I disagree that fediverse is inherently libertarian/anarchist. In fact, a big selling point is that you can find an instance the administration agrees with your politics and will implement moderation policy accordingly.
Comment on 41% of fediverse instances have blocked threads so far!!!
phillaholic@lemm.ee 9 months ago
Maybe a hot take, but if you want this big libertarian anarchist federated system you get all the pros and cons along with it. Not having a central authority means you have no real power to stop someone from coming in and taking it. It’s inevitable by design.
Pxtl@lemmy.ca 9 months ago
phillaholic@lemm.ee 9 months ago
If you consider each instance as the “person” it’s essentially libertarianism.
Tavarin@lemmy.ca 9 months ago
No, each instance is more like a country with it’s own laws, and trade agreements with other countries to share or block content.
phillaholic@lemm.ee 9 months ago
In real life you’re probably not traversing three or more countries in a single day. You’re much closer to small communities at this scale, and having all these differences at that level is terrible for community building. Reddit was complicated enough with subreddit specific rules for regular people. Now you may not be able to find the same content as your friend if they signed up for a different instance, which is suggested as a feature not a bug. It’s exactly the same time of idealism without thoughts of consequence that libertarianism has.
Lucia@eviltoast.org 9 months ago
Nah, the Fediverse is based on freedom of association while most people live in countries they were born in and leaving one is really hard in most cases. Not to mention that ‘self-hosting’ a state just for yourself would be considered an extremism by existing states.
The Fediverse is clearly a libertarian idea.
Maggoty@lemmy.world 9 months ago
Sure, to a certain extent. But having an ability to opt out is far healthier than the walled gardens we have now.
phillaholic@lemm.ee 9 months ago
In theory. In reality you’re bringing feather dusters to a nuclear bomb fight. A handful of hobbyists hosting instances with how many users? Couple hundred thousand? Against a 100 Billion dollar company with 3 Billion people? Yea good luck with that.
Kethal@lemmy.world 9 months ago
How do you think this works? Yes, Meta will partake in the Fediverse. No one is trying to stop that. That chart won’t get to 100% and no one cares if it does. People are just ensuring that there’s a place where Meta won’t be, and you don’t need billions to do that.
GluWu@lemm.ee 9 months ago
Look at a pie chart of “internet users of x type platform” from pre fediverse. If original internet dies and fedi does take off, it will be the same chart but they will be instances instead of www sites. There are still plenty of those prefacebook, premyspace forums on the www, it’s just only a few people use them.
pomodoro_longbreak@sh.itjust.works 9 months ago
What are we competing on exactly? Profitability? We’re not a company, we’re just a bunch of people talking among ourselves. This is like saying your casual Friday hangout with your buddies is no match for the likes of Rogers Telecom Combined International Userbase - like, by wtf metric? It’s not even a competition. They’re a company, and we’re a community.
We’ll just keep doing our thing, and if threads gets annoying then I’ll pressure my instance to block them, and if they don’t I’ll just move to a nicer place. 🤷
phillaholic@lemm.ee 9 months ago
If it’s no big deal why the immediate talk of defederating? And if they get annoying, every one of the instances I happen to follow something on has to defederate to keep the community at the same engagement level. I can personally block instances which is great, but that’s not helpful if the community starts posting there. It’s already sometimes difficult to keep topics together across who knows how many instances, with random defederation it makes it more difficult to experience lemmy with users on different instances.
It’s just my opinion, but the reddit backend wasn’t the important part that we lost, it’s the content and community. If my instance goes to shit I can move somewhere else, but I’m disconnected from my posts, follows, etc. that’s what I care about. Not the tech. I try not to, but I can’t help but be pessimistic on the idea when I feel like the point is being missed entirely.
Skullgrid@lemmy.world 9 months ago
the point of freedom is that authoritarians deserve it too, and when they want to use their freedom to take your freedom away, it’s fair game.
phillaholic@lemm.ee 9 months ago
That’s the tolerance paradox by another name.
Skullgrid@lemmy.world 9 months ago
correct.
rottingleaf@lemmy.zip 9 months ago
Things like fedipact are the main way of dealing with such abuse in ancap.
Funny, I’ve never gave a thought to this before, but Fediverse works on ancap principles. Even in pushing out ancaps.
Not even generally libertarian, but specifically ancap.
It’s also funny that the system I’m imagining and would prefer (if it weren’t imaginary) is closer to being generally libertarian and further from ancap.
chitak166@lemmy.world 9 months ago
There already is that someone, it’s the owner of the .world instances.
sir_reginald@lemmy.world 9 months ago
I’d say the system is working quite well, ever individual and/or community has the liberty to choose what to do about Meta.
