I agree with this take, and recently I actually read this article that criticizes how server centric fedi is as a whole. If it's hard and expensive for a layperson to self host, but you need to have an account associated with a specific server, then you're going to end up with a system where you're under the whims of a instance owner still. Not to mention the whole pick a server step severely hurts our adoption rates.
I like the idea of having an account just being a public and private key pair. Theoretically you could make one client side, use it to sign your messages, and servers could verify the signature and distribute your post without needing to have an explicit account for you. You could send every message to a random instance and it'd still work. You wouldn't have to worry about links to the "wrong instance" and you wouldn't have to attach your identity to a instance that might shut down or be bought by a bad person. The server would be essentially irrelevant.
I align with that article 's conclusion; in fact such a "fediverse browser" is exactly what I think the fediverse needs to fully replace closed/proprietary/traditional social media.
However, some of their arguments seem off. For example, for the client to be able to choose/implement it's own sorting algorithm, it seems to me that it would need to have access to all posts. At that point, your client is just another server, with all the problems that we're originally trying to avoid.
I have the same problem with your proposal / nostr's approach: you may obtain a portable identity but all the "content" tied to that identity still has to live somewhere - someone else's server or your own.
Yeah, I disagree with that part as well. I think it's fine for servers to store the content and provide endpoints for specific queries/sorts, and expecting the clients to have all the posts is a tad extreme.
In this case, yes the data needs to live somewhere, but that's the nature of having data be retrievable.
Nostr does some interesting things! What I mentioned here is actually just the identity part of what I think could be a significantly improved version of the fediverse. I have ideas on how to support subreddit style communities and decentralized moderation and things like that that make the whole idea a bit different from nostr.
I suspect retrofitting a whole new identity system to Fediverse will never happen because server admins, or instance admins, will come up with all kinds of reasons why they don't like the idea of not knowing who their users are. Some of them would probably allow it, but I bet a whole bunch of them wouldn't, and we'd get into this fragmentation where some servers won't allow posts from those types of identity, etc. It seems to me much easier to take Nostr and just give it the functionality you get inside the Fediverse.
She's right, but centralized services like BlueSky won't be it.
Social networks don't need servers playing middlemen, friend-to-friend networks with onion routing to pass messages to friends-of-friends would more accurately reflect the structure of real-world social networks.
You only connect to your trusted friends, but by passing messages along the Kevin Bacon chain it's still possible to reach practically anyone on the network. Retroshare's built-in services include email, instant messaging, traditional web forums, microblogging, and Reddit-style karma-ranked forums/linkboards, and third party plugins include voice and video chat. It's desktop-only, but I think it demonstrates that serverless social networks are possible.
Say you want to send a letter to a friend of a friend, but you don't know their address so you can't send it direct.
Instead, you can package your letter inside a second letter to your mutual friend, asking them to finish filling out the mailing label for you so your message will reach the intended recipient.
They call it "Onion Routing" because the message can be wrapped in multiple layers of these routing requests, with each recipient stripping off the layer addressed to them and forwarding the remainder on to the next connection in the chain.
Using this protocol, so-called "Friend to Friend" networks can still enable communication between non-friends so long as a "5 degrees of Kevin Bacon"-style connection exists between you and whoever you're trying to reach.
Not sure why this was downvoted. The business model of BlueSky is that they're the indexer or whatever they want to call it. Technically it is federation but it's a disingenuous implementation.
i feel more afraid of bluesky than meta/threads. they are already pushing a very corporate-centric solution with a bolted on feature the fediverse if frothing for (portabability).
Social media provides the tools and platforms for social networking to take place, but social networking is the actual practice of using those tools to connect with others.
"Social Networks" can be a reference to the various social media services available online, but they can also be an reference to the collection of social connections one has offline.
They also state their opinion that the issue “should have been prioritized for a faster fix… Don’t you think as a community-powered, open-source project, it should be possible to attend to a long-standing bug, as serious as this one?”
It's crazy how every single entity who has any issue with any free software project always seems to assume their needs should be prioritized.
Im not good at frontend development, my goal was to create a very basic frontend which works to show off the project. Going forward I will definitely need help to improve the design or create an entirely new frontend in a different language.
Anyway the main thing about this project is the working federation, but without a basic frontend it would be very difficult to showcase.
Maybe making it work as an headless API and develop a linker to an existing Wiki like Dokuwiki would work better? Something like this plugin that syncs a Dokuwiki with a git backend: https://www.dokuwiki.org/plugin:gitbacked
An intelligent conversation is not one that desires oppression, economic or whatever kind. That kind of dialogue you seem to refer to is basically pseudo intellectual hipster culture, the shit you see on reddit and in liberal spaces.
