Both are correct. I don’t see the Fediverse ever becoming as large as the billionaire platform for the precise reason that it isn’t run by billionaires with gigantic advertising budgets. As such, the Fediverse will not have the large numbers of users and hence, will be quieter.
That being said, the Fediverse IS an alternative to the billionaire platforms - especially for people who desire smaller, more intimate communities and - perhaps most importantly - controlled and governed by the people who use it.
Preach. I’m happy to only hang out with the sort of people who see the value in social media by the people and for the people. Sometimes it’s messy, some of us are kinda annoying, but it’s always going to be better than corpo shit.
One of the reasons that billionaire controlled tech platforms become so mainstream IS their ability to grow and spread, and eventually become de facto means of communication online.
This allows them to break out of the early adopter, technical space and spread to a wider audience
The Fediverse is decentralized, which means that it cannot (or at least it would be very, very difficult) be shut down by anyone. On an individual level, any user is free to start their own instance or community with their own rules in place should another instance or community become undesirable. If there is something you don’t like or that is somehow stifling to you, start your own and make it the way you want it.
I can start an instance right now. But that doesn’t mean it will have any kind of importance. If I can create new spaces, and let’s say it grows, wouldn’t the problems from the first instance just carry over.
So I’m wondering how this is a solution to safe guard against tech billionaires?
Because it isn’t a singular space. An instance that goes bad can be tethered from the rest of the wider network, and abandoned, leaving it on its own.
I can start an instance right now. But that doesn’t mean it will have any kind of importance. If I can create new spaces, and let’s say it grows, wouldn’t the problems from the first instance just carry over.
I don’t know what you mean by “problems with the first instance”.
Ok please humor me then here. Can you walk me through a situation where an instance would untether itself. One day lemmy becomes super popular. People notice it as a platform to get information on. Millions of views an hour. Peter Thiel is paying chinese click farms to post manosphere content in popular lemmy communities. Musk is linking “no kings 5.0” lemmy posts to his followers on X who are brigading the comments. The moderators of the most popular lemmy.world communities are Marvel executives and Billionare Pedophiles.
So now we abandon it and leave. What does that mean as far as protecting that instance from that same thing happening?
We’ve cut the hyrda’s head clean off. Now what? Do users all move to the new instance? Is all the bad from the first instance just going to contain itself to that instance? What protection is in place?
Ok please humor me then here. Can you walk me through a situation where an instance would untether itself. One day lemmy becomes super popular. People notice it as a platform to get information on. Millions of views an hour. Peter Thiel is paying chinese click farms to post manosphere content in popular lemmy communities. Musk is linking “no kings 5.0” lemmy posts to his followers on X who are brigading the comments. The moderators of the most popular lemmy.world communities are Marvel executives and Billionare Pedophiles.
I think this is so ridiculous as to essentially constitute fantasy. Lemmy.world, the largest Lemmy instance has about 40% of the active userbase (and declining slowly as a share of overall users) out of a pool of about 40k users. I don’t think that’s sufficient if Lemmy.world tried to cut itself off from every other network, they’d shed a lot of users who have people and communities they interact with outside of the main instance.
If Lemmy became popular, it across the instances would become popular. Not just one instance.
If for some reason a single instance did become hyperpopular and obnoxious to interact on, the lemmy software would still be accessible to rebuild another ecosphere elsewhere.
So now we abandon it and leave. What does that mean as far as protecting that instance from that same thing happening?
I’m not sure you know what an “instance” is. Can you tell me what you think an instance is?
paying chinese click farms to post manosphere content
I block people, I block instances, I block communities. Problem solved. It looks like you’re stirring shit like an annoying russian agent that would love to stir shit.
You know what I’ll do after reading all the comments in this thread? I’ll block you because you’re annoying, and then the problem will be solved.
I think you should take a more constructivist approach - what we have now, rather than what we might have in the future. Currently we have a network of like 20 major servers, mostly federated with each other. If one of those servers becomes insanely popular and overrun with bots and garbage, the rest will simply defederate from it. From the perspective of users on those other servers, they’ve only lost 5% of the network they liked. From the perspective of users who were on the popular server before it went to shit, they now have to move servers but still have 95% of the old network as they remember it.
