If Lemmy and Mastodon continues to get popular, we will eventually get Instance wars.
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.
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.
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.
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."
“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
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).
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?
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
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
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.
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.
I'm pretty much brand new to lemmy but the thought of having to switch instances to see cooking conversations after conversing about Raspberry Pi projects in a different instance just seems unwieldy. But I guess as long as my instances are all federating with each other I don't need to switch instances. I'm a technical guy but this needs to be easier for joe sixpack or it's not going to catch on. And if it doesn't catch on there's going to be less interesting content...
"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!
Seeing boomers on here talking about email addresses is weird since everyone my age just defaults to Gmail unless it's a work or school address that was just assigned to you
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.
Would an app that pulls directly from each server (anonymously) or an app that pulls from dedicated servers (while logged in/subbed) be better? The first is more efficient but the instance owners likely won’t be [financially] supported, while the latter requires duplication and is prone to defederation issues. In the end I suspect overcoming defederation will be a significant design goal of third party apps.
I've got multiple accounts because I have my main (this one) and an account on feddit.uk. The account on feddit.uk exists because I wanted to make a very UK-niche community on there, and I believe you need an account on an instance to make a community on that instance. I could give up my feddit.uk account now, but it's nice to keep around in case my main instance goes down for maintenance or some such.
Beehaw is busy building their ivory tower by defederating anyone with a slightly different oppinion so i'd say they are the centrists or maybe the swiss.
Other than that the rest is pretty much the same, if you ask me.
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.
No joke. During my interview for a bell company my email came up for whatever reason and thier response was "oh! You use Gmail!". Like I was hired on the spot because of it. It was very strange.
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.
Sopuli made me write a little paragraph about myself before they let me in
Actually tbh I'm not even sure what anyone here is even talking about...federations and instances? I thought this was just a new Reddit but with a different back end.
Okay, it makes sense that some instances are doing that already. I signed up for a few and none of them did, but I'm not on lemmy.world. I'm on lemmy.sdf.org (and a couple others, but this is my main one).
u/[email protected] already gave a great explanation. So here we are, three different people using three different servers, all talking in the same thread and generally not even noticing the difference. Neat, isn't it!
Lemmy is a federated link aggregator and forum. Kind of like a hybrid between email and Reddit. I'm a member of Lemmy.zip, but I'm posting on another Lemmy instance (I forget where this post is, Lemmy.world, right?). Lemmy.zip and lemmy.world are "federated", which means if users on one instance interact with users on another, both servers will sync this activity. Lemmy.world will accept lemmy.zip user posts.
Community searching shows the community name and the server where it's hosted. Even though I only have an account on Lemmy.zip, I can subscribe, comment, and post on communities from other instances, as long as lemmy.zip is federated with them.
Recently, Beehaw de-federated from much of the fedi-verse. This means their software works the same, but prevents their users from interacting with the rest of the community, and the rest of the community from interacting with their communities and users.
It's complicated and annoying, but necessary to be federated to prevent the fate of Digg and Reddit.
Also, one instance could require email and 2FA to be safe, and choose to de-federate from an instance that has no verification and becomes full of spammers. Or, someone could create a Lemmy instance that requires verification of identity (like AMA used to do, or the old Twitter checkmark), so if John.Oliver from the "Lemmy.OnePercent" instance posts, you know it's the real John Oliver. There's benefits and complications from federation.
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.
I'm not sure about all of them, but for Google, you can't create a new account without a valid phone number for SMS verification. If you created your account a long time ago then you're kind of grandfathered in and don't need to add a phone. They don't allow known VOIP numbers (including Google Voice) and I think you cannot use the same number for lots of accounts.
This might vary by country. My experience is with the US version of gmail.
It's already occurring. If you have an account on esploding head you can't set content from some places and people will reply to you in aggressive ways based on preconceived notions. I know if I see a commie or tanky making comments I view as shitty then I am already doing it too.
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
Not exactly anonymous...
Lemmy will most likely go the way of 4chan, they'll ban connections from all major VPN services and start banning users via IP.
I'm sure that it's a little more complicated than that with a federated network. Since you can host your own lemmy instance you could hide your information behind that.
The important thing here is to get back to social networks and away from social media. The important entities here are the humans, not the memes or the money or the uplems or whatever we eventually call them.
Humans connecting with humans in ways that advance our collective well-being is the promise of social networks that Facebook and Twitter started. Once they saw how many users they had (and the bills for hosting and coding) they got hyper focused on making money.
Hypothetically we can avoid that fate here by having the job of hosting and coding spread out among many. Especially if we also come up with a way to crowd fund the costs of hosting and coding.
