.ml stands for Marxist/Leninist apparently. Communists try not to let idealism get in the way of practicality challenge(impossible)
To be fair this is a pretty crazy black swan event they couldn’t have possibly seen coming. But yeah, this is why novelty domain suffixes are novelties.
No that’s not true… .ml is the TLD for Mali and lemmy.ml selected it because it was free… This claim you’re making is like people claiming AC/DC stands for anti-christ devil-child. No, it’s electrical currents, hence the lightning bolt…
With that said, they did censor anti-china rhetoric, had many pro-china trolls/brainwashed users, and started censoring words, including “bitch.” So I’m not defending the instance. But this claim about what .ml means is just blatantly false! It’s a country’s TLD!
I can understand why refederation needs to be done manually, but I’m confused as to why transferring users and histories is a maybe. Web and database hosting are mutually exclusive from domain hosting/registration.
With ActivityPub all of the primary ids contain the domain of the hosting server. So if you lose your domain none of the other instances know that you’re the authority on those communities, posts, comments or users. So essentially federation breaks with all of the old data.
Same issue is why mastodon needs your origin server to be online to migrate to a new server. In both cases, federating a public key for the server or accounts would allow either to pop up at a new domain and prove it has the authority to migrate links to the new location.
The domain bs is a interesting case of scummy practices in general, .tv was missused in a similar way with awful contracts, essentially scamming a already increadably poor country!
There is also .io for the Indian Ocean territories. They seem to be fine with it. It is interesting they have problem with it. I wonder what the actual motivation is, because it can’t be due to a lack of viable domain for businesses.
The US and UK build a military base and established it with that ages ago so I am not surprised the current population is fine with it but they expelled the original population to do so! :/
TLDs are a non-tangible arrangement of characters that are defined by a committee at a whim. The countries they are given to have not contributed anything to make them worth more. I don’t see how that can be seen as a scam when they don’t get free money based on a random decision by someone outside of their country.
That’s not actually true, the guy who made them originally was from the west and those countries didn’t contribute because they had no chance of any digital infrastructure yet but top level country domains use caracters from the correspinding countries name and those are all determind in the same way so you essentially use their name without their permission or based on scetchy and scummy legally binding agreements!
If you tried to trademark any of these tlds, it would fail horribly.
TV, ML, IO etc are literally just two letter combinations and they are descriptive by nature. There is no real way to claim ownership on just two letters, especially when they have an accepted understanding as being geographically descriptive.
If you could do this, concepts such as maps would also be infringement.
Additionally, the IANA is who is in charge of assigning TLDs, which is in turn controlled by ICANN. IANA gets to appoint trustees for country code TLDs and has the authority to take that control back.
IANA is based in the United States(though it has stakeholders globally) and has the authority to revoke TLD (unlikely to happen, but well within their rights and control) and more likely, to re delegate control to another authority, if they found the currently appointed trustee to be abusing the control of the TLD.
.ml was a terrible name anyways. People just kept saying everyone was a tannkie whether or not true. Not the image that’s going to help you grow or your ideological goals imo
A week ago I literally read articles about how .ml was switching to the (Russian-influenced) Mali government in a week, and did not even think about how lemmy.ml would be affected
this is why instances should be abstracted away as underlying infrastructure and the users don’t have to think about “instances”. accounts and communities are replicated across servers.
This was my thought as well. Before learning more about the fediverse, I thought things are distributed and are replicated across servers (much like how distributed storage and computing works). But apparently they’re not. You still have to choose which instance you want to use as your “home”, and your data and your contents stays in your home. Others get to look at your profile and contents thanks to ActivityPub.
I understand the needs for multiple instances (i.e., preferences for moderating concents, governance, etc.) But shouldn’t the users and the user generated contents (arguably fediverse’s valuable resources) should be safe-guarded by having redundancies in place across multiple instances?
I thought things are distributed and are replicated across servers (much like how distributed storage and computing works)
yes, exactly! when you use the internet, you don’t manually choose which ISPs to route through. you can pick which DNS servers to use but you don’t have to. when you use youtube, netflix, or facebook, you don’t choose which CDNs to use.
There are a few technical problems with that. First of all, the cost of each instance would become quickly unbearable since everyone has all the duplicated data.
Second problem, a malign entity could just come, create its own instance, spam everything and everyone with ads or whatever and suddenly every instance is full of that stuff. Also, how do you handle defederating in that case?
What has been proposed before instead was to make some kind of mega communities that gather all posts from communities with the same name across instances
everyone does not have all the duplicated data. they only have the data that they need – the data requested by a user who happens to be using some instance.
handling defederating is a good point. there could be malicious nodes that would be damaging to the network. i suppose there could be a community-mainted ledger of known malicious nodes (similar to minecraft usernames of known hackers), and the admins of the servers would maintain a blacklist. (obviously you configure that your instance’s blacklist would be automatically synced with this ledger)
the mega community idea could be good. where is this being discussed?
This is not the solution! Being able to pick a server to trust your data and content moderation with is a feature, not a bug.
