The only comment I’d add here is that you should make sure you have a real domain, that you’ve paid actual money to, when setting this up. ActivityPub assumes the domain is immutable, and the free dynamic domain names you can get (or free TLDs like, say, .ml was) are a bad choice. Spend the $10 or whatever, because if something happens to your domain name, you cannot just update it in the database and fix federation: it completely breaks everything in a way that’s not repairable.
Just to be pedantic, it’s not pull, it’s push: the data is POSTed from the server that hosts the community.
Right now loading a page makes a bunch of API queries to pull all the related data for the posts, votes, sidebar info, and so on AND the API is very untuned and sending way more data than the WebUI/a client needs to actually generate a page: hence my ‘it’s less efficient’ comment, though this is certainly something that can be tweaked to improve performance between the back and frontends.
I will, however, admit that this is only true if someone is actually reading the content they’re subscribed to. The ‘subscribe to everything’ scripts turn this math on its head because now you are using resources to gather data you don’t care about.
ActivityPub isn’t anything more than JSON over HTTP(s); there’s no reason at all that you couldn’t simply tunnel all the traffic using hidden services over Tor using nothing more than the Tor daemon to create a hidden service and the proxy functionality to route all outbound HTTP traffic over Tor.
ActivityPub is not a distributed network: you don’t have communications between servers in a mesh, the server that owns a community(ex. fediverse@lemmy.world) pushes out JSON data to any subscribers.
Small servers won’t talk directly to each other, unless they’re subscribed to communities on each other so having a lot of small servers doesn’t actively impact the load on each other, but only on the larger servers that have the more active communities.
And, even then, the JSON requests are going to be a lower impact than a user actively browsing the site, though probably only marginally and maybe not in all cases.
I’ve found enough interesting people to follow (along with Mastodon users, of course) that I’m happy, but that’s entirely a personal and very subjective opinion.
Agree with this comment: Firefish is much better than the current state of Mastodon, especially since all the complaints you have are basically being wont-fixed by the current dev team.
Honestly, from all the Gen Z and younger kids I know in my life the big thing that’s probably killing the fediverse is it’s not a media-first platform.
Not a one of them really participates in text-primary social media, which is what Lemmy definitely is.
Mastodon supports it better, but there’s so much gatekeeping around the “right way” to share media content that the few people I know that tried to use it just bounced off it because they couldn’t figure out the technical and social aspects of how to interact, because it’s just piles of conflicting opinions.
They will, however, spend an insane amount of time on TikTok or Youtube or Twitch or Instagram or Snapchat endlessly watching whatever comes up and scrolling along to the next thing or sending pictures/videos of whatever they’re doing at that moment to their friends.
I was attempting to say CSAM without saying CSAM.
Three words: creepy anime porn.
Yeah in that case I’d agree; if you’re on a giant public server that anyone can sign up to, I’m not sure there’s any particular value to be found in defederating anyone, other than places with uh, questionable content.
I think that defederation is the middle ground.
One extreme is The Algorithm tells you who you’re going to talk to, and shoves junk at you nonstop, and the other is that you have to just accept and filter through whatever gets posted with no filtering at all.
Defederation puts the control back in the hands of, if not the users, then at least the administrators and mods of a community; if you can control who can see your content, and what posts you see then and only then do you own the platform instead of being a faceless number that’s only there to be shoved into a dashboard to calculate your revenue value.
A lot of it is people wanting to avoid another Eternal September .
If you have a community you’ve built, and like, a flood of people who don’t understand the culture and behavioral expectations swarming in can be viewed as, frankly, an unwanted invasion.
I also think if this was some new startup (say, Bluesky) instead of Meta, there’d be a different tune, but that’s because a good portion of the people who run the communities and invest their time and money into building the community they want were burned by the aggressive enshittification that Meta is basically synonymous with at this point.
TLDR: this has happened before, and it’s absolutely destroyed communities just due to the sheer volume of people who don’t understand how to behave swarming in and drowning out everyone who the community originally belonged to.
The media was something I didn’t consider, but yeah the original image is served from the original posting server.
That’s probably trivial to fix, given other fediverse software locally caches and serves images, though yeah, that requires an extra level of trust and more work for admins in the far too likely case of CSAM or other illegal content.
One minor correction: if lemmy.there has users subscribed to blargh@lemmy.here, the content that is federated to lemmy.there won’t vanish if lemmy.here does: that copy is more or less independent once it’s federated out.
It’s not a 100% complete clone, but it’s also not at risk of totally vanishing off the face of the earth, either.
There are issues with further interaction with that group (since the host instance is gone and it won’t federate back up and then out to other subscribers), but the content does still exist anywhere it was subscribed to.
The real risk isn’t really Meta, or Reddit, or whatever coming in and shitting on everything, but rather the same thing that happened on Reddit: upvote bots, bought and paid for mods, communities that get astroturfed by corporations with fake reviews/“questions” about if a cool new product is, in fact, cool/“hey i just found this thing!” posts and so on.
Those aren’t as immediately obviously toxic as lemmy.facebook.com would be, but they’re still a corrupting influence that degrades the experience for everyone, and they do it in a way that’s less obvious to a lot of people because I mean, is it just a random person, or is it a paid-for shillbot?
Still, have to be careful of Meta federating their piles of users, but it’s not really the risk that’s likely to happen in the short term as much as “social media marketers” shitting things up the way they shit up everything they get anywhere near.
If you want to keep up with trending topics, find news outlets you believe provide you the proper coverage of what you’re after, and just follow the RSS feeds instead.
Mastodon/Lemmy/Reddit/Facebook/Twitter are there for people to post hot takes on the news, not just share the news. RSS is the way to go if the news is what you’re after, and not people commenting on the news.