Comment on Technology Connections' thoughts on Mastodon
hono4kami@pawb.social 4 weeks agoI agree!!!
Speaking of critique, this reply thread on Mastodon by him is probably worth reading (regardless whether you agree or not) mastodon.kangaroopunch.com/…/112996284620400056
AusatKeyboardPremi@lemmy.world 4 weeks ago
The link isn’t operational.
hono4kami@pawb.social 4 weeks ago
Sorry, try this one mas.to/@TechConnectify/113056731556590285
AusatKeyboardPremi@lemmy.world 4 weeks ago
Thanks. This works. I fully agree with comments made.
Jesus_666@lemmy.world 4 weeks ago
Honestly, this suggests to me that the ability to defederate might be a bug rather than an issue.
If my instance doesn’t talk to the instance at foobar.example, I might be unable to see (parts of) relevant discussions. This is worse for a microblog like Mastodon than it is in the threadiverse but it’s still something to keep in mind even over here. And most non-enthusiasts don’t want to have to do that.
Email is an example of a successful federated platform and it barely has defederation support. But in general all mail servers can talk to all other mail servers as long as they provide the right look-at-me-I’m-legitimate signaling. That makes email easy to use for regular people no matter if they use Gmail or their cousin’s self-hosted mail server.
Perhaps that is how at least the non-threaded fediverse should work… However, that would also mean that some instance hosting heinous shit would keep being visible to everyone. It’s a tricky problem.
Kichae@lemmy.ca 4 weeks ago
Couldn’t disagree more.
The simple fact of the matter is, the fediverse is local. Everything you interact with is locally hosted on whichever website you’re using. That means, if I’m running Mastodon or Lemmy on my website, I’m platforming everyone who has contact with my website.
And I’m not going to want to platform a lot of people. I’m not going to want to pay to host their posts. I’m not going to want to deal with dealing with other websites who refuse to moderate their instance, and who refuse to take out their trash. Suggesting that people should be forced to is how you ensure that people don’t run ActivityPub enabled websites at all, and you reduce the fediverse to a semi-centralized family of, like, 5 big websites.
hono4kami@pawb.social 4 weeks ago
This is what I have been thinking!!! Defederation is THE WORST feature of fediverse, and trust me, it will keep people away from joining the fediverse.
I just remembered that a year ago some artist I really liked joined Mastodon. I tried following it through my old account on kbin.social but somehow it doesn’t work, no clear error message. After asking around I figured it out: turns out said Mastodon instance defederated from kbin.social, with no valid reason given!!
Draconic_NEO@lemmy.world 4 weeks ago
Couldn’t disagree with you more, the thing about federation is that it isn’t viewing the content on the server it was posted on, it is crossposting it to all other federated servers. That means you are when federating remote content you are literally platforming it. That also means you are liable for it if it’s objectionable or illegal content. So being able to not accept those crossposts is important. Honestly defederation and limited federation are not as big of issues as you and others think they are, you can ignore the majority of the defederated servers and it’ll be fine, the issue comes when people want the world and aren’t entitles to have it, like I said in my other comment.
You are insanely naive for saying this. If you’d used non-corporate email servers, like the much smaller email providers out there (which are basically extinct at this point) you’d know just how wrong this actually is. Most smaller email providers out there are blocked or limited by the big ones and the ones that are blocked your mail will never reach the inboxes of people on the big servers, not even the spam folders on those servers. They won’t bounce it back to you either, so it’ll just go into the void.
Most email these days is used primarily by the all mighty trinity: Gmail, Outlook, and Yahoo, and a Few on Hotmail and AOL and while there are a few smaller companies out there like Proton, when it comes to something that isn’t a company or is self-hosted you can expect a lot of problems with domains being blacklisted, IPs being blacklisted, or both. And it’s actually much worse than defederation.
You’re beginning to realize why the decision to limit spam and illegal shit was chosen over catering to the people who want the whole federated world instead of what they’re allowed access to. Ultimately it is better for everyone if the depraved shit and spam gets blocked, than it is for the people who want the whole world to have their way. If you want the world, go to Nostr, you’ll learn why most people do not want the world.
twen@lemmy.world 4 weeks ago
There is less of defederation in the email network, because mail has been build to reach its destination no matter the path or the time, message must arrives even partially. (this was a premise of the US military, at ARPAnet). Even if a mailadmin blocks one server, mail could go another route. This is also the base of the internet, path is not the most straight forward direct link between source and destination (companies are usually against this structure)
AT or Mastodon don’t have this freedom or constraint (depend of one point of view).