He was on the board, it's not like it was his project or anything. Imo he wanted to create a protocol, not a platform. "Improve Activitypub" like they always claimed. But then Bluesky realized that they can simply build their own platform and be Twitter 2.0
@Microw@dumbass No. He wouldn't be happy with ActivityPub as well. He imagines a social network where no one can perform any moderation. He favours Nostr for exactly that reason. Bluesky has got moderation (just like the Fediverse) - which he dislikes.
Moderation should always be client side. Server side should not be able to interfere or even read public content
Yup. I don't know if I agree re public content, but perhaps private messages should be encrypted, client side, before sending? That issue is one that bothers me about Mastodon.
No. He wouldn’t be happy with ActivityPub as well. He imagines a social network where no one can perform any moderation. He favours Nostr for exactly that reason. Bluesky has got moderation (just like the Fediverse) - which he dislikes.
So? Like Usenet was back in the day before it became a pirate haven. Then email lists became it. LOL, People tend to ignore the extreme nut jobs regardless. I never saw any child porn on Usenet, but then I didn't go looking for it. No doubt it existed too.
The thousands of extra-legal killings that were the direct result of the election of Duterte as president (who was AFAIK elected with direct help from Cambridge Analytica and a vile social media campaign on Facebook) is also nothing to scoff at.
But I think the Rohingya genocide is way more insideous, because Facebook knew that their platform was being used for direct encitement of violence and coordination of progroms and chose to ignore it because they thought Myanmar would be a lucrative market and wanted to consolidate their monopoly power there.
I think this comment chain is going in a circle while everyone actually agrees with the underlying point.
I cannot see anything bad here. Blocking an actively malicious actor should be the norm.
It might be true that they aren't ACTIVELY being malicious currently. It's also true that they have a horrible history, and they will likely be actively malicious in the future.
(I say 'might' because I seem to recall them being malicious towards the fediverse with secret meetings with admins, but I didn't follow up on that)
Facebook allowed connecting with XMPP clients for a while and then cut off that access. While they were not the main offender compared to Google, they still did nothing but leech off the XMPP ecosystem until they decided it wasn't in their interest any longer.
I'm failing to see what's wrong about this. They used XMPP and then stopped? That seems to be exactly what people angry about Threads federation want Meta to do with ActivityPub.
The point is that at no point in time where they actually interested in supporting the XMPP federation. It was only a short term tool for them to capture some audience that it would not have otherwise.
It's Facebook dude. To put it in Lemmy friendly terms, they're not different entities in the way that Linux and Windows are. They're different entities in the same way that Windows and Xbox are. It's not technically the same thing but it's the same people calling the shots. Expecting something different is only going to leave you disappointed.
if only Facebook had started in 2004 and not 2024 we might have some historical evidence about how the company handles moderation or community safety or protecting user data or..
The thing is, Meta does not care about community safety, or moderation, or protecting user data. (Fun fact: they don’t have a data protection agreement, but a data usage agreement.) All they care about is how they can get the most money out of something. Killing off things left and right of their path.
The question is not IF Meta kills the Fediverse but only WHEN they do it.
Sure they have, over and over and over, just not in this neighborhood yet. Folks were either too young to witness or just weren't paying attention to the decades of anti-consumer bullshit from this company.
They have been very nearly the worst example of an awful tech company for their entire existence. They will exploit the fediverse to the maximum extent they can, and we should not be voluntarily accompanying them.
the worst example of an awful tech company for their entire existence
Not to stir the pot, but at one point Zuck was an idealist. Circa 2008? When interviewed by a news corporation about privacy concerns he said, and I quote, "It's your data. You own your data." At the time, he hadn't monetized with anything more than ads, and I think he truly believed it.
A short few years later he saw the opportunity to become a multi-billionaire and probably decided ethics and idealism is for poor people. Much the same as Reddit, Google, Apple, etc. Do you remember? Those of us who lived through it remember.
One day, the largest Lemmy instances may be no different. Time will tell.
Slight difference is that Zuck has had control from the start, whereas other companies might have had "don't be evil" leadership that was… optimized away for financial reasons.
Not that it really matters nowadays. Just an observation.
Is it that we should not hold Threads at arms length because [citation needed] Zuck was once a tech idealist and had lots in common with current fediverse denizens? (setting aside my doubt for the moment)
If so, I don't really care how nice and kind Zuck was when he was a freshman in college. I care about what he has done since then, and leading up to now.
Is it that one day I may not like something large Lemmy instances do, so should not be so anti-Threads?
I don't even get that idea, so I am guessing that can't be it.
Much the same as Reddit, Google, Apple, etc. Do you remember? Those of us who lived through it remember.
I lived through using 8" floppies, so yes, I remember.
Which of those are open source projects that anyone can fork and/or run their own instance of at any time, providing a place for people to seamlessly transition from Reddit, Google, or Apple if they don't like what those companies do with their platform? The comparison you are trying to make falls apart immediately.
Take it at face value. The comment is a historical correction and gentle reminder that we only have one chance to prevent data from walking out the door, regardless of how friendly the platform is. Once your data is out, it's out. Guard it well.
Is FaceBook detrimental now? Yes it is, unquestionably.
Was it always? No, it wasn't.
Should we de-federate? Absolutely. Yesterday and retroactively, if possible.
Which of those are open source projects that anyone can fork and/or run their own instance of at any time, providing a place for people to seamlessly transition from Reddit, Google, or Apple if they don’t like what those companies do with their platform?
Reddit. Once upon a time.
I lived through using 8" floppies, so yes, I remember.
Ah, 8" floppies. Good memories. And bad. "Please read that... Why aren't you reading it? If you're not going to read it, spit it out... Let go. Now try again. Why is it blank? It wasn't blank after I wrote to it. Why did you wipe it? Damn." It was the best of times.
I was so excited when 3 1/2" introduced attached switchable write protection. The peak of convenience.
Facebook has and it's doing plenty bad. At this point, assuming this time they will be good is too much of wishful thinking.
Still I would let the instances decide. Seems a bit counter spirit to try to force them. Even as a user your can block them (there are two that a lot of users are blocking already...)
Just to be clear, threads can federate with an instance that is not defeated with them, and in this case threads users can see all the Lemmy content, but not the other way around.
So this means that we can just keep posting anti Facebook content all the time and they will serve it to their users or will have to be blocking it.
The more I think about it, the worse it seems for threats to federate.
Right, so that means when someone on Threads is complaining about Threads, Lemmy users can't chime-in and say "uhh, just register on here and thats not an issue, guy"
What's the number of Threads users compared to Lemmy? If the number of Threads users greatly outweigh the number of Lemmy users, then we'd simply be drowned out by all the Threads posts. That's part one of Embrace, Extend, Extinguish.
Extend adds functionality to Threads that Lemmy either can't support or won't support for a while due to development time. People migrate to Threads because Lemmy is "missing" functionality. Plus, though I'm not clear on the exact legal specifications, proprietary code can be added to open-source code, and the proprietary code would be copyrighted. In other words, Lemmy devs would have to figure out a way to interact with and mimic Threads' proprietary code using open-source code.
Extinguish is when Threads' support of Lemmy is eventually dropped. The users left on Lemmy have suddenly lost a huge amount of content, and they're left with fewer users than before Threads enabled federation.
I'm rather sceptical that this can work as a good alternative to Wikipedia. Wikipedia's content moderation system is in my opinion both its greatest strength and its greatest weakness. To create a better Wikipedia, you would have to somehow innovate in that regard. I don't think federation helps in any way with this problem.
I do though see potential in Ibis for niche wikis which are currently mostly hosted on fandom.org. If you could create distinct wiki's for different topics and allow them to interconnect when it makes sense, Ibis might have a chance there.
No I think it would actually be great. You could peek at two opposing views on the same article, for example. I'm sure some "instances" would be ripe with disinformation but what's it to you? Idiots are already lapping up disinformation like candy. It's not like wikipedia isn't filled with it already...
Not only is the noise ratio low, this seems like a good lesson in "encyclopedias are not primary sources nor arbiters nor authorities on information." Yes, people use Wikipedia that way anyway. No, baking in an even lower trust system does not seem like it's actually a fix to any of Wikipedia's problems.
Good thing Wikipedia articles are always the best researched and sourced!
