this post was submitted on 12 Jun 2023

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Fediverse

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This magazine is dedicated to discussions on the federated social networking ecosystem, which includes decentralized and open-source social media platforms. Whether you are a user, developer, or simply interested in the concept of decentralized social media, this is the place for you. Here you can share your knowledge, ask questions, and engage in discussions on topics such as the benefits and challenges of decentralized social media, new and existing federated platforms, and more. From the latest developments and trends to ethical considerations and the future of federated social media, this category covers a wide range of topics related to the Fediverse.

founded 2 years ago

While trying to wrap my head around the concept of the Fediverse, I made this map. How did I do? (media.kbin.social)

submitted 1 year ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

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[–] [email protected] 4 points 1 year ago (6 children)

That visualization shows exactly why the whole thing here is overwhelming for the average user. I feel that the federated aspect should be less focused on when talking about the fediverse. It makes sense to explain it, but many explanations on how to switch to lemmy/kbin/whatever put the whole federation thing on top of the list. I think this is a big turnoff for casual users/lurkers. They do not understand that they don't need to understand the structure of the fediverse to join, enjoy content and engage with others, so they don't even start.

I'm sure a visualization could help with that, but having a bunch of boxes and circles with arrows all over the place isn't exactly something that will mitigate the feeling of being overloaded with information. I'm not saying you didn't do a great job. "Arrows all over the place" is not meant to devaluate your work, on the contrary, it perfectly captures the feeling i have about the fediverse, but I would not use that image as an ad for it.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 1 year ago (2 children)

true. I am literate in internet/computer yet the idea in general is still confusing. Navigating is also abit jarring, and I dont understand some buttons and features like “boost”. It would be great for beginners to include a tutorial for navigating the UI and a short introduction of the fediverse in #teachmelikeim5 level

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Boost is a repost as far as I know :)

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 year ago (2 children)

Boost is a repost or retweet on mastodon, and in the microblog sections of kbin.

On thread comments, a boost pushes the top level comments to the top of the stack. It means "this is the shit, everyone's gotta read this first."

On the threads view, a boost pushes a thread up the list but not all the way to the top, so it's practically an upvote.

In all cases, if you have followers, it pushes the threads and microblog posts you boosted into their feed.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago (1 children)

I just wish boosting had a confirmation or a way to undo/delete (not sure if the Fediverse/ActivityPub supports this). My itchy Reddit migrant fingers have accidentally boosted several posts just because my monkey brain goes "ooh, large number" at this point :P

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago

The stuff you already boosted have a line under the boost button. You can take your boost back by hitting that again. It doesn't delete it from your followers' feeds obviously but it makes it easier for it to be overtaken by something that's boosted more.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago

AFAIK, boosts are only used to rank posts on kbin. Lemmy uses upvotes for that.

Boosts are necessary because they re-publish content to the group, and that pushes it out to people who subscribed to the group after the content was originally posted

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago

My understanding is that a "boost" is like a re-tweet or a "share". it reposts the content to boost visibility. whereas upvotes are like reddit upvotes or "likes".

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago (2 children)

Agree completely. The average user doesn't need to know any of this, at least not like right away. Just join on kbin.social like you would on Reddit and start using the site.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago (1 children)

its not that simple. If for example you want to join m/technology and the community in your own instance is empty, a new user will think that there are not users/traffic. You need to explain them somehow that the m/technology@another-instance is different community even though that they share kind of the same name (first part of the name).

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago (1 children)

I think thats why the fediverse will never take off with the majority of reddits users.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago

kind of agree. I cannot think of any way that this could be overcome. Something like having "default" communities but then this breaks the federalization. Where would this community be hosted and does this mean that there is a central entity? But still need at least a better search where one can easier discover communities from other instances. It is very tricky indeed

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago (2 children)

What I've been doing during switching, so far so good with kbin. A bit under polished, but otherwise a great solution, esp with being both a Twitter+reddit alt. Looking forward to seeing it's further development

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago

One thing to know is, the up and downvote buttons don't do anything to the placement of a comment or post. It's a general like-dislike marker.

If you want to upvote something as in the reddit functionality, boost it.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago

They do not understand that they don't need to understand the structure of the fediverse to join, enjoy content and engage with others, so they don't even start.

I think this is the biggest issue. People get so worried about how it works that they don't even try it out and get to see that it's actually pretty simple and works pretty much the same as reddit

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago (1 children)

The problem is that the user is necessarily confronted with the technical design of the fediverse from the moment they create an account. "Do I join lemmy.ml or lemmy.world or mastodon.social or kbin.social" can only really be answered by explaining how the fediverse works, because the simple answer is "it doesn't really matter but it also sort of does", which is profoundly unhelpful

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago

I totally agree. It was stressful trying to pick an instance before I really understood how it worked.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago (1 children)

The absolute best way to explain the fediverse is to not.

When I wrote a short guide to getting started on Mastodon I made deliberate efforts to completely ignore the technical side. The instance stuff does not need explaining. Nobody cares about that. They want to know how to find people to talk to on this Mastodon thing they heard about.

Nobody will tell you to try some chocolate by explaining the entire supply chain for all the ingredients that went into it. They say "try this delicious chocolate bar!" or words to that effect.

If you can't think of a USP for fedi that doesn't revolve around obscure technical details that most people do not and will never give a shit about, and that honestlly are kind of awkward to explain and sometimes even defend, well... I'd suggest going away and trying again.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago (1 children)

And people showed up on Mastodon, ignored how it all worked, complained that they couldn't find what they were looking for, refused to listen about how they could find it, and then fucked off.

