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The Federated App Problem

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Re: The Federated App Problem

#91

Post by Frondo »

memefrog wrote: post #29
7e wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, all problematic users don’t congregate on the same server. Problematic users can pop up anywhere. However, a server could fail to moderate effectively and become a source of misinformation and trolling. That’s the benefit of federation: it ensures a minimum level of moderation quality. Servers that don’t moderate are blocked, which sets up the proper incentives.

What's misinformation? Things you don't think are true? Things the instance admin doesn't think are true? Things officially deemed untrue by the State? Or by the UN/WHO? Is is considered Misinformation if it was deemed Untrue in the past by State Officials but is now Official State Policy? We have always been at war with Eastasia. We have always recommended the wearing of masks. We have always seriously considered th…

There seems to be an assumption in your writing that people should use social media to challenge themselves, be exposed to different views, to "discourse" and so on. Nearly everyone I know via social media wants to hang out with their friends, not debate people. Whether something is an echo chamber is sort of beside their goal, they want to have fun.

If one seeks out something that explicitly isn't an echo chamber, I'm sure there are many places for that. I'm just not seeing that as, really, at all desirable for a lot of people.

Re: The Federated App Problem

#92

Post by ranguna »

Animats wrote: post #86

Yes. The usual problems. Discovery, identity, storage. Identity is the hardest problem. Yes, there's stuff like OpenID. But few non-programmers use it. We badly need some kind of ID system that doesn't depend on a vendor that's in the advertising business. Discovery is a problem mostly because Google has a monopoly in search. The problem with federated storage is that storage is currently organized by "where", not by…

Re:discoverability

And because the option to not index posts is enabled by default and a good chunk of the fediverse is opposed to indexing due to their irrational fear of bots:

https://fedsearch.io/

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33546937

https://www.reddit.com/r/Mastodon/comments/131amhl/why_are_s...

Re: The Federated App Problem

#93

Post by JoshTriplett »

drdaeman wrote: post #48
JoshTriplett wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And for both email and the Fediverse, there's an ideal answer that requires only marginally more work: have your own domain. In both cases, you don't have to host a server yourself, you can pay for email hosting and use your own domain. For email, services like Fastmail let you bring your own domain. For the Fediverse, https://togethr.party/ works well.

This works with email, but not so much with Fediverse. There is no standard or - AFAIK - even attempts domain/account sharing (unless you hack your way around), you'll have to be you@mastodon.your.name and you@lemmy.your.name and you@peertube.your.name, but not [at least not easily] you@your.name if you want to use it with multiple systems.

It'd be nice if there were a standard forwarding-interoperability server such that several services could share the same account name and local copies of the messages to/from that account. But in the meantime, having @you@your.domain be a Fediverse service like Pleroma or Mastodon, and then having @you@service.your.domain be the handle for each specialized service, still seems preferable to using a third-party server. And if in the future some mechanism exists for those services to share, you would then be able to use the standard redirect mechanism to preserve the old names while using the shared top-level one as the canonical account name.

Re: The Federated App Problem

#94

Post by nkuttler »

armchairhacker wrote: post #39

A big problem is that you don't actually see content on other instances. Also, you can't link accounts between instances (EDIT: you can post and subscribe to communities on other instances, but it's not obvious. You can't link 2 accounts on separate instances though) There are several rust instances: https://lemmy.ml/c/rust , https://programming.dev/c/rust , https://lemmyrs.org/ , and probably more. Why aren't they l…

> A big problem is that you don't actually see content on other instances

What do you mean? On lemmy you simply click "all" and see a feed from all federated sources, on kbin that seems to be the default. When you open threads/posts you see comments from all sources. The other stuff doesn't exist yet as the platform is very new. You can help.

Re: The Federated App Problem

#95

Post by dclowd9901 »

nightpool wrote: post #35
dclowd9901 wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Can you migrate to another instance if yours becomes defederated?

"Defederated" is not something that happens to an instance, it's a choice that other instances make. There's no "globally defederated" state. If your server (Server A) is blocked by Server B, then no, you can't move to Server B. But you can still move to Server C that doesn't block you.

Well so this is kind of what I was getting at. It feels similar to an email service being blocklisted, only in this case, you really _can’t_ move your content because at the end of the day, a group of federated instances will also be wary of instances without reputation, as much as those of ill repute. So no, in reality, you can’t move your content, or if you can right now it’s a foible of the system as it is today and will not continue as such.

Re: The Federated App Problem

#96

Post by myaccountonhn »

ajdude wrote: post #72
drdaeman wrote: post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

But you don't have separate identities for Youtube, Gmail, Meet et.c. For a federated internet, you should have the same ID for all federated services so that you can build the same product experience as with Apple or Microsoft or Google.

Re: The Federated App Problem

#97

Post by Kiro »

nologic01 wrote: post #88

This discussion could be a movie scene: Prison door malfunctions and lets prisoners free. Prisoners step out in the sun and get confused by their freedom to move in all directions. They gloomily walk back to their well understood confines. The door locks again, this time for good. Ok, fair enough, we don't want them prisoners to go back to the "comfort" of their cell. What is needed? Not much. A few damn signposts wo…

I definitely prefer prison to all this nonsense.

Re: The Federated App Problem

#98

Post by v64 »

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…

>I'm aware that Mastodon can talk to them with some success, but AFAIK it is only optimized to present certain types of content, so if you want Reddit-like user experience rather than Twitter-like one you want Lenny.

This is partially true. I run Pleroma, which is a microblogging server like Mastodon, so Mastodon content that federates to my instance shows up identically to my own posts. On a system like Lemmy, when their posts federate to me, what I see natively on my instance is a person posting a link that links to the originating website. I can see some replies inline, but they're linear and not threaded like on Lemmy. However, unlike what you said, still using my @me@my.domain identity, I can click the link from my instance to the Lemmy instance and interact with the content there natively. No need to create a different subdomain. There's no need to host a Lemmy instance yourself if you want to interact with Lemmy instances. Lemmy on the backend is still talking the ActivityPub protocol and it's only the frontend that alters how the posts are presented, so as long as your server speaks ActivityPub, you can use the same identity.

Re: The Federated App Problem

#99

Post by Kiro »

Mastodon (and Lemmy) had the opportunity of its lifetime and failed to capture it. It honestly feels like crypto with lots of smart people wasting time on a doomed concept.

Re: The Federated App Problem

#100

Post by ikt »

bobsmooth wrote: post #65
ikt wrote: post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Federated services have so, so so so, many usability issues I like how you're talking about it like it's some abstract underground BBS style system that requires a modem, ISDN line installed, custom software running on a unix subsystem I mean I found https://fosstodon.org/home signed up, clicked on local, liked posts, followed people, now I get a stream of posts to my home feed every day Maybe your everyday faceboo…

Try loading up an image on a different instance, or browsing that instance from a different instance. If you can figure it out, it's as slow as molasses.

Fosstodon posts that are on my home feed from other instances like this: https://imgur.com/6ToDHHm which is from floss.social load up instantly

Looking at the image source despite it being uploaded to another instance it's hosted on Fosstodon: https://cdn.fosstodon.org/cache/media_attachments/files/110/...

That said when I see posts linked to Mastodon on HN I do notice that maybe the HN Hug of Death hits them hard as they are noticeably slower to load than my day to day interaction with Mastodon, maybe this is what you're seeing?

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