Not having a central authority means you have no real power to stop someone
This is demonstrating the exact opposite. Community organization is valid.
Comment on 41% of fediverse instances have blocked threads so far!!!
phillaholic@lemm.ee 9 months agoSure, but the rhetoric behind it is my point. Trying to get everyone to do it is antithetical to the design of the system.
isles@lemmy.world 9 months ago
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.
pomodoro_longbreak@sh.itjust.works 9 months ago
I mean they haven’t infiltrated the private phpbb forum me and my friends have been running since 2008, for the simple reason that they aren’t invited.
Same difference with the fediverse. I have no problem going back down to pre-2019 levels where it’s just a few hundred of us, chatting and sharing #caturday pictures. The fedipact means we can easily find those networks of like-minded communities to federate with.
tal@lemmy.today 9 months ago
I mean they haven’t infiltrated the private phpbb forum me and my friends have been running since 2008, for the simple reason that they aren’t invited.
Mark Zuckerberg smiled to himself. Nobody knew that he was DarkWolf47.
I have no problem going back down to pre-2019 levels where it’s just a few hundred of us, chatting and sharing #caturday pictures.
IRC did do that on a few cases, where one federated IRC network had irreconciliable differences with another and you had a split, with a new IRC network forming.
EFnet or Eris-Free network is a major Internet Relay Chat (IRC) network, with more than 35,000 users.[1] It is the modern-day descendant of the original IRC network.
In July 1996, disagreement on policy caused EFnet to break in two: the slightly larger European half (including Australia and Japan) formed IRCnet, while the American servers continued as EFnet. This was known as The Great Split.[5]
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Undernet
Undernet was established in October 1992 by Danny Mitchell, Donald Lambert, and Laurent Demally as an experimental network running a modified version of the EFnet irc2.7 IRCd software, created in an attempt to make it less bandwidth-consumptive and less chaotic, as netsplits and takeovers were starting to plague EFnet.[4] The Undernet IRC daemon became known as “ircu”. Undernet was formed at a time when many small IRC networks were being started and subsequently disappearing; however, it managed to grow into one of the largest and oldest IRC networks despite some initial in-fighting and setbacks. For a period in 1994, Undernet was wracked by an ongoing series of flame wars. Again in 2001, it was threatened by automated heavy spamming of its users for potential commercial gain. Undernet survived these periods relatively intact and its popularity continues to the present day.
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.
sir_reginald@lemmy.world 9 months ago
I meant on Mastodon, where it is that simple. After all, it makes more sense since they are both microblogging.
In Lemmy it’s a bit of a hassle, but the devs were working on it.
phillaholic@lemm.ee 9 months ago
Haven’t really done much with Mastadon, I always liked following topics over people, and when I last tried it was still firmly people based.
tal@lemmy.today 9 months ago
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.
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.
sir_reginald@lemmy.world 9 months ago
between Mastodon instances it’s quite easy and painless. everything else is kind of a mess.
I’d rather have some sort of public-private key system to permit for moving across instances and being able to associate accounts.
that would be very useful and a fairly good solution.
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.
Crashumbc@lemmy.world 9 months ago
You’re touching a sore topic. Hence the downvotes, many that have bought into the fediverse, believe (in a religious cult way) that its architecture won’t be taken advantage of by bad actors. Even though history has proven the opposite.
Lucia@eviltoast.org 9 months ago
Reminds me of this comment by one of the Lemmy devs: lemmy.ml/comment/6744852
Technology won’t save us if we allow unethical companies to mess with us.
phillaholic@lemm.ee 9 months ago
I get that cult feeling for sure. There is a lot less nuance here. I’d be curious of the average demographic because I see a lot of naivety that’s probably linked to age & experience.
Croquette@sh.itjust.works 9 months ago
If that is the case, then the Lemmy will start to shrink or straight up die, but that is life.
