this post was submitted on 08 Jun 2023
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Yeah exactly. I think what we need is decentralization and a move back to smaller hobbyist message boards - the costs of running such communities is more sustainable for individual owners and they are not so big that their owners would look to sell them out.
That's certainly my hope for the federated model. Scope and scale have been issues since the advent of social media, which encouraged users to centralize all of their interactions in one spot. One hundred people shooting the shit on a specific interest will always be a better experience than orders of magnitude more people who know nothing of the context spouting off to feel good about themselves.
I found the quality of my Reddit interactions had gone so far downhill that I took a month off to start the year. I'd gotten sucked into the belief that upvotes == quality of what I was writing, which creates perverse motivations completely unrelated to being more informed about the world.
I mean upvotes are related to how old a post is.
Anyways I don't expect places like Lemmy to fix the ills of social media - eventually running something like this will cost their owners too much money and something will have to give. Also moderation has always been an issue, even with the message boards of old.
Agreed on the last point. That's part of what I was alluding to in terms of scope and scale. The smaller communities from early internet days (my experience overlaps with the time of BBSs but never included them) were pretty light on moderation. If you were a dick on IRC, you got booted. If you spouted off about politics in places that weren't about politics on phpBB, you were ignored then booted. These days, that sort of dynamic has moved to Discord, with people expecting that they should be able to say whatever they want, wherever they want everywhere else.
But I feel you're begging the question on funding. The ownership and profit model is the problem. User subscriptions can solve that funding issue in a vacuum; reality tends to be a bit messier, but I'm hoping we'll find that it works.
Well on the Lemmy subreddit, some people are already complaining about moderation issues here, and how you can't block federated servers you don't want to see individually - that is up to the federated server itself. Honestly, while Lemmy seems cool, I can see issues arising as it scales, especially with regards to moderation.
Beehaw seems to be fine, but some users have explained that they take issue with Lemmy.ml's moderation - chiefly from the main developer who created this platform to begin with. And that's troubling too. For example, on Lemmy.ml, any talk about Russia or China (or anything similar) is banned. You can't safely talk about the war in Ukraine here without getting banned from the main federated server.
As Lemmy gets bigger there will be more and larger communities that aren't on Lemmy.ml, and if you're worried about the software itself, aside from being open source, there's also already a fediverse alternative called kbin. You can even used it to follow Lemmy communities if you want.
The whole point of the fediverse is that it can't reaaly get screwed up by a small number of people.
I'm versed in ActivityPub to the extent the Twitter imbroglio landed Mastodon on Ars and Techdirt, so ... not very well. But wouldn't someone who really wants control over which instances they see be able to spin up one of their own and then just not let people join?
I guess. I'm kind of new to whole idea of federation myself, never jumped on Mastodon, for example. But we will see as Lemmy and its federated instances scale up.
I didn't get on Mastodon either, as I never got the appeal of Twitter.
I misread the last sentence in your prior response the first time around. That's worrisome. What's the practical impact of being banned on the main server? "Decentralized" is not the term I'd use for a network where one node has absolute control.
Let's say you sign up on Beehaw. You post a comment that gets you banned from Lemmy.ml. That means your posts will no longer show up to users of Lemmy.ml. If all federated instances were equal, then that wouldn't be a huge problem; your comments will still receive enough interactions. But right now, since most of the activity is on Lemmy.ml, getting banned could reduce the quality of your experience on Lemmy as a whole, i.e., you receiving fewer interactions from your posts.
So, you'd only be able to interact with those on instances that believe the Ukraine war is a valid topic of discussion? Kinda seems like a feature. Reddit is the easy example of why quantity is not my goal in online interaction ...
Yeah I imagine as Lemmy scales you are going to see moderation issues. But that's message board culture in general.
Wait is that really how that works? Geez..that doesn't seem right.
Edit; on second thought, I do kind of see how this would be beneficial...on certain topics. Okay, I'm not sure how to feel about that exactly yet.
@Powderhorn @rimlogger the cool thing about decentralization and activitypub is that I'm replying to you now from a Mastodon instance. The conversation isn't as nicely threaded but it works.
Yep, can always make your own instance and look at whatever instances you want
@rimlogger @tango_octogono there is good argument to be made that these "unified services" were created to monetize them in first place.
Said that, federation as a concept of new era of social networking is good foundation. Hope it sticks and we work out quirks and people learn how to use it.
That's what I've been thinking, as well -- if a message board (or any other service) doesn't reach that critical user mass where it's no longer sustainable, then there's less chances of it selling out