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The Federated App Problem

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Re: The Federated App Problem

#71

Post by evbogue »

The Federated App Problem has already been solved a couple of times using replicated gossip networks of signed messages. Sometimes they use append-only logs, other times they use only relays, and the implementations are all highly creative and experimental.

The trouble with decentralized federation social media servers is the weight of the network falls upon whoever volunteered to host the program at the domain name in the first place, and sometimes the weight is too much to handle.

The solution is, as we all already know, self-authenticating messages that do not rely on any one server. Do we want to call this Scuttlebot? Do we want to call this Nostr? Does Bluesky even qualify? Well, I'm sure we'll figure it out eventually with enough minds trained upon the problem.

Re: The Federated App Problem

#72

Post by ajdude »

drdaeman wrote: post #61
ajdude wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I had absolutely no issues with hosting my own mastodon, I pay $7 dollars a month for a VPS with backups. I'm the only user that can register on my instance so it's just me. I'm `@aj@s.aj.immo` and I can follow and have conversations with other mastodon users of various servers seamlessly. I was just doing it this evening in a thread while tagging four different people on four different servers. When people tag me in…

> I had absolutely no issues with hosting my own mastodon Just Mastodon - it's not what I'm talking about. Please let me know if my parent comment wasn't clear enough. Mastodon certainly works and you can be just @aj (as long as no one else with the same host-local part walks in, I guess) no matter where the actual conversation is hosted. But what about Lemmy, Peertube, or other Fediverse systems? I'm aware that Mast…

Are you saying that the primary issue is that for each federated service we need a separate account / instance for it as opposed to email which is just one email account? I don't disagree with that but it's the same situation for Reddit, YouTube, Twitter. I have to maintain separate accounts on those platforms too.

Re: The Federated App Problem

#73

Post by jojobas »

Stephen304 wrote: post #56
sxg wrote: post #4

I agree with the premise of the article. I’m a new Mastodon user trying to give the platform an honest shot, but I can’t understand why I would choose any particular server over another. Why choose anything other than the pseudo-default Mastodon.social? If I’m forced to choose another server, is that choice actually meaningful? I feel like I’m randomly picking between Hachyderm and TechHub.io and others. One advantag…

Problematic users do tend to congregate on certain servers because they keep getting banned from better moderated ones. Eventually they find the ones that won't ban them, and now well moderated instances have an easy target to block them wholesale. That's how you end up with instances like explodingheads.

The only caveat is that what's well moderated and what's not depends on who you ask.

Re: The Federated App Problem

#74

Post by jojobas »

crazygringo wrote: post #22
donio wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> ... but I can’t understand why I would choose any particular server over another. Email is often a good analogy for questions like these: Why do you pick one email service over the other? Maybe you think the domain is cool. Maybe you heard that they are reliable or have features that others don't. Maybe your university, company or other community you belong to runs its own service. Or you decide to host your own. O…

Except that with e-mail there are obvious good reasons, which basically boil down to whether you've centered your digital life around the Google, Microsoft, or Apple ecosystems (or never moved away from Yahoo, etc.). These are recognizably proven brands that aren't going to disappear next year, and which integrate with your other tools in ways that clearly provide benefit. And back in the day before webmail was a thi…

Email is much better than that. Even if you don't want to maintain your own email server you can still register your own domain and assign it to a hosting service for a trivial amount.

You can also do that with Mastodon if you're keen, so email analogy holds.

Re: The Federated App Problem

#75

Post by vGPU »

croutonwagon wrote: post #46
class4behavior wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The same way people manage to decide whether to buy buns at the bakery on the right rather than the one on the left or donate to the NGO1 rather than NGO2 doing exactly the same, you ought to manage to judge which instance is a better fit or if it even matters in your case. >why would all problematic users congregate on the same server? Isn’t it far more likely that you’ll have to block individual users across numero…

I have also noticed that in some cases....user blocks are being replicated to an instance I run. I have this huge and ever growing list of banned users on my single user instance in lemmy. ANd I have no idea who is banning and why...I doesnt seem to affect me...but its odd

Which is exactly what worries me. I don’t want other people deciding who I can read and who I can’t. I don’t want other people deciding what voices should be heard.

This just seems like the creation of another echo chamber.

Re: The Federated App Problem

#76

Post by bluedemon »

Here's a rant by a person that is annoyed that redditors are not understanding the fediverse:

https://kbin.social/m/RedditMigration/t/59927/rant-Why-is-th...

