If the descentralization of social networks continue, we will have to prepare for the eventual rise of the instances wars, where people will start to fight about which instance is better and which one is weird to be in and so on, but that’s for the future of us all.
The biggest problem with lemmy and decentralization right now is that for optimal performance you need to spread out the load relatively evenly between instances. The problem is that users tend to go where other users are (otherwise why go there) and that naturally leads to clumping on one or few instances which causes it to overload.
The way to solve it is to avoid having generic “anything goes” instances and instead have instances be focused on a specific topic. For example, have gaming instance, a personal finance/investing instance, all things home ownership and improvement instance, etc. You can have multiple communities per instance as long as they stay within the same general topic. This way users will naturally spread out by subscribing to different instances based on topics they’re interested in. And that will solve the performance issue we’re seeing with lemmy.world or other popular instances.
I’m pretty much brand new to lemmy but the thought of having to switch instances to see cooking conversations after conversing about Raspberry Pi projects in a different instance just seems unwieldy. But I guess as long as my instances are all federating with each other I don’t need to switch instances. I’m a technical guy but this needs to be easier for joe sixpack or it’s not going to catch on. And if it doesn’t catch on there’s going to be less interesting content…
Correct, as long as the instance your account is in federated with all other instances you’re subscribed to, you don’t have to switch accounts.
Now, defederation is another issue if you want to see the widest possible amount of content. What’s going to happen is ideologically opposed instances are going to defederate each other, so left-wing instances are going to defederate right-wing ones and vice versa. So if you’re a user who wants to see the content from both sides, you’ll have to create multiple accounts in each “cluster” of federated instances. It’s kind of annoying to be honest, it makes it hard to discover communities just because your instance admin decided to defederate from them and encourages echo chambers, but it it’s the best we’ve got.
Another way to solve the issue is to have users and communities be instance-independent where the instances only provide storage for communities and users they want to support.
Where would user information be stored?
Would this require you to switch between instances to view all the content you wish to follow? That doesn’t seem very appealing as a user.
I am subscribed to Ukraine on sopuli.xyz and memes in lemmy.ml and a few others on Lemmy.world and they all show up in my feed, so I’m now more confused. Am I viewing several instances or not? Lmao
You are as long as they agree to federate with each other (which they obviously are if they’re in your feed)
So what is the point of congregating on a general purpose instance? I ask this because of the snippet from the root comment:
The problem is that users tend to go where other users are (otherwise why go there)
If everything is visible from any (federated) instance, why not switch once you encounter slow down? In my comment, I was just clarifying that I understood the premise.
I also see these when sorting by All in lemmy.world, for instance (no pun intended). I’m just making sure I am not confused. Sorry if I confused you in the process!
No, you can see all the content from all instances you’re subscribed to, as long your instance admin hasn’t defederated from them.
Right, I think this was the potential concern I was vaguely remembering.
I wonder if specialised instances are easier to administer? If the admins are familiar with the instances specific subject matter, jargon and memes, it might make their job easier perhaps?
I agree
This wouldnt be as much of as issue if Lemmy had better support for connecting with other instances and their communities.
Don’t we kinda already have them?
bombastic side eyes at Beehaw
Interesting to hear this from a dirty lemmy.fmhy.ml-er! 😈
Only real motherfuckers post on general communities from their lemmynsfw account
Those tankies ain’t getting me!
What if there was an app that let you log in to multiple lemmy accounts at once, aggregated the lot into one seamless feed, and used the relevant account for each interaction? Maybe even going as far as to automatically cross-post any submission to duplicate communities and aggregate that too.
I’m actually working on this haha.
It’s definitely a v2 feature, but it’s in the works
Use wefwef.app
This would be the best of all worlds. Instances get to choose who to federate with, users get to choose want instances to use.
Sign me up.
Would an app that pulls directly from each server (anonymously) or an app that pulls from dedicated servers (while logged in/subbed) be better? The first is more efficient but the instance owners likely won’t be [financially] supported, while the latter requires duplication and is prone to defederation issues. In the end I suspect overcoming defederation will be a significant design goal of third party apps.
I’ve got multiple accounts because I have my main (this one) and an account on feddit.uk. The account on feddit.uk exists because I wanted to make a very UK-niche community on there, and I believe you need an account on an instance to make a community on that instance. I could give up my feddit.uk account now, but it’s nice to keep around in case my main instance goes down for maintenance or some such.
I have been running a Mastodon instance since like 2016/17 and this has been quietly happening for the entire time I’ve been on the fediverse. (I can’t check the exact date right now as I’m in the middle of upgrading it.)
