How do you handle this part with the above one (exploited, manipulated) ?
It’s one thing to have systemic corruption and exploitation (what Big Tech does), it’s another to have endemic issues (bad actors, small-scale scammers, etc). The former can not be neutralized by individual/localized action, the latter can.
You can only filter and sort what was downloaded by the client. So that runs into resource constraints.
In the client, you wouldn’t need to be sorting and running extensive calculations on all data. You could, e.g, build the front-page by indexing/scoring posts and comments that have been created since your last visit with a hard cap on some time window (last 48h) or total data points (e.g, keep only the most recent 10k objects in a local hot database, freeze/archive everyhing else.)
I’m so with you. https://xkcd.com/927/
That’s what RDF/JSON-LD gives us for free. There is no need to have us arguing over what each tag means, all that developers need to do is to learn how to use the different vocabularies.
That’s more the ATproto/Bluesky vision.
Doesn’t mean that we can’t adopt it.
No, I want the Fediverse to get bigger. I don’t necessarily think its desirable to become anywhere near the size of Reddit though.
You are kind of arguing my case here: I think that the “Fediverse” should be lilke “The WWW”. Universal. The majority of people might use mobile apps for day-to-day things, but we can pretty much bet that the absolute majority of the billions of the connected people use web browsers.
So, when you say “I don’t think it is desirable for the Fediverse to be anywhere near the size of Reddit”, and knowing that Reddit is one of the smallest social networks out there (less than 100M MAU, mostly US-focused), to me it does sound like you are on the “Small Fediverse” camp.
No-one thinks Lemmy/Piefed or theFediverse more broadly has the logistics, funding or capacity to supplant them.
I’ve answered this on a sibling thread. I think that the problem is ideological than of resources. Most people here will proudly claim they prefer to have a “small” Fediverse over an “universal” one. Then it becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy. Mastodon had three big waves of people that wanted to leave Twitter but were met with hostility by a loud minority. There are people here who still think that the Reddit mirrors were bad because “if I wanted to see reddit stuff, I’d go to Reddit” and completely miss the point that the mirrors are a tool to get people out of there.
Plus, we shouldn’t need to “supplant” them. It would be enough to simply “disrupt” the model. Reddit still is in an incredibly fragile position. Twitter is a zombie network. Social “media” is in a overall declline. Instead of emulating these dying platforms, we should be skating to where the puck is heading and use the open protocols to build the Next Big Thing.
They prefer big tech, so let them use big tech.
It’s not about “preferring big tech”. It’s all the societal harm that big tech causes on everyone because their source of profit is not aligned with the interests of their direct customers.
I don’t care about “changing habits”. I just don’t want people that I care about being exploited and manipulated like that.
I will say something that I know will be grossly misunderstood, but I will try to make the case: I want to have influencers on the Fediverse, I want to see corporations setting up their instances and pushing their stupid corporate PR bullshit. I want to see phone companies selling data plans with ActivityPub accounts. I want to have the equivalent of LinkedIn lunatics, and personal coaches and all that crap that one can find on Instagram/TikTok/Facebook.
You know why? Because that would mean that the Fediverse is relevant. It would mean that we have enough people here that it can not be ignored anymore.
My goal as a moderator/piefed staff is to make you understand
I am not talking in a piefed-owned channel and afaik you have no authority to give me “options” here. You may not like how I expressed my opinion, but that doesn’t mean that I need to agree or comply.
i think the best way to change people is telling them about the fediverse IRL,
You do know that I’m running a hosting provider for the Fediverse since 2019, right? I’ve done a lot more than just complained about the state of current projects. I’ve done my share of “IRL” marketing, promoted FOSS alternatives to companies, set up demo instances for prospective customers, set up free accounts for my friends, put up a Matrix room for my college buddies to show them an alternative to WhatsApp…
When I talk about the shortcomings of the Fediverse and the lack of ambition of the developers, it’s because I’ve already got lots of people in here, but the overwhelming majority of them ended up going back to the proprietary platforms because there simply isn’t enough interests/interesting people. It tries so hard to reject mainstream and “normies” that it ends up feeling hostile to them. The majority of people are not interested in being lectured 24/7 by patronizing tweenies.
but it does require responsibility from the user to maintain their keys
Not necessarily? We can have did methods that do not rely on key ownership.
