The only threat to this burgeoning community is the same old divide & collapse nonsense that separates citizens under their overlords everywhere.
I would create accounts and start calling to defederate instances which allow non-polite (or politically incorrect or otherwise offensive) communities.
We didn’t just survive the trolls on reddit. We thrived amongst them. We can handle them. We can block them.
I want curatorial tools to curate my own feed. I absolutely 100% do NOT want any admins telling me what I can’t read. And going to another instance is no solution if that instance is blocked.
I don’t want to be on a purely polite ecosystem, or a purely right-wing-idiot ecosystem. I want access to everybody, and the tools to curate that experience.
The trolls do NOT have the power to take us down. But the admins definitely do.
Welcome to the Defediverse.
I understand that it’s a technicas issue that we have to have instances with a lot of people on them right now so that the more technically inclined people can set up the software so that the others can just use it. But the problem is that when it is like that then there are two sides of the problem, users have no control over their content and what they can consume and admins can be responsible for things the users do/post.
I really hope that in the future there will be some technology which would be able to live without central sevrers but instead it would be a p2p sollution which would replicate itself onto your devices where you want to have it. Only then we’ll be able to be autonomous enough.
We have bittorrent with the magnet links which are only a couple of bytes big, back in the day I kind of suspected that on top of something like that we would build p2p social networks, but it never happened, I’m not sure why.
It’s data cost. Private torrent sites are the exception, but most people who torrent don’t continue to seed for a long time, which means that availability is low and the bandwidth cost is usually split among just a handful of users with a seedbox, which is basically getting back to the idea of a server. How do you motivate people to use up their bandwidth and pay for the extra electricity to keep the availability and speed reasonable?
The most similar thing I can think of to what you’re talking about is i2p, but that comes with all the speed and connnectivity problems that are commonplace for the dark web, and the vast majority of mainstream users have no interest in engaging with a complicated P2P network that serves content at speeds that make you feel like you’re living in 2003.
Unless the mindset of the general computer user changes, we are unlikely to see any system take off that doesn’t rely on a central team of motivated people to do the backend work that the users simply don’t want to worry about.
I would love to see an actual protocol like email or torrents replacing all social media. Then we wouldn’t have to rely on admins to protect us from the baddies, or graciously allow us access to each other. We could just block rude people, and subscribe to interesting people.
Email is probably the technology where admins have to do the most to protect you from the baddies.
The problem is really inherent in any technology that allows anyone to contact anyone else without pre-screening (like an add to friendslist feature most messengers have).
Yeah I was just about to say. What do they think a spam filter is but admins protecting you. This isn’t even talking about the trust system within emails where you can’t email someone al all basically if your email server isn’t trusted and configured correctly.
SPF, DKIM, DMARC policies, DMARC reporting, ARC, DNS RBLs for IPs and Domains, Bayesian spam filters, various honeypots, systems for exchanging user spam reports, virus scanners, MTA-STS and SMTP TLS reporting,…
I doubt there is any other technology that has spawned this many technologies to protect users from bad actors.
Wait, email is basically exactly lika ActivityPub, it also relies on servers like outlook, gmail and so on. And those servers have to have admins and those admins do block other servers because of all the spam.
They block spam, they don’t block servers just because people are emailing shitposts or being politically incorrect.
Blocking spam servers is totally different from blocking “problematic” servers.
RBL’s are nothing more than a way to block problematic servers. And some of those problems are nothing more than they don’t have a rdns.
That’s not due to technical differences though. Blocking/defederating is entirely up to the admins, so it’s more of a cultural issue than technical. If a social media network was built around SMTP (email) it would see the same censorship debate were seeing with ActivityPub (Lemmy, etc).
Exactly. While lemmy does need better tools to help mitigate the problem on a more granular level, at the end of the day if you have a lot of spam coming from one instance then defederating from that instance will always be a valid option.
Spam servers constitute a technical issue so I think that defederating them is entirely different from just defederating instances that allow trolls and right wingers (or centrists or whatever).