Do you want to be in the Anime Girl Who Posts Nazi Memes Fediverse? How about the Queer Furry Fediverse? Or maybe you’d rather be in the Mocking Shitposts Fediverse? Perhaps you want the Everyone Has A Photo Of A Human And Thinks Federating With Facebook’s Activitypub Is Actually A Good Idea Fediverse? Or how about the TERF/Gender-Critical Fediverse? Or the “Standalone” Social Site That Is Actually A Fediverse Instance With Federation Disabled And The Credits Removed In Violation Of The Source License?
Some of these Fediverses will happily talk with others. Some of them will rapidly defederate from others as soon as they encounter a place that clearly belongs to a Fediverse they are incompatible with. Some of them quickly get defederated from the Fediverses they are incompatible with. Some of them look at the #fediblock tag, some to keep aware of places worth pre-emptively blocking to make a chill place to talk, some to look for fellow people who have been cast out of someone else’s chill zones.
Is this a bad thing? I thought kind of, curating who you associate with is one of the benefits
Not at all, I am very happy to be able to preemptively keep Terf Fedi and 4Chan Forever Fedi and all those other Fediverse the fuck out of my little corner of Queer Furry Fedi. Throwing everyone into one giant discussion forum and pushing them to fight with each other because that’s what keeps the ad impressions coming is not an experience I care to return to.
Realistically though I can’t be bothered to engage in “fighting about which instance is better to be in” though, I know which one is better for me and if you think that one is a shitty place for you to be then I am pleased to have you stay in whatever place you like as long as you don’t try to make the place I like stop existing or change to fit your desires.
well said
And that’s exactly what’s supposed to happen. Instance wars and eventual defederation and fragmentation are important moderation tools, and will progress the culture and feel of instances and regions of the Fediverse. Many instances will form federated [cliques](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clique_(graph_theory) that are highly connected and have similar vibes and cultures, and some will be federated with multiple cliques, showing users a variety of cultures and situations.
If the Fediverse reaches a large enough number of people, it can support multiple independant cliques, and enable users see entire mini-universes with different communities and vibes.
imma have undercover alts everywhere for the sole purpose of getting all the cats communities in one page.
Your legend well be carved into the pages of history as the first person to complete the catalog!
My man !
One benefit that people don’t talk about enough is it naturally tends towards smaller community sizes than in a centralized system which is a better fit for our tribal human brains.
We’re not great with speaking into a room with 1,000 people in it, much less a million.
The problem is that it’s worse for keeping topics centralized and fragments communities for external reasons. It’s antithetical to the idea of a link aggregator where you centralize all of your news if you need to use several of them to make it work. Defederation should be a last resort to protect the admins from legal action, content manipulation, or brigading, not because beehaw thinks open signups harm their safe space. Making the internet a safe space is how we got to this point with Twitter/Google/meta/reddit, and everyone wants to do it all over again to rebuild their echo chambers.
Perhaps keeping topics de-centralized is a key part of keeping systems from turning tyrannical. That’s the theory behind the term “totalitarian”: that too much unification of thought produces behavioral restrictions, via the justification that if the truth of each topic is known and indisputable, then there’s no reason to share power in society as long as the person in power knows the One Truth.
Centralized systems designed to uncover one clear answer, such as stack overflow, have every reason to fight against redundancy in answers. Anything rightly called a community though should not be built around the (totalitarian) idea that conversations are best centralized and made non-redundant.
Big important questions need to be rehashed millions of times, not just covered once with millions of audience members.
99% of the content people post and interact with doesn’t have a reason for multiple copies of it’s conversation to exist. Most content is consumed not discusses.
Yet when a person arrives and asks a question they are discussing. If they wanted to consume, the could.
And the vast majority of the users consume the answers, not the discussion. They don’t ask the questions, hey look them up, and if no one asked, or no one answered, they can’t find anything and just give up. They don’t ask.
And some of them don’t even bother with trying to look it up. They just ask, because they like that method of getting information.
I truly hope this type of hierarchical thinking can stay fun and not create the kind of grating pomposity that pervades every bloody animalistic thing. I want us to grow beyond childish competitiveness.
Ladder of evolution speed run commence
The instance that someone is hosted on is (almost) completely irrelevant to which communities they can join.
I am in a local region instance but can still access any communities on Lemmy.world, Lemmy.ml and even other federated platforms like kbin.social
I may be restricted on what I can do in each of those instances; it there is some disagreement between Aussie.zone and sh.itjust.works I may not be able to post about camping to my preferred community.
Absolutely. I don’t think that’s a bad thing.
What I do worry about somewhat is multiple forks of the codebase that differ so much as to cause bugs when instances try to interoperate.
