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A lot of this boils down to consequences of lemmy.world being the largest instance: typical Reddit users beeline for it, trolls go there, larger comms so more frequent issues with moderation, people who fail to distinguish between "we shouldn't concentrate our activity into the largest instance" and "largest instance bad! EDIT WOW THANKS FOR LE GOLD TO LE KNEE KIND STRANGER!", so goes on.
Back when reddit* was just starting to fall to shit, I had already been dipping my toes in the mastodon water, and while I really liked the instance I was on it did not have enough people on it to properly surface good collections of off node traffic.
Knowing that Mastodon had the problem, I didn't dick around with smaller nodes. To be honest it's still a fight if you're on a node with only a handful of people, you have to do something to mitigate the lack of community traffic in the face of lacking discoverability.
People are doing that here though - e.g. the user Blaze made accounts on basically every instance, and subscribed to every community. This gets around the limitation where at least one user of an instance must subscribe to a community before it will even so much as show up for others to also subscribe. Really the developers should have made better automation so that this was not necessary, but... anyway it works, for now:-).
(If true) that's actually really terrible for federation performance, particularly because lemmy doesn't do batch synchronization. So basically every comment, post, like, and community is being sent to all Lemmy servers as individual sequential requests. That's a lot to handle.
Supposedly that will change with v0.19.6 (A recent discussion about that here: https://feddit.org/post/3524876), but yeah it's causing smaller instances such as Aussie.Zone to have delays of over 7 days.
I also expressed disbelief that this info would not be bundled somehow - at least put together a package for everything that happened across the entire instance in one second, or one minute could be far better, for servers that can't handle the per-second traffic?
Well that's good!
And right, I had the exact same thought... It seems like the lemmy devs are not highly experienced web developers, at least not that have worked on anything at the scale lemmy became after the Reddit exodus.
I thought at first that everything was simply slow to develop bc of using the Rust programming language.
Now I hold great excitement for the upcoming projects like Sublinks, Piefed, Mbin, and Tesseract (that one is more a front-end UI for whatever backend protocol). But Lemmy still has all the effort put into it in the past so it is ahead for that reason at least.
I'm eyeing Piefed and Sublinks. I've done a lot with Python and Java... Maybe at some point I'll find the time to contribute more than the bit of PR review I've done for Sublinks.
I'm also watching mastodon, particularly because they're working on groups... And I don't mind the Twitter style, I've just come to prefer following topics over people... And hashtags just get flooded with low effort crap.
Yup.
People being able to contribute more readily should really help the development move along faster, methinks, even though it is starting from behind and needs to play catch-up for awhile.
There's a whole (opt-in) service for it
That's nice! ☺️
I feel like ActivityPub implemented federation in a really weird way, and that's what causes problems like @[email protected] is reporting, or the issue that Blaze is addressing through multi-accounting. Perhaps we shouldn't be sharing content across instances but only credentials.
For example. If you're registered to instance A, and B federates with A, then B would let you post from your A account as if you were registered to B. Then let the retrieval of the content of different instances up to the front-end, instead of mirroring it.
No, the whole point for the federation is to share the content. For one, it allows redundancy so that if a rogue mod or admin decided to delete a bunch of stuff, then every other instance still retains copies of what came from it.
But that said, having to keep everything up to the second, in batches of a single action, is extremely limiting. If I downvote someone with an accidental button press, then undownvote them, then upvote - that could have been just one net interaction to send, but instead it is three.
Redundancy is better handled through specialised mirrors, similar in spirit to reveddit. That would be even more transparent than the current system - as the mirrors could translate actions like content removal into content highlighting, so it would stick out like a sore thumb*. This would also throw the burden associated with redundancy (transmission, storage, removal of clearly illegal content) into a few machines, instead of the whole network.
I'm aware that it's a weaker form of federation than the current one but, as long as the front-end handles simultaneous multi-account and merges the feeds of the instances that you're registered to, it's already addressing the main needs:
*currently you can only find a piece of removed content if you know that it exists.
