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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

#211

Post by grep_name »

mariusor wrote: post #113
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.

If you're interested in hosting a discussion based community similar to HN or reddit, I'm working on a project that might interest you. Link in my bio.

What would be involved in hosting something like this? I'm always looking for stuff to host (and have been sick of reddit for a few years now), but anything I host would just be a server in my room on a residential IP, which may not have the reliability you want

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

#212

Post by jancsika »

tylerchilds wrote: post #209
jancsika wrote: post #171

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I'm not fully sure what their use case is to speak to that. The article spells it out-- they don't want drive-by, low-effort engagement with their posts. > A good launching point to finding like minded people is this list though Perhaps I'm idiosyncratic, but I don't see any value in choosing a server or community based on interest. What I really care about is choosing a moderation policy, and viewing the content f…

I think that approach is just at odds with the concept of federation. What you're describing just sounds like reddit to me.

If that were true then email would be at odds with the concept of federation. There aren't interest-based email servers, or at least the concept of email isn't hard-coupled with interest-based servers.

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

#213

Post by FalconSensei »

rglullis wrote: post #189
andrewzah wrote: post #179

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"To me local timelines only make sense if the instance has a very clearly defined group with some kind of shared access, e.g, a company that has an instance for use by its employees, or a club or organization have some kind of membership" Wow yeah, this makes a lot of sense. It's too bad nodes became associated with niche hobbies or interests. E.g. a fraternity/sorority that hosts a node would make perfect sense for…

> people would still find it too if people's handles kept on changing. Will they? Isn't it the same case with email? I used my University email when I was a student. I have a different company email for different jobs? Those that needed to communicate with me because of the job, I would give them my company email. When my work at company X ended, no one expected me to still message me at raphael@x. The same with addr…

But with work/university email, you only use it for work/university. It's not a social network. It's not like you are sharing a pic of your cat, and want to keep the replies after you move to another job.

After starting a new job, I don't care about my old job's emails, but my twitter (which is my social network) is still the same

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

#214

Post by FalconSensei »

lifthrasiir wrote: post #164
Barrin92 wrote: post #117

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Moderation alleviates those issues and the difference between Mastodon instances and Twitter is that the former can moderate content according to local community standards. It's wrong to think of Mastodon as a 'social network', it's literally what the name suggests a federation of 'micro nations' with their own rules, more like subreddits than Twitter.

If your instance is large enough or your instance is small but peering to other instances, there would be enough interactions that will bother you eventually. Otherwise there is no point using them at all, a small IRC or Matrix or Slack or Discord server would work better.

> If your instance is large enough or your instance is small but peering to other instances, there would be enough interactions that will bother you eventually.

I had this problem. And unless you are the moderator/host, there's nothing to do. I was having problems with some other instances, but as a user there was nothing I could do. I thought Mastodon would do a better job on allowing me to block or limit my viewers based on their instance, but no luck.

So I went back to Twitter. If I can't do anything about instances I don't like, better use Twitter and get rid of that extra layer of complexity.

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

#215

Post by einpoklum »

riffic wrote: post #36
einpoklum wrote: post #31

Can someone contextualize this post somewhat, for readers who have been living under a rock and don't know about the Fediverse nor who is "we" at "infosec-handbook"?

Wikipedia has an article on the Fediverse, to sum it up it's a community of communities based on open web standards: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fediverse I don't know anything about this "infosec-handbook" group.

I actually went and read that, but it's wholly unclear what place the fediverse actually has in online culture today, what "kind" of people use it, or parts of it; what it replaces for them; etc.

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

#216

Post by kevincox »

I think that some of their points are good. I think the major one is that unless you run your own instance you have no ownership over your identity (save the mastodon migration tools). I think it is weird that if I want to use Mastodon to post short messages and PeerTube to post videos I need two different identities. I think it would have been better if I could have a shared identity that could be used across multiple fediverse apps, or used to move my identity from a "shared" provide to a new one, or a self-hosted one.

I also think that length-limited posts are not a great basis for a social network, but that is not mastodon specific.

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

#217

Post by didericis »

finiteseries wrote: post #199
didericis wrote: post #131

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The entire world has been forced to act as diplomats. When coming from vastly different world views and experiences, being charitable in your interpretation of others is essential; it is important to distinguish disagreement, harassment, and true threat so as to avoid false positives and further degradation of the conversation. That charity requires having a very thick skin, and yes, it’s unfair when it’s not recipro…

I think a better solution than forcing everyone to become diplomatic or banning those who violate the norms of others is to have somewhat siloed social groups that are represented by open minded thick skinned diplomatic types that permeate the borders. This is a genuinely fascinating idea that I haven’t seen before in discussion around Mastodon & co. Not convinced it’s an actual possibility because of a lack of scarc…

Thank you, will consider writing one/fleshing this out.

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

#218

Post by rglullis »

FalconSensei wrote: post #213
rglullis wrote: post #189

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> people would still find it too if people's handles kept on changing. Will they? Isn't it the same case with email? I used my University email when I was a student. I have a different company email for different jobs? Those that needed to communicate with me because of the job, I would give them my company email. When my work at company X ended, no one expected me to still message me at raphael@x. The same with addr…

But with work/university email, you only use it for work/university. It's not a social network. It's not like you are sharing a pic of your cat, and want to keep the replies after you move to another job. After starting a new job, I don't care about my old job's emails, but my twitter (which is my social network) is still the same

Yes. But what is your confusion about it? Where are you objecting to what I said?

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

#219

Post by cutemonster »

cbozeman wrote: post #205
cutemonster wrote: post #203

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> America has a long tradition of being vocal and offensive in its communications Selection bias. I'd think that's how people you happen to hang out with, or talk with on the internet, might be. But not people in general, at least not the ones I've met from the US (lots of people).

> Selection bias. Check out the book Infamous Scribblers: The Founding Fathers and the Rowdy Beginnings of American Journalism . > I'd think that's how people you happen to hang out with, or talk with on the internet, might be. You literally have no data to support that comment, whereas I'm referencing existing documents throughout American history that show just how vitriolic communications were. You realize that ou…

Yes a bit selection bias in my case.

> referencing existing documents throughout American history that show just how vitriolic communications were.

> Do you know many corn farmers from the Midwest states? Do you know any deep sea welders from ...

Maybe you're right that those groups of people more often communicate in the ways you say.

At the same time, maybe they do also in Mexico or Italy or Kongo and in lots of other countries too.

So the examples doesn't really mean anything to me. Thanks anyway for explaining how you were thinking.

The US is a large country and by cherry picking examples one can "prove" anything one wants.

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

#220

Post by [deleted] »

bionade24 wrote: post #192
dleslie wrote: post #148

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not quite: Twitter and Facebook have _armies_ of community moderation employees at their disposal; the fediverse has volunteers.

No, the fediverse has at least one per instance, often more. I would even go as far saying the fedi has more mods per users. They're still only mods, for the instance they're on, though.

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