And no, they don’t speak to one another / find one another or are able to follow / like / reply to one another as one is told the Fediverse works.
This is true, it is a problem, but maybe not as big a problem as you think.
Kbin combines the data model of both Lemmy and Mastodon so Kbin can interact with both of them perfectly. Mastodon can interact in a limited way with Lemmy. Frendica and Pixelfed also work fairly well with Mastodon, so Kbin should be able to interact with both of those as well, although I have never tried. PeerTube is probably the least compatible, although I can upvote and post comments on PeerTube videos using my Mastodon account, and follow PeerTube accounts on Mastodon. But I can't create new PeerTube posts on Mastodon. I hope in time all of these different app services will be able to interact with each other more.
The most difficult thing right now is moderation tools. Right now, banning instances is very coarse, and it also deletes the entire social graph between instances, so people who were following each other lose their connections with each other, even after the ban is removed.
There are people working on solving that problem right now, but it might be a little while before the changes are spread throughout the network.
What I would like most is if I can create one ActivityPub account and use it on every ActivityPub service. This for me would be a perfect solution, because then I could use any app using a single account. I would also like to see it possible to ban instances temporarily without losing social connectivity, and I would like to see better moderation tools for individual user accounts being banned by an instance.
What I would like most is if I can create one ActivityPub account and use it on every ActivityPub service. This for me would be a perfect solution, because then I could use any app using a single account.
This is exactly it, this is what it sounded like when doing research about the Fediverse online. So perhaps that is the thing, but one user said that they can connect to all of them from Friendica. That's the thing, it's just to follow them, not create new PF or PT or Kbin posts from say Mastodon or Friendica. Posts can be done on one's chosen instance, but the following would be so much more streamlined if it could be done from one place. :-) :-)
I keep running into all kind of weird federation issues. I don't know if the reasons are technical or political. Point is, you can't see the whole fediverse using one account on one instance.
Sorry. Perhaps the thoughts were not clear, but have watched a lot of videos and even Wikipedia makes it seem like they are all social networks and that one can follow / post / reply on the other networks:
It isn’t about following everything and everyone, but about not wanting to have a Pixelfed account to follow a photographer, or not needing a Lemmy account to follow interesting topics, or not needing a Mastodon account to follow a blogger / writer. It is perhaps then a bit oversimplified on the “intro to the fediverse” videos / posts that’s been seen on the web. Was hoping to have one single account on any of the above, and then just interact from there, and not needing an account for every single one of them.
@PlasticPigeon
I have a Mastodon account, and a Beehaw (more civil version of Lemmy, more moderation, no downvoting), and i have no pixelfed or peertube (fediverse YouTube) accounts and yet I can access any account/community/hashtag from any service by either of my accounts. Mastodon has a character limit that beehaw/lemmy doesn't but Mastodon is about following individuals while lemmy is about subreddit/community/magazine/etc that anyone can participate in.
That's strange, as having tried Kbin, Mastodon, IceShrimp, etc. and a lot of times want to comment on other instances, like Beehaw an hour or so ago. And only Friendica was able to see it and interact.
@PlasticPigeon I can reply on Lemmy with Mastodon (with Mastodon character limit), and never tried to comment on pixelfed or peertube, but Beehaw can interact with all lemmy and kbin. I primarily use Mastodon and a secondarily Beehaw.
There are 500 million posts on Twitter every day. Do you read them all? There are 2.8 million subreddits. Have you browsed them all? The internet is big. You're not going to be able to follow everything everywhere all at once.
I agree it's a bit more difficult finding all the stuff you like in the fediverse without a central authority telling you where to go, but I've managed to fill my feed with active communities. I might be missing something, but so is everyone else. It's humanly impossible to see it all.
There are 500 million posts on Twitter every day. Do you read them all? There are 2.8 million subreddits. Have you browsed them all?
Nobody subscribes to every twitter acct or every subreddit so nobody is expecting to have every single post delivered to them. The fediverse has a legitimate problem where ppl don't actually receive all the posts of accts they're subscribed to. It's silly to compare what the OP is complaining about to not being able to see every post on twitter/reddit.
There are 500 million posts on Twitter every day. Do you read them all? There are 2.8 million subreddits. Have you browsed them all? The internet is big. You’re not going to be able to follow everything everywhere all at once.
That is not really the point though. Suppose there are 2.8 million forums on Kbin or Lemmy. If you join an instance of any ActivityPub app, can you talk to any of those 2.8 million? Can you interact with all of the precise subset of forums that interest you? You can choose an instance to join, but you have to know ahead of time all the instances you want to interact with, and your interests might change over time. Or you have to create and maintain multiple accounts.
