Huh. Didn’t know. Thanks.

I just visited and got this message:

We are working on resolving the issues Over the next few days, there will be a change in server infrastructure. Temporary problems with the website’s functionality may occur during this time.

Great to see the Marco Rogers citation, they really hit the nail on the head about the awkward of the “constant vigilance” approach.

And great ideas too! Something more organised and powerful is sorely needed.

Oh sure … all media is likely some form of garbage, especially when it comes to anything other than the main text.

But a blood bypass would surely be the first major and critical step to isolating a brain from the whole body, except for cranial nerves and spinal cord of course, depending on what purpose anyone has for this. I’m presuming there’s some advantage that could be had in certain surgical procedures.

Hmmm … it might have been, I’m not sure. If so, not since or during the twitter migration, as my understanding there is that mastodon.social couldn’t scale well and so it was up to all the other and often new instances to take on the load (similar to lemmy’s story).

Since then, AFAIU, they’ve put their server on kubernetes so it can horizontally scale, and of course, put themselves as the default instance in the mobile app. But as user growth hasn’t really continued on mastodon it’s hard to tell what the dynamics are now. Having glanced at the numbers a bit over the past year my impression is that the proportion of users on mastodon.social has been slowly growing. I haven’t seen any analysis though. I did some analysis early last year (https://hachyderm.io/@maegul/110331433071884694) and maybe I’ll repeat that soon.

Mastodons community is also very much aware of the issue. There are some who even call for defederstion from large instances. The main impetus being mastodons people’s concern for safety and moderation, where big instances necessarily allow much more to pass through. So while there’s more of a push from the top to make mastodon.social the flagship, from the grassroots there’s very much a push against it (I’m loosely a voice in that might self).

Lemmy.world’s push to be a big vanilla instance is not much different from what’s happening over at mastodon I’d say not least because it’s run by people running one of the big mastodon instances.

In the end I’m not sure the two spaces differ that much in their dynamics around this, notwithstanding the differences in the attitudes of the lead devs, especially given that the same result has occurred. Which is why I say it’s likely a natural phenomenon. You’ll found the distribution of instance sizes likely follows a power law which is common in nature.

I guess here it’s less prevalent because the site is still accessible, and most of the users don’t really follow closely the Lemmy versions.

Yea exactly. A DDoS is the sort of failure I’d imagine you need to shift people off. Not that big/central instances are completely bad. I think they help get people into the ecosystem that wouldn’t otherwise … and they turn out to be a pretty natural and constant phenomenon in the fediverse (mastodon.social is also about ~25% of masto) … to the point that I personally start to ask questions about alternative structures which we spoke about in another thread.

that might have suggested some users to switch to instances that were more up-to-date

Maybe? I’d fear instead that centralisation is pretty sticky without some massive failure and wouldn’t expect much movement in the proportion of users on lemmy.world.

Which means, if I’m onto something with my critique, there may very well be a bit of problematic dynamic there.

Fair!

Yea it’s one of those awkward things I suppose, where the instance (.world) is big enough that its operational concerns are kinda at odds with where lemmy as a project is up to.

With that many users, who also kinda expect a more reddit-style experience AFAICT, a certain amount of professionalism, stability and, in effect, slowness, is expected. And that’s great.

But meanwhile lemmy is a small essentially underfunded project doing its best with a small group (2 main and a few voluntary on the side), which means bugs and then bug fixes and tweaking until things work … all of which works well over a distributed array of smaller instances so that no single node is a major let alone fatal point of failure.

And so we’ve got this situation now where you could be critical of how lemmy.world relates to the bug fixing and testing load on the lemmy-verse. lemmy.world is likely the best funded instance (last I checked their donations exceed their infra needs) and yet the job of testing and working through bugs is offloaded onto all of the other smaller instances while they wait until it’s all been ironed out. I don’t know if it’s a fair critique in the end, but it certainly seems to be there and worth considering.

I was under the impression that it’s clear that additional relays can work within their system? Have they not setup anything in the protocol for how that’d work?

And it’s also a good choice because it’s a standard protocol that everyone agrees on.

Not sure how true this is in practice. See eg: https://hachyderm.io/@hrefna/111812820133158591 And there’s of course BlueSky and ATProto that may alter that truth drastically (we’ll see)

Otherwise, I hear you. Thing is I’m aiming for something in the middle. If the platforms are all FOSS and commit to easy movement/migration features (which the fediverse sucks at to be fair) as well as good quality aggregators (which the fediverse also sucks at), then maybe your concerns aren’t a fatal possibility?

Also, and I do apoligise for making this a tad personal … it seems you’re on an instance that’s mostly for you or small group of friends (which is awesome! How’s it going?) … which is a level of enjoyment of what the fediverse offers beyond most people and even beyond what many capable of doing so would want to do for their social media. Meeting things in the middle is also about bringing better social media to more people, which could naturally deprive the technically capable of their abilities to be flexible with their needs (though in a way BlueSky’s promise is kinda to do both, if it succeeds).

