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Lack of centralized control.
Until there’s some kind of organizing central committee of servers that could mutually defederate problematic instances, every server is forced to play whack-a-mole to deal with fascists and pedophiles and the like. Every server can not be an island onto themselves, they should be in communication with each other and then collectively decide on the rules of the federation.
I forsee in the future federation boards, like servers that work together to vote on good/bad actors/instances and from those other instances could subscribe to their moderation. Still open moderation, you can still set up an instance that doesn’t adhere to group A or group B’s mod lists, but for the vast majority of people you could have a good experience.
For example, dunno how many saw but had to remove an anti-LGTBQ post in a LGTBQ community today. I’m sure I’m not the only mod who removed that from their instance today, it’d be great if there was a way other instance admins could share that and “team up” with moderation.
Like internet countries. Choose a virtual citizenship, vote for your moderator and wait to be disappointed
Poop
poopless like countries, but I would view that more like the federation UN, with each instance getting a vote and a majority passes. You’re still in charge of your country, but you could say “I like how this group moderates, I’m going to auto apply moderation from them on here”, maybe you could choose which communities are automoderated too. If I ever started disagreeing with that group I could unsubscribe and subscribe to a different group’s.
For example, the post I mentioned was not in a community that I host, but for my users I had to remove it too. Would just be nice to say “whoever gets there first can remove it”
I really really don’t like the idea of a central committee of liberals that will defed any instances that are more radical that “vote blue no matter who!”
I really really don’t like the idea of a central committee of extreme right cultists that will defed any instances that are more radical that “vote red no matter who!”
Point being, I think it’s a plus to be able to decide for ourselves.
That’s why the radical instances should
I see that as a pro and a con. If one narcissist manages to get to a position of authority, they can’t derail the whole network. That also means that people can form their own echo chamber islands of like-minded instances. There could be the main island of random interests and then a separate extremist island of all the instances that got defederated from all the big instances. Not an ideal solution, but it’s still better than a fully centralized Reddit.
What if instances could “subscribe” to the list of defederated instances of each other?
So for example. Let’s say that Alice and Bob have their own instances, alice.ml and bob.ml. Bob trusts Alice, so he sets up the following rule in bob.ml: “if alice.ml defederates an instance, then bob.ml defederates it too.”
Then Charlie starts charlie.ml. It’s a bad instance. Alice manually defederates alice.ml from charlie.ml. Bob won’t need to do anything - bob.ml would do it automatically.
I feel like this idea would address the issue of playing whack-a-mole, since admins of multiple servers can split the busywork if they so desire, and only with whomever they desire. And there’s no risk of a central control going rogue, since there’s no central control on first place.
It could be even further refined with more complex rules on when to automatically defederate other instances. Such as taking into account if the other instance did it manually or automatically, or how many among X instances defederated it.
What you eventually get is a single global list that the majority of instances use, at which point every new instance must immediately agree to adopt the list lest they themselves are also immediately defederated.
From what I understand, there are already instances who operate this way.
What you eventually get is a single global list that the majority of instances use
Not necessarily. Defederating too many instances means that your own instance will get less content; admins know that, so good admins generally avoid doing it unless necessary for the goals of their instances. Couple that with dissenting points (for example: grotesque but morally acceptable content, porn, dumb/low-quality content…), and the odds of said “single global list” popping up becomes fairly small.
Instead I expect to see a bunch of smaller lists, between instances with similar goals, and plenty unilateral subscribing (e.g. A subscribes to B, but B doesn’t subscribe to A).
From what I understand, there are already instances who operate this way.
That’s good to know. If they do it automatically, this system could be already implemented across Lemmy.
It’s interesting to see the mirror between Fediverse philosophies, and the history of international relations. For every person who believes every physical country should be an autonomous island unto themselves, you’ll find someone else who believes every country should be policed by the standards of another country or group of countries.
