If everyone was spread out onto different instances, and communities were based all over the fediverse, the decisions of one instance would be less impactful.
Can I move a community from one server to another or do I have to delete the old one and recreate it elsewhere? Because I have a community on .world and would like to move it somewhere else, probably feddit.de
Think we need universal/transferrable accounts to make this happen. People, myself included will be concerned that if they sign up to a tiny instance someone’s hosting on a raspberry pi or something that it’ll just disappear without a trace one day and their account along with it
If accounts were made portable I think a lot more people would disperse
If everyone was spread out onto different instances
Each instance with an owner/operator making rules… that the average social media user walks in, orders a drink, and starts smoking without any concern that neither one may be allowed. People can be loyal to their media outlets even when it is beyond obvious they are bad. People raised on storybooks that endorse bad behaviors and values, HDTV networks, and social media too. Audience desire to “react comment” to images and not actually read what others have commented - nor learn about the venue operators and reasons for rules is pretty much the baseline experience in 2023.
An Instance is just another word for ‘server’ in lemmy terminology. HDTV is a classic form of media that doesn’t involve TCP/IP to watch films and other video content.
I made an account on lemm.ee, thought it was a bad idea since all the communities were on .world. After this whole fiasco though, I’m happy with my decision.
It’s pretty entertaining tbh. It really makes you more tight knit with your community too. It’s something I never really considered with federations, you’re like joining a team.
Which is why identities and communities on Fediverse should be cryptography-based, and an “instance” should simply be a sort of a supernode, or a caching node.
In principal yes, but requiring people to handle private keys would be a nightmare! Imo what we can and should do is support for transferring accounts between instances, including posts and comments.
If the account itself is like a property/attribute of a post/comment, then I suppose it can be changed seamlessly. But i dont think it is designed to be that way.
Afaik right now you’d have to send an update for every post/comment individually, if it would even work. I think we need one simple ActivityPub message that simply means “this actor is now this other actor, and all its objects should be updated”.
The amount of data that needs to be exchanged because of this approach is not scalable. Assume that there are 3 instances with 100 users each. Even if lots of users upvote/post/comment, the traffic is exchanged only between 3 servers. But if there are 300 single user instances, the amount of traffic/storage will be duplicated which can cause a huge load for everyone which might not be viable in the long run, for both the sender and receiver. PS: I am assuming that the instances periodically update content by fetching the deltas.
Just go to your average big popular subreddit, check out all the text of all posts and comments they week. That’s still a minuscule amount of data. A few megabytes when uncompressed.
And Lemmy won’t get to that point of popularity and traffic for a very long time.
And even then, it’s an easy problem to solve. Each instance creates a chunk of a day’s data, sign it and share it on a bittorrent like protocol. Even nntp massively archaic infrastructure can manage this, it is a piece of cake for Lemmy to do.
🤔 We need an ActivityPub app that is basically just a user account holder that is tied to their IP or MAC address so individuals can carry the same info throughout the fediverse, block instances they personally don’t like, and so bans from instances are actually permanent and enforceable.
IPs change constantly, MAC is per network device (a laptop with Wi-Fi and wired has two different MACs), so you would need to be able to have a list of MACs and MACs can be easily spoofed so thats a whole other set of issues.
Another interesting thought about MACs and any other chip-based IDs that get floated in the future. Spoofing aside, while MACs are supposed to be unique, there are a lot of dodgy mfgs that just burn the same MAC or set of MACs into entire batches of chips at a time. If a new standard was announced, it would be interesting to see the results of orgs trying to take advantage of the ID while shady mfgs continue to not give a flip.
🤔 In principle, you could just order a chip from a manufacturer with a specific ID tag so you could mimic someone you hated, or steal their shit, or otherwise fuck up their lives under such a system.
While this is true, the fact that communities tend to all group together when one gets big enough on an instance means that the same centralized control of power problems happen.
For example one of the Android communities I was subbed to on here closed down because they all moved to one on a different instance that was started by the reddit android mods…so now those same power hungry reddit mods are the mods of the go-to lemmy android community. It’s all centralized there. Are there other android communities on lemmy? Sure, but they’re tiny and unused because no one wants 10 tiny communities, they want 1 big one.
