If the descentralization of social networks continue, we will have to prepare for the eventual rise of the instances wars, where people will start to fight about which instance is better and which one is weird to be in and so on, but that’s for the future of us all.
There is nothing better than a good old tribe war.
One of the oldest human pastimes, hating people who are different from you in some way, no matter how inconsequential.
“You ever notice that? Any time you see two groups of people who really hate each other, chances are good they’re wearing different kind of hats. Keep an eye on that, it might be important.” - George Carlin
Ah shit they should bring back tribes, I miss that game.
Goddam you made me nostalgic. Wonder how slow i would be today… Sloooooow
Nothing drives down real estate prices like a good old-fashioned gang war.
And that’s exactly what’s supposed to happen. Instance wars and eventual defederation and fragmentation are important moderation tools, and will progress the culture and feel of instances and regions of the Fediverse. Many instances will form federated cliques that are highly connected and have similar vibes and cultures, and some will be federated with multiple cliques, showing users a variety of cultures and situations.
If the Fediverse reaches a large enough number of people, it can support multiple independant cliques, and enable users see entire mini-universes with different communities and vibes.
The big problem is going to be when someone decides to start spamming and vote manipulating with bot populated private instances that automatically re-spawn themselves under a new name whenever they are blacklisted. Eventually, the standard will have to move to whitelisting over blacklisting, and once that happens the whole premise of federation starts to fall apart.
It’s not harder than what we’ve had to do with e-mail spam. Which has been enormously successful, with 99% of it not even getting delivered to your spam folder but just dropped entirely.
Instances will het as much visibility as they’ve earned through successful engagement across instances. The visibility of a new instance’s posts will increase over time.
This is why yes, there needs to be a feed algorithm. “Just show it to me chronologically” is the most naive thought, and people still have it all the time. There are just so many fundamental things that need to go into a sorting algo. We’re not even talking about personalization.
E-mail spam filter is funded by google and other multibillion megacorporations though, and they just outright block or rate limit unknown providers. I’d say it’s not gonna be as easy to do it with fediverse.
This is why yes, there needs to be a feed algorithm. “Just show it to me chronologically” is the most naive thought
Agreed 100% but again, I wonder if we have enough resources to actually make it good while also keeping it free, both in terms of monetization and in terms of outside influence and biases. Twitter and others spend a lot of manhours on it and mastodon still doesn’t have it either for example, it’s not even being worked on afaik (or nobody talks about it).
The trick is to find out how to leverage the community for quality signals, and just support that with good foundations.
Spam filtering is done by corporations but they’re not all mega tech companies like Google. A lot of it is done at the network level, too.
DNS has also always been the prime example of a federated service that works so well we can rely on it as a public utility. Why hasn’t it been taken over by bad actors rapidly recycling their identities? It’s not because big tech has thousands of human agents monitoring it at great expense.
how to leverage the community for quality signals
I say we give each person one up or down vote on each piece of content. Then, people should be able to sort by the sum of those up or down votes (with up being worth +1 and down being worth -1).
I’m not sure, but I suspect a system like that might have content moderation built into its structure.
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Moderation itself can be gamed. A moderator who’s a bad actor can cause a lot of damage easily by “gaming” the moderation system.
We can keep playing this until some bad actor is pretending to be me typing this right now.
But this is why moderators work in teams, and why there is an admin as well. A solo mod who’s a bad actor is not going to develop a very appealing community, and whole scam shitpile instances can always be defederated.
It’s why I’ve made fediseer.com to prepare for this inevitability
So I went to the website. It explains what it does, but not much how… Or maybe I’m too dumb to get it. Could you explain how the verification happens? How does this system work?
Did you read the devlog? I got into more detail there. Just so I don’t explain everything from scratch
Hey one thing I learned while canvassing for a politician is that it can be really beneficial to repeat yourself when it comes to articulating a message, instead of articulating it once then passing copies.
The more times you write and rewrite the same explanation the better it will get.
I had not. I see it now. Looks real cool! I hope it works.