In 2023, Jan Grabowski and Shira Klein published an article in the Journal of Holocaust Research in which they said they had discovered a "systematic, intentional distortion of Holocaust history" on the English-language Wikipedia.[367] Analysing 25 Wikipedia articles and almost 300 back pages (including talk pages, noticeboards and arbitration cases), Grabowski and Klein stated they have shown how a small group of editors managed to impose a fringe narrative on Polish-Jewish relations, informed by Polish nationalist propaganda and far removed from evidence-driven historical research. In addition to the article on the Warsaw concentration camp, the authors conclude that the activities of the editors' group had an effect on several articles, such as History of the Jews in Poland, Rescue of Jews by Poles during the Holocaust and Jew with a coin. Nationalist editing on these and other articles allegedly included content ranging "from minor errors to subtle manipulations and outright lies", examples of which the authors offer.[367]
367: Grabowski, Jan; Klein, Shira (February 9, 2023). "Wikipedia's Intentional Distortion of the History of the Holocaust". The Journal of Holocaust Research. 37 (2): 133–190. doi:10.1080/25785648.2023.2168939. ISSN 2578-5648. S2CID 257188267.
I don't think they're suggesting wikipedia currently is "best researched and sourced," just that a federated alternative wouldn't automatically solve that issue.
I mean, much more often than not, and for the majority of the time, they are.
You don't see this statement as dogmatic? How do you feel confident in this other than just a feeling?
The majority of the time the articles would require actual expertise to make that evaluation with confidence. An individual can take a few minutes to verify the sources, but for so many topics it's not realistic to rule out omissions of sources that should be well-known, or even rule out that a source given provides an important broader context somewhere nearby that should be mentioned in the article but isn't. Can you be sure that the author is trustworthy on this subject? It's not enough to just check a single page mentioned in a book while ignoring the rest of the book and any context surrounding the author.
An expert on a very specialized topic could weigh with accuracy in on whether the wikipedia articles on their subject is well-researched and sourced, but that still won't mean they can extrapolate their conclusion to other articles.
So you're saying it would rely on each person to stay objective and use good critical thinking, instead of accepting the first thing they read and fall down an echo-chamber rabbit hole? Wikipedia definitely doesn't always get it right, but it does try to use a form of institutionalized objectivity.
So you’re saying it would rely on each person to stay objective and use good critical thinking, instead of accepting the first thing they read and fall down an echo-chamber rabbit hole?
This is such a rich statement to make from a social media site of all places. My guy have you even looked at what some of the instances on Lemmy believe in? How is a federated wiki site any different?
but it does try to use a form of institutionalized objectivity.
By all means use wikipedia if you wish. As I've already pointed out in another comment, Wikipedia is often edited by bad or nationalist actors that do go undetected for a while.
Imagine it's post-2001 and George Bush is saying we need to take away Iraq's Weapons of Mass Destruction (WMDs). You hear there is a controversy around this topic, so you look it up on Wikipedia. The Wikipedia article may not even mention the controversy because it came from "fringe sources" or unreliable media, instead its rules mean they only share the message from approved media sources, and that means the article says Iraq definitely has WMDs and something must be done.
This is how it works now, and always had.
When I was in college in the second half of the 2000s, we were banned from using Wikipedia as a source due to the way it is built. Many complained but given how many controversies Wikipedia has found itself involved in which includes paid editors, state actors, only being able to use biased journalistic coverage to construct articles, refusing to use other media sources such as established bloggers...
Trusting Wikipedia at any point was the mistake. It's not even the Wikimedia foundation that is the issue, it's the structure of the site. If no approved journalists will speak the truth, your article will be nothing but lies and Wikipedia editors will dutifully write those lies down and lock down the article if you attempt to correct them using sources they personally dislike.
Never heard of any examples and certainly no one has provided any in this thread. Just been the usual muh western website is evil by default kind of stuff.
I'm going to use your comment to tell people to download Indie Wiki Buddy. It's a plug-in for your browser that redirects Fandom to independent alternatives. I highly recommend it.
I find it very questionable that you publish this sort of hit piece against Lemmy without even bothering to ask for a comment from our side. This is not how journalism should work.
Effectively you are blowing the complaints of a single user completely out of proportion. It is true that we didnt respond ideally in the mentioned issue, but neither is it okay for a user to act so demanding towards open source developers who provide software for free. You also completely ignore that this is an exception, there are thousands of issues and pull requests in the Lemmy repos which are handled without any problems.
Besides you claim that we dont care about moderation, user safety and tooling which is simply not true. If you look at the 0.19.0 release notes there are numerous features in these areas, such as instance blocking, better reports handling and a new moderator view. However we also have to work on improvements to many other features, and our time is limited.
Finally you act like 4000€ per month is a lot of money, however thats only 2000€ for each of us. We could stop developing Lemmy right now and work for a startup or corporation for three or four times the amount of money. Then we also wouldnt have to deal with this kind of meaningless drama. Is that what you want to achieve with your website?
Wow, when are you going to realize that you work for your users?
This isn't "one user" being "so demanding". Its a trend. Read what others have said. Learn from your mistakes. Your community of instance admins are pissed because you're constantly throwing them under the bus. And, yes, your moderation tools are crap. Thats objective.
And 2000€ per month is a ton of money. Most open source devs get nothing. Stop being so ungrateful and disrespectful to the community that you work for.
Sorry if you were just making a joke, my sarcasm detector is not really working anymore (/s at the end would help). But if not, this comment really perfectly captures the entitlement in open source.
Now imagine you spend months (or even years) of your free time to build something for people to use freely, and the result is that you get endless comments from random strangers, telling you that you work for them and that you need to respect and be grateful to them. I honestly am impressed that open source still exists at all at this point.
I think it's a question of philosophy. If I take donations for something, is it really still my hobby projects I build in my free time?
Not really IMO. The moment I make money off it, it's more than that.
And if I have a community of people who use that project, I should be transparent with them and engage with them. Maybe the Lemmy devs are doing this in some place where I'm not (like on their matrix), but I have never seen them explain why they are working on certain features and not on others. Their development updates are awesome and I appreciate them, but it's very much a communication of "we are doing this, see you next time". The recent AMA was a good example of engagement that gives the possibility to explain things better and get into contact. My advice would be to work on communication and feedback channels.
I love lemmy, having been here since the very earliest hexbear days. In my view, the devs are doing the best they can. They're a tiny team surviving on grants, trying to produce software that the users, for some reason, expect to have feature parity with reddit, a large corporation with a large paid dev team. It's weird to say the least.
My understanding is that nutomic and dessalines survive solely on that 4000 euros per month, because all of their time goes to lemmy. How do you want them to survive? They need to eat and pay rent, you know. The real world exists and they're humans in it, needing food and sleep and shelter.
It seems to me you want magic. You don't want the lemmy devs to be humans, you want them to be magic coder gods who are infinitely patient, with boundless time and energy. But that's completely unrealistic, you surely must see that, right?
Also big wonder-who-thats-for vibes lol. Telling others to stop being ungrateful and disrespectful, while being ungrateful and disrespectful themselves.
Yea takes an impressive level of self awareness to go from "you work for us" to "no you don't deserve more money" to "why arent you personally catering to me more" in that amount of time
Wow, when are you going to realize that you work for your users?
Do you pay their salary and have an employment contract with the developers of Lemmy? If not, they do not work for you.
And 2000€ per month is a ton of money. Most open source devs get nothing. Stop being so ungrateful and disrespectful to the community that you work for.
This is not a typical open source side project. The developers work full time on it, it's basically their job. That 2000 Euros is their monthly gross salary. Average monthly salary in France is 2340 euros net as of 2022. The developers of Lemmy are earning well below average.
The thing that really gets me with these, is that we are 2-4 devs working on software used by over 40k ppl. It is absolutely impossible to please everyone, and fix every issue, there just isn't enough of us.
Oftentimes we ask for ppl to do the open source thing, and contribute a PR, and many of them do.
Anyone can look at our github profiles and see how busy we've been, and how many moderation related issues we've been working on, this is all out in the open. Yet writers of these articles somehow never bother to look, or reach out to us for questions. The amount of entitlement and second-hand rumors is really dissapointing.
Thanks that is a bit better. Unfortunately people who have already read the article wont see the update, and even people who read it now may not read all the way to the end, and still leave with a negative impression. Still its better than nothing.
To get an idea how most Lemmy users feel, have a look at this thread. Practically every comment is positive about Lemmy, you can hardly find any negative sentiment. And certainly no one cares about this image deletion issue, which proves that the complaints of a few individuals are completely blown out of proportion.
As a user, I love lemmy, and I want to thank you and the other devs that work tirelessly to develop it.