They will stop being in contact with you. So what’s the point telling them all this ? You argument fell into a pit.
My goal is not to convince Rimu or any of the people working on PieFed to change their minds. I know they won’t. I’m not trying to win any argument here. I’m talking in a public forum, giving my opinion, so that others can have a contrasting point of view.
So why are you here ?
Because I don’t want to keep contributing to centralized platforms?
What’s the point of being here if they are “superior”.
I didn’t say they are “superior”, I said they are more useful to more people. “The point of being here” is that I want to make this place as useful and universal as the centralized platforms. But I find this line of reasoning quite strange, to be frank. Do you think that people should only be here if they are willing to conform to a certain set of values?
The threadiverse is already beyond proprietary software thank to those many people building the fediverse.
All of the “features” you are giving as “superior” are meaningless, if the Fediverse is only interesting/useful for 0.1% of the overall population. I don’t care about moral superiority. I will not consider the Fediverse “beyond” anything on any front until TikTok, Reddit, Instagram, Bluesky, et al are irrelevant as tools for mass communication.
You can write a critize but without insulting people
I am not insulting people. It might be a harsh criticism on the product of their work, and I do understand that it’s human nature to be defensive when their work is criticized and how hard it is to separate ourselves from the things we do out of care.
But this is not a personal attack on any of the developers, and I do not think that using a softer tone would help here. Many times in my life I embarked on a project because I was riding high on some ambitious/virtuous goals and I wished I had more people being brutally honestly and calling me out, to bring me back to reality. The worst thing is to when people say they want “feedback”, but are only willing to listen to those who validate or fake-support them.
The developers can ignore me and keep working on it however they see fit, or they can stop and see if any of what I am saying has any merit. But just like they don’t owe me anything, I do not owe them any validation.
Just like any other post. Character limit is an abstraction introduced by Mastodon, it has nothing to do with ActivityPub.
Yes?!
Isn’t that my whole complaint about the implementation of “ChooseAnswer”?
Isn’t that my whole complaint about the community migration being done in a way that will not work with servers implementing the Portable Objects FEP?
SDF’s instance is on FediDB’s first page for user count.
Because not everyone is willing to self-host, deal with domains and take on a long-term commitment?
I’d say OP is right, looking for a stable, medium-sized instance is better for the Fediverse than pushing this idea that everyone should be running their own instance.
On reddit voting is entirely private,
Go to Reddit with a bag of money, get the voting history of whoever you want… how is that for “private”?
If we are talking about building an “open” web, then it makes no sense to justify any design based on how the “closed” web works. The incentives are different, the use-cases are different and in the long run it will be detrimental to the open web if we keep trying to mask away the differences.
More than that, I think that the biggest mistake being done by current fediverse projects is that they keep trying to emulate the proprietary networks. Social media “platforms” are bad by its very nature and chasing this idea that we can “fix” them by making open source versions of them is a fool’s errand.
What other activities do you have in mind?
Any and all of them? What is so special about as:like and as:dislike? There is nothing on ActivityPub preventing users to create posts or announce activities for a different target audience.
You done a poll on this?
This is tyranny of the majority. If one person is out there saying “I don’t want to have the data I’ve posted on server A to be presented as if I posted on server B”, then this person will be right to complain if they see their requests being respected.
(And before someone comes up and points fingers at me saying that Fediverser was also copying user posts without their consent: it’s true that the bots were recreating the posts and comments, but they were not publishing information on the Fediverse with “actor ids” from Reddit. There is a subtle, but important difference)
Anyway, can we move on from this conversation, please? I am not going to change your mind about it and I don’t want to re-hash past discussions. I’m also not particularly interested in any of the current server-centric Fediverse projects, so you will have a hard time convincing me that anything being done on PieFed is worthy of praise.
Some people don’t like it and don’t want their votes to be easily accessible to the wider fediverse.