The fact that we can have this debate on the internet is interesting…but I also find it interesting that the internet was already federated to begin with. And we all see how that turned out. The Fediverse is just an internet within the internet.
Scalability. Most federated Lemmy instances are hobbiest run projects started by every day joes and privacy advocating sysadmins. These instances can handle a modest amount of activity. Lemmy.world is slowing to a crawl and barely working due to being overloaded. At the scale of tens of thousands of active users you NEED proper infrastructure and a dedicated team. These are not things that come easy when the instance generates no revenue besides meager donations. Lemmy.world is looking for on call system operators willing to contribute 5-10 hours per week. Good help is rarely cheap let alone free.
You are exactly correct.
I posted this in response to the DDOS attacks a few weeks ago. Same idea.
"… This is a shame. Hosting a high visibility server is no joke, and I don’t envy the admins and the very difficult work they do. It’s simultaneously an argument for and against decentralization. For - a single instance can get knocked out without talking out the whole fediverse. Against - it seems as though high visibility communities are potentially fairly easy to target and take down.
I think that decentralization wins out here in the end, but it does feel like there may be a need for some sort of fallback mechanism to be in place at an instance/community level. I suspect this might evolve somehow over time. It would require some way to expand trust between instances and or portability of communities (which could be fraught with user trust/data integrity issues).
If things don’t evolve it could grow into a whack-a-mole game for bad actors, or there might need to be more investment into server infrastructure (which could work against decentralization if only because of economies of scale).
Or maybe there’s no issue after all? I’m just imagining potential implications of a scaling fediverse - it’s fascinating and exciting stuff! …"
Everyone is a lot safer, faster and less vulnerable by being on smaller servers.
It’s not possible to ddos thousands of smaller instances in the same way. And if communities were spread out, taking a few instances down wouldn’t even be noticeable.
Theoretically, yes. Practically, maybe not so much as a ton of these smaller instances are consolidated on a just a handful of hosting providers.
When Lemmy.world was ddos’ed, other instances didn’t feel any of the effects, despite being on the same hosting provider. So it really matters - spread out :)
I expect as federation becomes more common we’ll see patterns like user servers, community servers, archive/redundancy servers, and eventually it’ll be less clustered. My instance that this version of me is on is much snappier than lemmy.world but it’s also federated differently and that’s very obvious when searching or browsing all
Yeah I’m not exactly clear over why federation differs either. Its designed not to differ I assume?
It is actually! The idea is you can join servers with certain levels of curation. For example if lemmy.world decided tomorrow it didn’t like blahaj.zone it could defederate them. That’s not the point of blahaj.zone but think of it like having multiple reddit accounts with different subscriptions each account is like a superpowered multireddit on it. You choose the subreddits that go in the multireddit but not that the account it’s on subscribes to
What you’re describing is a problem with doing centralization in the fediverse. If you instead federate in the fediverse, it scales fine.
Lemmy.world is slowing to a crawl and barely working due to being overloaded.
I heard 0.18.4 has performance improvements.
One downside/senario I’m worried about is what happens when something really bad happens. Like illegal authorities-get-involved bad? Like leaking sensitive government information or a homegrown r/ jailbait situation that the media catches wind of. Stuff can’t be permanently deleted, at least not without nuking everything around it…which people might be tempted to do. And that’s basically turning anything seriously incriminating into essentially an infohazard that could get you nuked because you’re in an instance where someone else from it commented on the thing or something. And any attempt to and defederation from the offending parties probably isn’t the hard shutoff that the authorities would be demanding in such a situation. Even if nothing effectively happens to the greater Federation, it would be a PR nightmare that would probably kill any future attempts of evangelising the platform in the future, especially to bigger communities looking for a new place to stay.
Places like Reddit have mods and admins that worst case scenario, can be the scapegoats. Lemmy doesn’t really have that layer of protection because of how esoteric it is to the layman.
