this post was submitted on 06 Sep 2024
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Fediverse

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A community to talk about the Fediverse and all it's related services using ActivityPub (Mastodon, Lemmy, KBin, etc).

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[–] [email protected] 17 points 3 months ago (5 children)

It shouldn't be like this. If we keep treating the Fediverse as just a scrappy, amateur effort, it will never reach its full potential and it will be forever just a niche thing.

[–] [email protected] 23 points 3 months ago (1 children)

I actually kind of enjoy the "scrappy diy effort niche" thing.

[–] [email protected] 5 points 3 months ago (2 children)

it's fine if you want to have it as a hobby. It's not fine if you want to destroy Big Tech.

[–] [email protected] 23 points 3 months ago (1 children)

Well, I guess it's priorities. Destroying Big Tech would be pretty nice, but I'm really just here for the community.

[–] [email protected] 6 points 3 months ago (2 children)

Not to single you out, but this attitude is unbelievably frustrating. Everyone here loves to waste hours of their day signaling their virtue and complaining about all the evils done by the corporations, but so few are actually willing to put any skin in the game. they complain about entshittication from Spotify and Netflix, but religiously continue paying their subscriptions while refusing to support smaller, independent businesses.

[–] [email protected] 7 points 3 months ago (1 children)

I mean, you are not entitled to people being soldiers in your war against Big Tech. Like, I'd be totally for it, but some other time, nowadays I'm resting and being creative. Speaking of, not everyone here laps the crotch of Spotify et al. I'm a proud (but modest) pirate.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 3 months ago

I wasn't the one starting the protests against Reddit, and I am not the screaming at my computer whenever Elon Musk says something completely stupid.

I just thought that after all these years, more people have understood what "when you don't pay for the product, you are the product" really meant.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 3 months ago (1 children)

The fediverse will never destroy big tech unfortunately. In their worst case, they will incorporate it and easily dominate.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 3 months ago (1 children)

If not completely destroy it, at least make it irrelevant for those who want to avoid it.

The FOSS movement never destroyed Microsoft, but it arguably made it possible for us to live in a world where Bill Gates owned every PC software that we run.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 3 months ago (1 children)

In my opinion, the fediverse as it exists today is very vulnerable to domination by big tech. The only reason it hasn't happened yet is it is too small for them to care that much.

If the fediverse ever becomes mainstream, big tech will dominate it. If we want to fight big tech, we need to rethink our strategy and the fediverse, because right now, the fediverse is not ready to take it on.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 3 months ago (1 children)

How would that happen? If the core idea of "the Fediverse" is to have a loosely-connected network of servers and applications speaking a common protocol, how is it that they would use to "dominate" it?

I am not saying that Big Tech couldn't try to use it "open wash" their solutions, like Facebook and Google did with XMPP before. But what I am saying is that (like XMPP) I think it's virtually impossible for them to "dominate" something that is open.

I'm also not saying that the software we have is ready for the masses (it isn't) but all the issues I see are just a matter of implementation, not a fundamental design flaw.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 3 months ago (1 children)

There's several vulnerabilities:

  • the fediverse unfortunately remains quite centralized. Most users wanna join the big servers. If it wasn't for the big servers literally driving people away, we would've been even more centralized
  • most people have no issue with corporate presence in the fediverse. They're okay with blue sky and okay with threads. In fact, clearly Gargaron is okay with meta and threads.
  • big tech already has a federated server that dwarves the rest of the fediverse combined: threads. Yes it's still not quite there yet, but if they complete its federation, they will dominate it.
  • gargaron showed he's okay selling out to Meta. What prevents another instance admin? A corporation could easily offer enough money to a handful of instance admins and control all these instances.
[–] [email protected] 1 points 3 months ago (1 children)

This is not answering my question, or we have different ideas of what it means to dominate.

80% of email traffic is either Gmail or Outlook, yet none of Big Tech is able to control it fully. They can not force you to use their email server, and smaller providers still exist and are actually healthy business.

Is it hard to run an email by yourself? Yes. Is it impossible? Absolutely not. To me, that is what matters.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 3 months ago (1 children)

Then yes indeed were thinking differently. To me, email has already lost to big tech. The technical possibility of hosting email is there, but you can't even reach most users of the world without a lot of work.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 3 months ago* (last edited 3 months ago)

What is your idea of "a lot of work"? Because I am perfectly happy with my $19/year service from migadu.com.

[–] [email protected] 10 points 3 months ago (1 children)

But you can already see the hurdles of large instance like lemmy.world.

The costs are so immense (probably because of some unoptimized code), the software isnt "ripe" enough that it can be left alone for few months and have it run smoothly. It needs permanent monitoring and maintenance. And that doesnt even go into the moderation issues.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 3 months ago

Aren't you kind of making my point?