What we do have to do is make this feature more resilient and easier to use. Like adding the ability to easily transfer accounts and communities between instances, or even change the domain name of an entire instance.
no, you’re misunderstanding. that shouldn’t be how it works. there shouldn’t be any difference between the software on each instance such that it make your data insecure. this is how bitcoin works. this is why anyone can spin up a bitcoin instance and have it start contributing to the bitcoin blockchain and you as a user don’t have to “trust” that particular node. trust is built into the distributed software architecture. you don’t “choose” a set of bitcoin nodes. you don’t “choose” your CDN or DNS servers.
Cryptocurrencies and social platforms are completely different beasts. In crypto I want no moderation/censorship, I want anonymity, and there is a payout system so nodes can compete for something. This is all different when building a social network, so you can’t just use the same architecture. Building social structures and trust is desirable in a public forum, not something you want to get rid of.
This is all different when building a social network
wait you want censorship in a social network? also, the architecture i’m describing does not do away with moderation and social structure. what about it makes you think that to be the case?
Of course! Moderation is censorship. There is certain content I don’t want to see, and I don’t want to have to filter it myself so I join a community of seemingly likeminded people who censor content based on rules I generally agree with. They ban users who break the rules, keep spambots out, block malicious instances and so on, and if they are doing their job right then it builds trust and attracts more people.
what about it makes you think that to be the case?
Because you want to strip all that out and abstract it away. Who do you think would do the moderating and spam blocking? Who aggregates posts from all over the world and presents a sorted list to a user on their smartphone? It would be the wild west with users having to do everything themselves. I know it’s tempting to think about building a Fediverse without instances, but afaik you need these social structures for the system to work.
Crypto for example only works because you can define the rules mathematically beforehand, and then hand out money for computers to check them. That’s just not possible with a public forum, at least not yet imo.
i do not want to strip out the functionality of communities having mods that moderate the discourse and ban malicious users etc. it sounds like you misunderstood what i was proposing.
I think the one thing we could adopt from crypto is having public keys as user IDs, instead of tying it to an instance. But that would require users to handle their own keys, and people are just reeeaaally bad at that!
you connect to some lemmy instance on your web browser
the client application (lemmy web app) authenticates your login credentials by first checking its own user database, if it doesn’t find you (which it should because by default you’d be connecting to an instance that you’ve already used, and if done through a mobile app for example it would automatically find the best instance to use by lowest latency), it send out a message to the nodes(instances) that it knows about, searching for your user, recursively, when found, sent back and stored in each node that was part of the searching. (there’d be some threshold of tree depth so the unsuccessful branches don’t keep going forever, and some other algorithmic details to prevent redundant network activity)
you navigate to your subscribed communities feed, lemmy shows you the posts that are already on the node that you are directly connected to, then asynchronously sends out a request to the surrounding nodes to pull more posts from those communities, recursively reaching out to adjacent nodes, again avoiding repeatedly hitting the same node via algorithmic details which we can discuss further if you wish, sending back the info up the tree to your primary node. now a bunch of servers have duplicated community data, like a distributed storage system, but you, the user, don’t know about all that stuff that just happened behind the scenes. your GUI is updated accordingly
now you can interact with these posts, make new posts, and each interaction will be sent out to all the relevant nodes in a reverse process.
another user on the other end can visit some community that you just posted to, and a request will again be propagated through the network, but starting from his node, and eventually reaching some node that has your new post.
the advantages of this:
if a node goes down, not all of the community and user data is lost, because its neighbor nodes have replicated the data
if i am hosting a node, and have limited bandwidth and storage, i can specify limits so that my network is not unintentionally DoSed. so this implies that when the prior-described processes are occurring, some instances will not store the data they are pushing through, which is fine, and one of the intended features of this distributed architecture
similar to previous point, each instance can have a whitelist or blacklist of communities (for either storage and/or data passing), defined by the admin, if he/she wishes to tailor the content for example to keep it related to content they are interested in rather than being forced to serve everyone on the network. it’s like if someone wants to help a little bit but they don’t have all the bandwidth and storage in the world, they can, instead of having to handle traffic for a bunch of irrelevant-to-them communities.
There is so much wrong with this that I don’t even know where to begin.
I don’t intent to be rude, but this is just not how you build a decentralized/distributed system. The network would grind to a halt if every user app had to search recursively through a portion of the network, and aggregate & rank posts by itself. Aggregate values (communities, votes and so on) would never be right, because you’d never be able to acually gather all events for a particular entity in time. This might work in a local network of 10 nodes, but not on a global scale.
On top, who would pay for those nodes you are querying? There is no relationship between the users and the nodes, so why would anyone just run a node for others or be willing to pay anyone else in this scenario? Servers cost money and stuff. And your spam filtering and moderation solution would be the exact same as with instances, so nothing is gained here.
Maybe have a look at the Session messenger and their Oxen network. They go to great length to make sure the work is equally distributed among nodes and they are compensated fairly. This doesn’t just happen magically by itself, and there are many bad actors who will try to exploit any weakness they can find.