I think these problems might be solvable with auto blacklisting instances based on their age, how their users behave and what % of comments and posts of them are flagged as spam
How would an instance grow if it’s auto blacklisted by everyone? Doesn’t make sense
One thing that is feasible is for established instances to give votes from new instances a lower weight. So, no blacklisting, but until they have been around for a little while to be able to calculate that their activity corresponds to their size and that nothing is off, upvotes and dowvotes could be ignored or given a lower weight.
Thats the problem. It would be very difficult to get a new instance off the ground unless you were an insider or had inside connections. If you have a cabal of existing admins acting as gate keepers you could keep outsiders from abusing the system easily, but you are also walking right back into the centralized control federation is supposed to prevent.
Welcome back to IRC. :)
Yes, age alone shouldn’t lead to getting blacklisted. But if an instance is two days old, already 50+ accounts from there were banned on your instance for being bots and besides that there was no real contributions coming from that place, this might be a candidate for auto-blacklisting.
Well non-federated forums can grow by word of mouth and similar. Being federated does lower the barrier of entry for interacting but it’s still possible to visit the instance the old fashioned way. You probably still need to rely mostly on word of mouth anyway, even if you are federated.
Maybe we’ll move to a system where only upvotes from that home’s instance matter. After all karma is meaningless anyway and is just used for short term discoverability, maybe kbin1.social doesn’t care how kbin2.social votes on kbin1.social threads (or any lemmy example instance)? If you subscribe to kbin1.social then you hope that they will upvote their content appropriately the same way you expect them to self-moderate appropriately. Dunno, just thinking out loud
and once that happens the whole premise of federation starts to fall apart.
Will it? Even if we get to the point where there’s a whitelisting system, major instances will still be federated. There could be even a transitional small instances federation.
The biggest problem with lemmy and decentralization right now is that for optimal performance you need to spread out the load relatively evenly between instances. The problem is that users tend to go where other users are (otherwise why go there) and that naturally leads to clumping on one or few instances which causes it to overload.
The way to solve it is to avoid having generic “anything goes” instances and instead have instances be focused on a specific topic. For example, have gaming instance, a personal finance/investing instance, all things home ownership and improvement instance, etc. You can have multiple communities per instance as long as they stay within the same general topic. This way users will naturally spread out by subscribing to different instances based on topics they’re interested in. And that will solve the performance issue we’re seeing with lemmy.world or other popular instances.
I’m pretty much brand new to lemmy but the thought of having to switch instances to see cooking conversations after conversing about Raspberry Pi projects in a different instance just seems unwieldy. But I guess as long as my instances are all federating with each other I don’t need to switch instances. I’m a technical guy but this needs to be easier for joe sixpack or it’s not going to catch on. And if it doesn’t catch on there’s going to be less interesting content…
Correct, as long as the instance your account is in federated with all other instances you’re subscribed to, you don’t have to switch accounts.
Now, defederation is another issue if you want to see the widest possible amount of content. What’s going to happen is ideologically opposed instances are going to defederate each other, so left-wing instances are going to defederate right-wing ones and vice versa. So if you’re a user who wants to see the content from both sides, you’ll have to create multiple accounts in each “cluster” of federated instances. It’s kind of annoying to be honest, it makes it hard to discover communities just because your instance admin decided to defederate from them and encourages echo chambers, but it it’s the best we’ve got.
Another way to solve the issue is to have users and communities be instance-independent where the instances only provide storage for communities and users they want to support.
Where would user information be stored?
Would this require you to switch between instances to view all the content you wish to follow? That doesn’t seem very appealing as a user.
No, you can see all the content from all instances you’re subscribed to, as long your instance admin hasn’t defederated from them.
Right, I think this was the potential concern I was vaguely remembering.
I am subscribed to Ukraine on sopuli.xyz and memes in lemmy.ml and a few others on Lemmy.world and they all show up in my feed, so I’m now more confused. Am I viewing several instances or not? Lmao
You are as long as they agree to federate with each other (which they obviously are if they’re in your feed)
So what is the point of congregating on a general purpose instance? I ask this because of the snippet from the root comment:
The problem is that users tend to go where other users are (otherwise why go there)
If everything is visible from any (federated) instance, why not switch once you encounter slow down? In my comment, I was just clarifying that I understood the premise.