Also as a user I value the ability to manage my data, and hope to see image deletion implemented when you’re able to do so.
After having read the Nightmare piece, my decision was to stop posting images directly to lemmy. To share images, I’m going to self host an Imgur like service so if I do want to delete an image, I can.
I’m not a developer, and can’t contribute code to address the problem, but, at least for myself, I’ve got a solution I can implement.
To chime in:
Yes, people are positive about Lemmy. I like Lemmy, people like Lemmy. And Lemmy users in general want to see activity at Lemmy. Who wouldnt? That's kind of a given...
but still I want Lemmy to continue to evolve in functionality. That doesnt contradict itself?
And if someone points out that certain things arent technically possible at the moment, I as a user would expect that this isnt considered a "complaint" or a "negative sentiment".
Especially when it's a functionality that might have legal implications. Does "no one care" about that because people think it's unnecessary? Or because they have never noticed before that this isnt possible?
The GDPR is not a joke, and foss does not have an exemption clause for adhering to it. Additionally a lot of people on Lemmy are very privacy-conscious.
Therefore I think it's great that this issue has been brought up now and you guys are working on a fix for that. Thanks for all of your work on this project, it's really appreciated.
When we talk about Open Source, we’re not just talking about code. We’re talking about a way of approaching software, of designing it, developing it, distributing it, spreading it, making it something that benefits everyone. So being a developer in this context means thinking of software as a common good and then contributing means making it better and if by better we mean more useful, more accessible, more secure, more powerful, more stable and easier to use, then it’s clear that we are not just talking about writing code.
If you can take a moment to move your massive, fragile ego out of the way, you'll realize it's not a hit piece. It's criticism of your behavior in reaction to what is frankly a reasonable set of requests.
Journalism is not just about serving as a propagandic mouthpiece to lionize you and your work. Sometimes, I have to report on subjects that are frankly horrible, people acting shitty, and how people in spaces react to that.
Effectively you are blowing the complaints of a single user completely out of proportion. It is true that we didnt respond ideally in the mentioned issue, but neither is it okay for a user to act so demanding towards open source developers who provide software for free.
This issue is basic fucking table stakes for user safety and data compliance, and the fact that it still does not exist after four years of being a project is wild to me. It creates liabilities for admins. The fact that it's still a problem, right now, illustrates that these things are not direct concerns in how you design software.
I find it very questionable that you publish this sort of hit piece against Lemmy without even bothering to ask for a comment from our side.
The fact that the issue exists after 4 years clearly shows that you are in fact blowing it out of proportion. Actual issues that affect large numbers of people running servers end up being addressed by people contributing to the project. Lemmy is an open source project that anybody can contribute to, and fix the issues that are affecting them. The fact that this hasn't happened shows that this issue is not as high priority as you want to make it out to be.
This doesn't mean this isn't a real issue that should be fixed at some point, but it's simply not the show stopper you paint to be.
So yeah, you are absolutely doing a hack job here.
So this is how you see me, all based on two issues out of thousands and never having talked with me directly. Honestly this comment would be a good reason to ban you for harassment and violating the site's code of conduct. But lucky for you I don't care what random strangers on the internet think about me.
No, it's how I see you based on pretty much any time I observe you making a public comment. Which is unfair of me, admittedly, I can't possibly see everything you write. Most of the time, though, you come across as hostile, and read as though you're dunking on other people and projects.
Anyway, the article was updated somewhat to give proper credit for your recent developments and point to your fundraising efforts.
I think it's a dead lock. The replies show that they can't even understand the concern.
That's a typical death to a project. For, there will never be a moment for the team to address the concern. Whatever you try, the team won't move an inch.
I don't know what instance admins are thinking, but there's no point complaining at this point.
Its funny because there is no one in the world who signed any sort of development contract with us. All the money we have ever received for Lemmy have been donations which means there is no obligation for us to do anything. This includes money from NLnet which provided most of our income for the past years. And I bet the people complaining so loudly no have never even made any donation.
This feels like a hasty "solution" to an invented "problem". Sure, Wikipedia isn't squeaky clean, but it's pretty damn good for something that people have been freely adding knowledge to for decades. The cherry-picked examples of what makes Wikipedia " bad" are really not outrageous enough to create something even more niche than Wikia, Fandom, or the late Encyclopedia Dramatica. I appreciate the thought, but federation is not a silver bullet for everything. Don't glorify federation the way cryptobros glorify the block chain as the answer to all the problems of the world.
It only gets corrupted by state department interests if it gets popular, so we must work to make it less popular! (edit: I hope its obvious this is a joke)
Over 95% of Chinese as a whole support the Chinese government. This is according to a Harvard study that spanned around 20 years, from what I remember. So, it does have to do with race.
If the government told me that my "score" dictating my ability to participate in society would be greatly affected based on what I thought of the government, I'd support the heck out of that government too.
The neoliberal moderators make that impossible. The talk pages for anything even remotely political is radioactive, with the mods flagrantly abusing their power in reverting any change they personally find disagreeable.
So you're saying you want a federated wiki that uses a blockchain??? Genius.
Kidding aside, you're absolutely right. Wikipedia is one of the very few if not ONLY examples of centralized tech that ISN'T absolute toxic garbage. Is it perfect? No. From what I understand, humans are involved in it, so, no, it's not perfect.
If you want to federate some big ol toxic shit hole, Amazon, Netflix, any of Google's many spywares -- there's loads of way more shitty things we would benefit from ditching.
Edit: the "federated Netflix" -- I know it sounds weird, but I actually think it would be really cool. Think of it more like Nebula+YouTube: "anyone" (anyone federated with other instances) can "upload" videos, and subcription fees go mostly to the creator with a little going to The Federation. Idk the payment details, that would be hard, but no one said beating Netflix would be easy.
And federated Amazon -- that seems like fish in a barrel, or low hanging fruit, whichever you prefer. Complicated and probably a lot more overhead, but not conceptually challenging.
There's a wiki program that natively uses a version control repository, Fossil. You can fork a Fossil wiki and contribute updates back to the original.
It wouldn't be too hard to for example create a few Fossil repositories for different topics where the admins on each are subject matter experts (to ensure quality of contributions), and then have a client which connects to them all and with a scheme for cross linking between them
Peertube already exists for video, it's more like a different take on bittorrent.
Yeah I was thinking more of a paid service, I guess more like Nebula then Netflix, since Netflix just shows TV shows and movies made by big companies. I don't mind paying for things if they're good things, and I know the right people are getting the money for it.
I don't think the fact that a small group of people who are easy to manipulate by the US government and millions of edits originating from Langley are a small or invented problem. I'm extremely scared of having resources being centralized and controlled by the US propaganda apparatus and think this is a major problem.
I mean we have seen how the Lemmy devs approach certain topics, and it is definitely not with a preference for openness or free exchange of ideas. There are certain topics here which have a hair trigger for content removal and bans, for extremely petty and minor "transgressions," so the motivation here seems pretty transparent.
Several of you seem to be misunderstanding. When he says “like Twitter” it’s not in the negative ways you are thinking. It’s in the negative ways he’s thinking. Meaning censorship and being able to ban accounts. He doesn’t want that. Mastodon would have the same criticisms if he commented on it.
These billionaires are just regular people with less empathy (there are no ethical billionaires). They have the same braindead ideas we all have if we dont know anything about a topic and are in a talkative mood or possibly drunk or high, or all of those combined I guess.
Wasn't twitter really good about banning actual Nazis and not banning journalists until Musk came along? After Musk came, Nazis were unbanned and we saw a huge wave of journalists getting banned.
Before Musk, Twitters advertising was driven by engagement, and engagement was driven by encountering things that made you angry. So they were slow to respond to anything but the most egregious cases of hatred and bigotry.
No... NO. It was appallingly terrible at banning Nazis, worse than even Reddit in many ways. Twitter banned a tiny, tiny fraction of extremely prominent and openly fascist accounts that had been permitted to operate for years, but they ignored Nazi dogwhistles from large accounts and smaller accounts that didn't gain a following and were used to harass 1-2 people were generally allowed to operate freely.
Remember: they didn't even ban Donald Trump himself until he tried to literally violently overthrow the US government. Twitter pre-Musk was an absolute shit hole, but it was at least headed in a hopeful direction. Musk kept it a shit hole and just changed the direction it was going.
Well, this tells us that more privacy minded people with a background or interest in technology tend to be more present/engaging on Fediverse platforms. Not really surprising.