So I just think it’s impossible to create something like lemmy in an anonymous way, because content moderation is a human decision. There is no one correct mathematical solution, and I also can’t send some kind of filter query to a server to do it for me. All I can do is read the general rules that another human being has wrote up, subscribe to their moderation “service”, see how they are doing, and decide to stay or switch to another.
Similarly, if I don’t want to aggregate all the posts in the world by myself (as you are suggesting), then I’ll have to fine someone to do it for me, and somehow pay that someone for their service. This part is actually kind of solvable (again look at Session), but it is not straight forward at all! It would involve crypto currencies, mining/staking, and some kind of client-side monetization. For this part I think trusted instances are just a much better solution, because we are building a social structure here anyway.
ok, you make good points, but i feel like the algorithm could work to not have the system grind to a halt. i’d have to look at other examples where this has been done. but maybe i am overly-optimistic and it’s not possible.
who would pay for those nodes you are querying
the people who are already running nodes, like lemmy.world, lemmy.ml, me, etc. i run some services on my home server that i let anyone use, because i have the hardware and the bandwidth to be able to afford it. there are enough people who have the necessary hardware and bandwidth to contribute to it at minimal detriment to them. it’s already an open-source project where people volunteer their time to code it.
i’ll read up on oxen network.
in an anonymous way
wait who said anything about anonymous? what are talking about being anonymous? there would still be user accounts.
if I don’t want to aggregate all the posts in the world by myself (as you are suggesting), then I’ll have to fine someone to do it for me
this is already what is done, except that the data is not stored in a replicated and distributed manor. you get all the posts in the world of a community of an instance. it is one server, with all the data stored on its harddrive, like a traditional website. in what i’m proposing, this is also what would happen in many cases, because the thing wouldn’t requery the entire network every time you request posts, there would be a time threshold, like how posts are cached on your local mobile device for most social media apps. posts would be cached on the server.
now, yes, this architecture would in fact result in more network traffic occurring between each and every node, as they receive updates about events on other nodes. so that would be extra burden upon the hosts. but i believe it is something we can work through.
you already share water with them though. how is this any different? more seriously though, you already share internet infrastructure with them. the packets you just sent to make that comment could have been sandwiched between a “tankie” and a “fascist nutball”. that’s just the way it is man, there have always been crazy humans.
the tankie instance or the nutballs on the fascist instance
here you reveal a conceptual misunderstanding, or rather, a part of the lemmy architecture which i disagree with. there shouldn’t be a concept of a “interest X instance” etc. it should be similar to a distributed storage model. so the concept of a community is not per-instance, it’s just an abstract thing that exists in conceptual space.
I’m aware of how you think it should work (Usenet, basically) but how does moderation actually work on Lemmy? Can someone be banned from a sublemmy on one instance and not banned from it on another?
I wouldn't be surprised. That was a pretty major mistake, so I was already kind of expecting there to be some changes with the .ml TLD. Didn't expect this, though.
The Mali government taking control of the .ml tld probably has something to do with the fact that hundreds of thousands of US military emails have been accidentally sent to Mali by users who type .ml instead of .mil in the address field.
It’s just that the Fediverse now has enough global attention being paid to it that they’re probably actually cracking down on enforcement. Probably something under the “Insults” or “Racism” content policy, since those are the most vague and poorly defined and highly likely to be “obvious” primarily to the country who is operating them, Mali.
Even better, join a smaller one to spread out and make use of the federated nature. Right now imagine lemmy.ml and lemmy.world for whatever reason go down. Basically whole Lemmy is kinda fucked because it’s extremely centralized, even though decentralization is one of the points of Lemmy.
We need a better way to advertise what servers to direct people to. Would be nice to circle through a big list of instances to evenly direct new users to
It’s hard to make anything “official” on the fediverse as things are distributed. Who makes the “official” determination for Lemmy? The biggest instances? The devs? Do we hold a vote across instances?
People couldn’t care less if it’s centralized or not. People come for the community, not the tech behind it. Also people are lazy, they will use the easiest thing that comes up. Why should one go to another instance, if the one they are right now works great?
I am not saying that this system is bad. I am just saying that people will always take the easiest option there is.
Well, I’m not blaming the people, really. This is a communication issue, it should be well advertised to do it “correctly” and it should actually be the easiest option.
How I see it is that every decentralized system with people is going to form some sort of centralization unless you actively fight against it.
In Lemmy’s case, new people will check what are the biggest communities and go there, and since there are more people there, it attract even more people. More people, more communities in that instance.
I think any non-regional and non-special TLD is fine. Some have rules associated. I thought .movie had special rules about only lasting for a specific amount of time but it looks like I may have been wrong (not sure where I got the idea and I can’t find anything to back that up). .us you have to be a US citizen for. .dev has the “rule” that it is HTTPS only because *.dev is in the HSTS always-on list by default but that’s not related to the domain itself.
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