I’m still reading it and I’m halfway through it. I agree in recommending it! Moreover gapminder (which is the source of most of the stats) now has data updated up to the year 2022.
So it would need to be a movement across instances, not just a single action, but given the principles of the user base here and why we’re here I think that movement would be very successful.
For now, in the past 30 days I’ve seen instances be very active in moderation and development and federation\defederation. They defederate even when they don’t need to. This anecdotal experience leads me to believe that most instances will defederate from Meta, but I’m certain that a few of them will not.
But just as a side note, a user can block an entire instance as well, at least on Mastodon. I haven’t checked for that functionality on Lemmy. That’s not defederation, but it prevents you from seeing things you don’t want to at the user level.
I haven’t found it but I’d love to see it if I can. As world is struggling I want to use an alt but most alternatives haven’t defederated exploding heads
They’re extremely comfortable with homophobia and transphobia. When I was seeing if I could ban them for example they were talking about considering “cis” and “cisgender” a slur that’s bannable, but they don’t consider a particular word starting with an f that bad.
Super Metroid. It’s an amazing game if you play it normally, and you can branch out into sequence breaking tricks pretty easily. It basically created/popularized an entire genre of games.
I’m currently using a PinePhone Pro as my daily driver and if you want something to play around with that’s definitely an option (though the PinePhone is probably a little more stable and less tinkery).
If you care less about it being a “free” phone built specifically for Linux and just want something that works, then rooting some older phone with good support will probably provide a better experience.
If a corporation aims to purchase an instance, all the other instances would let them know they will vote to defederate it as soon as the purchase is finalized. That ought to make them change course.
That's not how meta's going to do it; they'll start their own (with blackjack blah blah) that has better servers, better design, and other stuff real money can buy until theirs is the default. Then when they have the vast majority of users, they'll start throwing their weight around and others will be pressured to comply with the 'standard' they set.
Other instances can always wall them out from the beginning. Sure, they might have better UI/servers, but if they’re never federated they’ve essentially just created another Facebook.
To be clear, this is using the same frequencies WiFi uses, but customized hardware and software to accomplish the task. Those frequency bands can of course penetrate walls. It’s why we picked them for network connectivity.
It’s a long jump from yet another method to detect things using EM radiation to plugging an AI into your WiFi router to spy on people.
The protocols and software are all free and open source. You can’t stop a company from running a Lemmy or Mastodon instance any more than you could stop an individual from doing so.
The nice thing is that the system allows for free choice. Your favorite instance isn’t forced to federate with a hypothetical Meta instance, and and even if it does you can choose which communities to subscribe to or avoid. Who cares if Meta runs an instance, or a hundred instances? You can simply choose not to use them.
Yeah on the whole it could be good, In the same way that it isn’t a problem that google owns the most popular e-mail service, that doesn’t hurt those on proton mail or any other mail service, and in fact offers benefits that they can just as easilly e-mail their friends using gmail from their preffered mail service. The real fear is the embrace extend extinguish. IE if meta encourages people to join their instance, then gradually makes things incompatible after major communities move to them, but they can’t prevent us from moving back just the same even if they somehow got us to jump there.
The real fear is the embrace extend extinguish. IE if meta encourages people to join their instance, then gradually makes things incompatible after major communities move to them
Kind of like how Facebook Messenger (and GChat, and AIM) used to federate with XMPP, and then dropped it like a bad habit once their platform took off.
Due to the dominance of just a few companies’ big email services, it’s now almost impossible to set up an independent email server. Emails from small independent servers are just not delivered by Gmail and the like. They will only accept emails from other big email providers. In this sense it is a problem that Google owns the most popular email instance. They and a few other large companies have effectively turned a democratic and distributed system into a closed loop owned by a handful of big corporations.
Any reading on this? Seems a little outlandish. I self host an email server for both my business and personal use, and have never had issues sending or receiving mail. Not saying I don’t believe you, just that that has not been my personal experience.
Yeah, I’ve been running E-mail servers for a long time. You kind of have to get things right, like not configuring an open relay and properly setting up SPF (and maybe DMARC) but I’ve never had an issue with E-mail delivery to Gmail.
On what planet can this be true when there are tons of companies and organizations that operate their own email systems? Have you ever spun up an email server and see what happens?
I don’t think it’s the existance of big providers, as much as the general problem of spam, lemmy will likely have this too one day if it grows big, with or without big corporate backed lemmy’s. Fact is, it’s trivial to set up an e-mail server, and have it send millions of spam messages a day to thousands of addresses. You can then register dozens of domain names for a few dollars, and fill the internet with millions of spam messages.
Which is why pretty much all e-mail servers default anything that isn’t known to be throttled (IE a gmail account won’t let you just send as many messages as your bandwidth can handle). A black list whack a mole is basically an unwinnable battle on that front, all anti-spam measures kind of have to start with a “prove you aren’t a spammer then we’ll whitelist you”, rather than the opposite.
But the main point still remains, there are dozens of e-mail providers that have proven they aren’t spam, and more or less ones that meet every overall goal one might have. Ones that don’t track you or put ads (some you may have to pay for, but that’s the options). Still 100x healthier than say facebook and twitter where you consent to all their tracking and rules, or you can’t talk to their members ever.
I think it is really important for communities to spread out to avoid exactly this. Users can centralize, but distributed communities is what will prevent what you describe.
let’s say the instance i belong too has been bought out by zuckerberg… can i transfer my data and move? or do i just lose everything like i did with reddit?
Transferring is theoretically technically possible (Mastodon does it), but Lemmy hasn’t implemented the option yet. There’s an issue for it on their GitHub.