Everyone should see how incredibly important this project is, and its potential. Wikipedia is yet another US-controlled and domiciled site, with a history of bribery, scandals, and links to the US state department. It has a near-monopoly on information in many languages, and its reach extends far outside US borders. Federation allows the possibility of connecting to other servers, collaborating on articles, forking articles, and maintaining your own versions, in a way that wikipedia or even a self-hosted mediawiki doesn't.
Also ibis allows limited / niche wikis, devoted to specific fields, which is probably the biggest use-case I can see for Ibis early on.
Wikipedia also releases all content for free download under a permissive license, so I don't think it's fair to say that the US government is a meaningful threat to its quality of information, especially over non-English languages that are managed by an independent set of volunteers who could pack up their bags and move everything over wherever they want at any point.
Still a cool project and technological diversity is good though.
Wikipedia also releases all content for free download under a permissive license, so I don’t think it’s fair to say that the US government is a meaningful threat to its quality of information
Anyone can fork at any time. The US gov could theoretically hold Wikipedia's brand and servers hostage, but the actually valuable stuff is already mirrored in a decentralized fashion that is completely unrestricted under US and international law.
EDIT: Maybe you meant that the US could covertly vandalize Wikipedia? Maybe, if they keep it very low-key. Editors are used to this kind of stuff though, it happens all the time from all governments since they can just, y'know, edit it. Anything actually impactful will be noticed by the editors which will just cause a fork.
Many of the editors are themselves neoliberal American cultural imperialists and proud of it. The issue isn't direct control so much as an army of useful idiots.
US-controlled and domiciled site - yes, but I do not see it having a monopoly on information at all. Sure is big, has lots of info, pages, it is a rather good resource in linking stuff to the various concepts that you want to explain others e.g. in an argument.
But the very fact that anyone can edit information makes it not recommendable in academia, for example (really, when I was a student, all my professors were generally not recommending it for information because, as one of them said, even grandma could edit it). So I don't think I would trust ibis on scientific articles either, at least not in the fields I'm directly interested in - maybe for some random trivia/did you know stuff, idk.
limited / niche wikis
But this is where I think it would really shine, indeed, as one could make a wiki about a game or software more easily, probably link pages from different instances, etc. (as others said already).
Don't know what else to say, it just seems like an interesting project. Congrats to anyone involved on this first release and looking forward to see what this project will bring.
The fact is that we can’t rely on any single website to hold the whole world’s knowledge, because it can be corrupted sooner or later. The only solution is a distributed architecture, with many smaller websites connecting with each other and sharing information. This is where ActivityPub comes in, the protocol used by Mastodon, Lemmy, Peertube and many other federated social media projects.
Thank god Lemmy has no malicious users/bad actors/spam issues...
Interesting idea anyway. I would be a bit more worried that when important information is siloed onto instances, each instance becomes a point of failure, and thus can be corrupted or lost.
Right? Right now with Wikimedia, everything is hosted in one place and moderated in one place. Having everything spread about in various instances with varying degrees of moderation and rules, and the option to block other instances is not great for information quality and sharing.
Not at all. We've seen this our whole lives, and are currently seeing it with the liberal response to the ongoing genocide in Palestine too. They only support emancipatory movements in theory, but in practice are the same as conservatives: they stop when those people are taking direct action for emancipation, specially when it threatens their own positions.
"...who constantly says: "I agree with you in the goal you seek, but I cannot agree with your methods of direct action"; who paternalistically believes he can set the timetable for another man's freedom; who lives by a mythical concept of time and who constantly advises the Negro to wait for a "more convenient season." - MLK
Liberals didn't like Mandela's use of force to overthrow apartheid in South Africa, and they wouldn't approve of it if it happened now either. The same way they aren't approving of Palestinian resistance groups like Hamas in their war against the apartheid colony "israel".
That was the same with black liberation and apartheid South Africa in MLK and Mandela's time: they support it only in theory. How many of them supported direct action and use of violent force to actually materially change those? How many of them support Hamas, PFLP, etc in our current time now?
The answer is "not many", because MLK, Malcolm X and Mandela were all right about liberals being the same as conservatives in practice.
Hamas is more complicated, because they have also called for the extinction of Israel. That being said I'm pretty sure 90%+ of protests against Israel in the US have been lead by liberals.
Anyways, yeah, they're exactly the same, except for taxes, education, infrastructure, student loan debt, environmental protections, general demeanor, morals, actual family values, LGBTQ+ rights, not committing insurrection, avoiding gerrymandering, not delaying supreme court nominations, following the Constitution, mental health policies, healthcare, generally caring about their fellow human beings... you get the idea.
See what Malcolm X, MLK, and Mandela meant? You would've said shit like this about MLK's and Mandela's violent riots and sabotages of the government too, and liberals did.
No, the difference is that black people didn't generally call for the extinction of the rest of the united states. They wanted equality, not supremacy. Sometimes situations really are different.
Also I find it interesting that you only responded to that part of my comment.
"In every political community there are varying shades of political opinion. One of the shadiest of these is the liberals. An outspoken group on many subjects. Ten degrees to the left of center in good times. Ten degrees to the right of center if it affects them personally." - Phil Ochs
You would have to start a long conversation about the overton window, and what left vs right even means to both you and i before tackling this question, friend.
Neoliberalism is stuff like putting children to work in the coal mines and also includes modern day conservatives (especially the nazi ones, a lot of people don't realize how the nazi regime was more or less liberalism taken to its conclusion, which is why it took a war for them to face any opposition from the liberal world order, and even then it was only because they bit the hand that fed them)
Thank you so much for writing this, it articulated a lot of things I've been thinking about this past week. So many of us are all spending our most valuable resource, time, trying make this a better place, in whatever way we can, and none of these 4 groups (some of us are members of more than one) deserve any vitriol or negativity for their efforts. We all need to think about ways we can reduce that negativity, and not all of them can be fixed with computer code, or at the admin level. We all need to improve how we interact with people, and treat them the way we'd like to be treated, with a view towards their well-being.
I'd like to follow your good example, and send out my genuine thanks to all the users, admins, developers, those doing server support, and contributors in any form to lemmy, and it's ecosystem of apps and tools. Members of all of these groups are absolutely vital, and this place is only possible because of our cooperation.
I don't know about the devs specifically, but maybe advised is a better term. Beehaw themselves don't really want ro be using Lemmy as it doesn't have the moderation tools they want.
I know the devs can't control who uses the software but apparently they want Beehaw to quit using Lemmy. It seems strange to me, especially after reading this comment, that's why I asked.
Nope it's "start sending pull requests if you want that stuff so urgently, or use another software, but stop whining".
Beehaw has quite a number of users and generally community goodwill, I bet they could find a dev or two with some free time on their hands to work on the features they desire so much. That would be a solution-oriented approach. Simply telling the existing lemmy devs "you need to do this now you need to prioritise this" isn't, no matter how polite the language it's still entitled AF, and just for double clarity "not solution oriented", in the FOSS world, means "toxic".
What, exactly, do you think entitles beehaw to dictate what the lemmy devs should prioritise?
If I'm getting the neighbourhood together to build a playground for the kids, and you come along and says "You must now build an observation post for my bird watching club", how would you expect me to respond? Especially while I'm holding up a heavy beam frantically looking for something to rest it on so the whole structure doesn't collapse?
I think answering "I have no objections to you building that observation post" is a perfectly adequate response. I don't owe your bird watching club jackshit, and neither do the lemmy devs owe beehaw jackshit.
From what's in their essay it doesn't seem like they are dictating what the devs prioritize. Regardless, I don't see how they could dictate anything since they lack power over the devs. You keep characterizing them in negative ways, what's that about? I feel like I'm missing something here.
Regardless, I don’t see how they could dictate anything since they lack power over the devs.
Lacking power doesn't mean that no attempts are made. You can be as polite as you want if I don't want to build that observation post and you keep pestering me that's an attempt to dictate what I do with my time. Even just dealing with the pestering is a time sink.
You keep characterizing them in negative ways, what’s that about? I feel like I’m missing something here
I've dealt with entitled users before. The wider FLOSS community has oodles of experiences with toxic behaviour from users, nothing about this is new or even surprising if you've been in the space for a while, it's all the same pattern: First they act like they're paying customers, then you tell them that they're not (but that patches are welcome), then they say "well I'll never use your software if your attitude is like that", then you say "fine with me", then they either leave or start to shout, at which point you block them. A FLOSS project needs healthy erm ego boundaries or it dies because nothing ever gets done.