Do users all move to the new instance?
What incentive is there for them to move? By the very nature of hype explosions, they are exponential, and as such most users will have joined when it was already quite popular. They won’t remember the “good old days” of their server being federated, so for them it’s fine to be isolated on a garbage server, at least initially. I suspect if something like this were to happen, most other servers will also limit signups for some time, to keep the spirit of the network alive and growing organically.
I’ve long surmised that the future of lemmy / activitypub is a fragmented one. Federation only works if everyone instances are participating in good faith. There are instances that are generally not federated with because they do not participate in good faith.
If at any point you feel that “billionaires” are encroaching on your experience, there will always be a next refuge.
All scaled Internet sites, no matter the country, shows that there needs to be control of some sort. The problem is that there isn’t a way to create a distributed way of control/ownership.
But there is. Between the two options, moderation or community controls, I’ll pick community controls.
But this is kind of my point. Lemmy should not be recreating what we already know end up as a tool that is used by authoritarians to control us. Lemmy should be generating more new ideas and testing them out. New instances with new features. Some will work some won’t. It’s why I get a little pissed off seeing people who claim to be leftist, claim they’ll punch a nazi, claim that Trump and Bezos and capitalism is responsible for great suffering who them go on to just use lemmy for posting feel good fun time cat pictures and moth memes. We should be doing more. Because at some point we’ll need tools and by the time we need them we’re not going to have time to fiddle fuck trying to get them to work. We needed tools 15 years ago.
Including billionaires or heritage foundation or Thiel. Also what would you do with this node? Significance matters right now. Numbers and engagement matters. The left have lost significance and engagement year over year. You can stand up a node but how does this safe guard our spaces from being over run?
But they exist still. My assumption here is it wasn’t always a shit hole. That the shit hole occurs when a few poor features of digital spaces are exploited. Vote manipulations. Moderation capture. Linking posts and communities by accounts like Libs of TT who brigade. And once you de-federate, what stops them from jumping to any other instances you enjoy?
Keep mind that Trump’s truth social is a Mastodon instance. But no one federates with it (by design; they never turned federation on on purpose). That doesn’t mean that other mastodon instances are made worse because it’s there.
You’re saying that because assholes have their own space, that we can’t?
Your point makes no sense. Do you understand federation and defederation? It’s not a tool of censorship. It’s literally the solution to the problem you’re complaining about.
I really don’t think you understand how this works.
If I start an instance, it is impossible for you to censor me, on my instance. Even if you were a billionaire. I cannot censor you on other federated sites, but I can defederate from a site which is run by billionaire assholes. They can have their space, and I can have mine and there doesn’t need to be any cross pollution.
It is impossible to censor anyone within their own instance. But you can block instances.
This is not a single site. It is dozens, or hundreds, or thousands, or millions, and so on. In theory, every person on the planet could have their own instance and no one could censor them.
Everyone can create an instance (Well, at least anyone who can pay for a domainname and hosting, which is the basic requirement for every webservice)
As default, instances federate with each other
Instances that are bad neighbors get defederated
That’s it, basically. Even if someone bought up all instances and domainnames (which would require that server admins sell them, which i can’t see many doing, or else they wouldn’t run a fediverse service in the first place), there’s nothing stopping you from creating a new instance outside of the control of this person the same day. It literally cannot be simply taken over by, say, Microsoft.
Right, and I’m thinking this is not actually a solid way to protect fediverse from what is happening everywhere else.
