You lost your job? Your wife an away with the post man? You are just grumpy?

Go splash the Mona Lisa’s glass and all your troubles go away!

@aihorde@lemmy.dbzer0.com draw for me Soup with Mona Lisa splashed on it. The soup is enjoying the Mona Lisa and the Mona Lisa is very tasty.

That happens if you don’t have an actual legal team… I am sure they are doing their best, but if you don’t have a lawyer, you can’t do legal texts.

Sorry, no condescension intended.

Your post read like one written by someone with very minimal knowledge about the subject, which might have been a misunderstanding on my part. So I tried to cover the basics before talking about the rest.

There is really no shame in asking questions about something where you don’t have experience. There are far more topics I have no idea about than there are topics where I do have a deep understanding.

So to get on the same page, I’ll summarize what I understood, please correct me if you mean something different.

• You don’t like ActivityPub, you want a new protocol
• The system should make it easy to create new, small instances
• The instances should share sessions with the other instances (=single sign on) based on trusting them
• You prefer a centralized system?
• You want the system to not use a single protocol (ActivityPub), but use multiple protocols?
• ActivityPub based services have bad UX due to the complexity of the protocol

Is this correct?

We have a few contradictions here.

You cannot have a system where anyone can easily create servers and at the same time have shared sessions based on trust. These two requirements conflict with each other.

Either servers only work with servers they trust, and then you can’t just create a new small server and interact with the network.

Or anyone can easily create a new small server, but then you can’t do anything based on trust, since you never know if that server was created with malicious intent.

Regarding centralized/decentralized you have to differentiate between implementation and management.

All major social networks run distributed systems. If you want to serve billions of users, you need to run millions of servers. These servers are distributed around the globe to give fast access to users everywhere. Chances are pretty high that your ISP has a few racks of Facebook, Netflix, YouTube and Tiktok servers.

Their distributed system is orders of magnitude more complex than everything running ActivityPub combined.

But their system works, because they have tens of thousands of highly paid specialists to make them work.

ActivityPub based services on the other hand have almost no funding and manpower.

Mastodon is the best in this respect. They have 6 people who are actually working on the system.

Lemmy has two developers who earn close to minimum wages.

Kbin has a single guy developing it.

That’s the real reason why the UX is crap.

If anything, ActivityPub and the services running on them are extremely underengineered and underdeveloped.

Btw, there is something rather close to what you seem to want: online forums with Google single sign on.

The forums are not interacting at all with other forums. No federation or anything at all. There are enough commercial solutions that work really well. And with Google Single Sign On you also don’t have to register for each forum.

E-mail. E-mail does support small servers.

Btw, I think you are mixing up a few topics here, so let’s see what you actually want.

• Protocols are what computers use to communicate with each other. No protocols means no interaction between different computers/servers. Without protocols, none of the things you ask for can be possible.
• Federated services don’t have single sign on. On the contrary, single sign on is a centralized service not a distributed one. To clarify that: I cannot log into lemmy.world with my feddit.de accout, same as I cannot log into hotmail with my gmail account. In both cases I log into my instance/provider and this allows me to communicate with people on other instances/providers. Federation is the process of sharing content between instances. SSO on the other hand is a centralized service that then communicates with other services to let you log into these other services. For example, I can log into my Google account and then use this to login to other sites. This only works because people trust Google. This would not work as a decentralized service with untrusted servers.
• Duplication is used on federated services for a few reasons. First, it’s a kind of caching mechanism distributing the load. If someone posts something on one instance, it’s transferred only once to the other instances which then serve it to all their users. Without duplication, each individual view would have to be requested again from the original instance. The other advantage is that the admins of all the instances retain control over the content. If the other instance goes offline, users can still see “their” copy of the content. And if the other instance doesn’t moderate their content, the mods/admins of your instance can do that themselves.

So as you see, these concepts aren’t there just for fun, but for a purpose.