Sounds like you’re describing BlueSky there. Have you looked into it?

Unless you’re talking about something more nostr/web3.0?

Good point!

I’d say more or less the same thing at the core of the fediverse, which is an open and shared commitment to values, features and practices. If the platforms are FOSS, and you can always download your content/posts, than any shitification will be met with moving, no?

There’s the risk of losing all the threads attached to the posts, I suppose. But I’m not sure that that’s an absolute problem. There could be solutions around commitment to archiving and hosting archives etc. But also, the federation thing of copying everything everywhere creates problems around privacy and safety (like people have left the fediverse because they’ve found it to be worse in terms of racism etc than twitter). Having content on single servers with higher walls allows for better safety and privacy features. So it’s a trade off.

As for a big instance being bought … well like I said, people can just move. Shared sign on should make that a nicer experience than here. And some feature for hosting archives of posts from other servers (which the structure of the fediverse actively makes very difficult because content has to be uniquely addressable across the whole network) could probably go a long way to protecting good content. On the fediverse, people have to move whenever a server goes down, but can’t take their posts with them.

On top of all of that I’m not entirely clear on how much a federated protocol prevents corporate enshitification. When Threads federates, and should for example something like Tumblr and maybe some others do so such that the majoriyt of the fediverse is actually on corporate platforms funded by ads and data tracking (which can apply just as well to content that federates with such platfroms from otherwise FOSS platforms) … is that not some form of enshitification? Which isn’t to touch on the things that can happen to the ecosystem once big-corp wield such large user bases.

What protects the fediverse then? I’d guess it’s that the platforms we have are FOSS and those of us who want to break away and start our own instances can. But that’s not the protocol or federation … that’s FOSS platforms and commitment to values and working together. If I’ve got a point with this … the broader abstract idea is that many of these problems are not tech problems but people problems, and, very much to my broader point, confusing people problems with tech problems can lead you astray into making solutions that do not succeed because you’re blindsided by your tunnel vision love for the tech solution.

I’m genuinely curious to know if/how I’m wrong about this. Because a decent read of the fediverse in the wake of the “2023 migrations” is that, to many people, federation itself was form of social media shitification … in that it was seens as an overly complex and annoying technology that actively disrupted and sometimes worsened the core features and motivations of social media … socialising with people … all while acolytes could only tell complainants that their issues weren’t meaningful or serious enough and were likely due to them not using the fediverse correctly. Now I’m here, obviously, because I’m a fan. But I can’t shake the possibility that the fediverse might have fatal flaws and am always a fan of solutions that stick with what’s easy and tried and true (generally good engineering advice IMO).

Yea I didn’t know before seeing that that one of the BlueSky devs (the author of the blog post) was heavily involved in p2p stuff (eg beaker browser).

Sorry, no condescension intended. …

All good!!

And thanks for the reply! I don’t have time now to read through it, but will later. Just wanted to say I’m aware my post was very short and understand where you were coming from … and that, for me, if I address an issue I have with tone, it’s in the interests of the community, kinda “tone policing” as awful a term that is to say out loud … to just let someone know they may not come off as well as they or we would like. But I’m all good personally and look forward to reading your post!

Well, none really, because the work of ActivityPub wouldn’t be performed in my idea. There wouldn’t be mass copying of content to all servers. And the trade off would be that you wouldn’t be able to follow or see content from another server either (just like modern Twitter and Reddit).

The work around though is that SSO should enable easy cross posting from one server to another, so information/posts would be easily shared between servers. But more importantly would be the commitment to open APIs and building/supporting aggregating or unifying clients, so that from a single interface you can follow and read and reply to content from any server.

In terms of servers and users, the idea is essentially to do the content copying/unifying at the user side rather than the server side.

As far as what protocols are necessary here … basically the internet we have now … which is very much the point.

In simple terms the idea starts from a common praise of the fediverse … that it enables posting between Twitter and Reddit and that it is open. Well, how about we build Reddit and Twitter clones just with FOSS, open APIs and cross posting features?

Yea right. Me too I think. It’s out there and has been for a while. Just don’t think it’s ever taken off.

You might find this interesting: https://pfrazee.com/blog/why-not-p2p

Well I’m spitballing here, so I wouldn’t worry about not being able to imagine it! I’m struggling too!!

Is there a chance that BlueSky is more like what you’re after?

Well that’s kinda the point of my quick suggestion in the original post.

Instead of committing to federation, how about committing to aggregating clients that allow you to do exactly this. Right now, there’s no app that will work for both lemmy/kbin and mastodon/microblogging. No way to unify the notifications or even combine the feeds or just have a unified interface for the two platforms (that are, let’s face, both just full of text messages and feeds).

By allowing each platform to be distinct but remain open with their APIs and “play nice with each other” while leaning into the value of aggregators as a primary part of the value proposition of the system, users might be better served.