My personal hope is that the ActivityPub standard prevents this from happening. After all, I’ve seen decent federation between Lemmy and KBin and they’re entirely different platforms, nevermind a fork of the same software.
There is nothing better than a good old tribe war.
One of the oldest human pastimes, hating people who are different from you in some way, no matter how inconsequential.
“You ever notice that? Any time you see two groups of people who really hate each other, chances are good they’re wearing different kind of hats. Keep an eye on that, it might be important.” - George Carlin
Ah shit they should bring back tribes, I miss that game.
This will likely follow a similar pattern to email, since it’s starting from a very similar position.
At some point people will begin to assign identities to instances and imagine (rightly or wrongly) that being on an instance says something about a person. People do that with cars, shoes, and yes, even email domains.
From a technical perspective, right now Lemmy is as anonymous as can be — I’ve yet to see an instance that requires ANY kind of verification. I didn’t need to provide an email address, phone number, or any other identifying information to sign up. Didn’t even need to solve a captcha. I just choose a name and set a password and BOOM! I was in.
Once upon a time, email worked this way, too. Then came the spammers, scammers, and other bad actors, and this was deemed untenable. Nowadays, any email provider that allows anonymous signup is likely to be blocked by most of the email-using world. You won’t be able to use them to sign up for other services, and you might not even have your mail accepted by other providers.
This will definitely become a problem as Lemmy becomes popular, and instance admins will need to crack down, lest they be overrun and defederated by the rest of the world.
I’m not sure what the answer is. This is a problem that has not been adequately solved, IMHO. A few bad apples spoil the bunch. That’s been true since long before the Internet.
At some point people will begin to assign identities to instances and imagine (rightly or wrongly) that being on an instance says something about a person.
*Cough
even email domains.
No joke. During my interview for a bell company my email came up for whatever reason and thier response was “oh! You use Gmail!”. Like I was hired on the spot because of it. It was very strange.
Wait - what kind of proof of identity do Gmail, outlook, Yahoo, etc require to make an email address?
I’m not sure about all of them, but for Google, you can’t create a new account without a valid phone number for SMS verification. If you created your account a long time ago then you’re kind of grandfathered in and don’t need to add a phone. They don’t allow known VOIP numbers (including Google Voice) and I think you cannot use the same number for lots of accounts.
This might vary by country. My experience is with the US version of gmail.
Hm I have made at least 3 gmail addresses and didn’t have to do this. And in fact their apps support account switching pretty easily, which seems to indicate that they don’t really disapprove of making multiple accounts.
In fact the only thing they asked for was a backup email address in case you get locked out or they need to send security alerts, and that was optional.
Interesting. I had to make a new account just a couple weeks ago (for Android testing as part of my job) and there was no option to continue without SMS verification. Couldn’t use a landline, couldn’t use VOIP, couldn’t fall back to email verification or anything else.
One of my coworkers was unable to use their cell phone number because Google said it was already in use. But it let me use the same number I have associated with my personal account, so go figure.
Interesting, could be because it’s something you’ve had to do often enough that they’re trying to rate limit you
It’s already occurring. If you have an account on esploding head you can’t set content from some places and people will reply to you in aggressive ways based on preconceived notions. I know if I see a commie or tanky making comments I view as shitty then I am already doing it too.
I had to verify with email to sign up for this?
Actually tbh I’m not even sure what anyone here is even talking about…federations and instances? I thought this was just a new Reddit but with a different back end.
Okay, it makes sense that some instances are doing that already. I signed up for a few and none of them did, but I’m not on lemmy.world. I’m on lemmy.sdf.org (and a couple others, but this is my main one).
u/kale@lemmy.zip already gave a great explanation. So here we are, three different people using three different servers, all talking in the same thread and generally not even noticing the difference. Neat, isn’t it!
Lemmy is a federated link aggregator and forum. Kind of like a hybrid between email and Reddit. I’m a member of Lemmy.zip, but I’m posting on another Lemmy instance (I forget where this post is, Lemmy.world, right?). Lemmy.zip and lemmy.world are “federated”, which means if users on one instance interact with users on another, both servers will sync this activity. Lemmy.world will accept lemmy.zip user posts.
And user names are only unique for a server. Just like “chunkylover53@aol.com” is a different email than “chunkylover53@hotmail.com”.
Community searching shows the community name and the server where it’s hosted. Even though I only have an account on Lemmy.zip, I can subscribe, comment, and post on communities from other instances, as long as lemmy.zip is federated with them.
Recently, Beehaw de-federated from much of the fedi-verse. This means their software works the same, but prevents their users from interacting with the rest of the community, and the rest of the community from interacting with their communities and users.