There are two issues with that:

• The GDPR notice on feddit.de is not GDPR compliant, and the link isn’t even visible on mobile.
• If you request deletion, they can’t guarantee that the data is deleted on federated servers. They can send deletion messages, but federation is constantly not working correctly, other instances can decide themselves whether they do delete stuff, and if an instance is unreachable for a while, the deletion message will be dropped.

Lemmy, or even ActivityPub are designed to be non-GDPR compliant. (Probably not on purpose, but the way it works makes it basically impossible to be GDPR compliant.)

That already exists. The person who created a post or comment can delete it. But it only works sometimes, since federation is constantly not working correctly.

That’s true, but neither the article nor the discussion are about ActivityPub.

Both are specifically about Lemmy, and Lemmy does have private messages.

And the content of private messages.

How about private messages which are also unencrypted?

It’s actually not wrong if you look at it in another way.

• Big tech will abuse your data, but it will do within legal constraints, and there is actuall (though weak) accountability of these companies due to the legal system.
• On federated services like Lemmy, instances are hosted by anonymous individuals. Most social media laws don’t apply to them, and their legal accountability is basically zero.
• Lemmy, for example, does not comply with GDPR. There is no legal notice, no privacy contact person, no banner asking whether you are ok with the fact that your data is sent to unknown servers in random nations, no nothing. Private messages aren’t even encrypted, so any admin can read them without issues.
• There is no way to actually delete your data, as the GDPR requires. Deleted posts are only marked as deleted and you can see their plain text content by just pressing the “reply” button in any of the apps. There isn’t any kind of guarantee, that your post will be deleted on other instances. If federation has problems, the post will remain on other instances and is now permanently undeletable by the user.
• There are no moderation standards. Some instances will delete nazi content, some basically require nazi content. And some instance admin might even edit your posts to say something completely different. It’s all possible and in the hands of random people on the internet.
• Hobbyist-run services are much worse when it comes to availability and reliability. If something happens while the admin is on holiday, nothing will get fixed. If the admin runs out of money, doesn’t care anymore or even dies, the instance with all it’s content and users is just gone.

So there are very real risks attached to a hobbyist-run service with no legal accountability and no transparency at all.

We all know the downsides of Big Tech though, so it’s everyone’s personal choice to figure out which disadvantages hurt them personally more.

Emails also go to other’s servers.

But you could just host an IRC server.

But as soon as you interact with literally anyone (or anyone interacts with you) your data is still replicated on other servers.

If you want to rebrand Mastodon, then maybe talk to the guys at, you know, Mastodon gGmbH. That’s a real company with real people there that really own trademarks and branding.

You trying to grassroots-rebrand Mastodon is about as useful as trying to grassroots Coca Cola into “Birdpiss”.

Yeah, you might like it, but it’s not your brand and it’s not yours to decide.

Also, while their branding/marketing isn’t great, rebranding is worse, because it means you have to completely start over. Take a look at the big idiot in the room, X.

They have a massive amount of “involuntary marketing”, by having almost all newspapers worldwide reporting on their name change. Still, if you say “I’ve seen this meme on X”, it will take the person you are talking with a second to translate and realize “Oh, you are talking about Twitter”. And that’s with all the newspapers worldwide doing their marketing for free.

Now consider doing the same with Mastodon. Most people have at least heard of Mastodon. Now say it’s rebranded to, let’s go with “Treetops”. Name changes, Mascot changes, Art style changes, everything changes to something completely unrelated. It’s a new, blank-slate brand without any recognition. How would that help?

The much bigger issue regarding Mastodon marketing is not whether it’s called Mastodon or Treetops or whether instances are called instances, trees or nests. The biggest issue is that they are non-profit and don’t have money for marketing. If they had a few billions for marketing, it would be much better as well. And erazing all their brand recognition won’t help them have more brand recognition.

And regarding the name of instances: Yeah, the term might be techy, but covering the term in a non-descript non-techy term does nothing to make it easier to understand. You still need to explain it, and now you got a layer of abstraction in between that makes it harder to do so.

If anything, it could be renamed to “provider”, because that’s the name that’s mostly used for access gates to federated services in the real world (email, phone, internet, all federated services that you access through your provider. Even health care kinda falls into the same category.).