In the same way that it’s part of the fediverse specs to copy info from another instance when a user requests it, it’s also part of the specs to delete info when an instance requests it. Goes both ways. The only way it becomes a problem is if your instance deliberately disables certain functionality, or otherwise fails to moderate.
Of course if a user copies the info locally and holds a copy there’s no stopping them, but reddit would have the same issue there.
Yeah this happened to some guy in Australia hosting a tor exit node if I recall? I saw it on Lemmy, but didn’t save the link. Since he wasn’t behind a corporation, I think he got held personally liable. Best bet in hosting an instance is probably to form a corporation for some legal protections.
Sure this is the case? Because Mastodon had that problem before. I thought every federated platform had permanent deletion implemented by now? And federation of the deletion and cached data…
You have duplicate communities, posts, etc.
It’s hard to find communities.
Duplicate communities also existed on reddit, though. There were just so many people, it was a feature.
True, but it’s more complicated wiht Lemmy since the duplicate communities aren’t as obvious because of the multiple instances.
Its kind of a bug and a feature since it’s how decentralized services work but it will likely keep Lemmy from growing (at least to the extent that reddit did).
I see the fediverse growing slowly over time as people realize that centralized services are fundamentally doomed in several ways. It’s always only a matter of time before a bad UX change, or they’re acquired and they sell your data, or the owner turns out to be a sex offender, or the platform is taken over by trolls, etc. Each time one of these mass exodus’ happen, most users will jump onto the next doomed bandwagon, but some small portion will try out the fediverse where they’ll realize they’re now relatively immune from these fatal flaws. An instance might go down, but the rest of them will move on without them.
r/dgdag and r/dogs_getting_dogs are an example
It’s also hard to find active communities that aren’t just reposting from another source, like another lemmy community on another lemmy site, or reddit or something. It’s kind of weird here.
I wish they had multi-“reddit” support so I can aggregate common communities between instances. I suppose clients could do this but I haven’t seen the option yet.
Identity theft. Not as serious as the real life version but imagine that I make an account with your username on another instance, maybe under a domain that’s very similar to yours, and start stirring up trouble. If you’re someone people recognize I could hurt your reputation or scam people.
mastodon has a solution to this, where you can verify yourself with a website
It is difficult to control users, to ban them permanently etc. It is difficult to make money with federated software. You could maybe show ads. But nothing that’d make you rich.
That second point is a feature, not a bug.
To be fair if nobody can get rich from it the fediverse is probably going to stay a much nicer place than the rest of the internet. Profit motives are fine when you’re dealing with strangers but they always add an element of dishonesty to communities of people you intend to stick around with in my opinion, there’s no good faith when my presence is being monetised any more than a farmer has the best interests of their livestock in mind.
More of a wish than a challenge but federated identities would be awesome. Home instance offline? No problem, just switch servers. No need to try and sync settings and subscriptions between accounts.
Blockchains already do this with public key cryptography. Your “login and password” would just be a Mnemonic Phrase. The fediverse just distributes the public information to use that phrase.
Agreed, portability of accounts should be much higher priority that it currently seems to be on either mastodon or lemmy. But also, that limitation is not an option at all on non-federated platforms.
I just did this kinda. Lemmy.world has been a yoyo for weeks.
There’s this… https://github.com/aidandenlinger/lasim/blob/main/README.md
Which could be improved to make this happen without user interaction.
1: Anything that’s federated is public (to instance admins) and can’t be reliably deleted.
For ActivityPub, that’s pretty much everything except user account.
For email (SMTP) that’s sender, recipient, subject, and usually body.
Etc. Instance admins can log whatever they want. Laws like the GDPR or CCPA don’t apply to all instances.
2: User signup is much harder because choice paralysis over which instance to join often sets in. That in turn leads to default recommendations, resulting in centralization in a few instances. E.g. lemmy.world, beehaw.org, sh.itjust.works, lemmy.ml for lemmy, Gmail, Apple mail, MS Live email, AWS email options for email.
