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The Fediverse is inefficient but that's a good trade-off

berk.es

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Re: The Fediverse is inefficient but that's a good trade-off

#131

Post by mariusor »

irusensei wrote: post #126
CM30 wrote: post #120

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So, like when using most websites? If you use Hacker News you're trusting Dang and the other folks running this place. If you use Facebook or Twitter, you're trusting Zuck, Elon and the folks working at Meta or Twitter. If you use independently run forums and community sites, you're trusting the people running those places. Self hosting your own instance is great when possible (and I definitely think it should be pos…

Let’s say you are a journalist or wathever today profession that depends on reaching people. After the twitter fallout you went to this new journalist centric instance and managed to recover a good following. Months later and you had a bad intercalating with the server admin which ended up not being a level headed person as you previously thought. He deletes your account… not even a chance to use the migration tools…

Some of these hypotheticals are a becoming a little ridiculous. There's very little recourse if twitter bans you, or youtube bans you and you're not capable of raising a stink on HN, or what not. It's hardly any different when you're using a mastodon instance.

Re: The Fediverse is inefficient but that's a good trade-off

#132

Post by sandyarmstrong »

Kiro wrote: post #106
uneekname wrote: post #4

What has happened with Mastodon recently feels like a great thing for the fediverse. Many of these platforms are still working out their implementation kinks, but they aren't babies anymore. Just when I thought ActivityPub might never catch on, a significant number of people have decided to give it a chance. Makes me want to implement some ActivityPub features on my own site, so I can get in on the fun!

My takeaway is the opposite. If not even this could make people switch to Mastodon nothing can. Even if Twitter got shut down they would find something else that is not AP.

In my circles I'm seeing mass exodus. It's not just the tinkerers and the anarchists. I'm not surprised about the uptake in the open source community, after all I remember identi.ca being a lovely network for GNOME back in the day.

But I'm also seeing authors, actors, journalists, doctors, and scientists I follow make their way over, as well as a few novelty accounts.

Sure, many of them are dual-posting. But I still see them interacting directly on Mastodon and not just mirroring their Twitter posts on it.

I didn't expect this, but I'm finding it very easy not to use Twitter most of the time. The main exception is friends and family messaging various tweets to each other to share news or laugh about something. So I still have an account, it's still useful, but I'm not scrolling it casually anymore.

Re: The Fediverse is inefficient but that's a good trade-off

#133

Post by haunter »

mlindner wrote: post #115

Won't this just end up in the situation that the far right stays on Parler and the far left goes to Mastodon? Sounds like Twitter will end up a happier place without the extremists.

Pretty much. You can already see the ideological lines laid down on Mastodon

Re: The Fediverse is inefficient but that's a good trade-off

#134

Post by irusensei »

mariusor wrote: post #131
irusensei wrote: post #126

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Let’s say you are a journalist or wathever today profession that depends on reaching people. After the twitter fallout you went to this new journalist centric instance and managed to recover a good following. Months later and you had a bad intercalating with the server admin which ended up not being a level headed person as you previously thought. He deletes your account… not even a chance to use the migration tools…

Some of these hypotheticals are a becoming a little ridiculous. There's very little recourse if twitter bans you, or youtube bans you and you're not capable of raising a stink on HN, or what not. It's hardly any different when you're using a mastodon instance.

Twitter won’t ban you for personal reasons. Can you vouch the same for a server admin?

Re: The Fediverse is inefficient but that's a good trade-off

#135

Post by kornhole »

irusensei wrote: post #35

I really need to remind you folks that you are transferring your trust to these local server administrators. They might mishandle your data. They might be even less prepared to deal with moderation than big social media. They might end up having to close their services due to lack of time or money. It’s all fun but please keep this in mind. Perhaps host your own instance?

Because big data is valuable and little data is generally not, admins of small instances have little incentive to dig into the DB.

Because humans are moderating the small instances, they can do a better job than AI moderators, albeit with more work.

Moving from one Mastodon instance to another taking follows and followers is quite easy. Admins usually announce plans to close with enough time for people to make the move.

Re: The Fediverse is inefficient but that's a good trade-off

#136

Post by mariusor »

irusensei wrote: post #134
mariusor wrote: post #131

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Some of these hypotheticals are a becoming a little ridiculous. There's very little recourse if twitter bans you, or youtube bans you and you're not capable of raising a stink on HN, or what not. It's hardly any different when you're using a mastodon instance.

Twitter won’t ban you for personal reasons. Can you vouch the same for a server admin?

Tell that to Kathy Griffin and Jeph Jaques. And even before that, I doubt that people getting banned were considering it as "not personal".

Re: The Fediverse is inefficient but that's a good trade-off

#137

Post by irusensei »

ZeroGravitas wrote: post #128
irusensei wrote: post #35

I really need to remind you folks that you are transferring your trust to these local server administrators. They might mishandle your data. They might be even less prepared to deal with moderation than big social media. They might end up having to close their services due to lack of time or money. It’s all fun but please keep this in mind. Perhaps host your own instance?

Apparently there is some work being done to give the non-admins even more power/control over their own content, which currently needs GPG shenanigans. I learned this from this talk: A New HOPE (2022): ActivityPub Four Years Later: The Good, the Bad, and the Fedi https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vnciCz83t70 Which notably is a recent talk (July) but was given before the recent influx.

Great. I don’t want to sound lazy but can you give me a time stamp to the relevant part? Thanks in advance.

Re: The Fediverse is inefficient but that's a good trade-off

#138

Post by irusensei »

mariusor wrote: post #136
irusensei wrote: post #134

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Twitter won’t ban you for personal reasons. Can you vouch the same for a server admin?

Tell that to Kathy Griffin and Jeph Jaques. And even before that, I doubt that people getting banned were considering it as "not personal".

Did twitter TOS was ever ok with impersonating accounts?

I don’t want to be in a position where I’m defending twitter but need to remind federated instances are run mostly by normal people. Having the cake and eating it and all that.

Re: The Fediverse is inefficient but that's a good trade-off

#139

Post by ZeroGravitas »

irusensei wrote: post #137
ZeroGravitas wrote: post #128

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Apparently there is some work being done to give the non-admins even more power/control over their own content, which currently needs GPG shenanigans. I learned this from this talk: A New HOPE (2022): ActivityPub Four Years Later: The Good, the Bad, and the Fedi https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vnciCz83t70 Which notably is a recent talk (July) but was given before the recent influx.

Great. I don’t want to sound lazy but can you give me a time stamp to the relevant part? Thanks in advance.

https://youtu.be/vnciCz83t70?t=878

Re: The Fediverse is inefficient but that's a good trade-off

#140

Post by lupire »

haunter wrote: post #46
csande17 wrote: post #7

Does Mastodon need to spend more time per post on moderation than a service like Twitter? As I understand it, people generally report bad posts to the moderator of the instance they came from and expect them to take them down. And if the instance is unresponsive to takedown requests, it gets added to a blacklist that is shared widely across instances (via #fediblock etc). So the end result is you generally have one p…

This is something I'm also struggling with. Feels like self host is the only way to go otherwise your server admins decide whatever you can see or not. That's why I think if you don't self host the first server choice ("choose whatever you want it doens't matter") is extremely downplayed. Instances can block each other and if you end up on a "wrong one" (the peer pressure to avoid guilt by association is really reall…

Name changes are a fact of life.

You need a secondary link to your friends (email, phone, other server) so you can notify them when one of your vertices is taken down or another is added.

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