This isn't exactly sustainable for individual users.
I would chalk most of that up to relative nascence, and mostly volunteer labor. I would expect things to improve. In the meantime, I'm fine with my lemmy and mastodon instances, and don't feel a lack of much.
This Tech Won't Save Us podcast episode makes a very important point: any movement that does not have a structure and some form of leadership can easily be taken over by anyone willing and able to fill that kind of power vacuum.
Fediverse currently does not have a structure nor a form of leadership other than perhaps "whatever Mastodon is doing". That's problematic. I hope that we recognize this and do something to fix it, before that power vacuum gets filled by… someone we might not like.
I do see that the researchers involved in the OP link are Erin Kissane and Darius Kazemi. That's fantastic. They are truly fedi old guard, deeply engaged, very knowledgeable, and generally wonderful human beings.
Agreed, Kissane and Kazemi are community forces to be reckoned with in this context. Their research into governance has been funded for at least the first half of 2024.
I can certainly tell you that Lemmy wont blindly follow what Mastodon is doing. They arent doing a good job for the Fediverse, for example they make zero effort to improve compatibility with other projects. Instead others are left to reverse engineer their federation logic.
I can certainly tell you that Lemmy wont blindly follow what Mastodon is doing.
Good to hear.
They arent doing a good job for the Fediverse, for example they make zero effort to improve compatibility with other projects. Instead others are left to reverse engineer their federation logic.
Yeah. Plus, the sheer size of mastodon.social and the monoculture of Mastodon-based instances is just unhealthy. I wrote about it at length.
That hardly means they’re investigating how to take over instances… These egghead think tanks will do research on anything that matches a couple buzzwords and this is one of them.
You all can downvote me but if you're not interested in living in the land of facts, demonstrating any attempt at backdooring Fediverse products beyond "bad money in a think tank", then there's literally not even the smoke to indicate a fire.
Can you share anything that indicates that understanding governance is even tangentially related to backdooring these products or the teams behind them? Is the best response really "wait four years and see"?
There's a difference between 'governance' and 'control'. And I really doubt Erin Kissane of all people is involved in efforts to control the fediverse.
Running instances costs money & labor, and I predict that many instance admins will be happy to accept various forms of assistance, and the CIA/FBI/etc-backed organizations will be happy to help. The assistance might be just money, which comes with strings attached such as simply having the ear of the admins. The assistance might be “moderation tools,” to save labor efforts.
I think the instances that choose to federate with corporate social media (which are already captured by feds) will probably be the easiest to gain control of. If you’ve been following the corpo federation discourse, you might have noticed that the instances with the largest user bases tend to be the most interested in federating with the corpo social media.
Do they also control email? As in all email servers that are "federated" with one another? Conspiracy thinking is dangerous. Maybe I work for "the feds"? Maybe you do and you've already been subverted against your own conscious wishes and this is a honeypot you're posting?
At some point you have to trust something or someone or you end up in the trust-equivalent of solipsism.
The moral is obvious. You can't trust code that you did
not totally create yourself. (Especially code from companies that employ people like me.)
Take this and abstract. Eventually you'll either need to be a wholly offline hermit, or accept that there is risk of subversion at every level and that risk must be tolerated in order to use the tech.
Those who suffer from conspiracy phobia are fond of saying: “Do you actually think there’s a group of people sitting around in a room plotting things?” For some reason that image is assumed to be so patently absurd as to invite only disclaimers. But where else would people of power get together – on park benches or carousels? Indeed, they meet in rooms: corporate boardrooms, Pentagon command rooms, at the Bohemian Grove, in the choice dining rooms at the best restaurants, resorts, hotels, and estates, in the many conference rooms at the White House, the NSA, the CIA, or wherever. And, yes, they consciously plot – though they call it “planning” and “strategizing” – and they do so in great secrecy, often resisting all efforts at public disclosure. No one confabulates and plans more than political and corporate elites and their hired specialists. To make the world safe for those who own it, politically active elements of the owning class have created a national security state that expends billions of dollars and enlists the efforts of vast numbers of people.
The ones that don’t choose to may eventually find themselves defederated from the ones that do. We’ll get walled off from the large instances that “play ball”.
Bonfire is one of the fediverse projects I'm most excited about right now. I hope they don't get too bogged down in organizational work right now. They're awfully close to version 1.0
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