FLOSS developers contribute because they want to build a specific thing. Conversely, if you want a specific thing that noone else already built or is excited to build, you have to contribute. There's no such thing as a free lunch.
The fact that they lack power over the Lemmy team is exactly what this is all about, in my opinion. They are demanding free changes out of people who they have no power over rather than finding programmers to help. They seem to expect to be treated like a client, but that isn’t how FOSS works.
Beehaw doesn’t have the greatest reputation in the Fediverse. Last I checked, their leadership was moaning about users from other instances and making a huge deal about who they wanted to defederate from, then they made posts on other instances when they were first thinking about leaving Lemmy entirely to see if we’d beg them to stay, and now there’s this whole breakdown where they cherry-pick some rude screenshots in an attempt to make their complaints look justified.
Nobody else seems to be causing this much drama. The rest of us are coexisting peacefully and doing fine. There is only one instance that feels like it needs a twelve foot wall and a moat around it, and that’s Beehaw.
I honestly don’t care if they stay or if they go, I just wish I didn’t have to hear them talk about it anymore until they make up their mind.
Beehaw is not causing drama, Lemmy.world and shitjustworks caused drama by filling their instances with turdbrainz. Beehaw literally removed themselves from the equation. That's deescalation not escalation.
This is all to say: we’ve been given many different channels and suggestions by the developers during our time on this platform for how to influence priorities. However, those priorities still have not materialized even after we used those channels and followed those suggestions–in fact, we’ve often observed our priorities seemingly being derided, played down at times, or to languish.
To me, this sounds like they were repeatedly trying to get the devs to work on what Beehaw wanted, and they are upset that those demands have not been met.
I think a better analogy here would be someone pointing that this is is a really bad neighborhood and you really oughta have a playground fence in the schematic.
Heard where? I heard that Beehaw is considering not using Lemmy, but they've said that for a long time without changing still. But maybe they will. But it's all up to them and they can control their instance how they like :)
Both side seems to be frustrated at each other there. Beehaw admins accused lemmy devs of not listening to their requests for better moderation tools, while lemmy devs accused beehaw admins of demanding more work without contributing anything or gave them appreciation. I hope the conflict is just temporary and they can reconcile later when things have cooled off.
The difference between open source vs paid-for software, and the lack of articulation of what entitlement is (and the harm it causes contributors to open source projects), is one of the root reasons for a lot of frustrations this past week. We've even added a specific no entitlement clause to our code of conduct a few days ago to try to avoid this in the future.
In short, entitlement is insulting or demanding behavior towards anyone for not doing what you want them to do, or not doing it fast enough.
Lemmy is developed by 2-4 devs, but used by >40k ppl. This massive disparity means it is absolutely impossible for us to solve every issue, and please everyone.
We make no demands on anyone, and don't force anyone to use lemmy, and encourage ppl to do the open source thing, and improve / work on issues we don't have time for. We gladly review PRs, as anyone can transparently see on the github.
Some of the beehaw admins on the other hand, are making demands, whilst refusing to do the open source thing and help add the features they'd like added. At this stage we've come to an impasse, where they'll likely just move to another platform, where the developers of that new platform will experience the exact same entitlement timeline: request for features, frustration that they're not getting completed fast enough, lashing out at developers, a similar developer response, then burnout for all parties.
The only way forward is for people to realize that entitlement has no place in open source, and that making demands on other people is not acceptable for any party.
From my discussion with some beehaw admins and sublinks devs, a problem is they they feel like their code contributions will not even be accepted for lack of shared goals. For example showing voting totals.
I keep saying that the most elegant solution here is to develop a plugin framework, to allow admins to customize their instance experience even when it diverges from the lemmy dev vision. If it's made software agnostic it would allow people like me scratch our own itches. Ironic I know but it's for this reason I think this should be one of the main priorities, as it will unleash a lot more Foss power on the project. It's a big reason why projects like WordPress and godot are having great success
a problem is they they feel like their code contributions will not even be accepted for lack of shared goals. For example showing voting totals.
They're free to not run the upstream version but their own patched one. Not being willing to write code will certainly not make that feature landing any more likely.
Plugins in Rust are a whole can of worms, what with AOT compiling and static linking, you can't just monkey patch everything like in PHP. Essentially a plugin system would be a way to organise patches, to dependency inject admin-provided libraries instead of default implementations. Having a collection of patches should help designing such a thing, Personally I wouldn't even consider designing such a thing before it's clear what it will need to do, where it needs to provide hooks, also, that it will be used.
Python is a dynamic language just as PHP, you can monkey patch there. Neither are anywhere close to the performance level of Rust or C++. I wouldn't call their approach better: It's very brittle, nothing tends to be well-specced, things easily become bug-compatible and a nightmare to maintain.
Godot has fixed extension points, which on top of that are accessible via gdscript or C#, not C++. Things you can hook into. Figuring out for which things that should be possible for, and how the interfaces should look like, is not something where eyeballing works.
Doing it the godot way would be rather pointless with lemmy as there's no need to extend the server's functionality while it's running, you can just replace the whole binary which is way simpler to do but the sensible way to go about it dynamically would be to use wasm. In both cases you'd need to figure out exactly where plugins should be able to hook into, there's no way around that without eating PHP's and Python's performance and maintainability costs. Also, rewrite everything.
There's no monkey patching needed! There's way better approaches with signals and events and shit!
Even if there was a performance hit. That's something for the plugin users to eat. The point is they have the option. Beehaw.org might accept the extra 1ms delay to have the tools they need.
And yes, the effort needed to support plug-ins is worth it. This is why all successful community driven software does it!
Why introduce a dynamic scripting layer if you can dependency-inject a crate, compile your custom version, and replace whatever is running just as if you'd be restarting the server, picking up where it left because all the important stuff is ACID? (Or at least I hope that's how lemmy works, never actually had a look at the code).
Certainly less development effort, gets as cheap as putting the function to be customised in a lazy static. The difficult part is the API that goes along with it, providing a stable interface to plugin writers because if you don't have that you can just as well tell people to patch the function directly. And at the same time lemmy's version number starts with 0 which doesn't exactly sound compatible with API stability, and bugs need fixing. As such it comes down to the same thing: If people want a plugin system, they'll have to contribute as dessalines and nutomic seem to be perfectly busy keeping the ship afloat.
Compiling a custom binary can be streamlined (Rust certainly already has a quite painless in-bult mechanism), and you can mix and match dependency injection that's not an issue. It may not be a fancy wheel but it's a sturdy wheel and a wheel that doesn't need to be invented yet.
If you can follow a tutorial and docs to edit a config file and start the server then you can follow a tutorial and docs to edit a config file and start a rebuild script.
Deploy? I'm a programmer, not devops. I'm barred from production.
Erm. Anyway. If you do it right you can have one nix flake that people can edit and the thing itself then decides whether it can use a standard binary or needs to do a custom build, no difference to the admin. The code needs to be compiled one way or the other, with Rust it just happens to be simpler, and just as automatable, to do it ahead of time instead of at runtime.
"if you do this right" sounds like wishful thinking. Sorry but every other software uses plugins for his sort of thing for a reason. As a devops, sysadmin, and developer, what you're describing sounds absolutely unusable for the vast majority of its target audience.
It's still plugins. It's still configurable without need to write code, or know Rust. Just the compilation step occurs ahead of time instead of at runtime.
And plenty of software is written that way btw though more often in the commercial and embedded sector. This goes into the general direction of a Software product line. As you mentioned godot: Game engines also tend to do it, simply for performance reasons. You can implement quest logic in a dynamic layer, but if you need custom physics or such it needs to get baked into the binary. Godot calls those things modules instead of plugins but really it's the same thing at a different point in compilation time.
You realize Godot supports modules and plugin for a reason, right? Like it would be absolutely inane if Godot asked gamedevs to recompile Godot from source to add shared functionality. And this is with a piece of software that is already aimed at developers and software houses, most of whom are familiar with compiling from source.
Lemmy admins are not software houses. Most barely have enough knowledge to run the ansible playbooks and you're suggesting they set up CI/CD pipelines!
Like it would be absolutely inane if Godot asked gamedevs to recompile Godot from source to add shared functionality.
They do, for a lot of things: Not everything you can do with modules can be done with plugins, while everything that can be done with plugins can be done with modules. And bevy requires it for everything: If you want a scripting layer you have to bring your own, the project doesn't, and won't, provide one. The envisioned editor indeed involves building everything from scratch, not just loading things into a pre-compiled runtime.
and you’re suggesting they set up CI/CD pipelines!