It has already started :) I'd say around 60% of major instances block exploding-heads, burggit and/or lemmygrad. Lemmygrad and EH in turn defederate a shitton of instances as well due to ideological reasons. Most "civility" or "law" related instances block piracy instances. The dbzer0 piracy instance blocks anything seen as too right-wingy cuz the owner is an anarchocommunist or something. LGBT instances are blocking & promoting for other instances to block instances that aren't too friendly to LGBT or are simply not moderating or even promoting homophobia & related topics. I actually made a tool called federation-checker.vercel.app/ that checks where an instance stands in the federation "war", so I know what instances to register onto if I wanna see some content that has been blocked by the instances I'm on.
I know that the url part is fucked. I did it fast and I knew what would happen as I coded it. I 100% know it sucks ass lol. It is what it is until I get help or time to fix it.
It's a buggy thing lol. I made it very fast. I am very busy nowadays. I can't bother to edit it much. I would appreciate PRs. My github is lemmygod. If you have any knowhow, any help is extremely welcome in these days of dayjob exhaustion. :)
Way to completely misread I guess. Bigots are defederating, cops are defederating, pedestrians are defederating, ants are defederating. Everyone and their mom is shunning and getting shunned except like a tiny couple kinda major instances and some of the smaller one that just don't care and don't cause any waves. Some of it is ideological. Some of it is personal. Some of it is prejudice. Some of it is about URLs or simple disagreements.
The fact that things get divided up by the community itself is a positive, not a negative. The "major" network of instances don't have to put up with extreme things on any end of the spectrum while those who do want to take part in that get their own bubble and won't have to cry about censorship.
Explain. Like basically order by who has defederated the most and stuff like that? I did wanna add how many users are blocked by each instance and by how many users they are blocked but I forgot and am too busy to even edit the code anymore. Just worked 12 hours today and I'm still so far from completion.
I mean--that's kind of already happened, hasn't it? The whole business with beehaw defederating is really just the first shots of the Instance Wars, and that's not even mentioning the pejorative view a lot of folks have for some instances (ahem, furries). I was accused of being a right-winger for even broaching the subject that beehaw defederating might not have been for entirely altruistic reasons.
I think we can expect to see a lot more of this in the future, especially once corporate players throw in their hats and realize they can weaponize human sociology as part of their EEE strategy. Once you have most of the users and most of the communities, just wall off (defederate) anybody you see as a threat to hegemony. Sure, people can migrate, but there's a mental cost associated with that that many aren't willing to pay.
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.
I have been running a Mastodon instance since like 2016/17 and this has been quietly happening for the entire time I've been on the fediverse. (I can't check the exact date right now as I'm in the middle of upgrading it.)
Do you want to be in the Anime Girl Who Posts Nazi Memes Fediverse? How about the Queer Furry Fediverse? Or maybe you'd rather be in the Mocking Shitposts Fediverse? Perhaps you want the Everyone Has A Photo Of A Human And Thinks Federating With Facebook's Activitypub Is Actually A Good Idea Fediverse? Or how about the TERF/Gender-Critical Fediverse? Or the "Standalone" Social Site That Is Actually A Fediverse Instance With Federation Disabled And The Credits Removed In Violation Of The Source License?
Some of these Fediverses will happily talk with others. Some of them will rapidly defederate from others as soon as they encounter a place that clearly belongs to a Fediverse they are incompatible with. Some of them quickly get defederated from the Fediverses they are incompatible with. Some of them look at the #fediblock tag, some to keep aware of places worth pre-emptively blocking to make a chill place to talk, some to look for fellow people who have been cast out of someone else's chill zones.
Isn't it already? Lemmygrad, exploding-heads and other extremist instances have already been defederated. But the main feature is the federation itself, which also creates powerful alliances between instances with common values. Platform-wise, it will be just a matter of difference of use and leaning, but federation alliances will work the same
When you play the game of instances, you either get popular or you die.
(I don't think that it's going to work that way, but with enough popularity corporations are gonna want to fuck with it for sure.)
Die? What is it with assuming that small instances will inevitably die? There are people out there who want small instances, they will keep them alive.
Each participating instance must choose a "side" from a selection of political systems, religions, world views, etc. whose views it (the instance) has to represent.
The war takes place in a community that is unlocked for all instances, or on a separate instance.
All instances are listed and numbered.
The opponent allocation is then done by a /random bot number generator.
The evaluation is then done by a /Poll of all instances.
The loser is kicked out and the new opponent for the winning instance is chosen again by /random bot.
In the year 2027, Tacobell, after buying 137 lemmy instances dedicated to food, coordinated an ideology attack and bought the last fast food franchise in the world, pizza hut, in what is known as the franchise wars.
Taco Bell and Pizza Hut have been under the same corporate ownership for decades, tho. Pepsi spun them out in 1997, fully 30 years before your dystopia.
The problem with transitioning from YouTube to PeerTube is that without a critical mass of users it's just not worth it for creators. But without creators the users won't go there, because there's no content.
Lemmy has that problem to a much lesser extend because this kind of platform is way more focused on the interaction between users. Or put differently, everyone is a creator here.