It’s complicated and annoying, but necessary to be federated to prevent the fate of Digg and Reddit.
Also, one instance could require email and 2FA to be safe, and choose to de-federate from an instance that has no verification and becomes full of spammers. Or, someone could create a Lemmy instance that requires verification of identity (like AMA used to do, or the old Twitter checkmark), so if John.Oliver from the “Lemmy.OnePercent” instance posts, you know it’s the real John Oliver. There’s benefits and complications from federation.
So if I’m understanding it correctly, Lemmy is the Federation and .world is the instance? And then within that instance are it’s own communuties?
Not quite. Lemmy.world is the instance. I’m from the instance lemmy.sdf.org and I also hang out on feddit.uk . The instance names are just URLs (.world, .uk, and org are all like .com).
Handwavy explanation because I’m fuzzy on details: Federation is the magical interconnection between instance lemmy.sdf.org and instance lemmy.world that allows me to see posts/threads/users on the lemmy.world instance .
Hmmm…I think this is the best explanation I’ve had so far.
I certainly don’t mean this negatively, but I get the impression a lot of the people here that actually understand it are also bad at explaining it to normies like me. And people like me are very much in the minority at this stage in the growth.
Aww, thank you.
It’s a hazard of really knowing what you’re talking about that leads to overestimating what other people know. I don’t have that problem 😉. Relevant xkcd: https://xkcd.com/2501/ .
@fluke is this a joke?
@fluke in case this is not a joke, yes instances host communities, but the lemmy.world is just a domain name. Federation just means lemmy.world and another server/instance such as geddit.social can share and exchange communities, comments, and threads they host with each other. I’d be happy to answer additional questions you might have, but I’m not as expert as I don’t share links in that format much.
Is what a joke?
From a technical perspective, right now Lemmy is as anonymous as can be — I’ve yet to see an instance that requires ANY kind of verification. I didn’t need to provide an email address, phone number, or any other identifying information to sign up
Not exactly anonymous…
Lemmy will most likely go the way of 4chan, they’ll ban connections from all major VPN services and start banning users via IP.
I’m sure that it’s a little more complicated than that with a federated network. Since you can host your own lemmy instance you could hide your information behind that.
I’d guess it’s a mix of your post and the parent post. Lemmy instances will have a user verification policy and de-federate with instances that differ too much. So the Lemmy instances with emai verification and 2FA will eventually de-federate from an instance that wants to be anonymous and has zero requirements for creating an account.
Maybe curse me for bringing the idea up, could a Lemmy instance exclusively use Facebook’s login features? So that you have to use “login with Facebook account” to create a Lemmy user on the instance?
Maybe curse me for bringing the idea up, could a Lemmy instance exclusively use Facebook’s login features? So that you have to use “login with Facebook account” to create a Lemmy user on the instance?
Oh god.
I don’t think the Lemmy code base supports that yet, but adding OAuth support is a natural thing to do at some point. I guess if you were dedicated you could hack it together yourself in your own instance even now.
As horrible as it is the implementation would take Facebook only a few days since lemmy is open source. The “problem” with an open system ist that basically everybody can join
Facebook will definitely hide behind a Facebook logins defederate everything that they don’t like to “protect” their users.
From a technical perspective, right now Lemmy is as anonymous as can be — I’ve yet to see an instance that requires ANY kind of verification. I didn’t need to provide an email address, phone number, or any other identifying information to sign up. Didn’t even need to solve a captcha. I just choose a name and set a password and BOOM! I was in.
Sopuli made me write a little paragraph about myself before they let me in
lemm.ee asked for an email and then sent me a confirmation email to click. But that’s it.
deleted by creator
so the owners and mods of instances will have to compete to provide a good experience. I don’t see a problem with this
Who does that select for though.
Those with the most time? The most money? The most aggressive approach?
Competition doesn’t tend to produce holistic quality; only efficiency.Yeah, I don’t think instances being competitive with each other would be good for the culture. It’ll just produce isolationism, elitism & hostility.
Isn’t it already? Lemmygrad, exploding-heads and other extremist instances have already been defederated. But the main feature is the federation itself, which also creates powerful alliances between instances with common values. Platform-wise, it will be just a matter of difference of use and leaning, but federation alliances will work the same
Lemmygrad is still federated with a lot of the big instances and not very extreme tbh.
What are they extremist about?
