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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

#21

Post by TulliusCicero »

AustinDev wrote: post #2

Mastodon will never have the level of censorship or control that a centralized platform like Twitter, Facebook, or TikTok have. I can't wait for it to be the norm but I doubt that it will ever happen due to the lack of censorship.

People say that they're not terribly fond of rules until they see what that's actually like, then they decide that perhaps rules aren't so bad after all.

It's easy to say that rules are 'censorship' in a vacuum, or when you're just talking with normal people, but when you get people intent on spamming or trolling or harassing, you quickly realize there's a reason human societies basically always end up with rules.

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

#22

Post by thrown_22 »

lifeisstillgood wrote: post #14

This reminds me of acoup.blog and his take on subsistence farming as a risk reduction decision. Yes under Roman rule there was more "efficient" farming as some (slave worked) farms began focusing on primary crops for sale. This meant efficiency of scale plus Ricardos law kicked in and Roman food production increased even without Haber or John Deere. But most small farmers throughout the ages did not do this - they co…

That's a gross oversimplification of the premodern economic system. You could only grow food crops next to navigable rivers, they doubled in price for every 20 miles they were transported overland. This meant that the majority of land could only be used for subsistence farming because nothing else could keep the people working the land from starving. Cash crops like frankincense were the only ones that could be grown without easy boat access because they were worth more than their weight in gold.

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

#23

Post by xg15 »

phoe-krk wrote: post #6

> (...) the fediverse, the network of mastodon servers, (...) This sentence at the very start already makes no sense. The above snippet makes as much sense as calling Web a network of nginx and Apache servers since nginx and Apache combined serve the majority of all web traffic. There are services like Pleroma, Friendica, Misskey, Pixelfed, Write.as, PeerTube, and other Activity-Pub-speaking software which are NOT Ma…

That's true of course, but seems a bit like "actually, it's GNU/Linux" to me. Mastodon currently is the "flagship" application of the Fediverse, especially as far as the current influx of new users is concerned.

At least I think we can hope that people will start to discover all the other things that the Fediverse contains ince they are there and start to use it.

Also, not sure if I'm correct, but from what I've read, the software seems to be quite influential in shaping the "de-facto standard" client/server API, at least for the "microblogging" part of the Fediverse?

Like, in theory, ActivityPub both specifies server/server and client/server interactions - however, the client/server part appears to be "underspecified and barely used" [1, 2]. e.g., AP doesn't say anything about how clients are authenticated or even how they can get notified of incoming messages/activities short of polling. This stuff is all specified in the Mastodon API.

So in practice, if I wanted to write a new client app for microblogging on the fediverse, my app would use the Mastodon API, not ActivityPub for reference. Is that correct?

Of course in the interest of avoiding centralisation, I'd agree that that's not a good state of affairs. It would be better if there was a real, widely-used standard for client/server and not just what the Mastodon devs think is useful. Though at least they cannot simply make changes to the API without convincing the majority of server admins to adopt those changes.

[1] https://socialhub.activitypub.rocks/t/activitypub-client-to-...

[2] https://github.com/mastodon/mastodon/issues/10520

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

#24

Post by lstodd »

JonathonW wrote: post #13
dustedcodes wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't understand the network-wide ban? That makes Mastodon inherently centralised. Who is the person who has the final say which server may be part of the fediverse? Why does a network-ban even need to exist? There is no algorithm that presents your feed with posts from other servers. You only see who you follow. It's like saying some person has the final say which RSS feeds all RSS feed readers should ban from the…

There is no network-wide ban; each server manages its own list of banned remote servers. There are lists of servers with bad reputations that get passed around and form the beginnings of many servers’ blocklists, but there’s no central entity maintaining a single list that says which servers are or aren’t part of the fediverse.

Reminds me of the FidoNet nodelist. And the proliferation of alternate FTN networks back then.

It's actually a nice solution.

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

#25

Post by mlindner »

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…

As someone completely unfamiliar with this stuff, that sounds like centralized witch hunting/cancelling to me. If that works as you describe, it sounds like mastodon/fediverse thing is headed rapidly toward all the problems that are widespread elsewhere right now.