Read his post again. He clearly states that he doesn’t want stuff that piggybacks/copies services like that.

To put it differently, he doesn’t like that the OP tires to piggyback off twitters (former) branding.

So you want to unilaterally rebrand Mastodon because Twitter has no bird anymore? Do you seriously think the success of twitter came from the bird, and that bird is what’s missing for Mastodon?

I think you might have misunderstood what’s actually holding back the fediverse.

Also, rebranding instances as nests makes very little sense and doesn’t work at all to actually make that concept more explainable.

Birds don’t usually use nests as a hub through which they communicate with others. They also don’t use nests as a social meeting point. They use them to lay eggs in and raise their young there.

There are many issues holding back the fediverse. A lack of birds is not one of them.

Huh, apparently the deletion wasn’t propagated to my instance. If I follow the link to the original instance (lemmy.ca), I can see that it’s deleted there, but on my instance (feddit.de) it’s still visible.

I guess, the takeaway is that the deletion function in Lemmy isn’t reliable.

Which brings us straight back to the topic ;)

The statement isn’t wrong, though.

Of course, the difference is money, no question about that. Lemmy has two underpaid devs. Reddit probably has a hundred. Lemmy instances are hosted as cheaply as possible, while Reddit has a massive budget for that.

But that doesn’t change that there is a real difference in quality. My Lemmy instance (feddit.de) frequently throws errors about being overloaded when I try to access it. Can’t remember that ever happening to me on for-profit social media (I guess, except of Twitter, which I don’t use. But Twitter can hardly be counted as for-profit by now. It’s more of an involuntary non-profit.).

Search and SEO are pretty bad on Lemmy. There are frequently desyncs in federated content. There are lots of small and larger bugs in Jerboa or the Web UI.

UX isn’t great. There are many things that still need to be sorted out.

And yeah, all that is annoying, but me as a tech enthusiast have the patience to power through it.

But if I’d convince my wife to use Lemmy, she’d probably end up throwing her phone.

For non-technical, non-patient people to use Lemmy, it will have to improve quite a bit, and I believe it will maybe get there some time. But it’s gonna take time. And probably, we as tech enthusiasts will have to do something we really dislike to do: Pay for development and hosting somehow. Freeloading only works if there are ads and enough people who don’t know what an adblocker is. That’s not the case here, so long-term, we’ll probably have to pay for something here. (e.g. here https://www.patreon.com/dessalines)

Yes, no, kinda.

(I am basing all this on these stats: https://lemmy.fediverse.observer/dailystats)

First, the most detailed statistics show “Active Users Monthly”. That means, if you have any interaction (e.g. posting a comment) you will be counted as active for a whole month.

If you have a look when the decline first started, you’ll see that it’s right around one month after the Reddit blackout.

So what happened is that tons of people came to Lemmy during the blackout, tried it out for a few minutes, maybe posted a comment, and then dropped it again. They were still counted in the statistics until the 12th of July, which is when the drop starts in the statistics, because all these “single-day-users” are dropping out.

But: the drop from the highest point to now is only ~10% of the users. Other than that the user count seems to be kinda stable.

For more up-to-date numbers look at the post/comment counts, since they are daily. Here you see a linear, maybe slightly more than that, increase, which indicates a steady amount of interaction.

Btw, the number of total users is steadily decreasing, and that’s a good thing. The reason for that is that there are lots of obscure instances with a handful of active users but 10k-90k of users who have never posted anything. These instances usually have open registration without captcha, so all these users are probably bots.

Since these instances don’t actually have real users or content, they probably were just created by someone to try something out, so they keep getting closed, and with them, the bot accounts disappear.

Yeah, they are actively working on functionality to migrate user accounts and other data between instances, so that they can use that functionality to migrate everything on an instance to another instance.

Since migrating data affects all the replicated data on other instances as well, I guess when they migrate lemmy.ml somewhere else, all of Lemmy will be down for a day or two, being just overloaded with all the migration stuff.