Then why restrict this logic to “like/dislike” activities, and not extend to any type of activity?
It’s also a wider criticism of the viability of the fediverse long-term in that communities are only as long as their hosted instance. This does a lot to mitigate that.
A mitigation is not a proper solution, even less so when it violates other principles in distributed systems.
Can you tell me exactly what harm this does to the mythical ActivityPub.
The harm itself will be for the instance admin later on. Still, the larger point is this solution is a workaround that does not bring any meaningful benefit for others in the Fediverse.
To be honest, though: I don’t know what we are arguing about here. I’ve already said it: I am not here to gate-keep anything. If this the way that the PieFed developers want to do their thing, more power to them. But it’s like you expect me some kind of approval from me. You don’t need that. I may not like 90% of things that Rimu and others are doing, but they don’t owe me anything.
We are talking past each other by now…
Well, sure. But it’s still less of an ‘exposure’ so to speak, than a vote federating out.
My point, in one sentence: it’s not up to the developers of a project building on ActivityPub to define policy regarding “exposure”.
ActivityPub is a protocol for public social networks. It’s not about private communications. Anyone looking for privacy should be told that and instructed to not post on a server if they are not willing to accept that will be public.
It’s as simple as that. If the developers of PieFed do not understand the basic principle of “use the right tool for the job” and keep trying to replicate anti-features from centralized websites (such as the fake-privacy that is provided by closed networks), then I will have no trust on their ability to design a good ActivityPub system.
You are in a vast minority. Most people are keen to see it go further and move subscribers too.
This is a good example of selection bias. You are getting most of your feedback from other PieFed users, who clearly are not aware of the implications of such implementation.
I said the lemmy-federate functions should instead be opt-in, and you still seemed to oppose it.
Yes, I am opposed to any functionality being added to the server when it can be solved at the client. Content discovery can be done by the client and using a separate service like Fediverser, fedidb, or anything else. It makes no sense to have this built-in into the ActivityPub server. It is one of the many examples where the piefed devs are adding a feature because they can without thinking whether they should.
Sure. Pseudonymity. Again, it was dropped.
No, it was not dropped. “do not federate votes” is not a privacy guarantee. It just reduces the exposure of the information from the whole Internet to the server admin. People still need to trust the admin.
I’m not here to quibble about the mechanics of the implementation, but purely noting that it is popular.
If you are one of the developers of the project, you should be quibbling about the implementation. “It is popular” is not a good enough reason to effectively fabricate information.
You’re against admins having the ability to turn this on if they want?
What I am against is this constant release of poorly thought out features and the prioritization of “easy” vs “correct”.
The more you try to justify what PieFed is doing, the more you are cementing my original opinion:
You might feel offended by me calling it “a pile of hacks”, but I can not think of any other term to describe this.
maximum anonymity, but this was widely disliked so it was dropped.
Maximum anonymity is a lie. Users still need to trust the server admin. The truth is that the Fediverse is not a secure/private messaging platform, and attempts to hide this from the users might be well-intentioned but will bite the devs in the ass, sooner or later.
this has vast fediverse support because it enables community modularity, which is needed in a world where instances will go offline, causing communities to be orphaned.
To solve this it would be better to have the PieFed team pushing/implementing the appropriate FEPs (FEP-7952 and FEP-EF61) instead of an-hoc hack.
This was agreed with the moderators of said community.
Not the point. The point is that the devs are taking the “everything and the kitchen sink” approach to features, prioritizing any type of functionality that is minimally useful to the users instead of putting some effort on the harder stuff.
I have suggested (lemmy-federate) be opt-in rather than opt-out.
Doesn’t matter. Admins will see it, think “that is nice!”, turn it on and only realize later that their database is completely bloated with data that is not really needed. Meanwhile, the real problem of content discovery could be solved by implementing pull-based federation and client-side caching, but again this type of work is not being done because it’s not something that the users see directly.
I would argue the opposite, actually. A lot of this data could be distributed in a p2p manner and the client nodes would have to rely even less on the servers. The key part would be that this data would have to be self-authenticating, but we do have the mechanisms to do that (Linked Data Signatures)