We can all create instances, but there needs to be engagement for it to matter. I’m not looking at this from the point of view of “what can I do to enjoy my time on the internet while my rights are taken away and I’m told my sister should go to jail for wanting an abortion”
There is a pattern that occurs with seizing digital spaces. It starts small. They begin dog whistling in small communities. Not enough to get banned. Just enough to get reactions. Based off the reaction they target a few of the weaker ones. Whistles get louder. They link those to their influencers who post to their base. That base begin to show up and the community begins to fracture. Mods get overwhelmed. Ask for help to increase mod team. Some of the new mod team are the very people poisoning the community or are affiliated. The new moderators make it worse. Users begin to block or leave the communities. More dog whistles. More growth from the right until the community is captured. They move on to target another bigger community and are now using the first community as a pool to feed into the bigger one and turn it. So you can de-federate but nothing really stops the attacks. There is no real mechanism right now to guard against what has happened as far as I see it.
If lemmy were to grow as big as other sites, it will be just as likely to swing hard right unless something else is done.
The “swing to the hard right” comes as soon as more normies arrive. There are basically two ways this goes:
a) badly behaved normies get the boot. comes with the side effect of keeping the cost for instance admins low and the work for mod teams small, but also means that we stay a niche. I have no issues with this.
b) normies come here and do as they always do. this is your scenario. Since normies - since they are normies - will simply swarm to single instances, as we saw at the API exodus, the rest of the fediverse will sooner or later defederate from those single instances if they aren’t able to keep their normie horde in check. This is fine, actually. If i really want to look at something only the normies are talking about, i can simply fire up my normie-instance account and see all i want.
Since we have a simple mechanism of keeping badly behaved instances in check, i cannot see how your scenario actually comes to fruit.
Both a) and b) only works for so long. We’re not talking just about users. We’re talking about coordinated efforts by group’s backed by financial support to slowly take over. I’ve seen them go so far as getting themselves onto mod teams. They have it down to a science mean if we’re not making them rewrite their books constantly then lemmy is just going to go the way of all other platforms.
I do not agree to your premise that we can’t do anything against your scenario. It’s simply a matter of moderation or the lack thereof. Compromised Instances will sooner than later get defederated.
Best Example: lemmygrad.ml or lemmy.ml - those are the instances of the lemmy coders, which are hard auth-left, and even they got defederated by most of the fediverse, and piefed was created (besides other reasons) to get a codebase that isn’t dependent on russia-apologists.
nothing. it’s at the mercy of the instance admins or those who host the instances.
if at some point they get bought up, or decide to collude, you won’t have any options.
they are also subject to the national laws in which their servers reside.
people forget, reddit started as a server in someone’s basement too in 2005. it was a start up, then it got purchased by conde nast in 2006, who started advertising it. i found reddit in 2007 as part of Wired’s website feed.
reddit was niche until the mid 2010s, it became a top 10 website in 2017-2018, and now is 7th most popular site on the internet, just behind twitter/x.
Exactly. This was my thought. I remember early reddit. It was amazing and we all said the same shit
Being able to upvote and downvote posts meant anything could be posted and the community moderated. Then it all shifted. Voting no longer mattered other than to be smug and say you don’t agree. I look at lemmy and it seems like it took the moderator first approach. It took the worst parts of reddit.
The decentralization is there, but in theory the owner of the largest node could defederate from everyone else, forcing users to leave the largest instance or put up with it?
It would be a lot like Meta in that way - the only reason it has survived is because everyone was already there and there’s no way in hell to get everyone to switch to the same new thing. I genuinely don’t know which direction users would go, lemmy users are an odd bunch.
lemmy users who are ideological tend to just align with the ideology of their instance, and are happy to defederate from instances that don’t align with their political beliefs.
and i don’t really blame them. a lot of instances are tiny, but very active, and extremely toxic in their userbase. the majority of hate speech and hostility I get on the fediverse comes overwhelmingly from a small group of instances, which I eventually just blocked.
and it makes sense if an admin has their instance’s communities brigaded by one of these other instances, they should probably just block it entirely for the health of their instance’s users.
If the Fediverse gets big, it won’t be via Lemmy unless there is a fork. The devs have plainly stated that they aren’t going to develop Lemmy to handle the scale of Reddit.
Both are correct. I don’t see the Fediverse ever becoming as large as the billionaire platform for the precise reason that it isn’t run by billionaires with gigantic advertising budgets. As such, the Fediverse will not have the large numbers of users and hence, will be quieter.