I am saying that the Fediverse will only be sustainable if everyone pays a little bit. Relying on a few generous souls to make up for the thousands of freeloaders will always take every instance to a ceiling which is, frankly speaking, very low. LW has 18k MAU. This number is laughably low for any social network.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 3 months ago (1 children)

I don't know exactly what happened. But I'm guessing he was doxxed and bullied by activists based on this post https://tenforward.social/@zyd/113086796304683411

[–] [email protected] 1 points 3 months ago
[–] [email protected] 2 points 3 months ago (1 children)

I totally get where they're coming from with that shutdown announcement. I've had to "talk myself off a ledge" a few times to not go the same route and shut mine down. Ended up making some server policy changes that helped, but there's eventually going to be something else later.

If we keep treating the Fediverse as just a scrappy, amateur effort, it will never reach its full potential and it will be forever just a niche thing.

What suggestions do you have to change the way we're treating/running it currently?

[–] [email protected] 1 points 3 months ago (1 children)

@rglullis @Rooki (OT: the last paragraph in the post has a couple of typos. I believe it should be TINSTAAFL (also I recommend making it an abbr for the less informed), and there is an “under” that should probably be “understand”)

[–] [email protected] 0 points 3 months ago (1 children)

"No such thing as a free lunch" (alternatively, "There ain't no such thing as a free lunch", "There is no such thing as a free lunch" or other variants, sometimes called Crane's law[1]) is a popular adage communicating the idea that it is impossible to get something for nothing. **The acronyms TANSTAAFL, TINSTAAFL, and TNSTAAFL are also used. **

You are right about the "under", though. I "accidently half a word", there. Will fix.

[–] [email protected] 16 points 3 months ago (2 children)

Then again, the Emacs server is not shutting down over costs. It's shutting down because the admin is tired of dealing with assholes on the internet.

Sure, you could pay people to do that as well, or maybe preferably, better tools need to be developed to ease the burden of individual instance admins. But this specific case is explicitly not about server costs.

"There's no such thing as free lunch" is a stupidity. There is. You have soup kitchens all over the world, the volunteers working for them do so because it gives them meaning, and they are often provided ingredients for free from supermarkets that would otherwise end in the trash.

It's a dumb metaphor that doesn't even work in the original example. There is more to life than capitalism.

That didn't mean nobody should pay. I make monthly donations to my Mastodon instance, and will probably branch out soon to support to other services I use as well. But everything is not always about money.

[–] [email protected] 5 points 3 months ago

Then again, the Emacs server is not shutting down over costs. It’s shutting down because the admin is tired of dealing with assholes on the internet.

Sure, you could pay people to do that as well, or maybe preferably, better tools need to be developed to ease the burden of individual instance admins. But this specific case is explicitly not about server costs.

Thank you for pointing this out

[–] [email protected] 0 points 3 months ago (1 children)

because the admin is tired of dealing with assholes on the internet.

You know another way to not deal with assholes on your instance? Charge just enough to make sure that people are minimally invested, and point them to the Terms of Service as the reason they are getting kicked out for egregious behavior.

maybe preferably, better tools need to be developed

If better tools was all that was missing, Big Tech would develop them and get rid of all these nasty meat bags. And as much as Google tries to do just that, they still hire tens of thousands of content moderators around the world for YouTube.

You have soup kitchens all over the world, the volunteers working for them do so because it gives them meaning,

The fact that things do not have a price do not mean that they are free. Somebody had to pay to get the food done and the volunteer can not take the hours worked in a kitchen soup and exchange for a discount on their electricity bill.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 3 months ago (1 children)

Why would big tech ever want to get rid of nasty meat bags when nasty meat bags drive much of their engagement and thus increase their advertising revenues? We can't escape the realities of how the human brain operates, how much it likes to be stimulated regardless of the qualities of the stimulus.

I think a much more logical goal would be to take just enough action to avoid most (but not all) legal consequences while otherwise encouraging as many nasty meat bags to encounter other nasty meat bags with opposing viewpoints as possible. That would maximize brain stimulation, increasing engagement and thus revenue. This improves the stock price and makes your boss happier with you.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 3 months ago (1 children)

Nasty meat bags I am talking about is human moderators.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 3 months ago* (last edited 3 months ago) (1 children)

Oh, I see. Still not seeing a big incentive for big tech, those meat bags are providing free labor. No strong need to replace them.

edit: Oh wait, you're talking about paid ones. Nevermind.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 3 months ago (1 children)

Free labor? Google/FB employ these people.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 3 months ago

Yeah I caught that when I reread your comment. I made an edit, just a little too slow.