I also see these when sorting by All in lemmy.world, for instance (no pun intended). I’m just making sure I am not confused. Sorry if I confused you in the process!
I wonder if specialised instances are easier to administer? If the admins are familiar with the instances specific subject matter, jargon and memes, it might make their job easier perhaps?
I agree
This wouldnt be as much of as issue if Lemmy had better support for connecting with other instances and their communities.
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“Instance wars” sounds like the way “the consequences of my own actions” will be framed at a point.
The far right instances dripping with hate, bigotry and recycled propaganda will be in an “Instance war” with the mainstream instances talking about regular human being stuff - stuff like beans.
Grab your samurai swords, mall ninjas… and inventory your powdered eggs, theocratic fascist doomsday preppers…
The instance wars are coming for your unvaccinated, homeschooled, incel butts!
What if there was an app that let you log in to multiple lemmy accounts at once, aggregated the lot into one seamless feed, and used the relevant account for each interaction? Maybe even going as far as to automatically cross-post any submission to duplicate communities and aggregate that too.
I’m actually working on this haha.
It’s definitely a v2 feature, but it’s in the works
Use wefwef.app
This would be the best of all worlds. Instances get to choose who to federate with, users get to choose want instances to use.
Sign me up.
Would an app that pulls directly from each server (anonymously) or an app that pulls from dedicated servers (while logged in/subbed) be better? The first is more efficient but the instance owners likely won’t be [financially] supported, while the latter requires duplication and is prone to defederation issues. In the end I suspect overcoming defederation will be a significant design goal of third party apps.
I’ve got multiple accounts because I have my main (this one) and an account on feddit.uk. The account on feddit.uk exists because I wanted to make a very UK-niche community on there, and I believe you need an account on an instance to make a community on that instance. I could give up my feddit.uk account now, but it’s nice to keep around in case my main instance goes down for maintenance or some such.
Email is federated as well, but I never saw anything I could call email instance wars. You can use whichever you want, no one really cares.
If I see an sbcglobal, aol, hotmail, or yahoo, I will assume tech illiteracy
haha, I do have a @hotmail.com account. Granted, nowadays I use it mainly as my “spam” account (to be clear: I’m not sending spam, it’s the account I give when I’m required to give an email or create an account) but hotmail was a big thing in the old days before gmail and that account still has sentimental value to me.
I chose my Gmail name when I was invited to it (it was invitation-only at the time), and it’s not the greatest name. I use it because I have decades of tuning it with filters and rules. But when Microsoft launched “outlook.com” I made an account with my real name as soon as I could, which I use for resumes and similar reasons.
I no longer assume Hotmail users are less literate than users of other email providers. Gmail or iCloud seem to be the default platforms for illiterate people today. Who only get an account because they have to for their phone. It’s so weird to me that my kids think email is archaic. I was a teenager before my family got email. And yes, we had one family email address. We had one family computer and one family landline. I was in college before I got my own email address and telephone number (thanks to my dorm Landline). Yet to my kids, it might as well be a fax machine.
I have a Hotmail account for the same reason. I’ve got a few things that still send to my Hotmail, like government and banking stuff, so I’ve just kept it. Outside of work, I don’t email much anyway so it’s not much to look after 2 accounts.
Gmail vs Hotmail vs Yahoo was pretty big, and before that, AOL.
Gmail vs Hotmail was easy. Gmail started at 1GB for your emails. At the same time, Hotmail was 2MB. Yes M and B
I mean, email was text or richtext. Occasionally a 35 kB gif that you’d laugh at and then delete.
Part of the issue was that Hotmail was completely inept at blocking spam, which had lots of text and images. I ran out of space daily
I completely forgot that there was almost no spam filtering back then. It was awful. I takey smart machine learning spam filters for granted.
