i realize this might be swinging at the hornet's nest, but i have a genuine question about the Fediverse
cohost.org
something that sort of confuses me about the fediverse, conceptually, is the idea that these disparate apps are cross-compatible in some way. like obvs there's mastodon-compatible platforms (pleroma, akkoma, etc) but in general other fediverse (pixelfed, kbin) are either only partially compatible1 or not compatible at all2. some of this can be easily chalked up to very different modes of interaction3 but if that's the case, why advertise as being part of the fediverse when that's only somewhat true? is it just for Buzzword points? even some sort of shared identity system4 would do a lot to mitigate this! but if i want to use pixelfed, i need a pixelfed account in addition to my mastodon account. how, other than the general "free software" shit, is this better UX than having an instagram account and a twitter account? if anything, it's maybe kinda worse because twitter and instagram at least don't pretend that they're compatible, and i don't have to pick a Twitter or an Instagram, there's just one and i know that it'll be the same one my friends are on. i guess a lot of this comes down to: "no one has done an especially good job explaining why the fediverse is better than centralized solutions." i realize i am somewhat biased as someone who runs a centralized solution, but this has been a problem at least since i first made a mastodon account in 2017, and i sure as shit didn't run a centralized platform then. many of the problems that exist on centralized platforms (content can disappear at any moment, you are at the whims of the admins, etc etc) exist on the fediverse too5, and there aren't a ton of benefits beyond "you can host your own."6 this is not an especially coherent set of thoughts, and it's mostly prompted by me seeing kbin, seeing that it's On The Fediverse, and then learning that it holds zero compatibility with THE primary fediverse application. what's the point of building this beautiful, platform-agnostic platform that's the future of the internet if everything is dependent on their own non-compatible extensions to actually function. ---------------------------------------- 1. pixelfed posts can be viewed and boosted on mastodon but won't display past the first four images 2. afaict, despite kbin being activitypub based, there is no connection between it and any other activitypub software 3. reddit and twitter are not the same, so platforms cloning one are not going to be especially compatible with others 4. hold on while i reinvent openid 5. first person who says "you can move your account to a different instance!" gets to be the first block on this account. you can't. it's a fiction invented by the mastodon project. "you can export your follower list and force everyone to follow you on a new account" is not account migration. until there is any story for migrating content7, claiming that account migration exists is misguided at best and actively deceitful at worst. 6. i used to disparagingly joke when people were being shitheads "ok bud, go make your own website then. it's easy. [https://runyourown.social] however, now that i've done this for over a year, i can not in good faith suggest anyone else do this. i would only wish "running a social media platform" on my worst enemy, and my worst enemies aren't here for me to clown on them. 7. "but i don't care about migrating content," you might say. that's great for you! you are not the only person who exists and many people do care about that.

The core phrase of the blog post: “no one has done an especially good job explaining why the fediverse is better than centralized solutions”.

Feels to me that it’s all growing pains, we WOULD benefit for a federated auth system instead of an account on every service, and we need lots of bug fixing, i just wish all these social media shitstorms had happened a couple years later and not at this point…

  • Lilium@lemmy.mlEnglish
    1·
    1 year ago

    no one has done an especially good job explaining why the fediverse is better than centralized solutions

    Uhhh, because if a billionaire with god complex buys an instance, the rot won’t spread to the entirety of Mastodon? Because if an instance decides to start asking exuberant prices to use their API, it won’t spread to the entirety of Lemmy?

    The world has shown live and in colors why federation is better, you just haven’t been paying attention.

  • Melmi@lemmy.blahaj.zoneEnglish
    1·
    1 year ago

    The primary benefit to federated services as I see it is that you can have a network of groups, all with their own policies on moderation and who they federate with. Some corners of the Fediverse block other corners of the Fediverse, but each corner has their own policies on what they block. It’s more democratized that way, and if you disagree with one instance’s moderation policies you can move to another while still interacting with the same communities. Alternatively, maybe you prefer a different interface or way of managing your online presence! There’s any number of reasons you would want to use a federated service.

    It makes sense that someone who runs their own centralized service wouldn’t see the need for a federated service, because they can run their centralized service the way they want and don’t have to worry about whether the staff of their chosen service agree with them, because as operator they hold sway over that.