Idk, but lemmygrad sounds like it could be a tankie-dominated place
dang, I never saw one. I wanna see what they talk about 😂
You can visit any instance’s front page anonymously in a browser, it is easy and prudent
I just did. It was kinda boring. Idk what i expected but it was all political
The big problem is going to be when someone decides to start spamming and vote manipulating with bot populated private instances that automatically re-spawn themselves under a new name whenever they are blacklisted. Eventually, the standard will have to move to whitelisting over blacklisting, and once that happens the whole premise of federation starts to fall apart.
It’s not harder than what we’ve had to do with e-mail spam. Which has been enormously successful, with 99% of it not even getting delivered to your spam folder but just dropped entirely.
Instances will het as much visibility as they’ve earned through successful engagement across instances. The visibility of a new instance’s posts will increase over time.
This is why yes, there needs to be a feed algorithm. “Just show it to me chronologically” is the most naive thought, and people still have it all the time. There are just so many fundamental things that need to go into a sorting algo. We’re not even talking about personalization.
E-mail spam filter is funded by google and other multibillion megacorporations though, and they just outright block or rate limit unknown providers. I’d say it’s not gonna be as easy to do it with fediverse.
This is why yes, there needs to be a feed algorithm. “Just show it to me chronologically” is the most naive thought
Agreed 100% but again, I wonder if we have enough resources to actually make it good while also keeping it free, both in terms of monetization and in terms of outside influence and biases. Twitter and others spend a lot of manhours on it and mastodon still doesn’t have it either for example, it’s not even being worked on afaik (or nobody talks about it).
It’s why I’ve made fediseer.com to prepare for this inevitability
I think these problems might be solvable with auto blacklisting instances based on their age, how their users behave and what % of comments and posts of them are flagged as spam
How would an instance grow if it’s auto blacklisted by everyone? Doesn’t make sense
One thing that is feasible is for established instances to give votes from new instances a lower weight. So, no blacklisting, but until they have been around for a little while to be able to calculate that their activity corresponds to their size and that nothing is off, upvotes and dowvotes could be ignored or given a lower weight.
Thats the problem. It would be very difficult to get a new instance off the ground unless you were an insider or had inside connections. If you have a cabal of existing admins acting as gate keepers you could keep outsiders from abusing the system easily, but you are also walking right back into the centralized control federation is supposed to prevent.
Welcome back to IRC. :)
It has already started :) I’d say around 60% of major instances block exploding-heads, burggit and/or lemmygrad. Lemmygrad and EH in turn defederate a shitton of instances as well due to ideological reasons. Most “civility” or “law” related instances block piracy instances. The dbzer0 piracy instance blocks anything seen as too right-wingy cuz the owner is an anarchocommunist or something. LGBT instances are blocking & promoting for other instances to block instances that aren’t too friendly to LGBT or are simply not moderating or even promoting homophobia & related topics. I actually made a tool called federation-checker.vercel.app/ that checks where an instance stands in the federation “war”, so I know what instances to register onto if I wanna see some content that has been blocked by the instances I’m on.
The fact that things get divided up by the community itself is a positive, not a negative. The “major” network of instances don’t have to put up with extreme things on any end of the spectrum while those who do want to take part in that get their own bubble and won’t have to cry about censorship.
Thanks God.
Hey, that’s a really cool tool! Thanks for creating and sharing it!
Tldr:
Bigots are getting shunned, and cops are ignoring crime
Way to completely misread I guess. Bigots are defederating, cops are defederating, pedestrians are defederating, ants are defederating. Everyone and their mom is shunning and getting shunned except like a tiny couple kinda major instances and some of the smaller one that just don’t care and don’t cause any waves. Some of it is ideological. Some of it is personal. Some of it is prejudice. Some of it is about URLs or simple disagreements.
It’d be cool if you could make a graph analyzer with this. It’d be a little more complicated, but it may be useful for choosing an instance.
Explain. Like basically order by who has defederated the most and stuff like that? I did wanna add how many users are blocked by each instance and by how many users they are blocked but I forgot and am too busy to even edit the code anymore. Just worked 12 hours today and I’m still so far from completion.
Have each instance be a node on a graph, linked to all other nodes it’s federated with. Basically a way to view federation islands.
federation-checker.vercel.app
That is pretty cool, but uhh maybe not user friendly. I entered “lemm.ee” and it says “Not a lemmy instance”.
It would be cool if it could pre-enter the HTTP referrer, then typing might not even be needed.
I know that the url part is fucked. I did it fast and I knew what would happen as I coded it. I 100% know it sucks ass lol. It is what it is until I get help or time to fix it.
It’s a buggy thing lol. I made it very fast. I am very busy nowadays. I can’t bother to edit it much. I would appreciate PRs. My github is lemmygod. If you have any knowhow, any help is extremely welcome in these days of dayjob exhaustion. :)
