There have been multiple accounts created with the sole purpose of posting advertisement posts or replies containing unsolicited advertising.

Accounts which solely post advertisements, or persistently post them may be terminated.

modulus ,

The biggest issues for me are:

  1. No centralisation means there’s no canonical single source of truth.
  2. Account migration.
  3. Implementation compatibility.

No single source of truth leads to the weird effect that if you check a post on your instance, it will have different replies from those on a different instance. Only the original instance where it got posted will have a complete reply set–and only if there are no suspensions involved. Some of this is fixable in principle, but there are technical obstacles.

Account migration is possible, but migration of posts and follows is non-trivial, Also migration between different implementations is usually not possible. Would be nice if people could keep a distinction between their instance, and their identity, so that the identity could refer to their own domain, for example.

Last, the issue with implementation compatibility. Ideally it should be possible to use the same account to access different services, and to some extent it works (mastodon can post replies to lemmy or upvote, but not downvote, for example).

Rescuer6394 ,

Only the original instance where it got posted will have a complete reply set–and only if there are no suspensions involved.

that should not be true. if all the instances involved in a comment section are fully federated with each other, the comments are the same on all of those instances.

things get complicated when there is defederation involved… but the base case is “everyone can see the same set of comments no matter the instance.”

is this correct or there is more?

Lucia ,
@Lucia@eviltoast.org avatar

things get complicated when there is defederation involved

More of that, only comments from instances defederated by your instance won’t be shown.

Feathercrown ,

Well, there’s replication lag of course, but afaik you’re right.

modulus ,

As far as I can tell, this is incorrect. If there’s a post on instance A, a reply from instance B, and someone on instance C follows the OP on A but not the RP on B, they will only see the OP without the reply.

Source: I very often notice this because I run a single-user instance, and when I open a thread it’s incomplete, lacking posts from instances that I have not suspended.

Feathercrown ,

Would be nice if people could keep a distinction between their instance, and their identity, so that the identity could refer to their own domain, for example.

This is one of the ideal use cases for Solid, in development by MIT and Tim Burners-Lee. Basically, you host a central store of data, including one or more user accounts, and allow access to it from other services.

aka_quant_noir ,
@aka_quant_noir@hcommons.social avatar

@Feathercrown @modulus

I'd be more comfortable with self-hosting my actual data somewhere, and just having an instance or the central store point to my data. I'd want to get to apply rules for who gets access to my data. It would be a lot easier to spin up a small data store with a few tools on it than a full instance.

mnrockclimber ,

This was the original premise of app.net - a social service from years back. They built a “social backbone”. They offered you a single place where your identity and friends were housed. Other people could build apps on top of the backbone.

So you would join say a clone of Instagram and all your friends were still there. And your account still worked. Or they had a Twitter clone. Same deal. It was a single sign-on social account/identity/social graph that was separate from the apps. So things could just plug in.

Worked great. But it was a paid service. And came out right at peak Facebook so it died off.

Feathercrown ,

Ooh neat. Too bad that it was paid. And centralized/private for that matter.

Danterious ,

No centralisation means there’s no canonical single source of truth.

I don’t think this is a bad thing. Having centralization leads to one narrative taking over the post. With more decentralization, there is a natural way for different kinds of conversation to take root.

Also, this is going to occur much more when people get the ability to block instances anyway.

RobotToaster ,

netsplits/defederation.

You can’t just tell someone to register for any server, and they will be able to see everything. So they then have to choose a server, which takes effort, and can cause analysis paralysis.

Lucia ,
@Lucia@eviltoast.org avatar

We can compose a list of instances with sane blocklists for each software and audit from time to time.

maynarkh ,

Yeah, but then the blocklists themselves become a centralized feature. I’m not saying “don’t block the fascists”, just that it’s going to be hard to maintain a blocklist.

I can totally see the Fediverse going the way of email, as in you need a reasonably large amount of capital to maintain a well-respected, not defederated-from server.

Lucia ,
@Lucia@eviltoast.org avatar

By ‘sane blocklists’ I meant small and auditable blocklists actually. There are instances like programming.dev, lemmy on sdf and the instance I’m on that don’t preemptively defederate from other instances. That’s what I meant.

Blaze ,
@Blaze@discuss.tchncs.de avatar

Could be interesting

maynarkh ,

I mean that Lemmy and the Fediverse is not big enough for Russian troll farms and US ad agencies to start up massive numbers of instances and drown us in bullshit, like with email. If it goes that way, blocklists will sadly not be enough.

Lucia ,
@Lucia@eviltoast.org avatar

I’m not sure how this hypothetical issue that may happen in a far future relates to what issue I addressed in my comment, actually.

poVoq ,
@poVoq@slrpnk.net avatar

fediseer.com can be used for something like that.

GadgeteerZA ,
@GadgeteerZA@beehaw.org avatar

Maybe that is exactly what we need to do, to spare them from the indecision. Recommend them to a specific instance to sign up and follow you (if in doubt, the instance we use). I suppose we can mention there are lots of choices, and those who are inclined that way will want to explore other servers, many are not, and for them pointing them at a server may be best.

I’m just thinking that trying to say there are lots of networks, each with lots of servers etc, may be the problem.

Alternatively, should ask them some questions like do they want to post short format or long text format, and take into account a specific interest they have, and then we still recommend a server instance to them to join.

So for fellow ham radio operators, I just pointed them all to the ham radio Mastodon instance and said sign up there.

danisth ,

The ability to “float” between servers would go a long way to improve this. Make an account on one server, then come across another that you vibe with more, and single button press and you’ve transferred. All you subs, comment history etc are preserved (for overlapping federated servers). No idea how to implement this, but it feel achievable, perhaps with a quick step to set up a new password and username if it was taken.

Blaze ,
@Blaze@discuss.tchncs.de avatar

Lack of documentation.

Recent example is Firefish. I love the platform, and I’m okay with discovering stuff on my own, but I can get why other people can be lost without exhaustive documentation

Kotking ,
@Kotking@mastodon.social avatar

@Blaze @ALostInquirer Yeah documentation is reaaaaaallyyyy lacking. Mastodon you kinda understand if you look enough, but Misskey .... If you don't use feature you won't find any information unless someone wrote a guide which is problem in it self as guides most likely are notes so it won't be easy to find one. Add to that error messages that don't explain problem, like why people can't make response to Kbin thread after some time(some did, some get error) https://imgur.com/a/3wjEcCb

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