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1: Anything that’s federated is public (to instance admins) and can’t be reliably deleted.
For ActivityPub, that’s pretty much everything except user account.
For email (SMTP) that’s sender, recipient, subject, and usually body.
Etc. Instance admins can log whatever they want. Laws like the GDPR or CCPA don’t apply to all instances.
2: User signup is much harder because choice paralysis over which instance to join often sets in. That in turn leads to default recommendations, resulting in centralization in a few instances. E.g. lemmy.world, beehaw.org, sh.itjust.works, lemmy.ml for lemmy, Gmail, Apple mail, MS Live email, AWS email options for email.
For your point 1) The same applies to any other social media or good old phpBB forums that some clubs still use. GDPR still apply as soon as you log personal data of an European user. So if an instance admin does shit with the data they can be charged.
GDPR isn’t that complicated, tons of small non profit structure (e.g a sport club) deal with personal data without any issue. If you don’t spy your user and do the minimum needed amount of data processing your data privacy policy can hold in a couple of lines. It get huge because big social media spy us
Old-school forums have single points of contact. They’re no more private than ActivityPub, but a takedown to the admin is a takedown of all instances. Obviously public data can be cached or archived, so as always you have to send takedowns to every archival service, search engine, and any CDNs too.
The GDPR “applies” whenever an EU resident’s data is stored. The enforcement requires some presence in the EU by the entity storing the data. For multinational companies that means if they have any banking services there (e.g. taking payments from EU customers) they have a presence. For individual fediverse admins, that’s not necessarily a concern. At worst their instance’s domain would get blacklisted to EU users.
Scalability. Most federated Lemmy instances are hobbiest run projects started by every day joes and privacy advocating sysadmins. These instances can handle a modest amount of activity. Lemmy.world is slowing to a crawl and barely working due to being overloaded. At the scale of tens of thousands of active users you NEED proper infrastructure and a dedicated team. These are not things that come easy when the instance generates no revenue besides meager donations. Lemmy.world is looking for on call system operators willing to contribute 5-10 hours per week. Good help is rarely cheap let alone free.
Lemmy.world is slowing to a crawl and barely working due to being overloaded.
I heard 0.18.4 has performance improvements.
The person hosting lemmy.myserv.one is trying to acquire more users because they want to take some of the load off of lemmy.world.
If you want something less burdened than lemmy.world, you should make an account over here. Do your Lemmy browsing from here, you know?
You are exactly correct.
I posted this in response to the DDOS attacks a few weeks ago. Same idea.
"… This is a shame. Hosting a high visibility server is no joke, and I don’t envy the admins and the very difficult work they do. It’s simultaneously an argument for and against decentralization. For - a single instance can get knocked out without talking out the whole fediverse. Against - it seems as though high visibility communities are potentially fairly easy to target and take down.
I think that decentralization wins out here in the end, but it does feel like there may be a need for some sort of fallback mechanism to be in place at an instance/community level. I suspect this might evolve somehow over time. It would require some way to expand trust between instances and or portability of communities (which could be fraught with user trust/data integrity issues).
If things don’t evolve it could grow into a whack-a-mole game for bad actors, or there might need to be more investment into server infrastructure (which could work against decentralization if only because of economies of scale).
Or maybe there’s no issue after all? I’m just imagining potential implications of a scaling fediverse - it’s fascinating and exciting stuff! …"
Everyone is a lot safer, faster and less vulnerable by being on smaller servers.
It’s not possible to ddos thousands of smaller instances in the same way. And if communities were spread out, taking a few instances down wouldn’t even be noticeable.
Theoretically, yes. Practically, maybe not so much as a ton of these smaller instances are consolidated on a just a handful of hosting providers.
When Lemmy.world was ddos’ed, other instances didn’t feel any of the effects, despite being on the same hosting provider. So it really matters - spread out :)
I expect as federation becomes more common we’ll see patterns like user servers, community servers, archive/redundancy servers, and eventually it’ll be less clustered. My instance that this version of me is on is much snappier than lemmy.world but it’s also federated differently and that’s very obvious when searching or browsing all
Yeah I’m not exactly clear over why federation differs either. Its designed not to differ I assume?
It is actually! The idea is you can join servers with certain levels of curation. For example if lemmy.world decided tomorrow it didn’t like blahaj.zone it could defederate them. That’s not the point of blahaj.zone but think of it like having multiple reddit accounts with different subscriptions each account is like a superpowered multireddit on it. You choose the subreddits that go in the multireddit but not that the account it’s on subscribes to
What you’re describing is a problem with doing centralization in the fediverse. If you instead federate in the fediverse, it scales fine.
From running multiple accounts across multiple instances, I’ve found that each instance feels like a separate forum of posts. Sure some of the big ones federate with each other, but that still doesn’t lead to being able to see the same federated content when you log into infosec.pub or lemmy.world. I think a lot of the differences in content lie with which instances federate with which other instances.