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

#27

Post by TylerE »

mlindner wrote: post #25
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…

As someone completely unfamiliar with this stuff, that sounds like centralized witch hunting/cancelling to me. If that works as you describe, it sounds like mastodon/fediverse thing is headed rapidly toward all the problems that are widespread elsewhere right now.

It’s almost as if it’s a people problem and not a technical problem.

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

#28

Post by wruza »

peterweyand wrote: post #16

I've seen more and more advertisements for Mastadon on HN, probably because of the whole Twitter debacle. Does anyone use the service? I mean, enough people so that the average person would know what it is? From my experience with Mastadon it took me a while to even learn how the service was used, and all I remember was thinking "wow that's too complicated to use or get Joe Average User to sign up for". Without ease…

If not a false memory, I have read it for a short while and from what I’ve seen (please excuse my opinion) it is a in a pretty good way a specific community(-es) which is probably not ready for this massive exodus. People of global communities barely understand the concept of lurking and local culture. Even with the obstacles you mentioned there is a chance for Mastodon’s own Eternal September happening.

Quoting someone sad

Warum retweeten alle aus Twitter? Das ist, als ob man sich von einer toxischen Freundin trennt und dann nur noch von ihr erzählt

I hope they can handle it well.

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

#29

Post by MiguelX413 »

xg15 wrote: post #23
phoe-krk wrote: post #6

> (...) the fediverse, the network of mastodon servers, (...) This sentence at the very start already makes no sense. The above snippet makes as much sense as calling Web a network of nginx and Apache servers since nginx and Apache combined serve the majority of all web traffic. There are services like Pleroma, Friendica, Misskey, Pixelfed, Write.as, PeerTube, and other Activity-Pub-speaking software which are NOT Ma…

That's true of course, but seems a bit like "actually, it's GNU/Linux" to me. Mastodon currently is the "flagship" application of the Fediverse, especially as far as the current influx of new users is concerned. At least I think we can hope that people will start to discover all the other things that the Fediverse contains ince they are there and start to use it. Also, not sure if I'm correct, but from what I've read…

“GNU/Linux” is simply a subset of “Linux” tbh Therefore “Linux” is always correct where “GNU/Linux” is, but not vice-versa. In contrast: Mastodon and Pleroma, PeerTube, etc. are simply elements of the same set.

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

#30

Post by nobody9999 »

davisoneee wrote: post #17
seydor wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> it gets added to a blacklist unless there is an election about who gets added to the list it s not even democratic. And the freedom of speech is generally protected, not subject to the whims of democracy

If it's an instance level ban, then you can vote with your feet by migrating to a new instance. You are not electing who goes on the list, but you are electing to follow certain lists implicitly by which instance you join. With mastodon/fediverse, you have a choice of numerous different 'twitters', rather than being stuck with the global twitter decision.

>If it's an instance level ban, then you can vote with your feet by migrating to a new instance.

That's the part that interests me the most.

Which is why I (when I get around to it) will self-host my own ActivityPub instance (Mastodon? Pleroma? WriteFreely?).

That way, I decide what gets blocked and what doesn't. And since it's federated (assuming other sites will federate with me), I can still access the benefits of using fediverse resources, without being beholden to someone else to make such decisions for me.

From a longer-term perspective, ISTM that an ActiviyPub (AP) "user agent server" (UAS) which allowed individual users to federate with the resources of their choosing without having to "join" an extant instance, makes a lot of sense.

Rather the UAS would utilize your local (i.e., generated and managed/federated from your AP UAS instance) fediverse credentials and act as a proxy for you, communicating with the instances containing the resources you're interacting with and acting as storage/cache/server for the user's client apps.

This would make the fediverse even more decentralized and under user control. However, it would also make discoverability even harder.

Perhaps that's ActivityPub's killer app? A discovery app. Perhaps a protocol change to require a cryptographically signed summary/intro for each instance, along with with a searchable index?

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