If Lemmy and Mastodon continues to get popular, we will eventually get Instance wars.
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.
1229
Comments440
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.
imma have undercover alts everywhere for the sole purpose of getting all the cats communities in one page.
My man !
Your legend well be carved into the pages of history as the first person to complete the catalog!
A man or sheer will and and an unhealthy amount of love for cat photos on the internet
One benefit that people don't talk about enough is it naturally tends towards smaller community sizes than in a centralized system which is a better fit for our tribal human brains.
We're not great with speaking into a room with 1,000 people in it, much less a million.
The problem is that it's worse for keeping topics centralized and fragments communities for external reasons. It's antithetical to the idea of a link aggregator where you centralize all of your news if you need to use several of them to make it work. Defederation should be a last resort to protect the admins from legal action, content manipulation, or brigading, not because beehaw thinks open signups harm their safe space. Making the internet a safe space is how we got to this point with Twitter/Google/meta/reddit, and everyone wants to do it all over again to rebuild their echo chambers.
Perhaps keeping topics de-centralized is a key part of keeping systems from turning tyrannical. That’s the theory behind the term “totalitarian”: that too much unification of thought produces behavioral restrictions, via the justification that if the truth of each topic is known and indisputable, then there’s no reason to share power in society as long as the person in power knows the One Truth.
Centralized systems designed to uncover one clear answer, such as stack overflow, have every reason to fight against redundancy in answers. Anything rightly called a community though should not be built around the (totalitarian) idea that conversations are best centralized and made non-redundant.
Big important questions need to be rehashed millions of times, not just covered once with millions of audience members.
99% of the content people post and interact with doesn't have a reason for multiple copies of it's conversation to exist. Most content is consumed not discusses.
Yet when a person arrives and asks a question they are discussing. If they wanted to consume, the could.
And the vast majority of the users consume the answers, not the discussion. They don't ask the questions, hey look them up, and if no one asked, or no one answered, they can't find anything and just give up. They don't ask.
And some of them don't even bother with trying to look it up. They just ask, because they like that method of getting information.
I agree, and I've already seen this happen!
One popular instance, Beehaw announced that they defederated from lemmy.world and shitjustworks to protect itself from an onslaught of new folks. Beehaw's admins say that lemmy.world and shitjustworks have let in a lot of folks who aren't well vetted and are the focus of most moderation action, so they're restricting access from those two instances.
And I'm over here on an instance with 600 users like, "Hm. That's a pity. Glad I'm not as basic as those poor folks."
I don't get how this is insightful.. The internet already has 4chan, okbuddyretard, whatever, people will always form communities
Damn, this actually made me feel chills. This is actually a universe in the making. It's new life.
That’s really freaking cool. I hope it plays out like that
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
Ya there probably will be, but in the end it doesn't matter which is the beauty of this platform.
True, and now that i've tried this, the "corporate" social networks feel primitive somehow.
Like going to Six Flags after your first Burning Man.
Cause I tried so hard ...
And got so far
But in the end
Lemmy.ml sucks
It doesn't even matter
c/lemmysings
I had to fall
No... No. No. NO!
Goddamit, the chains have returned
Singing chains are inevitable
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 get the sentiment and that is sarcasm and all, but this could still be hurtful to some people. Let's grow past dick size humor because I know that lemmings are better than that.
The way to get over something is to adapt, not avoid it.
It’s funny that dick size is a thing we care about. Some guys get big dicks, some get small ones, some guys let it define them, other guys don’t, some women admit they like big dicks, some don’t admit it, some actually don’t. Life is full of horror and it’s funny.
The more things you have to avoid the worse off you are.
Plus every time someone makes a dick size joke I think about randy marshs dick size formula. The time and effort he spend to make his dick be average size always cracks me up.
Like who cares about your dick size? Relatively few people get to see it anyways and if they judge you for it you're probably better of without them.
Humor police? No thank you…
I think there will eventually be a “safe space” subfederation for people with a fragile sense of humor. We can all coexist.
It's called beehaw, pretty much.
Yeah, question their morals or say they eat cats, lol
lemmy.world and lemmy.ml users competing whos the most generic NPC
pawb.social users not existing
lemm.ee and vlemmy.net users actually being based
I used to be an adventurer like you, but then I took an arrow to the knee.
Lemmy.zip users hoping the hamster has a few more months of running on the wheel to keep the servers powered until a new hamster can be purchased.
lol
feddit.de über Allen!
/s
I mean, we already see small skirmishes here and there.
As long as there are more than two humans left, we'll always find something stupid to argue about
Will not!
Will too!
I love Jacques Cousteau!
I guess Reddit is on a good track to eliminate flame wars.
"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!
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.
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.
Don't we kinda already have them?
