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Boy I was wrong about the Fediverse

⁨280⁩ ⁨likes⁩

Submitted ⁨⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩ by ⁨poVoq@slrpnk.net⁩ to ⁨fediverse@lemmy.world⁩

https://matduggan.com/boy-i-was-wrong-about-the-fediverse/

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  • Airfried@piefed.social ⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

    No doubt there are bad actors polluting communities on the Fediverse as well and I’m not feeling quite as optimistic as the author here. But they’re absolutely right about the corporate side of the internet. The mainstream that is controlled by the rich and driven by greed. You need FOSS to have at least a good base you can build on top of. Profit oriented platforms have failed us as a society.

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    • HulkSmashBurgers@reddthat.com ⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

      Totally. Social media (and other types of computing platforms I guess) need to be more grassroots and not driven by profit.

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    • FlashMobOfOne@lemmy.world ⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

      No doubt there are bad actors polluting communities on the Fediverse

      Yeah, but there’s a huge difference: human moderation coupled with better curation tools. You can block a user or a whole instance, which quiets the Nazis pretty fast.

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    • JustTesting@lemmy.hogru.ch ⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

      heck if anything, the Fediverse, as it is right now, is more susceptible to this. You can spin up spam instances on new domains, with spam users, and have them federate to existing instances, faster than volunteer run instances can ban/defederate.

      So you end up with not federating by default, but having some trusted web of instances that federate and maybe an approval process for new instances to federate with? But that’ll still lead to centralization with “trusted” instances and new instances having a hard time to join the club (there’s also the scaling problem of the fediverse, but that’s besides the point). So you end up with a few very big instances and the owners of those instances having all the power. Or maybe small isolated islands of mutually trusting instances? Still better than tech oligopoly, but also a far cry from the original dream.

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  • Jayjader@jlai.lu ⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

    Interesting read, but boy does this journalist have a … different read on things than I do.

    People talk a lot about the protocols that power Bluesky vs. ActivityPub, because we’re nerds and we believe deep in our hearts that the superior protocol will win.

    IMO it’s the exact opposite; we talk about this because we want the best protocol to win, this time, while knowing full well that usually it doesn’t.

    Of course search was broken because all OSS social tools must have one glaring lack of functionality.

    My understanding is that search on the microblogging side of the fedi is intended to be “broken” (from the view of someone expecting a Twitter-style search); hashtags are for opting-in to global discoverability whilst without them your posts are intended to be stumbled upon and/or passed around rather than sought out.

    If the American press had given me 20 minutes of airtime I could have convinced everyone they don’t want to get involved with Greenland. We’re not tough enough as a people to survive in Greenland, much less “take it over”.

    I doubt that trump supporters cheering on the USA throwing their weight around like the world’s bully-in-chief would be receptive to such a message.

    I can’t tell if I’m just too deep in the fedi-culture weeds, or if the article really is confidently ignorant.

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    • 73ms@sopuli.xyz ⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

      My understanding is that search on the microblogging side of the fedi is intended to be “broken” (from the view of someone expecting a Twitter-style search); hashtags are for opting-in to global discoverability whilst without them your posts are intended to be stumbled upon and/or passed around rather than sought out.

      Well it’s a bit more complicated. A really significant reason search isn’t that comprehensive even on a big instance like mastodon.social is that Mastodon prioritizes privacy and has made it optional to be included in the search results with mastodon.social also opting to make it disabled by default when they added it.

      A second problem is that if you’re on a smaller instance you may not be seeing enough posts because they don’t propagate there. This also affects hashtags. There’s projects like Holos Discover fediverse search engine and Fediscovery that are addressing this prolem but they won’t change the fact that many users simply have it disabled when it comes to indexing their posts.

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    • leagman1@feddit.org ⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

      I can’t tell if I’m just too deep in the fedi-culture weeds, or if the article really is confidently ignorant

      Prolly both :D

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    • djdarren@piefed.social ⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

      IMO it’s the exact opposite; we talk about this because we want the best protocol to win, this time, while knowing full well that usually it doesn’t.

      Honestly, I couldn’t give a shit. Like I couldn’t give a shit about celebrities and journalists signing up to Mastodon.

      The Fediverse with which I interact is vibrant, and full of (mostly) good people, all sharing knowledge, jokes, art, etc… I don’t personally care if Taylor Swift signs up, because the people who currently live on here largely play by the rules, and the vibe is good.

      I don’t care if Bluesky’s protocol ends up ‘winning’, because it doesn’t affect Mastodon. Or Lemmy. Or Pixelfed. Or Peertube. Or whatever federated services anyone else uses.

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      • hanrahan@slrpnk.net ⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

        this is how Fox News etal dominate though, so while I don’t use it, I do give a shit and always encourage others NOT to use it. I also castigate those who would pollute the fedi waters with that APIs etc allowing the shit to flow though.