Correct me if this is already a thing, but it would be nice if you could post to multiple communities at once and have users see comments across all communities and instances. So a user posts “A” on instances X, Y and Z all under communities run on those instances at the same time. When making the post, you select ehich communities the post goes to instead of just one. Users on instances X, Y and Z see it as a single post it appears in all of the communities the user specifies. A limit might be useful here to prevent trial spam. A user commenting on the post in instance X will be seen on the other instances and communities where that post was made.That way, you could remove the centralisation on instances and communities (one community or instance might remove the thread, but everybody else still sees it and each others comments in the remaining communities/instances.) This has a few advantages:
People are incentivised to post to smaller communities knowing that larger ones will also get the same post and everybody can see each others comments.
If a moderator of a community removes the post, it still disappears in their community, but not the whole instance. If the thread still exists in other communities in the same instance, users of that instance can still participate in the post on those communities.
If the post is banned instance-wide, it is banned across all communities in the instance at once. This could include non-local communities.
Users in other instances will still be able to see the post and continue contributing to it. You can only remove the post from your own instance.
One issue that came to mind when I tried to re-write this comment to post it on lemmy_support: a post can be made to communities with completely different rules resulting in commenters following the rules of the community they are in, but not the other community the post was sent to. This seems like a pretty big issue for moderation.
That is why defederation and blocking communities happen! If both communities are on far extreme side of the scale then there’s no good ground to be made for interaction.
Only idea I had in mind would be to have the post go to a “home” community and all other communities pull the comments from that one and submit their own comments to that one. If the “home” community has rules that the others roughly follow that might help filter the extreme ends out so you don’t just get constant de-federation.
Content allowed on instances:
Instance 1: Content A, B
Instance 2: Content B only
Instance 3: Content B, C
By making instance 2 the home for the post, which by it’s own rules only allows content that both instance 1 and 3 allow themselves, you filter out the content which 1 and 3 would hate. Of course, this puts the moderation burden on instance 2. You could still allow instances 1 and 3 to have their own comments which instance 2 doesn’t allow, but only they will see those comments.
IDK, I feel I’m starting to see why Lemmy works the way it does. I’ll post in !lemmy_support if I get a better idea. :)
It kinda makes me wish that instances were forced to be single-topic, or even single-community, and that authentication was key-based so that you didn’t need to “make” an account on a single instance.
I think instead instances should have every community. There isn’t one /c/books, every server has a /c/books. Your feed pages just pulls from the entire fediverse. No concept of “creating” /c/books, it just is.
Likewise, there isn’t “a” moderator. Every user is a moderator. Whether you vote, or delete the post out ban the user (from your view), your moderation opinions are published publicly. Your local feed algorithm sees everyone’s “moderation opinions”, if the consensus of the community is delete, then it just doesn’t show up in your thread
For each “moderation opinions” by a user, your client investigates their historical record to address credibility and likelyness of being a bot, a user’s history is his credibility
I’ve got similar ideas, but not entirely the same.
What you call communities would be closer to what I would call content sources / repositories (host servers) plus topic tags. Then instead of consensus (because that’s too hard to automate with decent quality results) you’d have communities formed by subscribing to “curation feeds” which pull submissions and comment from all over the network in a similar style.
This would let you easily crosspost and comment to multiple related communities in a network, as well as to yeet bad mods/curators without losing any content or splitting the community (just create a new curation feed and get people to switch). You could similarly choose to have your client mix comment from multiple curation feeds (similar to “multireddits” on reddit).
Whatever the solution, it needs to create communal view of content or else users will not have a communal experience of which is the basis for a community. This is why multireddit remained a niche feature incapable of overcoming zealous moderation and censorship.
As a midpoint there’s things you can do like “2/3 consensus of X, Y and Z’s submission selections on topics ABC”, then defining that as it’s own feed people can subscribe to.
But it gets complicated to mix and match when different subcommunities have very different local cultures.
The key based (and content addressing based) thing is what bluesky is building. They’re starting of with Twitterish microblogging, but there’s people building forums on top the protocol too. Federated, of course.
Lemmy is built upon the ActivityPub Protocol which has the flaws mentioned above Bluesky is built upon the AtProtocol which to me also looks kinda great yewtu.be/watch?v=wJBCpzM1VfM ;- Video that explains the difference (i just watched it minutes ago) atproto.com/docs ;-Docs for learning how it works
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