If I ever saw @aol.com as front desk in a hotel, I knew I was potentially in for a bad time!
What did @hotmail.com tell you?
I’ll answer this one. In my experience they used to know a little more back in the day. Tread lightly, it could go either way.
Yeah, I definitely never judge people for having a comcast.net email address.
Seeing boomers on here talking about email addresses is weird since everyone my age just defaults to Gmail unless it’s a work or school address that was just assigned to you
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💀
Don’t we kinda already have them?
bombastic side eyes at Beehaw
Begun, the instance wars have.
What about the defederation of the wookies?
Too late, it is.
Any good guides on all the instances?
I want to pick sides early so I can feast on the blood of those who dared choose differently.
Well, there are the fascists(exploding-heads.com) and the communists(lemmygrad.ml) for a start.
You have some national instances such as lemmy.ca, aussie.zone, feddit.de, feddit.nl, feddit.uk and feddit.it.
Beehaw is busy building their ivory tower by defederating anyone with a slightly different oppinion so i’d say they are the centrists or maybe the swiss.
Other than that the rest is pretty much the same, if you ask me.
You forgot about kbin. It’s kinda here, but not really
It’s only until they have better mod tools.
Yes, but they chose that route rather than for example expand their admin-team.
They would rather remain a small tight knit community than expand for fear of loosing their core values.
I’m disagree with their aproach but understand their reasoning. In the context of a instance war however I think they’d avoid conflict and thus remain impartial.
Just stay away from Lemmy.nz we…I mean they are VERY southern
This will likely follow a similar pattern to email, since it’s starting from a very similar position.
At some point people will begin to assign identities to instances and imagine (rightly or wrongly) that being on an instance says something about a person. People do that with cars, shoes, and yes, even email domains.
From a technical perspective, right now Lemmy is as anonymous as can be — I’ve yet to see an instance that requires ANY kind of verification. I didn’t need to provide an email address, phone number, or any other identifying information to sign up. Didn’t even need to solve a captcha. I just choose a name and set a password and BOOM! I was in.
Once upon a time, email worked this way, too. Then came the spammers, scammers, and other bad actors, and this was deemed untenable. Nowadays, any email provider that allows anonymous signup is likely to be blocked by most of the email-using world. You won’t be able to use them to sign up for other services, and you might not even have your mail accepted by other providers.
This will definitely become a problem as Lemmy becomes popular, and instance admins will need to crack down, lest they be overrun and defederated by the rest of the world.
I’m not sure what the answer is. This is a problem that has not been adequately solved, IMHO. A few bad apples spoil the bunch. That’s been true since long before the Internet.
From a technical perspective, right now Lemmy is as anonymous as can be — I’ve yet to see an instance that requires ANY kind of verification. I didn’t need to provide an email address, phone number, or any other identifying information to sign up. Didn’t even need to solve a captcha. I just choose a name and set a password and BOOM! I was in.
Sopuli made me write a little paragraph about myself before they let me in
even email domains.
No joke. During my interview for a bell company my email came up for whatever reason and thier response was “oh! You use Gmail!”. Like I was hired on the spot because of it. It was very strange.
I had to verify with email to sign up for this?
Actually tbh I’m not even sure what anyone here is even talking about…federations and instances? I thought this was just a new Reddit but with a different back end.
Okay, it makes sense that some instances are doing that already. I signed up for a few and none of them did, but I’m not on lemmy.world. I’m on lemmy.sdf.org (and a couple others, but this is my main one).
u/kale@lemmy.zip already gave a great explanation. So here we are, three different people using three different servers, all talking in the same thread and generally not even noticing the difference. Neat, isn’t it!
Lemmy is a federated link aggregator and forum. Kind of like a hybrid between email and Reddit. I’m a member of Lemmy.zip, but I’m posting on another Lemmy instance (I forget where this post is, Lemmy.world, right?). Lemmy.zip and lemmy.world are “federated”, which means if users on one instance interact with users on another, both servers will sync this activity. Lemmy.world will accept lemmy.zip user posts.