And they still state that it's easy and the other posters are scratching their heads as to why don't people understand this. "Whyyyy???"

They don't seem to understand that the average user doesn't find it easy to use. That's the biggest hint, but instead are acting like everyone is stupid but them.

That's why the fediverse is going to get a bump for a bit during this reddit situation, but then calm down as users aren't going to want to stick around. The same happened when others were leaving Twitter.

This fediverse situation reminds me of that Silicon Valley episode in which they're testing an app with a focus group. The group just doesn't understand the app and find it too complicated. Richard tries to explain the app to them, but it's too technical for them to comprehend.

Re: The Federated App Problem

#77

Post by paulddraper »

donio wrote: post #17
sxg wrote: post #4

I agree with the premise of the article. I’m a new Mastodon user trying to give the platform an honest shot, but I can’t understand why I would choose any particular server over another. Why choose anything other than the pseudo-default Mastodon.social? If I’m forced to choose another server, is that choice actually meaningful? I feel like I’m randomly picking between Hachyderm and TechHub.io and others. One advantag…

> ... but I can’t understand why I would choose any particular server over another. Email is often a good analogy for questions like these: Why do you pick one email service over the other? Maybe you think the domain is cool. Maybe you heard that they are reliable or have features that others don't. Maybe your university, company or other community you belong to runs its own service. Or you decide to host your own. O…

Your email choice used to reflect your ISP, and now reflects your chosen platform for file storage, image albums, productivity suite, calendaring, etc.

I'm not sure how this applies to Mastodon servers in practice.

Re: The Federated App Problem

#78

Post by neltnerb »

shadowfacts wrote: post #53
ShadowBanThis01 wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But why force people to categorize themselves? There's no special type of Twitter for people who are musicians, for example, or people who do airbrush paintings of squirrels. Who knows what you might want to send messages about tomorrow or next year or in half an hour? Having "themed" instances implies that you're committing to whatever that theme is, but all you want to do is share whatever is on your mind from day…

No one's forcing people to categorize themselves. You can be on a non-specific server, or you can be on one for a particular community—but even then, nothing precludes you from talking about other things. It may be the case that instance pickers/lists/descriptions aren't clear enough that you don't _have_ to limit yourself, but there's nothing forced about it.

The reality is that every server will have some local version of a bunch of the most popular things, and that will eventually reach a steady state with a tail. A few big ones, more medium size ones, decent number of small ones...

There's no point denying it, discoverability will be harder and communities will be smaller. So if you actually know of a really good community or magazine to point someone to, just do that. They can read the content without logging in. If they want to participate, then the server that they found a community they want to participate in is the obvious place to create an account, from which they can see everything else as you've said.

Little is being forced by the choice of server/instance, but that's not helping solve the hard part. The hard part is them finding what they need to find. They need a librarian, not a tech support desk. Tech people constantly assume the solution is technical... make the popular destinations popular by talking about them everywhere.

Re: The Federated App Problem

#79

Post by mariusor »

bluedemon wrote: post #76

Here's a rant by a person that is annoyed that redditors are not understanding the fediverse: https://kbin.social/m/RedditMigration/t/59927/rant-Why-is-th... And they still state that it's easy and the other posters are scratching their heads as to why don't people understand this. "Whyyyy???" They don't seem to understand that the average user doesn't find it easy to use. That's the biggest hint, but instead are act…

> They don't seem to understand that the average user doesn't find it easy to use. That's the biggest hint, but instead are acting like everyone is stupid but them.

In all fairness those were the exact same comments when people moved away from Digg to reddit, only in the opposite direction. History is just repeating itself.

Re: The Federated App Problem

#80

Post by mariusor »

SheinhardtWigCo wrote: post #45
_HMCB_ wrote: post #12

One problem I see is the lack of cohesiveness between clients. What one client/app chooses to name a “repost” is different than another client. Icons for said features also vastly differ. So it’s hard to build unity through the ecosystem without a common language (visual and vocabulary). This is just my brand developer’s take.

This is a big part of why I'm skeptical when folks point to email as an example of a successful federated system: most of the common language and conceptual model was established thousands of years ago.

I believe it's safe to say that in a thousand years ActivityPub will be equally well understood and uniform. You're just here for the ride. Try to enjoy it.
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