The Beatings Will Continue Until Morale Improves: Cohost and the Fate of Centralized Platforms
The Beatings Will Continue Until Morale Improves: Cohost and the Fate of Centralized Platforms
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I don't know what Cohost was but I'm pessimistic about Lemmy these days. Note that the link is to an article moaning about the centralization of sites like Reddit and that Cohost (whatever that was) failed because it was run by the same type of people. At first I didn't click on the link because it says "audio" so I expected it to be audio and I didn't feel like listening to one. It's a written article though.
I’m pessimistic about Lemmy these days.
Why? The userbase is quite stable, and new platform are emerging (Piefed, Mbin), and more people are probably going to come the next time Reddit messes up
The instance system is confusing for new users and they might not even realize that they're missing out on a lot of content by signing up to the wrong instance.
In the end it's just a bunch of centralized websites sharing content if the admins feel like it and sure you can create your own instance but another admin can decide to defederated from yours anytime they feel like it, that's still a lot of power in the hands of a single person...
Both front and back end need to be decentralized and also separated from each other. Make all content available to all and have people develop a UI to access it, let the users curate their feed.
This way people sign up on one page and can use the same credentials no matter what page they go to, the competition for front end devs is to offer the best UI, the development for the hosting part is what's done as a community on GitHub or whatever...
I always point new users to Lemm.ee nowadays.
another admin can decide to defederated from yours anytime they feel like it, that’s still a lot of power in the hands of a single person…
All of the top 20 instances ask feedback from their communities before defederating. They know that if they don't, people will switch instances in two clicks.
This isn't an absolute rule. Of course they don't (and shouldn't) ask for feedback before cutting off Nazi instances, but it's not always so clear.
.world defederated from fosstodon and I'm still unsure why.
.world defederated from fosstodon and I’m still unsure why.
Have you asked on [email protected] ? Could be spam issues too
No, thanks for suggesting. I saw a thread by other curious users and checked fediseer. Might be an admin issue, but I didn't see clear evidence.
Don't think it was spam as, unless I'm misunderstanding, that seems unlikely from fosstodon.
Most people won't switch though, they won't want to lose their username, their feed and so on, we're creatures of habits...
Hell, trolls could go around and recreate accounts on the top 100 instances with the same username users have on other instances to prevent them from reusing the same username elsewhere, just that is a weird concept to explain "Oh yeah, someone else can create an account and pretend to be you and unless people notice that the instance they're from isn't the same, there's no way to know it isn't you!"
You're sending users to Lemmy.ee but in the end it's an instance controlled by one person paying the hosting fees and with the last word on what goes on on their server.
Most people won’t switch though, they won’t want to lose their username, their feed and so on, we’re creatures of habits…
You can keep your username, export and import your subscriptions and block list in two clicks from the settings.
Hell, trolls could go around and recreate accounts on the top 100 instances with the same username users have on other instances to prevent them from reusing the same username elsewhere, just that is a weird concept to explain “Oh yeah, someone else can create an account and pretend to be you and unless people notice that the instance they’re from isn’t the same, there’s no way to know it isn’t you!”
"You are [email protected], but someone could create [email protected] and pretend to be you"
Also, this kind of impersonating would probably get the trolls banned.
You’re sending users to Lemmy.we but in the end it’s an instance controlled by one person paying the hosting fees and with the last word on what goes on on their server.
Lemm.ee had 5 admins. The main one has been very clear that he keeps defederation to a minimum: https://lemm.ee/post/35472386?scrollToComments=true
Of course you need to trust him and his team.
If you prefer a paid model where you have a customer relationship with the admin, you might to have a look at https://communick.com/services/lemmy/
The owner is @[email protected] , who commented below
That's 5 admins out of how many users?
In the end Lemmy is centralized, just in a different way, someone can wipe out a huge part of the content in a single click.
The content itself is harder to be deleted, because federation means that every post comment gets duplicated on all instances.
You do have a point regarding identity, and this is something that bluesky has solved already in a more elegant way. But this is also fixable with activitypub: as Takahe already showed it is possible to efficiently serve different domains with the same server. And on the extreme case, you can run your instance.
Did you see the scramble when feddit.de went offline for weeks and all its content became unavailable?
If there's going to be duplicates anyway, why not do as I said (decentralize the hosting separately from the front end and make it available to all) and just really duplicate everything so there's always a real backup and no one can wipe anything by shutting down their server?
Like I said, the content did not become unavailable. My instance still has the data from every community being followed.
The only unrecoverable problem with feddit.de is that the domain was lost. If the owner had given the domain to someone else, one could (theoretically) get all the identities back. They would need new keys, but the accounts would still be salvageable.
As for "separate frontend": this is already possible and like I said it is a matter of improving the existing clients. We don't need a fundamental change in the protocols to get what you want, we just need to get more resources available to developers so that they can continue working and improving on what we have.
But if a new instance is created after one was deleted, the new instance users will never have access to what was on that instance that got deleted.