Nah I suggest they run them. Either as-is or after tweaking some knobs. And frankly speaking running a server is not like opening MS Paint, if you don't have some background technical knowledge if the software doesn't eat you then the next botnet will.
They do, for a lot of things: Not everything you can do with modules can be done with plugins, while everything that can be done with plugins can be done with modules.
And yet, they support plugins, even through they're technically unnecessary since modules exist. What a waste of core developer time, eh?
bevy
I mean, there's a reason why Godot is slowly-but-surely taking over the world of Game Engines and I have never heard of bevy before now. Ease of use and ease of development trumps performance every time (as far as "market share" is concerned).
Nah I suggest they run them. Either as-is or after tweaking some knobs.
Sorry but as someone who does have the extensive experience with those things, there's nothing accurate about that statement.
if you don’t have some background technical knowledge if the software doesn’t eat you then the next botnet will.
Which is where allowing more developer resources to be injected into the project, with, oh I don't know, plugins, would help. We're looking to expand the pool of people who are technically able to run fediverse servers. Not shrink it.
I mean, there’s a reason why Godot is slowly-but-surely taking over the world of Game Engines and I have never heard of bevy before now. Ease of use and ease of development (overall) trumps performance every time.
Godot set out to be an open source unity, bevy set out to finally build an ECS-centric game engine with performance as its top goal. Bevy is also quite a bit younger, and not yet feature complete, but also far from a small hobby project it's serious business.
We’re looking to expand the pool of people who are technically able to run fediverse servers. Not shrink it.
Why would an admin care if setting a particular setting in a config file causes compilation of a custom binary, or the standard binary, once started, compiling/loading a dynamic plugin? There's no discernible end-user difference. In both cases you do the equivalent of ./lemmyctl [start|reload] --config my-config.json or such.
I might be a tad out of touch, which can probably be inferred by the ctl part, but it's the concept that matters, and this applies to any daemon: You configure, you start, you possibly change the config, and you tell the thing to reload the config.
On my system everything gets switched all at once with nixos-rebuild switch or home-manager switch: File systems get mounted and unmounted, daemons stopped and started, the whole system gets upgraded if necessary. It can be that easy. If it isn't, maybe that's a thing to look into before looking into plugins.
From my discussion with some beehaw admins and sublinks devs, a problem is they they feel like their code contributions will not even be accepted
They've never opened a single PR, whilst the github shows us merging tons of PRs from third parties, so that seems like negative speculation on their part.
For example showing voting totals.
The lemmy API already has open vote totals on everything (score, upvote, downvote), and I also made a PR adding a user preference setting for how to display scores for your user.
I believe there's an open issue for a plugin framework, but that would need to be fully worked out. If it's just simple preferences, there are tons of sample PRs to learn from.
I'm quite confused about some people's adverseness to learning Rust; it's been the voted the most favorite developer language for many years in a row now (for good reason), rust frameworks frequently top the fastest web server benchmarks now, and every real developer has to learn new languages and frameworks every few months to keep up to speed anyway. Just as an example, I was waiting for a messageease(an android keyboard) replacement, and nothing came close. I taught myself kotlin, and android programming, and made one, and I'm an incredibly slow learner and middling programmer.
Speaking or myself, it's simply a matter of time. Even doing the fediverse stuff I'm already doing is stretching me beyond my limits.
About the prs, ye I don't want to do the broken telephone here. The point is there's clearly a sort of disconnect between how welcoming the lemmy developers believe they are and how they are perceived by some other people. It's not an easy problem to solve tbh and requires some honest discussion in good faith with the affected parties.
About the open voting totals, I remember there was a conflict about this. Weren't they are some point hidden on the api? As in if you request the overall voting total for a user you alway get 0?
Speaking or myself, it’s simply a matter of time. Even doing the fediverse stuff I’m already doing is stretching me beyond my limits.
It's exactly the same for us. There are hundreds of open issues for Lemmy and we can't work on all of them.
By voting totals you mean the karma score? We intentionally decided not to show that because it has many negative effects. It was accidentally still exposed in the api so we removed that.
It’s exactly the same for us. There are hundreds of open issues for Lemmy and we can’t work on all of them.
You misunderstand. For you, lemmy is your full-time job, so working on feature A instead of feature B, is still working on lemmy. For me being a lemmy admin is a side-thing to my main FOSS project, and on top of that I also have my day job.
By voting totals you mean the karma score? We intentionally decided not to show that because it has many negative effects. It was accidentally still exposed in the api so we removed that.
yes exactly. But this is something that you diverge from what other admins might want. So they cannot submit it as a feature even if they want to which is what I was alluding to earlier as to why you might not see the PRs
Sure, thats because we develop for the majority of the userbase and not what some (real or imaginary) admins might want. Its impossible to make everyone happy so we have to choose what works for most people, and hiding karma is clearly very popular.
One thing I have never understood and keep repeating in this context: Beehaw has >7k$ balance. If they really have a few issues that would solve 90% of the problems, why not putting a 500/1000/2000$ bounty of that feature.
I believe they mentioned that in their essay I linked to in this thread yesterday, they looked into starting a bounty system for new features but the Lemmy devs told them not to do it so the idea was abandoned.
the one reason I joined the instance Lemm.ee was because its mission was to avoid defederating and be the widest firehose nozzle of lemmy content available.
even i would prefer for lemm.ee to defederate threads.
imo it doesn't matter for Lemmy right now one way or another, and maybe not ever. Being federated with Threads doesn't do anything yet. Defederate or not, the only change (from my understanding) is about making a statement, or standing with other microblog platform instances that made a choice.
On mastodon however, I'll likely either use a federated instance or run two accounts. It's very likely that some person I want to follow will be on Threads, and until people can convince them otherwise ¯\(ツ)/¯
What's nice though is that if Threads is on activitypub, you won't need to log in to see the content. It's only if you want to engage with the content, and that can be done from a second Mastodon account.
It’s very likely that some person I want to follow will be on Threads, and until people can convince them otherwise
You realize that it makes it a lot more difficult to convince people to come to the rest of the Fediverse instead of using Threads if people are following them and federating with Threads?
This is exactly how Zuckerberg wants you to think.
This is exactly how Zuckerberg wants you to think.
These conversations we're having are all speculative, and we won't know how things play out till we get there. Trying to predict the behaviour of large groups of people is... difficult
What I predict is that defederation will play right into their selling point. We're going up against a behemoth of evil with enough money to bankroll creators into joining and promoting their platform. Defederating (when the majority of people don't understand what that means) will end up with people joining Threads.
Threads has a very high (artificially inflated) user count, it's by a company everyone already knows, and all instagram users already have an account. The strongest selling point we can have is "Join Mastodon, you can see all the same stuff but it's run by a non-profit instead of Facebook" That doesn't work if the selling point is "Join Mastodon to see different content".
For what it's worth, I'm actively using Mastodon and trying to inform any friends / family that are jumping ship to shift to Mastodon. Best case scenario, Mastodon takes off properly, Threads becomes a failed project by Meta, and we can nail this shut for good.
But you're giving Meta the same selling point, right? Join Threads and see all the same content. There's no point in going elsewhere then. It kinda goes both ways.
You're right that we don't know what will happen. So it could just as well be that Threads would swallow the whole Fediverse and then if Threads blocks an instance, it's like a death sentence for that instance. That's the whole embrace, extend, extinguish.
But you’re giving Meta the same selling point, right? Join Threads and see all the same content. There’s no point in going elsewhere then. It kinda goes both ways.
Somewhat yes
I think Threads doesn't need that selling point because of the other advantages that it has
I find that when X defederates with Y, and people want to see all the content, all else being equal they will pick Y. Usually that means that Y = "We are happy to have X, but they chose to leave"
We saw a bit of that last July for how some people picked Lemmy instances
when X defederates with Y, and people want to see all the content, all else being equal they will pick Y
Hmmm maybe? But I think that's a misunderstanding from a lot of users. You don't want to see all content, trust me. Defederating is not necessarily bad. In most cases, it's healthy.
I think that even if EEE is what Facebook is going after here, after a certain point some users will just get fed up with the demands/changes they're making and move to an instance that is incompatible/defederated with Threads and then we're pretty much back at where we're right now.