That being said, the Fediverse IS an alternative to the billionaire platforms - especially for people who desire smaller, more intimate communities and - perhaps most importantly - controlled and governed by the people who use it.
as long as there are enough people and content here, why should we even care if everyone isnt here? I dont even want every idiot here.
Preach. I’m happy to only hang out with the sort of people who see the value in social media by the people and for the people. Sometimes it’s messy, some of us are kinda annoying, but it’s always going to be better than corpo shit.
This.
One of the reasons that billionaire controlled tech platforms become so mainstream IS their ability to grow and spread, and eventually become de facto means of communication online.
This allows them to break out of the early adopter, technical space and spread to a wider audience
Let me rephrase then. What is there to protect the Fediverse from control?
The Fediverse is decentralized, which means that it cannot (or at least it would be very, very difficult) be shut down by anyone. On an individual level, any user is free to start their own instance or community with their own rules in place should another instance or community become undesirable. If there is something you don’t like or that is somehow stifling to you, start your own and make it the way you want it.
How is that going to protect the space?
I can start an instance right now. But that doesn’t mean it will have any kind of importance. If I can create new spaces, and let’s say it grows, wouldn’t the problems from the first instance just carry over.
So I’m wondering how this is a solution to safe guard against tech billionaires?
Because it isn’t a singular space. An instance that goes bad can be tethered from the rest of the wider network, and abandoned, leaving it on its own.
I don’t know what you mean by “problems with the first instance”.
Ok please humor me then here. Can you walk me through a situation where an instance would untether itself. One day lemmy becomes super popular. People notice it as a platform to get information on. Millions of views an hour. Peter Thiel is paying chinese click farms to post manosphere content in popular lemmy communities. Musk is linking “no kings 5.0” lemmy posts to his followers on X who are brigading the comments. The moderators of the most popular lemmy.world communities are Marvel executives and Billionare Pedophiles.
So now we abandon it and leave. What does that mean as far as protecting that instance from that same thing happening?
We’ve cut the hyrda’s head clean off. Now what? Do users all move to the new instance? Is all the bad from the first instance just going to contain itself to that instance? What protection is in place?
I think this is so ridiculous as to essentially constitute fantasy. Lemmy.world, the largest Lemmy instance has about 40% of the active userbase (and declining slowly as a share of overall users) out of a pool of about 40k users. I don’t think that’s sufficient if Lemmy.world tried to cut itself off from every other network, they’d shed a lot of users who have people and communities they interact with outside of the main instance.
If Lemmy became popular, it across the instances would become popular. Not just one instance.
If for some reason a single instance did become hyperpopular and obnoxious to interact on, the lemmy software would still be accessible to rebuild another ecosphere elsewhere.
I’m not sure you know what an “instance” is. Can you tell me what you think an instance is?
I block people, I block instances, I block communities. Problem solved. It looks like you’re stirring shit like an annoying russian agent that would love to stir shit.
You know what I’ll do after reading all the comments in this thread? I’ll block you because you’re annoying, and then the problem will be solved.
I think you should take a more constructivist approach - what we have now, rather than what we might have in the future. Currently we have a network of like 20 major servers, mostly federated with each other. If one of those servers becomes insanely popular and overrun with bots and garbage, the rest will simply defederate from it. From the perspective of users on those other servers, they’ve only lost 5% of the network they liked. From the perspective of users who were on the popular server before it went to shit, they now have to move servers but still have 95% of the old network as they remember it.
What incentive is there for them to move? By the very nature of hype explosions, they are exponential, and as such most users will have joined when it was already quite popular. They won’t remember the “good old days” of their server being federated, so for them it’s fine to be isolated on a garbage server, at least initially. I suspect if something like this were to happen, most other servers will also limit signups for some time, to keep the spirit of the network alive and growing organically.
An instance doesn’t need to federate with others.
I’ve long surmised that the future of lemmy / activitypub is a fragmented one. Federation only works if everyone instances are participating in good faith. There are instances that are generally not federated with because they do not participate in good faith.