Yep it’s important to pick an instance that doesn’t block many other instances, if you want as much content as possible.
This is good and bad to me. I like the idea of a series of little neighborhoods. You know your home well, and have a place of comfort if you don’t feel like dealing with the wider world, but it’s all still very accessible (or ideally very accessible. Discovery is an ongoing issue without for you algos). Forums were nice, but it was always annoying if you were on more than one proboards (or what have you) and you were switching sites to see your variety of friends. Discord solves the same problems, but I also don’t trust that company at all.
Reddit gave you that comfort zone for certain topics, but only if it’s not a popular or contentious one. And like it’s nice to be able to have my comfort zone be more diverse than my 5 favorite topics.
I see no downsides to the idea of federation at all. All the downsides that exist on the specific platforms can be fixed or addressed; there is no inherent flaw in interconnectiveness of various sites/platforms/models, and that’s all the “federation” is: various sites connected together sharing content.
The overhead of duplicated data across the network. Not reposts on different instances, but the software itself on those different instances needing to cache/store this one single post for their users locally
Don’t large services have many duplicates/caches spread across the globe to balance load and reduce latency? Couldn’t this be seen as a positive? It could also be seen as a redundancy layer.
it’s absolutely just a redundancy layer, in fact this is one of the main benefits i see with federation.
Yes. It’s very common to cache content closer to the user, otherwise the site would be slow. Some services like Netflix and Facebook even provide custom caching servers to internet providers to install in their data centers. These are called Netflix Open Connect and Facebook Network Appliance respectively. They significantly reduces costs for the ISP, as Netflix and Facebook are generally two of the heaviest users of bandwidth on an ISP’s network, and traffic entirely within their own network is effectively “free” for them.
This is a good part of federation IMO - if users join an instance physically close to them, their experience is going to be nice and fast, since everything is cached on their instance. It’s also pretty easy to spin up a new Lemmy instance in your country if one doesn’t exist yet.
More of a wish than a challenge but federated identities would be awesome. Home instance offline? No problem, just switch servers. No need to try and sync settings and subscriptions between accounts.
Blockchains already do this with public key cryptography. Your “login and password” would just be a Mnemonic Phrase. The fediverse just distributes the public information to use that phrase.
I just did this kinda. Lemmy.world has been a yoyo for weeks.
There’s this… https://github.com/aidandenlinger/lasim/blob/main/README.md
Which could be improved to make this happen without user interaction.
Agreed, portability of accounts should be much higher priority that it currently seems to be on either mastodon or lemmy. But also, that limitation is not an option at all on non-federated platforms.
You cannot censor content. I could make an instance where I post the most vile things and even if 99.99% of lemmy hated my guts and wanted me shutdown I could continue to host my instance and federate with like minded communities. In a non federated platform Admins would delete my instance.
This is a positive to some and a negative to others.
This has been a thing since even before the web existed, with Usenet (the original federated forum) in the 1980s.
Would you really want admins controlling what you can and can’t say online? What if the admins have different political or societal views than you, and delete you / your content just because they disagree with what you’re saying? The world needs fewer power-hungry admins and mods, not more of them.
Also, the the thing with open source software is that you can’t control how people use it - a key feature of open-source is that it’s accessible to everyone.
IMO anyone should have the power to start their own Lemmy instance, but other instances should have the power to block you. I do agree that there’s some instances that 99% of Lemmy would block. For cases like that, an optional global blocklist of awful instances, that any instance could opt-in to blocking, would be useful.
Personally I do not want that but there’s a lot of people that want to shut down things they don’t like.
With great powers come great responsibility.
Lack of centralized control.
Until there’s some kind of organizing central committee of servers that could mutually defederate problematic instances, every server is forced to play whack-a-mole to deal with fascists and pedophiles and the like. Every server can not be an island onto themselves, they should be in communication with each other and then collectively decide on the rules of the federation.
It’s interesting to see the mirror between Fediverse philosophies, and the history of international relations. For every person who believes every physical country should be an autonomous island unto themselves, you’ll find someone else who believes every country should be policed by the standards of another country or group of countries.
The fact that we can have this debate on the internet is interesting…but I also find it interesting that the internet was already federated to begin with. And we all see how that turned out. The Fediverse is just an internet within the internet.
I forsee in the future federation boards, like servers that work together to vote on good/bad actors/instances and from those other instances could subscribe to their moderation. Still open moderation, you can still set up an instance that doesn’t adhere to group A or group B’s mod lists, but for the vast majority of people you could have a good experience.
For example, dunno how many saw but had to remove an anti-LGTBQ post in a LGTBQ community today. I’m sure I’m not the only mod who removed that from their instance today, it’d be great if there was a way other instance admins could share that and “team up” with moderation.