Like when reddit gave the ultimatum to switch to their app or stop using reddit we didn't really have a 3rd option. However if reddit was in the fediverse we could have just told them to have fun with their new platform while the rest of us stay with the old one among ourselves. Sure, you'll still lose majority of the content there but when it comes to threads we're not really interested in their content in the first place so it doesn't matter. If a Lemmy user is willing to play by Facebook's rules just so that they can stay connected to a bigger userbase then I'm not sure if we're actually losing anything of a value if and when our ways apart. Facebook can poison the majority of the fediverse but there's not much they can do with the instances that don't care if they get defederated or not. The niche instances will continue existing.
I'm not personally against my instance blocking them but I'm strongly against people pushing their values onto others. I would much rather have individual users block that instance if they so wish instead of someone deciding for them. Sure you can always switch instances but what Fedi Garden seems to be doing here is going against the essence of fediverse and bullying instances to do as they want just like we're worried of Facebook doing.
some users will just get fed up with the demands/changes they’re making and move to an instance that is incompatible/defederated with Threads
But many users might now and then we've given Threads leverage - stay federated with Threads and give in to their demands and changes, or lose a big chunk of your users. That's not leverage I want Meta to have. So I say defederate ahead of time.
I’m strongly against people pushing their values onto others. I would much rather have individual users block that instance if they so wish instead of someone deciding for them.
I've seen this sentiment before and I understand how it can seem appealing. Why should anyone decide what any user sees? Just let every user decide for themselves.
However, there's multiple problems with that idea. Firstly, it doesn't scale. It's not sustainable to have every user block all the bad stuff for themselves before they get a sane feed. Secondly, it's not a whole solution. A single user can block an instance, but that instance will still have an influence with votes (and blocking an instance right now in Lemmy is only blocking community posts so you'll also see comments from an instance you "blocked" and this is by design). So user blocking simply doesn't do the same thing as defederation does.
Also nobody is pushing values onto others really - each user decides for themselves what instance to join. They can join one endorsed by the Fedigarden og fedipact or whatever else they want. Or they can join another one. Up to them.
Is this really a problem for Lemmy though? Threads content isn’t going to show up here because threads doesn’t have communities, and Lemmy doesn’t allow you to follow people.
Part of the concern is deceptive/astroturfed content developed as advertising showing up in Lemmy communities. While those same actors could theoretically be based on lemm.ee, that's a lot more work than simply scaling up operations when you're doing it on Threads anyway.
Yes, my point remains. Even if a Lemmy instance is federated with masto or threads, the content does not appear here on Lemmy right now. It’s physically impossible. Lemmy literally has no code written to support self posts and to follow users.
For example, here is NPR’s masto account viewed through Lemmy.world. You get their name, avatar, banner, and bio….but zero content.
I feel like this would be spotted and stamped out immediately. Everyone's eyes are on Threads right now; astroturfed content might sneak in on Mastodon, where regular Threads content will be mixed in with the hypothetical astroturfed content, but here on Lemmy there will be little to no Threads presence due to lack of interoperability, so every single Threads account that shows up will be noticed. It's already super visible when Mastodon users show up due to the weird formatting issues that happen due to the lack of support.
I just don't see an astroturf campaign as being viable unless Threads implements community functionality, which seems pretty far out when they're only now implementing basic federation with Mastodon.
It's not that crazy, the Threads devs are already looking at specific FEPs for things like quote posting. If they really wanted to, they could implement Lemmy-compatible community groups.
Well, for one thing, Threads is already full of ads. And I don't mean Threads ads, I mean users posting ads, like ads for their own products or services or for their audience, trying to be an influencer and all that.
But it's not necessarily the users that will be problematic. It's more that by federating with Meta, you're giving value to Zuckerberg. And I don't want to do that.
Waiting for a tankie essay about how it's actually an inclusive move from russia or something like that. The last thread about China blocking lemmy.ml was a goldmine.
Funny how we constantly get told we support capitalist Russia, yet they never actually provide evidence for that.
I'm not surprised tho as lying about communists seems to be second nature to Western bootlickers
And
i love how that dude makes an absolutely ridiculous assumption, as i've never seen a "tankie" deny that current russia is reactionary as fuck, but since he's saying Bad Thing about The Tankies everyone just goes "hmm yea those tankies amirite? smh"
liberals are fucking idiots, they never have any idea of what they're actually talking about and just throw around concepts and categories with the level of understanding of a monkey playing with a power tool
And
"We support the Russian Federation's opposition to US imperialism. We oppose their reactionary government including the state suppression of lgbtq+ people, minority nationalities and ethnic groups, etc. Using these issues as cudgels for US/NATO imperialism hurts all people in Russia, including oppressed minorities, and undermines the progressive nature of those liberation struggles in that country."
Great thread. I especially love how some guy aks why the thread I mentioned was a goldmine and gets immediate response with screenshot of some funny comments. I love that @good_girl who took the screenshot must have seen the rest, comments like this: https://iusearchlinux.fyi/pictrs/image/95816e17-8d2b-42b7-b90d-b4cf3cb66870.jpeg
but still decided to screenshot only the funny comments. Anyways, happy dunking.
EDIT:
Also, most of comments in the thread are crying about how could I ever imagine tankie defending anti-LGBT move from Russia, because tankies don't actually support Russia (sure). Well, this comment proves that tankies are definitely able to do all mental gymnastics to defend moves like that:
I don't consider being on Threads as being "on the fediverse". My definition of the fediverse is servers that follow the Activity Pub protocol to interact with each other. You might disagree with that definition, but Threads only lets us "follow" (view-only) certain of their accounts (only about 2000 out of millions) from Mastodon. Those accounts do not see any replies to their post from the fediverse, or any fediverse posts at all for that matter--we are invisible to them. So no, he's not "on the fediverse", he's on Threads. I doubt he knows the fediverse even exists.
Thing is, for federation to work, his team had to opt into it. The fact that his statuses and profile render natively in Mastodon and Akkoma are a pretty strong start.
I'd like to see Meta put their money where their mouths are, and finish the integration. I think we'll probably see that happen sooner rather than later.
Personally I hope they never do, though it does look likely. Like many pre-November '22 old-time Mastodon et.al. fedizens, I came to the fediverse specifically because I didn't want to have anything with FB/Meta/Twitter or the other commercial, "engagement"-based, enshittified social media.
It feels like the fediverse is being gentrified, with half of it eagerly welcoming their new overlords (why don't they just join Threads?) and the other half resisting. The half that doesn't federate with Meta will move on, like people priced out of their own neighborhoods by gentrification, and become the new "real fediverse" where people can go to live free from corporate interference.
As someone who has repeatedly seen cities become gentrified (first Peoria, Illinois, then San Francisco, then Phoenix), I get what you're trying to say, but also don't think it's an appropriate metaphor.
The half that doesn’t federate with Meta will move on, like people priced out of their own neighborhoods by gentrification, and become the new “real fediverse” where people can go to live free from corporate interference.
Frankly, I think this is a bit melodramatic. The Anti-Threads part of the Fediverse will stay in their isolated bubble with little to no change, while the rest of the network continues to grow or change. It's not like operational costs are skyrocketing, or that hosting will become any more scarce or more difficult. It's not like the servers have to move to a different neighborhood. Gentrification is predicated on the finiteness of physical space and affordable places to live.
and become the new “real fediverse” where people can go to live free from corporate interference.
This is probably news to you, but there's not even a coherent, all-encompassing definition for what the Fediverse even is. The idea that there's a "real Fediverse" vs "Fake Fediverse" glosses over all kinds of history and nuance. The best anyone's gotten to defining it is by specifying protocols and interoperability, but even that doesn't quite cover it.
The Fediverse isn't just the parts you like, minus the parts you don't like.
It’s not like operational costs are skyrocketing, or that hosting will become any more scarce or more difficult.
That remains to be seen. There are multiple ways a single huge instance could drive up costs for everyone else, especially when there isn't organic growth that allows developers to find creative workarounds to firehose problems.
Lemmy has been seeing federation-desync issues over the last couple of weeks due to a bug in kbin being amplified by Lemmy.world. I imaging a similar issue but with a fully federated Threads would simply ddos most fediverse instances out of existence.
I get what you’re trying to say, but also don’t think it’s an appropriate metaphor.
You're also screamingly White; do you really think you have any latitude, any ground to opine on what is and isn't gentrification when the odds err closer to 1 that you've uncritically participated in this process before?
Y'know, if I had a watch on, I'd be looking at my wrist really condescendingly right about now.