That’s what federation is all about, no central power taking decisions in behalf of everyone else.
phillaholic@lemm.ee 9 months ago
Sure, but the rhetoric behind it is my point. Trying to get everyone to do it is antithetical to the design of the system.
dumpsterlid@lemmy.world 9 months ago
No, it is precisely the kind of action that we must take collectively in order to protect what we value about the fediverse. This is the work of maintaining a positive community space. If you don’t agree that is fine, genuinely I think it is good there is a diversity of opinions here, but it is pretty obvious to me that if we don’t have a lot of conversations about the importance of solidarity in defending the fediverse from corporate capture then history is just going to repeat itself.
…I am tired of history repeating itself, I like this place. I like you!
We can’t stop a massive corporation from interacting with open source, but we can choose whether massive corporations are allowed to get away with pretending they are benign members of an open source, federated community. At the very least, it raises the dollar amount these corporations must allocate in trying to convince us otherwise doesn’t it?
They have the money and time to convince us, even if you disagree with everything I say you can’t argue it isn’t a better strategy to be difficult to convince. Massive corporations will spend money and time up to the point marketing calculates the change in public perception is worth it and not a dollar further. They wouldn’t be doing their jobs well if they behaved otherwise and judging by how desirable those jobs are I feel like at least some of those people are pretty good at their jobs…
Plopp@lemmy.world 9 months ago
“No, it is precisely the kind of action that we must take collectively in order to protect what we value about the fediverse. This is the work of maintaining a positive community space.”
But therein lies the problem. The fediverse isn’t one homogenous entity. Although there seems to be an overall leftie tint to much of the fediverse, opinions on what is" valued" and “positive” vary quite a bit. The beauty of the fediverse is that you can choose your experience based on the instance you join. Trying to control the entire fediverse goes against the point of the fediverse imo.
phillaholic@lemm.ee 9 months ago
Call me a pessimist, but people are caring way too much about the idealistic implementation of the technology and missing the fact that the tech doesn’t mean shit compared to the community. If you don’t care about the community growing, then that’s one thing. But if you do, Threads is the competition that you won’t be able to beat if they feel like putting in the effort.
isles@lemmy.world 9 months ago
This is demonstrating the exact opposite. Community organization is valid.
Plopp@lemmy.world 9 months ago
But… the majority are federated? And if counted by affected users I don’t even know how large they federated majority is since the biggest instances are all federated iirc.
Either way I think it’s good that we can at least choose our own experience by selecting which instance to join.
phillaholic@lemm.ee 9 months ago
We’ll see. I don’t think you can beat a 100 Billion dollar company with 3 Billion users if they are motivated enough.
sir_reginald@lemmy.world 9 months ago
anti-meta activism is not a bad thing at all. The billionaire corps have their marketing teams, individuals and communities have their activism. Everyone can listen to both and take an informed decision.
They are just that, activists, informing everyone about a possible issue. There’s nothing wrong with that. They are not enforcing anything on anyone.
The worst that can happen is that if your instance admin decides to ban Threads and you want to federate with Threads, you’ll have to switch instances. Not a big deal. You’ll still be able to interact with the Fediverse, it’s not like you were in Twitter, you had to leave and now you’ve lost all your contacts there.
phillaholic@lemm.ee 9 months ago
I don’t see moving instances as this simple thing that everyone else does. Until I can bring my comments and subscriptions over instantly it’s a huge waste of time. Regular users aren’t going to do that. I’m on my third instance already and almost didn’t make the third jump due to the annoyance of adding them all again.
tal@lemmy.today 9 months ago
Honestly, the lack of cross-instance account portability is one of the major issues that I think the Fediverse has today.
I’d rather have some sort of public-private key system to permit for moving across instances and being able to associate accounts.
Croquette@sh.itjust.works 9 months ago
Not at all. Instances are free to ask other instances to not federate with Threads. And the other instances can tell the original instance to fuck off or agree with it.
phillaholic@lemm.ee 9 months ago
And then instances start fighting and decelerate from each other and it becomes this annoying game of will I be able to see the content I want to tomorrow? We’ll see how it turns out. Needing to keep moving instances isn’t my idea of a good thing like everyone else seems to think it is.
chitak166@lemmy.world 9 months ago
Untrue. Users cannot decide which instances they see.
sir_reginald@lemmy.world 9 months ago
of course they can. if they don’t like their instance’s policies, they just have to move to another. or host their own.
there has been people in pro-threads instances that have moved to one that blocks threads and the other way around.
chitak166@lemmy.world 9 months ago
So they have to sift through instances until they find one that federates exactly how they would? Lol. Or do they have to compromise because they don’t actually have the power to choose who they federate with?
Hosting their own instance makes them admins.