For your point 1) The same applies to any other social media or good old phpBB forums that some clubs still use. GDPR still apply as soon as you log personal data of an European user. So if an instance admin does shit with the data they can be charged.
GDPR isn’t that complicated, tons of small non profit structure (e.g a sport club) deal with personal data without any issue. If you don’t spy your user and do the minimum needed amount of data processing your data privacy policy can hold in a couple of lines. It get huge because big social media spy us
Old-school forums have single points of contact. They’re no more private than ActivityPub, but a takedown to the admin is a takedown of all instances. Obviously public data can be cached or archived, so as always you have to send takedowns to every archival service, search engine, and any CDNs too.
The GDPR “applies” whenever an EU resident’s data is stored. The enforcement requires some presence in the EU by the entity storing the data. For multinational companies that means if they have any banking services there (e.g. taking payments from EU customers) they have a presence. For individual fediverse admins, that’s not necessarily a concern. At worst their instance’s domain would get blacklisted to EU users.
From running multiple accounts across multiple instances, I’ve found that each instance feels like a separate forum of posts. Sure some of the big ones federate with each other, but that still doesn’t lead to being able to see the same federated content when you log into infosec.pub or lemmy.world. I think a lot of the differences in content lie with which instances federate with which other instances.
Yep it’s important to pick an instance that doesn’t block many other instances, if you want as much content as possible.
This is good and bad to me. I like the idea of a series of little neighborhoods. You know your home well, and have a place of comfort if you don’t feel like dealing with the wider world, but it’s all still very accessible (or ideally very accessible. Discovery is an ongoing issue without for you algos). Forums were nice, but it was always annoying if you were on more than one proboards (or what have you) and you were switching sites to see your variety of friends. Discord solves the same problems, but I also don’t trust that company at all.
Reddit gave you that comfort zone for certain topics, but only if it’s not a popular or contentious one. And like it’s nice to be able to have my comfort zone be more diverse than my 5 favorite topics.
Instances being defederated over things like petty drama. Unless it’s one that’s actively allowing nasty content or people, I don’t think that should be the first course of action like some admins seem to treat it as.
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You have to run and maintain several instances. What if one instance goes down forever?
Then all of its content was already synced to the other instances. And, you technically can re-activate the down instance’s communities on another instance, if needed.
I didn’t knew that content was cached on other instances. Wdym by re-activate? Can you migrate the community and its contents unchanged into another instance?
Everything on lemmy is synced (federated) to all other subscribing instances.
That is how i am currently reading/commenting on this post. I am interacting with the synced copy of the post and comments which was sent to my instance. As well- you are interacting with the copy which was sent to your instance.
I could technically flip a few values in the database and tell my instance that this is a local community, and I would then be able to manage it as such.
Where I notice the most annoying downside to me most is Mastodon: You cannot see any previous discussions and interactions.
When some makes a post I see zero replies, zero boosts, and zero likes when viewing it from another instance. The user also has zero previous posts and zero people following them. When opening the profile on their instance I see hundreds of previous posts, a couple of thousand follows and the toot in question has some likes, some boosts, and a lot of replies.
You cannot censor content. I could make an instance where I post the most vile things and even if 99.99% of lemmy hated my guts and wanted me shutdown I could continue to host my instance and federate with like minded communities. In a non federated platform Admins would delete my instance.
This is a positive to some and a negative to others.
With great powers come great responsibility.
Each individual actor in the system has less incentive to provide value and no incentive to maintain continuity. As a result, you are basically reliant on a small number of unconnected and pseudonymous volunteers who could walk away at any time. Add to that managing a server with thousands of users is basically a part-time job with little pay and you have a system that is sustained by the kindness of a couple dozen strangers.
That’s why I usually try to interact a bit with my two instance admins on one of my alts. It’s a small instance (less than 100 users at the moment), and I trust them enough that they would warn us and allow someone to take overall if they wouldn’t feel like managing the instance anymore.