And user names are only unique for a server. Just like “chunkylover53@aol.com” is a different email than “chunkylover53@hotmail.com”.
Community searching shows the community name and the server where it’s hosted. Even though I only have an account on Lemmy.zip, I can subscribe, comment, and post on communities from other instances, as long as lemmy.zip is federated with them.
Recently, Beehaw de-federated from much of the fedi-verse. This means their software works the same, but prevents their users from interacting with the rest of the community, and the rest of the community from interacting with their communities and users.
It’s complicated and annoying, but necessary to be federated to prevent the fate of Digg and Reddit.
Also, one instance could require email and 2FA to be safe, and choose to de-federate from an instance that has no verification and becomes full of spammers. Or, someone could create a Lemmy instance that requires verification of identity (like AMA used to do, or the old Twitter checkmark), so if John.Oliver from the “Lemmy.OnePercent” instance posts, you know it’s the real John Oliver. There’s benefits and complications from federation.
So if I’m understanding it correctly, Lemmy is the Federation and .world is the instance? And then within that instance are it’s own communuties?
Not quite. Lemmy.world is the instance. I’m from the instance lemmy.sdf.org and I also hang out on feddit.uk . The instance names are just URLs (.world, .uk, and org are all like .com).
Handwavy explanation because I’m fuzzy on details: Federation is the magical interconnection between instance lemmy.sdf.org and instance lemmy.world that allows me to see posts/threads/users on the lemmy.world instance .
Hmmm…I think this is the best explanation I’ve had so far.
I certainly don’t mean this negatively, but I get the impression a lot of the people here that actually understand it are also bad at explaining it to normies like me. And people like me are very much in the minority at this stage in the growth.
Aww, thank you.
It’s a hazard of really knowing what you’re talking about that leads to overestimating what other people know. I don’t have that problem 😉. Relevant xkcd: https://xkcd.com/2501/ .
@fluke is this a joke?
@fluke in case this is not a joke, yes instances host communities, but the lemmy.world is just a domain name. Federation just means lemmy.world and another server/instance such as geddit.social can share and exchange communities, comments, and threads they host with each other. I’d be happy to answer additional questions you might have, but I’m not as expert as I don’t share links in that format much.
Is what a joke?
At some point people will begin to assign identities to instances and imagine (rightly or wrongly) that being on an instance says something about a person.
*Cough
Might be true on sdf, but on lemmy.world and sh.itjust.works, there are captchas and email addresses.
Wait - what kind of proof of identity do Gmail, outlook, Yahoo, etc require to make an email address?
I’m not sure about all of them, but for Google, you can’t create a new account without a valid phone number for SMS verification. If you created your account a long time ago then you’re kind of grandfathered in and don’t need to add a phone. They don’t allow known VOIP numbers (including Google Voice) and I think you cannot use the same number for lots of accounts.
This might vary by country. My experience is with the US version of gmail.
Hm I have made at least 3 gmail addresses and didn’t have to do this. And in fact their apps support account switching pretty easily, which seems to indicate that they don’t really disapprove of making multiple accounts.
In fact the only thing they asked for was a backup email address in case you get locked out or they need to send security alerts, and that was optional.
Interesting. I had to make a new account just a couple weeks ago (for Android testing as part of my job) and there was no option to continue without SMS verification. Couldn’t use a landline, couldn’t use VOIP, couldn’t fall back to email verification or anything else.
One of my coworkers was unable to use their cell phone number because Google said it was already in use. But it let me use the same number I have associated with my personal account, so go figure.
Interesting, could be because it’s something you’ve had to do often enough that they’re trying to rate limit you
It’s already occurring. If you have an account on esploding head you can’t set content from some places and people will reply to you in aggressive ways based on preconceived notions. I know if I see a commie or tanky making comments I view as shitty then I am already doing it too.
From a technical perspective, right now Lemmy is as anonymous as can be — I’ve yet to see an instance that requires ANY kind of verification. I didn’t need to provide an email address, phone number, or any other identifying information to sign up
Not exactly anonymous…
Lemmy will most likely go the way of 4chan, they’ll ban connections from all major VPN services and start banning users via IP.