If at any point you feel that “billionaires” are encroaching on your experience, there will always be a next refuge.
Truth Social is Mastodon, its just not federated, either is Gab for that matter (thank fuck).
Bluesky needs a bridge and alas assholes keep making then
All scaled Internet sites, no matter the country, shows that there needs to be control of some sort. The problem is that there isn’t a way to create a distributed way of control/ownership.
But there is. Between the two options, moderation or community controls, I’ll pick community controls.
But this is kind of my point. Lemmy should not be recreating what we already know end up as a tool that is used by authoritarians to control us. Lemmy should be generating more new ideas and testing them out. New instances with new features. Some will work some won’t. It’s why I get a little pissed off seeing people who claim to be leftist, claim they’ll punch a nazi, claim that Trump and Bezos and capitalism is responsible for great suffering who them go on to just use lemmy for posting feel good fun time cat pictures and moth memes. We should be doing more. Because at some point we’ll need tools and by the time we need them we’re not going to have time to fiddle fuck trying to get them to work. We needed tools 15 years ago.
The devs have flat out stated they aren’t going to develop those tools. I don’t know if they would integrate those tools if developed by others.
That anyone can run a node. I could put one in my basement.
Including billionaires or heritage foundation or Thiel. Also what would you do with this node? Significance matters right now. Numbers and engagement matters. The left have lost significance and engagement year over year. You can stand up a node but how does this safe guard our spaces from being over run?
I can defederate from those instances. Problem solved. So can you.
But they exist still. My assumption here is it wasn’t always a shit hole. That the shit hole occurs when a few poor features of digital spaces are exploited. Vote manipulations. Moderation capture. Linking posts and communities by accounts like Libs of TT who brigade. And once you de-federate, what stops them from jumping to any other instances you enjoy?
Keep mind that Trump’s truth social is a Mastodon instance. But no one federates with it (by design; they never turned federation on on purpose). That doesn’t mean that other mastodon instances are made worse because it’s there.
So safe spaces for me, but not for thee?
You’re saying that because assholes have their own space, that we can’t?
Your point makes no sense. Do you understand federation and defederation? It’s not a tool of censorship. It’s literally the solution to the problem you’re complaining about.
Not sure what you mean here. I’m saying it is potentially not censorship proof and that we should be aware of that.
I really don’t think you understand how this works.
If I start an instance, it is impossible for you to censor me, on my instance. Even if you were a billionaire. I cannot censor you on other federated sites, but I can defederate from a site which is run by billionaire assholes. They can have their space, and I can have mine and there doesn’t need to be any cross pollution.
It is impossible to censor anyone within their own instance. But you can block instances.
This is not a single site. It is dozens, or hundreds, or thousands, or millions, and so on. In theory, every person on the planet could have their own instance and no one could censor them.
What does one do with numbers and engagement on the Fediverse?
Share ideas. Build community. Raise awareness. You build hype.
With enough numbers and engagement you can resist the spread of the right and push back.
That’s it, basically. Even if someone bought up all instances and domainnames (which would require that server admins sell them, which i can’t see many doing, or else they wouldn’t run a fediverse service in the first place), there’s nothing stopping you from creating a new instance outside of the control of this person the same day. It literally cannot be simply taken over by, say, Microsoft.
Right, and I’m thinking this is not actually a solid way to protect fediverse from what is happening everywhere else.
We can all create instances, but there needs to be engagement for it to matter. I’m not looking at this from the point of view of “what can I do to enjoy my time on the internet while my rights are taken away and I’m told my sister should go to jail for wanting an abortion”
There is a pattern that occurs with seizing digital spaces. It starts small. They begin dog whistling in small communities. Not enough to get banned. Just enough to get reactions. Based off the reaction they target a few of the weaker ones. Whistles get louder. They link those to their influencers who post to their base. That base begin to show up and the community begins to fracture. Mods get overwhelmed. Ask for help to increase mod team. Some of the new mod team are the very people poisoning the community or are affiliated. The new moderators make it worse. Users begin to block or leave the communities. More dog whistles. More growth from the right until the community is captured. They move on to target another bigger community and are now using the first community as a pool to feed into the bigger one and turn it. So you can de-federate but nothing really stops the attacks. There is no real mechanism right now to guard against what has happened as far as I see it.
