Live data from Hacker News

Fediverse

fediverse.party

131–140 of 143 posts

Re: Fediverse

#131

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The biggest defederation example I know of (with the caveat that I haven't actually used Mastodon in years) is that when Pixiv launched their own instance it quickly grew to be something like the 1st or 2nd biggest instance in the network and was eventually defederated by many other instances because people were REALLY antsy about the fact that a lot of Japanese art on Pixiv is illegal in other countries.

"Japanese art" is kind of underselling pornographic images of fictional children. Most forms of Japanese art, I presume, aren't of this nature.

Yeah, I meant specifically a lot of the content on Pixiv. It kind of is a self-selection problem because content that won't cut it on services like Twitter is allowed there since it operates out of Japan, so naturally their Mastodon instance will also be used by artists to post stuff they can't post on Twitter.

fwiw while the underaged illustrations are the most objectionable part, there's also other stuff that could get you in trouble - for example, illustrations of ww2 nazi soldiers with accurate garb would run up against regulations in germany and put the operators of german fediverse instances at risk. There are a few high-profile japanese games that feature accurate ww2 uniforms, weapons, vehicles etc so if you end up with fan-art for those games on your service you will quickly need an answer for "what happens if content on the fediverse is illegal in germany"

Re: Fediverse

#132

As someone whose primary social media is in the Fediverse, the discussion in this thread is ... confusing? It's so disconnected from my experienced reality of the Fediverse I don't even know where to begin . Functionally, my experience within the Fediverse is it's literally just Twitter but with moderation fully broken up between instances and not agreed on. An instance's administrator(s) can decide what instances us…

This is a nice idea in theory, but the issue then becomes inconsistent moderation that affects what is visible to everyone. If you get banned or have posts deleted on one platform, presumably those posts disappear from that instance, and thus the Fediverse as a whole.

This also leads to some pretty insidious siloing since (at least with Mastadon) you can have instances block themselves off from other instances or instances at large, which seems pretty unhealthy.

Not to mention, people don't typically want to pay for these services, or pay to host them, they want to access them for free. On top of that, with something like Twitter, the desire is to be visible to all, rather than just a few. Most people use Twitter to interact with 'the world', not just a local part of it.

Re: Fediverse

#133

As someone whose primary social media is in the Fediverse, the discussion in this thread is ... confusing? It's so disconnected from my experienced reality of the Fediverse I don't even know where to begin . Functionally, my experience within the Fediverse is it's literally just Twitter but with moderation fully broken up between instances and not agreed on. An instance's administrator(s) can decide what instances us…

This is a nice idea in theory, but the issue then becomes inconsistent moderation that affects what is visible to everyone. If you get banned or have posts deleted on one platform, presumably those posts disappear from that instance, and thus the Fediverse as a whole. This also leads to some pretty insidious siloing since (at least with Mastadon) you can have instances block themselves off from other instances or ins…

I don’t pay for my account on my home instance. I don’t want to interact with the world and I think most people are tired of living under threat of being one misstep away from a Twitter Mob.

Your complaints are features. People are fleeing to group chats for a reason.

As for the problem of your data being deleted if you’re concerned with that export your data regularly or run your own instance. Anyways, while it’d be nice to take a stab at that problem, it’s no worse than Twitter banning you.

Re: Fediverse

#134

As someone whose primary social media is in the Fediverse, the discussion in this thread is ... confusing? It's so disconnected from my experienced reality of the Fediverse I don't even know where to begin . Functionally, my experience within the Fediverse is it's literally just Twitter but with moderation fully broken up between instances and not agreed on. An instance's administrator(s) can decide what instances us…

This is a nice idea in theory, but the issue then becomes inconsistent moderation that affects what is visible to everyone. If you get banned or have posts deleted on one platform, presumably those posts disappear from that instance, and thus the Fediverse as a whole. This also leads to some pretty insidious siloing since (at least with Mastadon) you can have instances block themselves off from other instances or ins…

I think people should just drop the expectation that they can just be "visible to all". Not everybody wants to see your content. If they want to block you, then they should be able to. If a group of people wants to block you (think: getting banned from a mastadon instance), they should be able to as well. At least in the case of the Fediverse, you can look for a community where you'll be accepted. That's not possible on Twitter, you're either allowed or banned.