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    • HeyThisIsntTheYMCA@lemmy.world ⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

      If the American press had given me 20 minutes of airtime I could have convinced everyone they don’t want to get involved with Greenland. We’re not tough enough as a people to survive in Greenland, much less “take it over”.

      I doubt that trump supporters cheering on the USA throwing their weight around like the world’s bully-in-chief would be receptive to such a message.

      Yeah, remember these are the folk moving from Florida to Alaska with nothing but a knife and a Canadian tuxedo and being surprised when they die after two weeks.

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    • MysticKetchup@lemmy.world ⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

      My understanding is that search on the microblogging side of the fedi is intended to be “broken” (from the view of someone expecting a Twitter-style search); hashtags are for opting-in to global discoverability whilst without them your posts are intended to be stumbled upon and/or passed around rather than sought out.

      Search is broken beyond the choice of being an opt-in. The fact that there’s no way to sort search in any way except chronological order means it’s hard to find anything relevant. Instead it’s usually just a bunch of spam blogs or replies

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  • supersquirrel@sopuli.xyz ⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

    People talk a lot about the protocols that power Bluesky vs. ActivityPub, because we’re nerds and we believe deep in our hearts that the superior protocol will win. This is adorable. It flies in the face of literally all of human history, where the more convenient thing always wins regardless of technical merit. VHS beat Betamax. USB-C took twenty years. The protocol fight is interesting the way medieval siege warfare is interesting — I’m glad someone’s into it, but it has no bearing on my life. There’s no actual plan to self-host Bluesky. Their protocol makes it easier to scale their service. That’s why it was written and that’s what it does. End of story.

    So refreshing to see someone call out Bluesky for what it is.

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    • 4grams@awful.systems ⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

      It is, but it also sucks that it is. I don’t know why people continue to have such blind spots, but given who and what is behind bluesky, why would anyone, ever think it was ever going to be open or anything but twitter 2.0?

      I’m really baffled at why people are so unwilling to learn from history.

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  • Glitchvid@lemmy.world ⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

    It’s not the point of the article, but I think it nonetheless speaks to the power that the community-of-communities model provides.

    The algorithmic content surfacing models are what primarily rot online interaction. Having all-encompassing is another cause. Letting people join communities with shared values, and those communities collectively deciding who they interact with, is a fundamental model of human societies since prehistory.

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    • solrize@lemmy.ml ⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

      What are you saying here? Lemmy has algorithms too, and while it has some good points, it’s disappointing in lots of ways too.

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      • meldrik@lemmy.wtf ⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

        Those are very basic algorithms and they are public. You can see exactly how they work.

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      • Glitchvid@lemmy.world ⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

        For algorithms, anything that isn’t a straightforward scrutable way of presenting user content is bad, IMO.
        Algorithms that promote engagement, monetization, and sycophants are bad.

        As for community of communities, that’s how the Fediverse works — you have a home instance which communicates with other instances. An instance has (nominally) rules, and expected conduct, and is often centered around a particular interest (game dev, programming, cities or countries, etc) then these communities interact with each other.

        Having home instances with shared values and a subset of the entire userbase allows for recognizing and connecting with other “local” users. The same way people would trust their immediate neighbors more than random people from the city over. It helps form webs of trust, and establish natural networks.
        This is how human society has functioned up until very recently — it’s what the brain evolved to do.

        We can see the consequence of systems that don’t respect that fact, sites that try catering to everyone and put us in the same tent, it destroys social regulation, you cannot possibly hope to explain yourself to tens of thousands of angry people on the Internet, nor should people be exposed to such vitriol.

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  • snooggums@piefed.world ⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

    It’s the internet I was promised in 1996. It only took thirty years and the complete collapse of American journalism to get here.

    It is a return to the internet in 1996.

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    • NannerBanner@literature.cafe ⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

      Where’s that space jam website?

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      • snooggums@piefed.world ⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

        https://www.spacejam.com/1996/jam.html

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  • ProdigalFrog@slrpnk.net ⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

    This article is confirming the extreme merit of Citizen Controlled Media, which has only become more and more important as form an essential form of prefiguration as time goes on.

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  • mistermodal@lemmy.ml ⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

    It’s incredible how much ActivityPub sabotages itself. This author speaks on the deliberately dysfunctional aspects of Mastodon as being a result of “open source software having to suck” when in fact the devs here chose to make it suck because they decided it was better, like removing quote tweets etc. Misskey variants do all this stuff perfectly fine, far more features than Twitter actually, although the base version is incredibly buggy and inhabited by pedophiles. There is no reason why Lemmy and its forks can’t connect to these sites either. People are just incredibly confused on here and do not see their own potential.

    Big fan of Movim by the way.

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    • chris@l.roofo.cc ⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

      Mastodon has quotes now. They chose to make quotes controllable and added a standard for it. That’s why it took so long.

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      • 73ms@sopuli.xyz ⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

        That’s why it took so long after they got convinced to do it but not really why it took so long overall.