We have "separate front ends" at the moment (guessing you're referring to apps, otherwise people log in through their instance's website), but the content the users have access to and the people they can interact with still depends on the instance they sign up on, I'm talking about eliminating that completely and letting the users be the ones that decide who and what they can interact with.
I'll never be able to check what's going on on beehaw or hexbear as long as my instance is the one I'm on, but no one should have the power to decide that for me or the other users I'm interacting with.
all its content became unavailable?
All the feddit.de content is still available on https://lemmy.world/c/[email protected] and all the other instances which where federated.
Hell, trolls could go around and recreate accounts on the top 100 instances with the same username users have on other instances to prevent them from reusing the same username elsewhere, just that is a weird concept to explain
Yes but that doesn't mean you should get automatic dibs on a name everywhere. It's just a name. If you are Joe Bill at lemm.ee, that does not give you any rights over the name Joe Bill all across the world. Statistically speaking, there's at least 18 thousand other Joe Bills around at this very moment.
Like, this is something that is already solved by the instance's moderators.
I always point new users to Lemm.ee nowadays.
Most people are not interested in moderating their own feed. Leading people to an instance that does very little moderation on the defederation side of things could push them away. In that situation, they are likely to just leave the fediverse altogether and less likely to go to another instance I would say. I respect lemm.ee as an instance but I would not recommend it as a "gateway drug" to the fediverse.
The issue is that
- LW is too big
- SJW has a non neutral name
- Lemmy.ca advertised itself as Canadian
- Feddit.org has a meta community in German
There is Lemmy.zip, but they are also very light on defederation. Lemmy.dbzer0 blocks lemmygrad but still federates with hexbear
Do you have any other suggestion?
Yea... I get what you mean. There isn't really an instance that is "not zero defederation"-moderated and general enough for all people if you take out lemmy.world. That's honestly kind of surprising, it feels like a niche that more players could fill. But I guess that's how lemmy.world got as big as it did.
If you had to give one suggestion, maybe. But still, any instance matching geographical location or a specific of your interest would be better.
If you had to give one suggestion, maybe. But still, any instance matching geographical location or a specific of your interest would be better.
Indeed, but the thing is generally, people just one want URL, and that's it.
Latest example to date: https://old.reddit.com/r/RedditAlternatives/comments/1fe87g5/map_of_2000_lemmy_communities/
You'll see a comment on how to join Lemmy, in this kind of scenario I just give one link
In the end it’s just a bunch of centralized websites sharing content if the admins feel like it
The whole point of the fediverse is having a choice of admin. That democratizes the space because people can choose where to go. The point is not to rid yourself of admins entirely (or at least not without just becoming your own admin, but then there is still an admin, it's just yourself).
Make all content available to all and have people develop a UI to access it, let the users curate their feed.
Sorry but the vast majority of users are not interested in curating their feed. Most people don't want to also be moderators. I mean fuck it's difficult to even recruit mods for even medium-sized communities. Most people don't like "absolute free speech" and want some level of moderation. Making all content available is not a path towards healthy platforms - it runs into the nazi bar problem instantaneously.
I won't even comment on the herculean technical challenge of doing it in the way you describe, but even if it was possible, I don't think it's actually desirable. It sounds good on the surface, but that's about it.
Communities would still have their moderators though, there just wouldn't be someone at the top that can decide that tomorrow you don't have access to the content from another instance anymore unless you switch to another instance yourself...
If there are no admins, who can ever decide who is a moderator? How do you decide that? The way it is currently decided is via admins granting mods powers on communities on that admin's instance. If you don't have admins, I don't see how you could possibly have mods.
Create the community > you're the mod, if people aren't happy with your moderation they create their own community
I suppose communities would not have unique names then - otherwise I'll just go ahead and create communities from all the words in the dictionary and then I control all communities.
So if they don't have unique names, how in the world do we refer to them? By some opaque UUID or something? I mean I guess it's possible, maybe.
Who's hosting this new community you just made? Where does it live? The description of the community, you know the side bar in a Lemmy community, where is that physically speaking?
You realize the way things work currently doesn't prevent that, right?
As I said from the beginning, front end and back end are separate.
Ok, let me put it another way. Reddit's content is decentralized already (everything isn't hosted on a single server, everything is backed up on multiple servers in multiple locations) but all its content is available from a single web page.
What I'm suggesting is that the hosting is "done the same way" just handled by anyone who wants to provide servers instead of dealing with a service like AWS. Now contrary to Reddit, that content is then made publically available so anyone can develop a front end for it. There could be a default option (Lemmy.com or whatever) but it would give users access to the exact same thing as any other website that offers access to the database via a UI. No defederation bullshit, no admins that can decide to wipe out part of the site (everything is backed up, you wipe your server, no one cares, all that content is pulled from another server instead), just a huge decentralized database anyone can access.
You realize the way things work currently doesn’t prevent that, right?
It totally does prevent it because every community has a unique name, when you include the instance domain. Which is the whole point. The instance is where the community lives.
The issues are describing are real, but can be solved with better clients.
Interesting read!
What you're describing sounds closer to how atproto is supposed to work, but it's yet unproven in regards to decentralization.