It's debatelord behavior. Performance of colonizer norms mores (got the term wrong) for the adulation of rest of the genocidal settler masses at the expense of every subject-of-empire whose neck bears that invader's bootprint.
Meh, I'm not the one aggressively trying to shut down any conversation which doesn't go hard enough on ML fan service. I actually came to .ml at first hoping to find a more academically oriented leftist community which was willing to engage with topics other than "let's relitigate the cold war."
You are obviously free to dismiss any criticism of this community as "NATO chauvinist propaganda" or whatever, just as im free to roll my eyes and say that the world deserves a better class of socialist.
Not only did I not stick to ML orthodoxy while I was there (I'm more of a peacenik anarchist at heart), I wrote some fairly rude things when I found out how insane some of the tankies on lemmy can be. I hadn't expected such people to exist in reality, I had thought it was just a caricature invented by enemies of communism or something. Nonetheless they did not ban me or complain at all when I said that sort of thing.
Eventually I left because their list of blocked instances got too long for my taste.
I don't consider myself a Marxist, Leninist, or communist of any stripe and haven't had a problem so far. I'm far enough left that I refuse to call myself a liberal, but I suspect the folks who consider themselves Marxists probably think I'm too far right to self-identify as a leftist. (Although I do.)
Shitload of downvotes a time or two, but that's about it. I just wanted to be on a Lemmy instance that was honoring the fedipact, and preferred it to have an instance ethos to the left of mine rather than to the right of it.
You believe in "russian disinformation assets", like hell you are lmfao. Y'know what, let's go for a walk.
Russia may try, but it’ll never erase Ukraine nor the fact Ukraine made Russia.
No, they’re not. Populism as a whole is a horrible political strategy which benefits only a few members of the political class.
Because it takes away the puppet Russia has been building and nurturing this whole time.
There’s an easy way to end this war: either kill Putin or have Putin resign.
If by “core” you mean “civilized world”, yes.
Your words; not mine. You are no Marxist. You are a western chauvinist, a genocidal settler, and so terminally, neoliberally treat-brained that I expect you to keel over after you've been fed chocolate.
Hardly; I've never known actual communists who uncritically supported that man. It's always critical support, at best-- which is to say, he may do some things correct, but he's still an absolute affront to what came before, and honestly a problem Amerika themselves created. Advocating for wanting to kill a man in the midst of denazifying a NATO-backed neighbor, out of self-defense from NATO encirclement though; that's beyond the pale, as is everything else I've found regarding that member's carriage.
Fair enough. I don't believe this is what is happening ("denazifying a NATO-backed neighbor") and haven't seen a source suggesting it is that doesn't itself look like propaganda, but I'm also OK agreeing to disagree on that. I asked only because without further context it seemed like not supporting Putin was a big component of your comment.
I understand your position now, even if we disagree on Putin also.
Yeah no, my support of Putin is critical at best, and only because Ukraine is the last piece of the puzzle NATO needs to assemble to have Russia at checkmate gunpoint. Allowing the Five-Eyed Empire to genocide more innocent civilians is not how we solve the Putin problem.
Our problem here is, we have a guy here who stands against the voice of the people, decrying populism as "a horrible idea" like all our favorite Amerikan neoliberals; replaces "the imperial core" with 'the civilized world' in casual parlance, indicating a virulent and toxic western chauvinism at best and outright white supremacy at worst; an uncritical gamer too, so I'm erring more toward the latter than the former, I could go on til Nimrod's release day honestly.
Fair. I suspect it would be interesting to discuss these things with you over a beer, but also that it's too likely to end up feeling like an argument here, so I won't press further. Thanks for the clarification.
You don't need to support Putin to be a Marxist, him and Russia are deserving of a lot of criticism, but it's maybe a little suspicious if someone sees everything happening geopolitically right now and consistently chooses to focus their anger towards Russia.
To be honest when I read Supavillain's quotes my first reaction was also 'So they don't like Russia, who cares?", Ukrainian national identify exists, if Russia annexed western Ukraine they wouldn't be able to erase it. Non-principled populist politicians do always suck. And Russia would've loved (I assume this is about) Donetsk PR to have been their puppet.
But then those last two quotes are pretty bad. Killing Putin or even having Putin do a 180 wouldn't change anything. He'd just be replaced. And the poor countries are no less civilised.
But then those last two quotes are pretty bad. Killing Putin or even having Putin do a 180 wouldn’t change anything.
Assassination is never something I advocate, but there are a few world leaders who I would not complain about if natural causes could catch up to them sometime soon.