If lemmy were to grow as big as other sites, it will be just as likely to swing hard right unless something else is done.
The “swing to the hard right” comes as soon as more normies arrive. There are basically two ways this goes:
a) badly behaved normies get the boot. comes with the side effect of keeping the cost for instance admins low and the work for mod teams small, but also means that we stay a niche. I have no issues with this.
b) normies come here and do as they always do. this is your scenario. Since normies - since they are normies - will simply swarm to single instances, as we saw at the API exodus, the rest of the fediverse will sooner or later defederate from those single instances if they aren’t able to keep their normie horde in check. This is fine, actually. If i really want to look at something only the normies are talking about, i can simply fire up my normie-instance account and see all i want.
Since we have a simple mechanism of keeping badly behaved instances in check, i cannot see how your scenario actually comes to fruit.
Both a) and b) only works for so long. We’re not talking just about users. We’re talking about coordinated efforts by group’s backed by financial support to slowly take over. I’ve seen them go so far as getting themselves onto mod teams. They have it down to a science mean if we’re not making them rewrite their books constantly then lemmy is just going to go the way of all other platforms.
I do not agree to your premise that we can’t do anything against your scenario. It’s simply a matter of moderation or the lack thereof. Compromised Instances will sooner than later get defederated.
Best Example: lemmygrad.ml or lemmy.ml - those are the instances of the lemmy coders, which are hard auth-left, and even they got defederated by most of the fediverse, and piefed was created (besides other reasons) to get a codebase that isn’t dependent on russia-apologists.
nothing. it’s at the mercy of the instance admins or those who host the instances.
if at some point they get bought up, or decide to collude, you won’t have any options.
they are also subject to the national laws in which their servers reside.
people forget, reddit started as a server in someone’s basement too in 2005. it was a start up, then it got purchased by conde nast in 2006, who started advertising it. i found reddit in 2007 as part of Wired’s website feed.
reddit was niche until the mid 2010s, it became a top 10 website in 2017-2018, and now is 7th most popular site on the internet, just behind twitter/x.
Exactly. This was my thought. I remember early reddit. It was amazing and we all said the same shit Being able to upvote and downvote posts meant anything could be posted and the community moderated. Then it all shifted. Voting no longer mattered other than to be smug and say you don’t agree. I look at lemmy and it seems like it took the moderator first approach. It took the worst parts of reddit.
If you don’t understand the distinction between voting and federation, perhaps toy need to do some more reading?
Nothing I said implied this. We’re all having a discussion here. I don’t think this type of lazy statement helps anything.
User unfriendlyness.
Visually, Fediverse isn’t like reddit, instagram, or any other popular social media places.
You need to put in some effort to even browse it.
The decentralization is there, but in theory the owner of the largest node could defederate from everyone else, forcing users to leave the largest instance or put up with it?
It would be a lot like Meta in that way - the only reason it has survived is because everyone was already there and there’s no way in hell to get everyone to switch to the same new thing. I genuinely don’t know which direction users would go, lemmy users are an odd bunch.
lemmy users who are ideological tend to just align with the ideology of their instance, and are happy to defederate from instances that don’t align with their political beliefs.
and i don’t really blame them. a lot of instances are tiny, but very active, and extremely toxic in their userbase. the majority of hate speech and hostility I get on the fediverse comes overwhelmingly from a small group of instances, which I eventually just blocked.
and it makes sense if an admin has their instance’s communities brigaded by one of these other instances, they should probably just block it entirely for the health of their instance’s users.
I think we need to be okay with less users because the billionaire platforms use bots, anyways.
If the Fediverse gets big, it won’t be via Lemmy unless there is a fork. The devs have plainly stated that they aren’t going to develop Lemmy to handle the scale of Reddit.