    One of the other benefits of an open protocol like ActivityPub is that people can hook into it in the future. For example, Pixelfed may be the only software solution in its class at the moment, but if someone wanted they could make their own independent version and it could be interoperable if they used ActivityPub plus the same conventions that Pixelfed does. Sure a platform could always create their own open protocol, but better to use an established open protocol instead of reinventing the wheel for every new service. That’s even setting aside the possibility the some service will come along to unite all of the Fediverse under one app (Kbin is trying something like this I think).

    Also they’re totally wrong about the Kbin situation. Kbin is 100% compatible with Lemmy, if a little glitchy at times (early days, after all). It’s only the main instance that’s not federating, and that’s because they are using Cloudflare to deal with the surge in popularity from Reddit. Under normal circumstances even the main instance can federate.

  • fubo@lemmy.worldEnglish
    1·
    1 year ago

    no one has done an especially good job explaining why the fediverse is better than centralized solutions

    The default example people use for “a federated service” shouldn’t be Mastodon or Lemmy.

    It should be email.

    Why is it better that different companies, universities, and other organizations (and even hobbyists) can all set up their own email servers, rather than everyone just using (say) Hotmail?

    1. If Hotmail does something you don’t like, you can switch to Gmail or AOL instead, and you can still send emails to your friends on Hotmail.
    2. Different providers can specialize in different things, while remaining compatible. Maybe one provider doesn’t prioritize the features you need; but they can’t prevent a competing one from offering them.
    3. No one provider can impose censorship or other overextended control onto the whole system. No one provider can break the whole system when it has an outage: Hotmail going down does not prevent Gmail’s servers from exchanging messages with the University of Tübingen’s servers.
    4. Different servers can operate in different parts of the world, under different legal systems. Not everyone is ruled by California or Washington state; or the US. A hobbyist operating an email server in Alabama is not required to comply with Dutch or EU law, and a hobbyist operating an email server in Amsterdam is not required to comply with Alabama or US law. People get to live under the law of their own country; and yet the Alabama mail server and the Amsterdam one can talk to each other.
    5. The same infrastructure that supports federation also supports extension of the platform. Programmers can build services on top of email, and the medium is transparent to them. And, again, no one provider can tell them “no, you may not build that weird client program, bot, or mailing-list service.” To be honest, you don’t even get Hotmail if email is born as a centralized service. The whole emergence of webmail services could only happen because email is extensible and federated.
  • nachof@feddit.clEnglish
    1·
    1 year ago

    I don’t think the interesting issue is why not centralization. There’s tons of better explanations out there, but seriously, just “Elon Musk” is enough to explain why centralization is bad.

    But the post does raise an interesting issue IMHO, and it is the lack of good explanation as to why federation between different platforms with different paradigms. Why federation between different Mastodon servers is obvious. Why federation between Mastodon and Calckey and whatever else is obvious too. Same with federation between different Lemmy instances, or between Lemmy and Kbin. It just makes sense. What is not clear is why we want/need/like federation between Lemmy and Mastodon. Sure, you can post in a Lemmy community from Mastodon, but it sucks. You can follow a Lemmy community from Mastodon, but the experience isn’t great either.

    I do think there are good reasons for this, but I haven’t thought enough about it to articulate it properly. My thinking is that while a Mastodon-like service federating with a Lemmy-like service doesn’t seem to make much sense, Mastodon federating with a Facebook-like service does make sense. And I’m not sure if a Facebook-like thing federating with Lemmy makes sense, but I can definitely imagine something sitting somewhere in the middle between those two. And also, perhaps more importantly, we don’t want to erect artificial walls between the different ActivityPub services. Sure, the Mastodon-Lemmy integration sucks, and maybe it shouldn’t exist, but probably nobody will use it much, exactly because it sucks. But if we add a thing saying “no you can’t do it”, then we start needing to define borders between different services. Is microblogging different from blogging? What about a Facebook-like wall? Or a tumblr-like feed? Are those different enough from each other to be different services? Who wants to be the one defining those borders? I think the current solution, where anything is possible and integrations that don’t make sense just don’t happen organically, is the best.

    But still, that is a way more itneresting question than just “why federation”.