Re: Fediverse

#135
post #3

Which are the platforms that let you own your data cryptographically and let you move your account around seamlessly for yourself and your followers? Basically the network should be in the data and the servers should be replaceable. I think those are very obvious bottlenecks that affect most of these alternative networks. On the other side, censorship is also very important, nobody wants to have to dwell into spam an…

Urbit does this: https://urbit.org/blog/an-urbit-overview

Love the idea and will look more into it. Not sure why you got such a non-constructive and rude dismissal in another comment, especially given the hacker news guidelines

Re: Fediverse

#136
post #82

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Urbit does this: https://urbit.org/blog/an-urbit-overview

no one's adopting urbit, let's be real.

> Please don't post shallow dismissals, especially of other people's work. A good critical comment teaches us something.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

Re: Fediverse

#137

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Urbit does this: https://urbit.org/blog/an-urbit-overview

Love the idea and will look more into it. Not sure why you got such a non-constructive and rude dismissal in another comment, especially given the hacker news guidelines

[deleted]

Re: Fediverse

#138

As someone whose primary social media is in the Fediverse, the discussion in this thread is ... confusing? It's so disconnected from my experienced reality of the Fediverse I don't even know where to begin . Functionally, my experience within the Fediverse is it's literally just Twitter but with moderation fully broken up between instances and not agreed on. An instance's administrator(s) can decide what instances us…

I'm also confused about all these comments about whether it could work. There are already people using it in practice.

I may have joined mastodon because I wanted a non-corporate social media, but I've been using it for years because I like it. Not I'm hoping I will like it, but I like it how it works now.

In fact I have mixed feelings about a potential twitter exodus, because you never know how it will change things. (I also don't understand why you would quit twitter because it may suck when musk takes over. Why not wait until it sucks an then quit? And in the meantime you can also try the fediverse).

If anyone decides to give it a try, I recommended following many people, and later freely unfollowing people if it turns out you don't like their posts. Mastodon won't give you any content you didn't subscribe to, so you need to find some stuff yourself. You can find lists of people sorted by subject to start you out.

Re: Fediverse

#139
post #15
post #10

A Twitter replacement shouldn't be federated. It should be fully P2P. Federated platforms can still be censored and walled off. Not all Mastodon instances are peers, and your data isn't portable. It still has most of the same pitfalls as the platforms we complain about today. P2P is naturally efficient. The best ideas will gain traction within their memetic networks, and you can branch out and explore anything and re…

No, P2P is impractical and it inevitably leaks into the UX, making it significantly more cumbersome. With a P2P system, you can't just send someone a link to something you found — you either expect them to have a client for the service, or use a web proxy. > Sign and publish with a pubkey No, absolutely not. Public keys make terrible identifiers. You leak it and anyone can impresonate you, with you having no recourse…

> With a P2P system, you can't just send someone a link to something you found — you either expect them to have a client for the service, or use a web proxy

That's not a property of P2P, it's a property of anything that's not built into browsers.

That is, either the protocol is built into browsers and the browser is the client, or else it is not built into browsers and something else is the client.

Modern browsers already support P2P through RTCPeerConnection. In the future there may be even more general P2P capabilities built into browsers.

What you're talking about is at most a limitation of current browsers, not of P2P.

Re: Fediverse

#140
post #25
post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Couldn't this be solved by chains of trust and "blacklisting" accounts? This is pretty much how it already works in the most annonymous corners of the internet, and those are the best corners.

Chains of trust would not solve the problem I mentioned but simply kick it further down the road.

Chains of trust are the centralized solution, e.g. you trust the social media company.
Post reply on HN