I’m sure that it’s a little more complicated than that with a federated network. Since you can host your own lemmy instance you could hide your information behind that.
I’d guess it’s a mix of your post and the parent post. Lemmy instances will have a user verification policy and de-federate with instances that differ too much. So the Lemmy instances with emai verification and 2FA will eventually de-federate from an instance that wants to be anonymous and has zero requirements for creating an account.
Maybe curse me for bringing the idea up, could a Lemmy instance exclusively use Facebook’s login features? So that you have to use “login with Facebook account” to create a Lemmy user on the instance?
Maybe curse me for bringing the idea up, could a Lemmy instance exclusively use Facebook’s login features? So that you have to use “login with Facebook account” to create a Lemmy user on the instance?
Oh god.
I don’t think the Lemmy code base supports that yet, but adding OAuth support is a natural thing to do at some point. I guess if you were dedicated you could hack it together yourself in your own instance even now.
As horrible as it is the implementation would take Facebook only a few days since lemmy is open source. The “problem” with an open system ist that basically everybody can join
Facebook will definitely hide behind a Facebook logins defederate everything that they don’t like to “protect” their users.
I don’t want it to be mainstream. I just want it to be Good.
Already happening. Have you heard of Beehaw?
Competition is good. Competition keeps us strong.
The fact that all instances talk to each other, makes me think we likely won’t have wars.
I mean I’m subscribed to beehaw and kbin communities. And everything in between.
That’s totally something a kbin user would say.
I’m new… What are Beehaw and kbin?
Beehaw is a large lemmy instance which is notable for defederating from some other large instances recently due to their own admin policy. Kbin is an alternate federated platform similar to Lemmy, and the two can mostly work with each other.
Is kbin not an instance of Lemmy? As in, using the Lemmy source code?
Kbin and lemmy are different implementations of the activitypub protocol https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/ActivityPub
What are instances and federations?
I just thought that it was Reddit, but with a different backend. But people are talking like there’s more to it than that…
Ok so Lemmy itself isn’t really a single app or service like Reddit, rather it’s a software project that people can run on their own servers. It’s a bit like email in that regard, anyone can run an email server, or you can just join someone else’s like Gmail (think of instances as being like these). Instances can have their own rules and customisations, but they all still talk email (in lemmys case, something called activitypub) and work together, and you can send and receive content from other people even if they’re on a different email provider (lemmy instance). Federating is basically two different instances agreeing to connect and share their content with each other. This generally happens by default. Defederating is the opposite, deciding to stop sending and receiving content from a particular instance.
Email is also a federated platform just like Lemmy. You can have email clients that talk to email servers, but “email” itself isn’t really an app you can just run, it’s a collection of apps and servers that all work together. Lemmy is very similar.
Also worth noting, the language (or protocol, to use the technical term) that Lemmy uses to talk between instances is called ActivityPub, and a whole bunch of different services such as Mastodon and Kbin use this! Together, these services are known as the “Fediverse” and the really cool thing is that they can all talk to each other because they speak the same language! If you want to, you can technically browse and post on Lemmy from Mastodon, and vice versa, even though they’re completely different services. While it’s a bit tricky with Mastodon since its much more like Twitter than Reddit, Kbin works really well with Lemmy and is generally interchangeable. People on Lemmy can join in on Kbin and vice versa. The whole system is really neat and if it sounds interesting, you should absolutely google it some more and learn all about it! It’s a community project so if you like it and want to get involved, you can help create any part of this from contributing to Lemmy’s code to running your own instance.
Thanks for the explanation and the time taken to write it.
I’m starting to figure it out as I stumble my way around it. For example I’ve found that Lemmy.World (my ‘home’ instance) isn’t big on NSFW stuff, so I’ve made an account on another instance and linked the two.
Thanks again!
There’s so much more to it than that, but I’m too new and generally technically inept to properly explain it