At a wild guess, it could literally be the communism?
No really, I'm serious: what you are describing sounds to me like there is a sense of "ownership", as in an instance owns a community, whereupon everything else is lesser than the owner with respect to that particular content - e.g. the others "mirror" the content that is "owned" by the instance that the community is on. A master/slave relationship, in computer science terminology.
In contrast, ActivityPub sounds to me (caveat: I've never read the source) like everyone is equal, hence why every action is shared equally by all. A distributed burden. Except without the major traditional benefits of it being distributed - i.e. Aussie.Zone cannot simply connect to some other server instance with less physical distance between it and Lemmy.World, no it must go straight to the source, even when that results in a 7-day delay (and even that cutoff is only because things older than that simply get deleted).
On the other hand, there's nothing stopping someone from not respecting the deletion requests, and instead highlighting that content, in the current Lemmy framework. It would definitely be a deviation from the standard codebase though. And therefore every time there's an update or patch, there would have to be a merge event to keep that feature functional.
I wonder if the reason your idea is not done is bc it relies too much on "trusting" the client for security reasons? Although... tbf I'm not certain how much that would differ from how things are now.
I'm not sure if the analogy with communism holds well, as communism implies post-scarcity. Perhaps socialism - if you see the current AP protocol as the Soviet economy from 1918 to 22, my proposal is basically a Lenin style New Economic Policy: a step back (less federation) to take two steps forward later (federation growth).
As for the mirrors, secondary (as in backup) would be a good analogy; their main reason to exist would be to make admins+mods accountable. ("Why did you remove [content]? It's within the rules, even if you disagree with it!"). And ideally it should be possible for a single mirror to work for multiple instances, specially smaller ones. In the meantime, the actual (non-mirror) instances would be on equal grounds.
As far as I know, as someone who didn't read the source either, that's accurate. aussie.zone is basically mirroring the content of federated instances, to service its users, then when some aussie.zone user posts something there the other instances mirror it.
In theory, there isn't. In practice:
If I had to take a guess, the reason why W3C, Lemmer-Webber and Prodromou created the AP the current way is because, while you're raising a baby, you never know the growing pains that it'll have as a teen.
Awwww, we're growing up!?:-) So even if the Fediverse eventually (in let's say a decade or two hence) becomes merely an example of what not to do, still we are in on the ground floor as we all go through these growing pains, together:-).
And we must be doing something right. Or perhaps it's that there merely aren't any other good options. But this is where the people who are good to talk with are, currently. Like you:-D.
Yup, we are growing. It isn't just in number of users, or their activity here, but also in the number of platforms using the protocol - and that's one of the things that the ActivityPub developers did really right: they picked the concept of federation from earlier protocols/standards (like OStatus), and made it usable for more than just microblogging. The impact of that is twofold:
(I also like chatting with you!)
That's a good perspective. Mbin, Piefed, and Sublinks are all now implementing the ActivityPub protocol as well as Lemmy, meaning that even if "Lemmy" were to go away or fall behind or sth, the Fediverse overall would remain (as you said, and I am agreeing:-).
And entire new categories of things too - like I think that something as central as wikipedia shouldn't be federated (Russia, China, and North Korea would all have their "set of facts", separately from what the Western world uses, and e.g. Taiwan would be banned from using the latter and thereby forced to use the former, etc.), but for more niche concepts like individual video games or movie fandoms that's a great idea, so that just one single point of failure does not cause loss of all content.:-)
(and unfortunately as we see with the Internet Archive getting attacked recently, that aspect is revealed to be of greater importance than I think most people give it credit for - it's not easy to keep something up-to-date, particularly with "recent" edits, and ActivityPub as we see does so upon literally every single change, whether you wanted it to or not!?:-P)
Ease discovery of federated communities has been funded: https://join-lemmy.org/news/2024-09-11_-_New_NLnet_funding_for_Lemmy
Also, thank you for the comment above
That's some great news! It's great to see that the issues are being ironed out.
Giving me fucking flashbacks