Just because I have privilege doesn't mean I haven't experienced harsh realities that are relevant to this context. The idea that a person's race automatically qualifies or disqualifies them to speak on a subject without context or nuance is just silly.
You're out here mad because a dude expressed that it's stupid to compare server hosting for commodity open source communication software to societal decay caused by landlords, real estate developers, and people with four times the local income all rushing into a place and pricing out the people who already lived there. Y'know, something that actually has a real and tangible material effect.
Who said 'mad'? I asked you a question; "do you really think you have any latitude". Can't say your response surprises me either. I think your privilege absolutely disqualifies you from speaking without immense disclaimer-- which you didn't provide-- because you people can never be trusted to even properly parse the difference between prejudice and racism in definition, theory, or practice; so why should I trust you to properly define what is and isn't 'gentrification'? Especially considering the list of cities you give only gives me even more reason to believe you've participated in meatspace gentrification just as eagerly as you preach it over here? Tuhhhhhh.
Fact of the matter is, you and your little redditor weasel friends have done an admirable job at scuzzing the place up in State Department rot and water-bearing for all manner of genociders, war criminals, and merchants of death-- Meta included among at least two of three in that count. Their presence alone on the fediverse spreads that same Five-Eyed rot. That you either can't perceive, or won't perceive that, leads me to believe that yes. 'Gentrification' is exactly what they're doing. What you're doing. Just virtual this time; and if you believe corporate takeover of the digital commons doesn't count, you'd just be proving my point even more about your lack of standing or right to speak on the subject. They will embrace, extend, and then extinguish the fediverse as we know it, and expect you to pay for what comes after. Enjoy your dystopia, settler. You're no longer invited to discuss with me; not 'til you've done any kind of meaningful self-crit and preferentially some objective learning about the sociological place from which you speak.
If Google killed XMPP, how come some enterprise communication products (off the top of my head I can name two that are successful at least in Europe) use it?
There is XMPP the protocol which is indeed still widely used by commercial entities, and there is XMPP the open federated network, also called Jabber, which is still alive but Google did kneecap it pretty hard back then.
XMPP as used in the enterprise communication product my employer uses (AFAIK based on the common open source implementation) sucks as much on mobile as Xabber which I used back in the day. I get notifications 30 minutes late if at all. That thing killed itself by not adapting to smartphones.
That's a bad implementation then. Modern open-source XMPP works great on mobile, no problems with notifications at all on Android. iOS is more of a mixed bag, but that is solely Apple's fault and applies to all messengers other than iMessage.
That’s a bad implementation then. Modern open-source XMPP works great on mobile
The issue was the state of mobile clients when XMPP died in the mainstream and state of the art was crap like Xabber. Conversations was better but too little, too late.
iOS is more of a mixed bag, but that is solely Apple’s fault and applies to all messengers other than iMessage.
Telegram works flawlessly pretty much everywhere, including iOS which my mom uses.
Well, Monal on iOS doesn't work worse than Telegram on iOS, so then apparently it's flawless as well. I am not an iOS user, but I heard complaints about Telegram on iOS as well regarding notifications.
Well, Monal on iOS doesn’t work worse than Telegram on iOS, so then apparently it’s flawless as well.
Again: The current state is irrelevant when discussing the time frame when Google allegedly killed it. The state of Jabber and its clients was just abhorrently bad back in the day. That was the reason the world moved to WhatsApp. Google Talk has always been a niche product. That's why it's dead.
Also WhatsApp is using a slightly modified version of XMPP
Obviously modified enough to work better with mobile when it launched than Jabber's state of the art back then.
Again: Google did not kill Jabber. Jabber achieved its downfall on its own by being bettered by proprietary services that just worked better on mobile devices BACK THEN.
Google Talk was never Jabber. The Google Jabber integration was way before that in Gmail. Google Talk was what came after Google decided to abandon Jabber.
And yes Google very much held Jabber back by having the largest user-base in their Gmail integration and refusing to even implement SSL for that let alone supporting any other innovations like better mobile support. If Google had actually supported Jabber instead of sabotaging it, we would not have this discussion.
Google Talk was never Jabber. The Google Jabber integration was way before that in Gmail. Google Talk was what came after Google decided to abandon Jabber.
Wikipedia says otherwise.
If Google had actually supported Jabber instead of sabotaging it, we would not have this discussion.
Google kills messaging services all the time and launches new, incompatible ones. Google did not sabotage Jabber, they sabotage their own chat services all the time.
Wikipedia is not a good source on this. By the time Google's XMPP based messaging product was renamed "Google Talk" it had long ceased to be compatible with the wider Jabber federation.
While I agree that Google does also sabotage their own messengers, it was deeply involved in XMPP specs development and other stuff around the ecosystem in the beginning, and then just quietly began to blockage urgently needed changes as they were unwilling to implement them in their system.
But I guess this discussion has reached the end of being useful as you clearly have a lack of understanding what actually happened back then.
If I can follow some mainstream entertainment accounts from Mastodon, I'm fine with that. I dislike having to log onto Twitter or Threads just to find out what some motorsports teams are up to.
The Fediverse's main goal was to be a middle ground between completely centralized and completely decentralized networks, though... So I'd say it has accomplished its goal.
If posts were signed, it wont matter what instance youre posting from since your identity would be tied to your public key and not the account on a Mastodon/lemmy/etc server.
Thats more decentralized. It helps when you get banned, a server shuts down etc.
He's right that the public key would have to be somewhere, maybe on the profile page. The public key would be one more thing to be federated across servers.
Ok, but if it's not bound to something like an official domain name how can you be sure the person who signed their posts as president of the EU (or whatever the official title is) to actually be that person is real life?
Is there any benefit to it over nostr though? You'd have to link your public key to your account(s) and store a backup of your private key in addition to your regular login/password just to get a more fragmented and less seamless version of nostr. A lot of people already have issues figuring out how fediverse works with multiple instances and all... now they'd have multiple accounts with different credentials to keep track of on top of a meta login/password (pub/priv key). With nostr you only have 1 login/password (pub/priv key) to everything, it's just long and you can't change it. At least I think that's how it works, I don't really use twitter/nostr/mastodon type of sites.
I don't think a federated wiki is solving any of the problems of wikipedia. You've just made a wiki that is more easily spammed and will have very few contributors. Yes, Wikipedia is centralized, but it's a good thing. No one has to chase down the just perfect wikipedia site to find general information, just the one. The negative of wikipedia is more its sometimes questionable moderation and how its english-centric. This has more to do with fundamentally unequal internet infrastructure in most countries than anything though. Imperialism holds back tech.
I agree that it might be fine for niche wikis but again, why in the world would you ever want your niche wiki federated? Sounds like a tech solution looking for the wrong problem.
That's one way of putting it. Another way is "ramrodding the narratives of anglo chauvinists that are to the right of even the neoliberal historical consensus".
Wikipedia doesn't replace books. In my comment at least that's why I was specific about "general information". I think everyone must be aware that when it comes to Wikipedia on history or current events, it will largely be from a liberal and pro-west perspective. Not all the time, and usually the references and further reading sections point in more interesting directions. But this is far more valuable than the most boring so-called Marxist wikis. If you want critical history, go read historians like Gerald Horne, read first-hand accounts from journalists like Edgar Snow and so on.
Besides the purely political, wikipedia is also good for overviews on technical and scientific interests. Even with the negatives of wikipedia, I'd take it any day over some decentralized spam fest where its a gamble if you found the best version of some article. Not to mention core issues of the fediverse, such as whether the hypothetical wiki instance you found yourself on will sustain itself long-term.
Some days I wonder if the core Lemmy developers have drifted further towards anarchist politics and philosophy..
No, for the same reason forums can't replace reddit. Self hosted wikis have been around before and after fandom. The reason it became popular was giving you all the fandom wikis together, one account, discoverable, user friendly so regulars can contribute. If I have to sign up to every fandom wiki I can contribute to, learn a new interface (likely something old and not mobile friendly) and rebuilt up any reputation to gain extra editing rights... I just won't.
Ibis then in theory allows you to use one account, federate your reputation, use one interface, with lots of third party options if you don't like the official one (if lemmy is any indication) and have discoverability of new wikis.
Arguably even Fandom / Wikia is ruined by plain old greed more than centralization. What's wrong with it isn't content, it's the fact every page loads seven ads, a roll of clickbait, and a goddamn Discord server. A weird blog site for editable text and tiny images would work fine if it wasn't twisted to feed Engagemagog.
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