A tool that uploads and updates videos across multiple platforms while syncing descriptions, tags, etc is something that would be incredibly handy for creators while also being something that PeerTube could piggyback off of. "Why not upload my video to another platform I've never heard of? It can only lead to more exposure."
You are right. Lemmy and Mastodon are user-centric while Funkwhale or Peertube are more on the artist/creator. For this reason I encourage people to use these sites, supporting artists who decide to use these platforms.
I truly hope this type of hierarchical thinking can stay fun and not create the kind of grating pomposity that pervades every bloody animalistic thing. I want us to grow beyond childish competitiveness.
True, but i think that it could as well come to "if you're from this instance you are a bad person" situation. I don't care like you say, but some people will.
I can imagine other instances defederating from each other over minor or uncontrollable reasons. I'd hate to keep switching to new instances if that were to happen.
Yes. In the mid 90's, anyone with an AOL or Juno email address was a noob. Many people on the internet had .edu email addresses, because it was pretty hard to get internet access unless you were affiliated with a university. The rise of Hotmail and Yahoo mail ended up removing the association between email address and internet service provider, to the point where people who were using ISP-provided email addresses by the early 2000's were seen as unsophisticated and usually older.
No, this is exactly what will happen, though there will be bubbles of similar minded instances, no doubt, but given the federate nature of this all, I don't think someone will make their instance incompatible to the rest, except of course some corpos get their hands on it... looking at meta
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.
My personal hope is that the ActivityPub standard prevents this from happening. After all, I've seen decent federation between Lemmy and KBin and they're entirely different platforms, nevermind a fork of the same software.
BeeHaw, which I moved because they refused to allow people to make communities.
Lemmy.ml, which seems to always be down now, or throwing a ton of errors.
and now lemmy.world, but I don't see myself staying here because I know some instances already have defederated from .world (like beehaw) and I don't like that I am missing content from "major" instances.
I might just make my own instance so I can see all posts and don't have to worry about the instance being down for days/weeks.
Can we just go back to BBS where you have dial in with your land line to post on a board? The difficulty of use acted like an awesome protection from any community growing too large too fast and was super easy to moderate. I just want to pull my socks up to my knees, yell at the clouds, and dial in to the NG BBS...
I seriously was thinking the other day I need to see if newsgroups we're still a thing. It was so cool being able to dial up, refresh the threads and then read offline at any time without having to refresh or navigate multiple 20mb web pages.... That meme the other day about scraping got me jonesing for barbones simplicity.
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.
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.
I really hope that it'll be something we'll be able to avoid. We're all on the same federated system, we don't need to do this pointless "I would listen to you but you're a instance.lemmy.com user" unless they're from an instance that supports hateful content.
I think the even deeper cruxxity crux of it all is whether a person is willing to handle their own content filtering, which requires themselves to expose themselves to content they don’t want as they evaluate content, or whether they want to be completely protected by some external system which makes those decisions for them.
In the first people must encounter shit they don’t like. In the second they don’t need to, but the system can make them blind to content that might be good for them.
It's so dumb, yet it's so natural that even knowing it's dumb sometimes people end up devolving into tribe wars by complete accident.
And then some do it because it's the easiest way to get people to do what you want to them to do. It's definitely best to try to keep it in the back of your mind as much as possible to avoid falling into the habit.
One of the most enjoyable bits in REAMDE was about how the users of an MMORPG split into two warring factions over whether they preferred the default color palette or a custom version.
Mastodon is on a decline already. It is different than, say, Lemmy. Mastodon's contents are produced mainly by mainstream content creators, and they do not migrate from Twitter its counterpart.
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
I'm counting the days until all of the "Major" servers (sh.itjust.works, beehaw, lemmy.world, etc.) have a struggle session over whether to defederate from "tankie" instances (lemmygrad.ml, and ironically since the devs are MLs the dev instance lemmy.ml).
I actually had an idea with instance wars but for like photoshop battles or some other competition where the two versions of the community battle each other to one up each other. Only problem is I am not sure what sort of competition to make.
I think we'll gravitate to our own tribes. R/Donald fans will hang out on one instance. BernieBros on another.
Decentralisation means we'll be in our own bubbles more.
What was good about Twitter and Reddit was that it was the Agora, the commons, where you bump into others who really need you to see their cats or Excel art while you browse for your own picadillos.
The difference between the Agora and reddit was that you could be banned from reddit without any major violation.
I’m sure rights were relatively constricted in ancient Greece but nothing like what we find in privately-owned cyberspace.
And reddit is still there, for those who want the Agora. I personally was banned from reddit so I’m very happy to come to a place where it’s harder to ban me just because I don’t conform.
Until someone is willing to build a centralized place that is devoted to free speech, siloing is the price to pay for the architectural decisions necessary to permit all voices to participate.
True, your twitter example exemplifies it for me. When i used it a lot, like 7 years ago, it was for knowing and meeting people in my zone and interest range. Now it feels like tik tok. It's so unpersonal.