Why would Facebook bother buying out existing instances? They have the resources to create thousands of instances, and the userbase (the idea is to migrate all Instagram accounts) to populate them.
Not to mention that they’re creating a Twitter/Mastodon clone, not a Reddit/Lemmy one.
I don’t think so, but the fediverse is an open standard that’s being actively developed, so if it’s technically possible it could be added.
That said, this kind of social network account has zero lock in for me. I don’t care about my history and none of this is connected to my real life so I wouldn’t mind switching instances. The important thing is you can still access the rest of the network after you switch.
This “anyone is free to join any instance, you can just avoid what you don’t like” kind of thinking is perfectly reasonable in theory, but I think what OP wants to know is if this also holds up in practice. You could “defederate” Google and Microsoft by blocking emails from Gmail and Outlook addresses, but the reality is that the majority of people you will need to contact use those addresses. In most cases, your school/workplace will even make you use them for your organizational email. Yes, it is possible to avoid these companies and choose alternatives, but you’ll be isolating yourself from the majority of the network.
The question is not if it will be possible to use the future corporate-owned Fediverse without Meta (of course it will), but if it will be feasible for the majority of users.
My bigger worry is that they’ll try and take control of the fediverse on a larger scale. Even if all of their users join the fediverse and it becomes less convenient to be defederated from the larger corporate instances you can still have accounts on smaller instances or your own and you’ll be able to completely block all the corporate instances. But what if they strike a deal with activitypub? From my knowledge they’re the backend of the entire fediverse. If they’re able to do what they want with the fediverse as a whole then where do we go? I think that the developers of activitypub would be against that but meta can spend as much as they want to take control of this and I don’t know the developers personally so I can’t be sure if they’d pass on that money. I might be worrying a bit too much but big tech has a long history of taking stuff over like this.; social media and e-mail are both great examples of that.
You can think of it like HTTPS. It’s just rules for computers to talk to each other. If your computer follows those rules, it can talk to the other computers that adhere to those rules. These rules are necessary because otherwise the internet is just a bunch of 1s and 0s, you need rules to tell computers which 1s and 0s to send, and rules to tell computers what those 1s and 0s mean.
The World Wide Web Consortium are developing this set of rules, just as they’ve developed many other rules. They’re a non-profit organisation just kinda trying to make the web a better place.
I agree on some points, but I think it’s not fair to compare it to email. People use emails for work are somewhat forced to use them pretty often. I don’t know anyone who browsed Reddit for work over the past 12 years I’ve had an account, and I don’t believe Lemmy will change that. People are not forced to use Lemmy, reaching the maximum amount of people is usually not the point unless you’re advertising, and if you’re targeting the Facebook crowd you can… advertise on Facebook - this wouldn’t even be anything new.
The question isn’t whether or not the majority of users can use the Fediverse without being hampered by the corpos, it’s whether or not the core users can. Unless Meta can somehow force federation unto all instances, I will be able to choose an instance that is not federated with them.
A good analogy is Google with Gmail. They became the biggest player in email and even gained a lot of influence over for email works, but you can easily use another email provider and not be locked out of the system.
Imagine how horrible things would be if email were centralized. We really need to thank the founders of the internet for having the foresight to not let that happen.
It’s funny you bring Email as an example because everyone using the same 3-4 providers effectively centralized email. Anyone who tries to run any self-hosted email with decent volume quickly discovers this fact
Good read. Onboarding and discoverability are the weakest part of the fediverse and need to be a high priority.
Apps assigning new users randomly to a good general instance (vlemmy.net, lemmy.one, lemm.ee etc) without requiring the user to know about instances, and integrating lemmyverse.net’s functionality into lemmy would go a long way for both I feel.
Apps assigning new users randomly to a good general instance (vlemmy.net, lemmy.one, lemm.ee etc) eithout requiring the user to know about instances,
This is a terrible idea, and the defederation of Beehaw is the exact reason why this is a terrible idea. Don’t get me wrong, with the attitude of the Beehaw admins I suspect that Beehaw will constantly be defederating from a lot of instances over the course of its existence, but this comes with the consequence of people suddenly being locked out of participating in their chosen communities because “you signed up on the wrong instance.”
Which is something nobody should have to experience.
That’s why it’s important to make sure they’re good general instances that aren’t defederating everything else. Beehaw seems to be an exception in this regard.
Beehaw’s essentially walling itself off from other instances, and I think the vast majority of users would rather stay on the other instances’ side rather than one that seems to be staying small on purpose.
Instance migration is already a highly requested feature, and is a thing in Mastodon already. That will fix most remaining concern about being locked out of communities when implemented.
I feel the massive onboarding advantage of users not requiring instance knowledge by doing this vastly outweighs the few users who might not find some communities they like, most of which have alternatives in other instances anyway. And they could always just make another account until instance migration is in lemmy.
I’ve heard that adage about the porn industry pushing innovation, but I’m not sure it’s entirely true. Like, I believe “the world standardized on VHS because the porn industry did” is outright false.
Hosting porn brings down a whole load of legal scrutiny onto your service. In some places in the world it’s outright illegal or the effort it takes to do it within the law is so great that it’s not worth doing. Several instances don’t want to even attempt it. Instances that do probably need to specialize in the kind of attention that sort of hosting requires.
You want to say porn is what allowed Blu-ray to beat out HD-DVD?
I doubt it. By the time that format war arrived the internet was well and truly established, so I reckon the vast majority of NSFW content was consumed with no physical media.
Another reason would have been Xbox Vs PlayStation. The Xbox 360 had an HD-DVD as an optional extra, compared to the PS3 including Blu-ray as standard. Which was going to win?
The porn industry’s influence is vastly overrated.
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