That’s the risk of the federation. But I much prefer that than a monolithic black box controlled by a mega corpo.
phillaholic@lemm.ee 9 months ago
I just want to find the content I like, the content that helps me solve problems, and a way to interact with it without being forced to see ads. I’m not going to use a worse product just because it’s not controlled by a corporation and I don’t think I’m alone in that across most of the population.
rottingleaf@lemmy.zip 9 months ago
Yes.
I think a fully p2p system with a community, a user, and a post being identified by a key and connected via asymmetric cryptography, and then a reputation system yielding a number between, say, -100 and +100, would work better.
That reputation system wouldn’t be like karma, it would possibly also affect whether we store something below -50 score, to then share.
It should be relative - we may attribute an evaluation to a thing, which would affect its children. Or we may attribute an evaluation to a user, and then derive score for a thing from that user’s evaluation of it. Or maybe all of the described.
Maybe something like that is going to be easier to build on Locutus when it becomes operational.
tal@lemmy.today 9 months ago
I don’t think that any single score is going to make everyone happy.
Maybe if there are multiple user-scoring systems run by various sources, and I can choose which score I want to use as a metric.
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.
pomodoro_longbreak@sh.itjust.works 9 months ago
Is that really a problem? It’s not trying to “control” anything. It’s a voluntary pact meant to conserve the non-corporate fediverse, as it is right now.
This is never going to change. If you just don’t like the intent behind the fedipact, no problem - the majority of the fediverse will be talking with threads. You get the personal choice of which instances you make accounts on. Hell, you can make your own instance.
There is no problem here.
Plopp@lemmy.world 9 months ago
I don’t know exactly what the fedipact is, but I know of a collection of instances with arbitrary mods without accountability who have sworn to collectively create a block list and block instances based on what opinions those instances allow etc. Instances can even be blocked for not blocking another instance. I see that as a problem for the fediverse because it can grow and create an unnecessary rift of the verse.
Also, yes it’s great that you can chose instance and jump wherever you want, but an even better thing would be to put more emphasis on user controlled blocks. We can ourselves block instances from our feeds and we should make that the norm (and perhaps make those blocks more powerful and configurable if need be), and have the instances focus more on blocking straight up illegal things.
Demuniac@lemmy.world 9 months ago
I don’t think trying to control is the best way of looking at it. There’s a hive mind about the fediverse that has a purpose, that wants to protect it as part of the identity of it. So a collective of instances banding together to keep that intact seems right up its alley.
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.
dumpsterlid@lemmy.world 9 months ago
You say well we have to be pragmatic because threads/meta has so much more power than us that we will be able to reach so many more people with their help (or they could destroy us equally as powerfully)…. I say but wait a minute if they have all that power why is it shitty open source software projects with several orders of magnitude less funding than Meta are providing the vision of the future AND the technology to get us there? I mean sure if we just had the vision that might make sense but we already built the tools too…?
Honestly stop and think about why that is. Meta could have easily funded side projects and paid programmers to rewrite the code for the entire fediverse and all its associated softwares… many times over. Given the amount of money it has it could have done this over and over and over and over again and still be only spending a tiny fraction of its R&D budget. You have to convincingly explain to me why we were the ones who had to do it, through basically entirely volunteer work, and what makes you think engaging with them now AFTER we put in most of the groundwork to build the technology is a good idea.
You say we could get us so much growth, but every single damn person they bring us will still be the product for their true customers (advertisers etc) and from those people’s perspectives nothing meaningful will have changed. The relationship between meta and its users will be essentially the same, meta has to ensure this to protect their bottom line. So people will have joined the fediverse without actually joining it, who cares at that point?
There are a million ways meta can extend and embrace the fediverse, we need to prepare for the extinguish.
phillaholic@lemm.ee 9 months ago
And my entire point is you can’t. The system is designed to allow anyone in, you can’t decided to stop someone because they are a corporation. It’s similar to people trying to stop the NSA from committing anything to the Linux kernel because you’re afraid they’re going to put in a backdoor. It can’t be done by design.