Some rally basic level of understanding is helpful. Like the idea that "Mastodon" or "kbin" is not a single place, and that there are consequences to that that make things different here from centralized services.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Hmm, you are right with that. Maybe the focus shouldn't be on describing the underlying infrastructure before people join, but right after? So they have at least seen the building from inside before leaving again?

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago

This is a good idea. I joined Mastadon with the influx last November, got confused and didn't return until the current Reddit debacle. I'm trying harder now to understand, but what would have helped was 1) a simple guide to getting logged in and 2) finding content and 3) being able to view it and reply (including understanding if I was supposed to use hashtags, etc.). Get someone started with a short list of popular communities/magazines, THEN show them how to branch out. #trainingwheels

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago

No offense taken lol. I share many of your concerns about the viability of mass adoption of a complex system. The average user is not a computer scientist, and we can't expect them to have the time or patience to learn all this stuff: it needs to be intuitive and user friendly.

I think the Fediverse can get there, if not today, soon.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago (1 children)

I think this illustrates why this isn't a replacement for reddit for many people. The point of reddit is it brought community and discussion to one site. It's what killed decentralized forums, and sadly, I don't think the average user is going to go back to that.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago (1 children)

In general I think decentralisation is significantly oversold as a panacea, and conversely its advocates deliberately ignore that there are pretty concrete advantages to centralisation.

Worse, the advantages to centralisation are almost entirely on the end user experience side - "you can talk to anyone on the service no matter who!", "you only need to register one account!" - while the advantages of decentralisation are all remote and philosophical - "nobody can take it over!", "you can run your own service!". So centralised services will keep winning because they have the best pitch - or, at the very least, servers on decentralised services that become so big and have so many users that they are effectively centralised services all on their own (e.g. Mastodon.social, Kbin).

Most people don't care about philosophical stuff but they do care about having a usable service. It reminds me a bit of Linux advocates who preach the gospel about open source and how bad Microsoft is and how DRM will eat their nans or whatever, but fail to see the glaring issue that for 99% of users Windows works just fine and they don't actually care about anything philosophical, because they see their computer as a tool that plays a minor part in their life, rather than a means of self-actualisation.

That said, I think the best way to explain fediverse is to not. You don't need to tell people all the technical details, you just need to sell them on what they care about. Leading with decentralisation as your USP is a hiding to nothing because most people don't care - "it's a chill place here and you can do XYZ" will work far better. Anyone who cares will find out.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Centralization has another aspect that is simultaneously both good and bad: you can easily remove offensive content and problematic users. A centralized approach makes it very easy to remove cancerous people, groups, and content, while a decentralized approach makes that far harder. But in a centralized system, who defines what is cancerous content, et al.? Reddit did a great job at removing racist content, for instance (or, if you go back farther, they removed 'jailbait' and 'creepshots' communities, which were producing content that was just on the line of being obscene). But they also took a "both sides are bad" approach when it came to literal nazis v. antifascists.

I'm a Reddit refugee, so it's going to take me a while to learn to navigate this. And yeah, I've been kicked off Twitter, so Mastodon was already on my radar.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago

I believe disassociating from Nazis, CSAM, etc is still very possible in a distributed network like this, the instance admin just blacklists the instances they don't want to interact with. But it requires the user to find the server that best aligns with what they want to see. A centralized admin won't do it for them.

[–] [email protected] 0 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Interesting. last night when I signed up I tried posting, and it seems kbin forces me to select a "magazine" even for the microblog feature? On mastodon and twitter I know you don't need to select a "community" or "subreddit" or whatever, so is there a way to make mastodon/twitter style posts without selecting a kbin magazine? Obviously for the reddit-style threads you'd need it?

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago

The random magazine is meant for anything that doesn't belong in a specific magazine, so that is the one you should post to for uncategorized/random microblogging.

[–] [email protected] 0 points 1 year ago (1 children)

I'm more of a visual learner and none of the explanations of the Fediverse included a detailed map of all the different entities involved. By all means, please make corrections, I'm sure there is at least one misunderstanding in there somewhere. Also not sure how Mastodon fits in, seems like the format would be incompatible with kbin and/or Lemmy. Thanks.

[–] [email protected] 0 points 1 year ago (1 children)

The part I'm getting tripped up revolves around accessing the content in another part of the fediverse. e.g., if I go to a lemmy instnace, it will ask for a log-in specfic to it (i.e. it doesn't recognize my kbin log-in). So what's the mechanism by which travel between platforms happens? If I understood correctly, some stuff will show up here that's been 'retweeted'. But what if I'm searching for content that lives in Lemmy or Mastodon instances?

Am I sort of making sense?

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago

You are making sense, just remember your login does not travel between kbin and lemmy. When you are on kbin, you can search for communities on the server you joined or across the fediverse. The way to do that is [email protected]

For example, say if I found out the beehaw.org server had an awesome gaming community, well I can just type [email protected] into the search box and then subscribe to it. It will then federated into the server (the server will start pulling in new posts - but not old posts) that means others can now see it too. That's why if you see the message that it's not fully federated and you might see more on the original instance.

Your login is just a place to reside but with the fediverse, you can pull in content to view. Which helps as you don't need multiple log ins for multiple services. I've seen a few people ask about people with the same username as theirs on other instances and that will happen but remember that your username is like email. You have [email protected], so whilst someone might share the same username, they'll never be on the same instance. That's how you tell others apart.

Hopefully that helps make sense!