In a word, no. In a few more words, support for Russia (not Putin, as historical materialists don’t subscribe to great man theory) is only a partial, temporary, tactical one, in the context of imperialist liberation. Russia is still a capitalist state, though, so it’s a two stage strategy: first liberate colonized bourgeois states from colonizer states, and second revolution within those liberated bourgeois states.
Russia is an interesting case: it has already liberated itself from the post-Soviet “shock therapy” neocolonizers. This occurred during Putin’s administration, which is why he is especially hated by the US. So now the support for Russia is in the context of keeping the colonizers from recolonizing it, and supporting Russia to the extent that it helps other states liberate themselves. But Russia isn’t trying to “liberate” Ukraine, at least not all of Ukraine. It’s trying to resolve the genocidal attacks on the people of the Donbas, and it’s trying to resolve the imperialist military expansion at its border.
I can't quite tell if this is a parody, the trade union bit makes it seem sincere, but the self-importance to think that lemmy is too left for China to allow is just amazing.
I'm looking it up, and I don't see any "Tienanmin Square". Could it be "Tiananmen Square" that you're thinking of? The one protesting government corruption? Where unarmed soldiers were burned alive? Where Christian sickos were trying to get students in the line of fire to create atrocity propaganda? Surely there must be some confusion here!
You mean like that time white landowners firebombed Tulsa in response to Black Wall Street's creation and thriving? Or how about the time a PD in Philadelphia did the same thing to the MOVE Black liberation group some sixty or so years later? This shit keeps happening and the settlers think they have any room or moral high ground to talk shit 💀💀💀💀💀
What type of society do you think would allow you to burn other people to death and string up their corpses? Is it one that you think would be an improvement over modern China?
point is focus your criticisms on your own society that's 1000x worse than even the most exaggerated crimes about China, cracker. Chinese people aren't children and they can handle their own country in their own way, they don't need some forum poster condescending to them and you don't need a warped preoccupation with a country that probably has nothing to do with you
January 6th already happened but no consequences did. The US will only deploy violence if the movement is left of whatever their crazy idea of center is.
almost no one in China feels that their state is an oppressive force, they feel the opposite. The government has more than a 90% approval rating. The overwhelming majority of Chinese people view their society as legitimate and socialist. If you had any interest in democracy at all you'd respect this perspective instead of imposing your own
She's literally correct; studies from even anti-Chinese partisan sources can't help but find that satisfaction with the government is overwhelming. While you treat anti-imperialist movements like this sitting from your home in the imperial core, you're not a revolutionary or helping anybody build towards anything better, you're an active hindrance. Feel free to imbibe the actual opinions of people in China so you can understand the conditions there and not just your cracker conditioning. It's not perfect, but overthrow would be far; far worse.
What? I stand with the Chinese people against their oppressors. Criticism of an oppressive State is not criticism of its victims.
Said the anglo, eagerly parroting his three-letter-agency masters with his hands on his pearls and a breathless huff to his diction. I have never seen such eager catamites for fuckin genociders in my life; is this what living in Weimar Germany was like?
A distributed knowledge base is indeed an excellent concept since it enhances resilience against potential disruptions or manipulations compared to a centralized database like Wikipedia. By distributing servers across numerous countries and legal jurisdictions, it becomes more challenging for any single entity to censor the content. Furthermore, the replication of data through federation ensures higher durability and reliability in preserving valuable information. Kudos on making it happen!
Wikipedia is not a Big Tech nor a commercial enterprise prone to enshittification nor it profits from surveillance capitalism. We don't need another, competing, universal source of enclopedical information. Wikipedia, on contrary to X, Reddit, Facebook, etc. is not going anywhere. Any self-styled Wikipedia alternative ended up dead, thematic, or biased by design.
However there are many thematical and fan wikis hosted on Fandom, which itself is a commercial company and there were already some contoversies concerning it. Wikis on Fandom are very resource-intensive compared to Wikipedia or independent thematical wikis.
Ability to edit at several wikis from the same account without being tied to Fandom could be one of things that Ibis offers and could benefit independent wiki sites.
And of course, MediaWiki is free software and federation could be added as a functionality.
Everything is biased. Even saying something as simple as "grass is green" is biased, it has the bias of normal colour perception. I'm colour blind and don't see grass as green.
With biased by design I have meant something like Conservapedia, RationalWiki, etc.. They do not try to make neutral point of view, as is (or at least should be) applied on Wikipedia.
Each instance would ideally have their own standards for neutrality or bias that they see fit. It's no different from self-hosted wikis except with the federation concept appllied on top of it. I'm sure someone will create an instance that is a straight up clone of wikipedia, another person will create an instance for everything pro-communism / pro-china, someone will create a strictly anti-theism wikipedia, etc.
