreddit can still easily climb to the top of your feed.

No. I am on my own little single-user instance and I can follow, vote, post and reply anywhere from here. It’s just a little awkward sometimes because you have to learn how to paste URLs in the search box, and until you subscribe there will be some missing content. But once you get past that, everything works.

Something like that. But also with fully decentralized identity. So all content is signed by a keypair which is local to the user, and can be used to access Fedi through arbitrary instances. Probably I am too wishful.

No. And I think it’s a really hard problem. poVoq was right to call me out on full replication being a bad move, because duplicating all content on every server is obviously inefficient. But a solution in-between, with decentralization and redundancy, is probably a very complex challenge. Doesn’t seem impossible, but very complex network protocols rarely seem to succeed.

Edit: Sorry I was still thinking about some fabled perfect protocol. But if you’re looking into decentralized identifiers, W3 is working on one approach. It’s not something I have seen used anywhere or integrated with ActivityPub yet, but that could be the future I’m hoping for. Probably.

Well yeah, point taken that replicating everything everywhere and forever might be impossible. But I do believe at a minimum my identity should be portable and accessing Fedi (ie. in microblogging: posting and viewing a feed of the latest posts of my follows) should be decoupled from which instance I pick to access the Fediverse.

I don’t particularly like how owners of instances which grew are now essentially locked in to having to spend 100s or 1000s of dollars a month keeping their now expensive instances running and providing service. This is a bad place to be for a platform ran by volunteers. Letting instance owners scale their service down as well as up would be ideal. But this requires at least decentralized identity, and at best some form of content hosting redundancy…

It’s easy to say the current architecture of Fedi works when it’s still small. Your instance has 139 users… That’s not intended as a slight. Hosting instances is good and I applaud you for it! But I wish it were easier to more equally share the load once the platform becomes more popular.

Sadly, I feel like the Fediverse, based on ActivityPub, was fundamentally designed wrong for scaling potential. I do like Fedi and I like ActivityPub, but I think instances should not have to be responsible for all of this:

• Owning user accounts
• Exclusively host communities
• Serving local and remote users webpages and media
• Never going down, as this results in users and content becoming unavailable

Because servers “own” the user accounts and communities it’s not trivial for users to switch to a different instance, and as instances scale their costs go up slightly exponentially.

I wish the Fediverse from the beginning was a truly distributed content replication platform, usenet-style or Matrix-style, and every instance would add additional capacity to the network instead of hosting specific communities or users.

I guess it’s a bit too late for a redesign now… Perhaps decentralized identifiers will take us there in some form in the future.

Having remote links load on my local instance so I could interact with them would be awesome. Even better if my instance would fetch a remove posts & comments so it would really look like one unified platform without missing remote information.