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      • mistermodal@lemmy.ml ⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

        That’s nice for them, but I’m using good software now

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    • p03locke@lemmy.dbzer0.com ⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

      People are just incredibly confused on here and do not see their own potential.

      The internet doesn’t run on potential. It runs on actual fucking features.

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      • ProdigalFrog@slrpnk.net ⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

        From what I understand, Piefed instances will have better support for Mastodon posts, and I believe it supports subscribing to Peertube channels already (something that Lemmy still doesn’t support…)

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    • ProdigalFrog@slrpnk.net ⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

      Related to Movim; it just received Discord-like spaces a couple days ago! So it’s now a pretty effective decentralized Discord that can do group audio/video calls, screen share, and even has blogging built in.

      Highly recommend anyone thinking about ditching Discord to give it a shot. It doesn’t even require an email to use, just a username and password :)

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  • FlashMobOfOne@lemmy.world ⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

    Yup.

    Though I thought of it as the Internet from 2010. No ads. No algo. All chronological. Once you figure out where the slow mode setting is and turn it off, Mastodon is the fucking best. I even pay a voluntary sub every month to help my instance host itself.

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    • oeuf@slrpnk.net ⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

      Slow mode?

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      • FlashMobOfOne@lemmy.world ⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

        Yeah, when you’re on the global feed, posts fly by at a dizzying rate. Turning on slow mode makes it so that they stop auto-scrolling and only scroll when you click that you want to see more posts.

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  • TropicalDingdong@lemmy.world ⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

    Instead it became the only place consistently posting trustworthy information I could actually access. This became personally relevant when Trump threatened to invade Greenland, which is the kind of sentence I never expected to type and yet here we are. It would be funny if I wasn’t a tiny bit concerned that my new home was going to get a CIA overnight regime change special in the middle of the night.

    It was somewhere in the middle of DMing with someone who had forgotten more about Greenland than I would ever know and someone who lived close to an RAF base in the UK that it clicked. This was what they had been talking about. Actual human beings were able to find each other and ask direct questions without this giant mountain of bullshit engagement piled on top of it. Meta or Oracle or whoever owns TikTok this week couldn’t stop me.

    I never expected to find my news from strangers on a federated social network that half the internet has never heard of. I never expected a lot of things. But there’s something quietly beautiful about a place where people just… share what they know. No brand deals, no engagement metrics, no algorithm nudging you toward rage. Just someone who spent twenty years studying Arctic policy posting a thread at 2 AM because they think you should understand what’s happening. It’s the internet I was promised in 1996. It only took thirty years and the complete collapse of American journalism to get here.

    So, a few things. One, I appreciate the authors evolution on this, but I also think for anyone who lived through the US’s campaigns in the war on terror, on resistance movements like BLM, Dakota pipeline, Occupy, Me Too, on and on…

    The American (and often global) experience is a eventual experience of realizing you are being lied to and finding a way to the truth. For me it was being enlisted and finding Democracy Now! because it was a show I could download on an mp3 players and put on mini-disks when I was preparing for underways.

    The same sentiment that the author is appreciating is one that some people in the 90’s got when they first had access to the internet. That kids in the 2000’s felt when they found alternative media (DN!, others, many coming from the WTO protests of the 90’s), that kids in the mid-2000’s felt when they found social media, when kids in the 2010’s found the second wave of social media, when kids in the 2020’s found the fediverse, and on and on.

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    • HeyThisIsntTheYMCA@lemmy.world ⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

      At least we have hot chips now while we’re being lied to. Society has come so far

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  • Grail@multiverse.soulism.net ⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

    This article would have been better without the ableist slur against people with NPD.

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    • Retail4068@lemmy.world ⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

      Y’all will find something else to screech at. It’s just a never ending loop off finding something to be pissed at.

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      • Grail@multiverse.soulism.net ⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

        I have NPD, and I don’t like it when My disorder is shortened and used as the word to identify Me. I’m not a “N*rcissist”, I’m a person with NPD. Call Me a person, not a disorder.

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  • slothrop@lemmy.ca ⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

    I’d never considered how bang-on this viewpoint is…

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  • asudox@lemmy.asudox.dev ⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

    I don’t like that the logo of Lemmy is the logo of LW.

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  • Bazoogle@lemmy.world ⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

    A lot of hot takes. Definitely don’t agree with calling every youtuber and twitch streamer a narcissist. If you just go on the front page, sure. But there are thousands of normal people on there making great content. They just don’t appeal to the algorithm as much so you haven’t heard of them. But they’re out there

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    • OldQWERTYbastard@lemmy.world ⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

      I miss the mid-2000s YouTube when there was no monetization incentive. People just made videos and posted them because they believed others would enjoy them. That was it.

      Good times.

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  • AcidiclyBasicGlitch@sh.itjust.works ⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

    It’s the internet I was promised in 1996. It only took thirty years and the complete collapse of American journalism to get here.

    Image

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