What's the point of federation?
What's the point of federation?
What's the point of federation, when we will end up having large clumps of users in specific communites under instances, where the owners of the instance can censor information, and enforce their political ideological false authory over everyone. If somebody doesn't agree they can be banned without any valid reason. Federation is censorship resistant only to large government entities. We fail to realise that the issue with censorship is the owners and admins.
And yes, we can meke new instances that support our beliefs and that doesnt censor our speech, but then again we dont have an evenly distributed userbase. Having duplicate communities is cojnter intuitive anyways because it will confuse users. Lemmy is a failed project in my eyes unless they find a way to resolve these issues somehow.
Bad example but if i start a torrent, then the people who seed will own just as much of the torrent as i do. I'll be equal with the peers without any upper hand. It cant be taken down or censored. Thats the idea i had.
"Concern Troll" has just entered my vocabulary
I've been contributing to foss software for years. Maybe that gives some context. Im speaking genuenely, with no maliciois intent.
How have you contributed to foss? Open source repos (for example) are great because everyone from everywhere can contribute and help. Like everyone everywhere has the power to just start an instance if they're not happy with what's out there. That's a good thing. Power isn't determined by ownership of an instance but how many people use it, unlike sites like Reddit.
I think you've made the point yourself, actually. It's even worse if there's only ONE entity in charge, rather than many (as we're seeing from Reddit IMO). There's also the technical advantage of decentralization, server-wise. As someone who has moved over from Reddit to Lemmy on principle (I had no skin in the game), I also think that the federation actually makes a lot of sense, in the long run. I'm definitely here to stay! It doesn't hurt that I was able to keep my username from Reddit (much easier with federation)!
it's way better than just full on centralization, though
Slightly better. You end up having the same kind of controlled enviroment but with stuff all over the place, having to explain the workings of the fediverse for every new user, to not get them confused.
Just about anyone commenting on a subreddit is aware of a mod's authority and powertrips. It's not hard to grasp that lemmy is moderated as well.
Literally nothing humans do is perfect, maybe besides some art or pb&j
The most you'll get is serviceable. I'm enjoying the experience so far. It's like a social experiment.
Well im saddened if thats the case. New users wont sign up if we just have a "serviceable" platform. I think we can do better than this, but i appreciate that we have anything at all.
OK I didn't mean that literally lol.
I think these things just take time. I'm not into tech stuff, but it seems like things are moving pretty fast, and the more stuff you subscribe to, the easier new users will find communities.
I think the potential is here and then some.
I'm enjoying my time here and the general vibe. The jerboa app is pretty great and will get better. There's small bugs, expected.
We have to developed it, the whole things.
As far as whether federation will work long term, who knows? All about the journey for me.
The main federated service that pretty-much all Internet users use is email. It's also been around for a long time, and it's much more popular than other old federated services like IRC. So email is a well-understood example of how federation works in practice.
If you use Gmail and you decide that Google is evil, you can switch to Hotmail or any number of other providers, or even run your own mail server, and you can still send email to people who use Gmail.
That helps keep instance owners honest. You've never heard of Gmail and AOL and Hotmail and MIT all getting into a bun-fight over who's evil and cutting off federation with each other, because that doesn't happen. Doing so would piss off their own users, because people on Gmail expect to be able to get email from their mom on AOL and their buddy on Hotmail and the recruiter at the job they're applying to, without interference from Google.
the torrent analogy is pretty good actually, ISPs can block certain connections so a good chunk of users miss out on the swarm, and the swarm misses out on them. where federation differs from choosing an ISP is it's far easier to switch your provider to this service than it is an ISP.
and where a given instance draws the line on censorship isn't the be all and end all of whether other instances federate with them. as i see it, though my understanding of this comes from mastodon, even if one server decides to properly block another, a third server might chose to limit instead, if at all. there are block lists but that requires a very obvious and widely shared red line on freedom of expression, where there are very few places on the open web where you'll see less censorship than that.
in the end, wherever a given instance draws the line, is far more democratic than other social media sites. it's easier to think that twitter, or reddit, or facebook, is more accountable, because there's at least one guy everybody can point to to blame when something goes wrong, and sure, there'd be something in that, if the scrutiny they get actually changed anything.
Thanks! Makes much more sense like this.
glad to help. i've had all the same worries myself. it's different, and far from perfect, but the average user is more empowered in where exactly that line is drawn.
And yes, we can meke new instances that support our beliefs and that doesnt censor our speech, but then again we dont have an evenly distributed userbase.
I think evenly distributed userbase is not necessary on fediverse as long as users has choice to get what they want. Both admins and normal users are also users, they can desire anything, both good and bad. Any admin that wish bad things will see their instance lost users and defederated by the rest of fediverse and any users that disagree with admin choices can move to the other instaces or set up their personal instance. It happens a lot on microblogging-style part of fediverse, a lot of users okay with that and community wise, it is more or less stable there.
Good point.
Partly it's really a social experiment, it may work, it may not work, at least for me, so far so good. I hope to see decentralisation thrive. If it doesn't that means the market decided that it doesn't work, then let it be.
Sure. We'll see.
Fediverse is effectively just like Reddit actually, but without the admins, which is what cause 95% subreddits to blackout and protest.
Subreddits have drama all the time because of power tripping mods, but redditards can always create new subs.
I can only speak for myself but I like my server and admin and that our server is connected to more people and content out there.