Like internet countries. Choose a virtual citizenship, vote for your moderator and wait to be disappointed
Poop
poopless like countries, but I would view that more like the federation UN, with each instance getting a vote and a majority passes. You’re still in charge of your country, but you could say “I like how this group moderates, I’m going to auto apply moderation from them on here”, maybe you could choose which communities are automoderated too. If I ever started disagreeing with that group I could unsubscribe and subscribe to a different group’s.
For example, the post I mentioned was not in a community that I host, but for my users I had to remove it too. Would just be nice to say “whoever gets there first can remove it”
I really really don’t like the idea of a central committee of liberals that will defed any instances that are more radical that “vote blue no matter who!”
That’s why the radical instances should
I really really don’t like the idea of a central committee of extreme right cultists that will defed any instances that are more radical that “vote red no matter who!”
Point being, I think it’s a plus to be able to decide for ourselves.
What if instances could “subscribe” to the list of defederated instances of each other?
So for example. Let’s say that Alice and Bob have their own instances, alice.ml and bob.ml. Bob trusts Alice, so he sets up the following rule in bob.ml: “if alice.ml defederates an instance, then bob.ml defederates it too.”
Then Charlie starts charlie.ml. It’s a bad instance. Alice manually defederates alice.ml from charlie.ml. Bob won’t need to do anything - bob.ml would do it automatically.
I feel like this idea would address the issue of playing whack-a-mole, since admins of multiple servers can split the busywork if they so desire, and only with whomever they desire. And there’s no risk of a central control going rogue, since there’s no central control on first place.
It could be even further refined with more complex rules on when to automatically defederate other instances. Such as taking into account if the other instance did it manually or automatically, or how many among X instances defederated it.
What you eventually get is a single global list that the majority of instances use, at which point every new instance must immediately agree to adopt the list lest they themselves are also immediately defederated.
From what I understand, there are already instances who operate this way.
What you eventually get is a single global list that the majority of instances use
Not necessarily. Defederating too many instances means that your own instance will get less content; admins know that, so good admins generally avoid doing it unless necessary for the goals of their instances. Couple that with dissenting points (for example: grotesque but morally acceptable content, porn, dumb/low-quality content…), and the odds of said “single global list” popping up becomes fairly small.
Instead I expect to see a bunch of smaller lists, between instances with similar goals, and plenty unilateral subscribing (e.g. A subscribes to B, but B doesn’t subscribe to A).
From what I understand, there are already instances who operate this way.
That’s good to know. If they do it automatically, this system could be already implemented across Lemmy.
I see that as a pro and a con. If one narcissist manages to get to a position of authority, they can’t derail the whole network. That also means that people can form their own echo chamber islands of like-minded instances. There could be the main island of random interests and then a separate extremist island of all the instances that got defederated from all the big instances. Not an ideal solution, but it’s still better than a fully centralized Reddit.
Identity theft. Not as serious as the real life version but imagine that I make an account with your username on another instance, maybe under a domain that’s very similar to yours, and start stirring up trouble. If you’re someone people recognize I could hurt your reputation or scam people.
Identity theft is not a joke Jim!
mastodon has a solution to this, where you can verify yourself with a website
As I understand it, there’s a huge downside to federated software in the requirement to be Always Online. Lots of people have slow internet connections, or no connection at all, preventing them from accessing their software. Everyone should be able to use the programs/apps they have without regard to whether they are online or can get online.
This isn’t really specific to federated software. The client can go offline but the server can’t. Same applies to all centralized services. The only place this really applies is for decentralized (as in, no central points) systems, and those tend to have a lot of special sauce to make other people being offline less painful
What federated software would actually make sense to work offline, though? Everything I’ve seen is literally internet tools like social media (forums, blogs, chats, etc). None of those things would work offline. Is there, like, a federated paint or word processing app or something?
I’ll put it this way. In the US, there used to be a rule where, if you broke the law and the police were after you and you drove into another state, the police from the first state you were in had to rely on that state’s police to do anything. There was an episode of the Simpsons that spoofed this once. Now apply this to websites.
Here is an alternative Piped link(s): https://piped.video/watch?v=-ijyVl1RSkk
Piped is a privacy-respecting open-source alternative frontend to YouTube.
I’m open-source, check me out at GitHub.
As we’ve learned here on hexbear with our recent federation, reddit people are almost unimaginably bad at making memes. Suddenly having your feed look like 9gag is a downside till you block a couple comms
Each individual actor in the system has less incentive to provide value and no incentive to maintain continuity. As a result, you are basically reliant on a small number of unconnected and pseudonymous volunteers who could walk away at any time. Add to that managing a server with thousands of users is basically a part-time job with little pay and you have a system that is sustained by the kindness of a couple dozen strangers.
That’s why I usually try to interact a bit with my two instance admins on one of my alts. It’s a small instance (less than 100 users at the moment), and I trust them enough that they would warn us and allow someone to take overall if they wouldn’t feel like managing the instance anymore.