I don't see anything wrong or weird about this, the skepticism this project is receiving is stupid. It's nothing new under the sun.
I'm kinda against defederation or blocking anything at an instance level, unless the instance causes straight up legal issues or is literally created for the sole purpose of harassment
Well, I think Threads meets your litmus test requirements.
It is a certainty that Threads will heavily influence the future development of Activity Pub. This will inevitibly lead to the corporatization and enshittification of any service Threads can affect.
The only resistance we can offer against this is defederation and noncompliance with the will of the behemoth.
You’re missing the point. Fedi Garden is threatening to defederate from anyone who doesn’t defederate from Threads.
Imagine if other instances start doing this about things that aren’t threads. “Delist from db0 or world will delist you”, “delist from Lemmy.ca or Lemmy.ml will delist you.”
I understand your "what if" scenarios, but this is an existential crisis that needs to be resisted against with all instances working in concert. This is not a "what if" scenario. This is the actual iceberg and it is big enough to ruin the fediverse for all instances, no matter their affiliation with the garden.
So, we either unite to defend the independence of the fediverse, or we let a corporate giant take it by ovewhelming us with their "important updates for your security" until we are all assimilated.
I think we are all overdue for a shot of positivity so thank you for this write up. Yes, we have a long way to go on the community side, the moderation and the technical sides but I'm happy for what we have and the progress since June and before.
I've done minor contributions (to the Jerboa app), some translations, posted stuff in 4 languages and donated some change where I can... we can always do better and although some are motivated by spite, I think also that a lot of people would enjoy it more if we can cultivate an atmosphere that's less miserable and full of unnecessary drama.
Hmm, unless the plan is to have a lot of reposts from TikTok, the real difficulty of these platforms is to have super easy to use video editing tools in the mobile app. And that is really a project all on it's own and requires a entirely different skillset.
You know, that's actually a really good point. Dansup tends to iterate on certain parts of his apps several times over, like how Pixelfed handles image uploads and filters prior to posting. It might be that just going with the simplest possible thing makes sense for right now, until a better approach can be devised.
The idea of a federated, decentralized Wikipedia alternative is intriguing, but implementing it successfully faces major hurdles. Federating moderation policies and privileges across different instances seems incredibly complex. I believe it would also require some kind of web of trust system. Quality control is also a huge challenge without centralized oversight and clear guidelines enforced universally.
While it could potentially replace commercial wiki farms like Wikia/Fandom for niche topics, realistically replacing Wikipedia's dominance as a general reference work seems highly ambitious and unlikely, at least in the short term. But as they say - shoot for the stars, and you may just land on the moon.
That said, ambitious goals can spur innovation. Even if Ibis falls short of usurping Wikipedia, it could blaze new trails and pioneer federated wiki concepts that feed back into Wikipedia and other platforms. The federated model allowing more perspectives and focused communities is worth exploring, despite the technical obstacles around distributed moderation and content integration. The proof-of-concept shows the core pieces are in place as a starting point.
as they say - shoot for the stars, and you may just land on the moon.
I've only ever heard, "shoot for the moon, [and] even if you miss you'll land among the stars", which is the phrase as it was first said by Norman Vincent Peale. But maybe swapping "moon" and "stars" is a common enough variant of the phrase that I just haven't heard before.
I can see why. Although the stars occupy a larger portion of the sky, they are also further away than the moon. So either version of the phrase makes sense in its own way.
More critically, the proof-of-concept so far appears to lack any real work on moderation tools or implementing a web of trust system. These would be absolutely vital components for a federated encyclopedia to have any chance of controlling quality and avoiding descending into a sea of misinformation and edit wars between conflicting "truths." Centralized oversight and clear enforced guidelines are key reasons why Wikipedia has been relatively successful, despite its flaws.
Without a robust distributed moderation system in place, a federated encyclopedia runs the risk of either devolving into siloed echo chambers pushing various agendas, or becoming an uncoordinated mess making it impractical as a general reference work. The technical obstacles around federating content policies, privileges and integrated quality control across instances are immense challenges that aren't obviously addressed by this early proof-of-concept.
While novel approaches like federation are worth exploring, straying too far from Wikipedia's principles of neutral point-of-view and community-driven policies could easily undermine the entire premise. Lofty goals of disrupting Wikipedia are admirable, but successfully replacing its dominance as a general reference work seems extremely unlikely without solving these fundamental issues around distributed content governance first.
Fediverse
Top
This magazine is from a federated server and may be incomplete. Browse more on the original instance.