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Our experience with the Fediverse, and why we left

infosec-handbook.eu

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Re: Our experience with the Fediverse, and why we left

#21

Post by dleslie »

freeone3000 wrote: post #19
dleslie wrote: post #17

My experience with the fediverse was that enjoying the benefits of federation encountered the same issues with content and user behaviour that can be found in silo'd services. That is to say, fediverse sites increased their likelihood of replicating/serving hate, pornography and illegal content in correlation to the number of external sites they were connected to and the size of their user base. It left me wondering…

There's no algorithmic advertising, no universal tracking, and your instance's mod team is known to you instead of a faceless automation farm.

That's all true of hosting a private Discourse instance, as well.

Re: Our experience with the Fediverse, and why we left

#22

Post by seany »

dleslie wrote: post #17

My experience with the fediverse was that enjoying the benefits of federation encountered the same issues with content and user behaviour that can be found in silo'd services. That is to say, fediverse sites increased their likelihood of replicating/serving hate, pornography and illegal content in correlation to the number of external sites they were connected to and the size of their user base. It left me wondering…

Being able to pick where that line is, and who gets to decide it is a big part of the draw.

Re: Our experience with the Fediverse, and why we left

#23

Post by kowlo »

trhway wrote: post #18
kowlo wrote: post #3

> The “I read headlines only” problem This remains true for most platforms, not just those in the fediverse. HN is one example! I am reading this article with great interest. I've recently started exploring fediverse platforms with much excitement. I'm more interested in building a community at the moment, and although this can be achieved with a classic bulletin board system, the fediverse had me curious.

> HN is one example! actually i think HN - ie. the comments, especially TLDR - is an example of, at least partial, solution, and this is why me like many other people usually go straight for the comments instead of the original article/post.

I do exactly the same! What I mean is, there are those that will vote or even comment without reading the article - I don't believe it's a problem unique to fediverse platforms.

Re: Our experience with the Fediverse, and why we left

#24

Post by freeone3000 »

tylerchilds wrote: post #7

As a regular fediverse user, the main detail I'd be curious about is: Which server was the experiment done on and which servers were federated with? I don't have anything against this article per se, but it's worth noting every fediverse encounter is different. My main take on this article is that it's like walking into a McDonald's and being upset they don't serve pizza and then condemning all fast-food as being ter…

I'm going to take this opportunity to repost the article about the McDonald's Pizza: https://www.mentalfloss.com/article/65467/short-strange-life...

Re: Our experience with the Fediverse, and why we left

#25

Post by tylerchilds »

riffic wrote: post #10
tylerchilds wrote: post #7

As a regular fediverse user, the main detail I'd be curious about is: Which server was the experiment done on and which servers were federated with? I don't have anything against this article per se, but it's worth noting every fediverse encounter is different. My main take on this article is that it's like walking into a McDonald's and being upset they don't serve pizza and then condemning all fast-food as being ter…

> Which server was the experiment done on and which servers were federated with? They discuss this in their earlier post ( https://infosec-handbook.eu/news/2020-05-31-monthly-review/#... ): "We experienced the shutdown of our Mastodon instance twice. So, we migrated from securitymastod.one to mastodon.at, and then to chaos.social. Each time, we lost all of our posts, leaving behind a considerable number of dead links…

Thanks for digging that up! Absolutely agreed about self-hosting and treating it like email. I've seen quite a few instances shut down in the ~6 months I've been around.

It's a pretty rough experience for people that are coming from the mainstream, since it's probably hard to imagine a social network powered by a rag-tag few people behind each instance and not multi-billion dollar tech behemoths.

Re: Our experience with the Fediverse, and why we left

#26

Post by tasty_freeze »

centimeter wrote: post #11

As someone who’s never used any fediverse software, I found this post entirely uninteresting and irrelevant. It sounds like the author had some beef with random people they found online and want to portray this as a systemic issue.

The title starts with "Our experience with the Fediverse", so your criticism seems misplaced. They are describing their experience, and don't seem to claim that this will be everyone's experience.

Re: Our experience with the Fediverse, and why we left

#27

Post by S-E-P »

I would argue that what is described in this post is inherent in all social networks.

The wonderful thing about the Fediverse is that depending on the node you connect to, or the people you choose to federate with (in the event that you have your own instance) that your experience will be vastly different.

It’s given me some of the most enjoyable interactions I’ve ever had online in the last ten years.

You need to have a thick skin, take the time to use filters, block certain keywords.

And use Pleroma, Mastadon is crap, Pleroma let’s you type for DAYS, “limited character cap” is really only a mastadon thing and it’s crap.

Re: Our experience with the Fediverse, and why we left

#28

Post by kowlo »

INTPenis wrote: post #13

I've hosted a mastodon instance since 2017 and I see one general misunderstanding over and over, on mastodon or on fediverse related subreddits. People think it's a completely new concept. People seem to have forgotten, or not been part of, all the message boards we used to have during the late 90s and all throughout the 2000s. The ONLY thing Mastodon brings to this is federation. You used to have accounts on over a…

I thought Mastodon was closer to Twitter than it is to the classic BBS.

How is your instance going - did you build a community around it?

Re: Our experience with the Fediverse, and why we left

#30

Post by PragmaticPulp »

dleslie wrote: post #17

My experience with the fediverse was that enjoying the benefits of federation encountered the same issues with content and user behaviour that can be found in silo'd services. That is to say, fediverse sites increased their likelihood of replicating/serving hate, pornography and illegal content in correlation to the number of external sites they were connected to and the size of their user base. It left me wondering…

There’s a growing misconception that sites like Twitter are a good representation of unfiltered, unmoderated content, or that the only moderation actions from these sites is against famous figures like Trump.

In reality, sites like Twitter and Facebook remove a lot of terrible content posted by people who deliberately enjoy terrorizing shared spaces with abhorrent images.

Anyone who has been involved with the moderation of a moderately popular site or platform with image-upload features will understand: There are a lot of people on the internet with infinite free time and motivation to troll public spaces with shock images and similar content. Any unmoderated space will eventually attract these people.

Worse yet, if this behavior goes unchecked it tends to drive the good users away. Decentralized and/or unmoderated platforms seem to have a small following of ideologists who will look past the bad content and focus on the good, but the general public isn’t terribly interested in wading through random pornography or worse content just for the sake of being on a decentralized platform.

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