Begun, the instance wars have.
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
https://github.com/maltfield/awesome-lemmy-instances
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.
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.
It's not a war...
I swear people here have no damn idea what they're talking about...
But it is competition. When someone separates themselves now they are competing for the resources they decided not to share.
It wasn't ever intend as a competition either. If they're feeling overwhelmed and want to separate from big instances for a while, then they should be able to. Everyone's taking it super personal when it's not meant to be.
Regardless of the intention, competition is competition. Two artists whose paintings hang in the same gallery are competing for attention.
Competition happens any time a resource is needed by both and not shared. One who chooses to stop sharing has entered competition. Unless they just don’t want the resources.
what about beehaw? i've seen it around, but know not of any instance wars.
Beehaw defederated from a lot of servers and nobody knows why.
Nobody? They posted an explanation lol
It made no sense.
It made no sense to you.
Did it make sense to you?
Yes. How I understand it they're trying to run a curated safe space over there but are finding current moderation tools insufficient to moderate the influx of users on certain instances. I believe it was connected to those with no registration verification.
They've said they don't want to do it, and once they're feeling able to take better control they will re-federate.
And, that's entirely their call. If their users want access outside of their walled garden they can make an account elsewhere. If people currently defederated from them wants access, join an instance still federated.
It's because they're lame.
Why is the Shower Thoughts community essentially meta discussion of Lemmy and not, well, shower thoughts?
Because lemmy is new and its one big circle jerk right now, and I like it!
Yeah peeps are in the honeymoon phase.
folks, I prepared the meringue and the butplugs, let's talk about lemmy...
Wait, what's the meringue for?
For your wildest dreams, buddy, for your wildest dreams...
(We lubricate the rattle snake with it, duh)
Now that's wild!
lemmy is too new for its users to have used the shower yet
Wow this is a shower thought itself 😂
Just be glad we're actually taking showers.
Because that’s all we thinking about in the shower these days. Clever things to say about lemmy on lemmy.
The showerthoughts subreddit was ridiculously overmoderated, so 90-99% of posts just get removed.
This one is basically unmoderated.
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.
The important thing here is to get back to social networks and away from social media. The important entities here are the humans, not the memes or the money or the uplems or whatever we eventually call them.
Humans connecting with humans in ways that advance our collective well-being is the promise of social networks that Facebook and Twitter started. Once they saw how many users they had (and the bills for hosting and coding) they got hyper focused on making money.
Hypothetically we can avoid that fate here by having the job of hosting and coding spread out among many. Especially if we also come up with a way to crowd fund the costs of hosting and coding.
Leading the pack: beans
Uplemmied you because yo make great points (and also because of "uplems", not gonna lie)
I can just imagine some controversial post and the replies saying “of course it’s a lemmy.world user”
I mean--that's kind of already happened, hasn't it? The whole business with beehaw defederating is really just the first shots of the Instance Wars, and that's not even mentioning the pejorative view a lot of folks have for some instances (ahem, furries). I was accused of being a right-winger for even broaching the subject that beehaw defederating might not have been for entirely altruistic reasons.
I think we can expect to see a lot more of this in the future, especially once corporate players throw in their hats and realize they can weaponize human sociology as part of their EEE strategy. Once you have most of the users and most of the communities, just wall off (defederate) anybody you see as a threat to hegemony. Sure, people can migrate, but there's a mental cost associated with that that many aren't willing to pay.
Begun, the Instance Wars have. Beans.
How do I get in on Team Beans?
Also, what's the deal with beans?
Your guess is as good as mine. It's basically a viral meme, far as I can tell.
Nevertheless, if you're wondering how you can get involved, don't worry. If you're here, you're already on Team Beans.
of course it's a comment by a reddhat.com user
it seems my prophecy has become self-fulfilled
Interesting to hear this from a dirty lemmy.fmhy.ml-er! 😈
It has already started :) I'd say around 60% of major instances block exploding-heads, burggit and/or lemmygrad. Lemmygrad and EH in turn defederate a shitton of instances as well due to ideological reasons. Most "civility" or "law" related instances block piracy instances. The dbzer0 piracy instance blocks anything seen as too right-wingy cuz the owner is an anarchocommunist or something. LGBT instances are blocking & promoting for other instances to block instances that aren't too friendly to LGBT or are simply not moderating or even promoting homophobia & related topics. I actually made a tool called federation-checker.vercel.app/ that checks where an instance stands in the federation "war", so I know what instances to register onto if I wanna see some content that has been blocked by the instances I'm on.
This very much feels to me like the beginning of a Civ game, where we're all fresh nations with different starting conditions that are exploring our territories and building up armies....
The first schism is gonna be fairly dramatic, I'll bet.
Then I'll going to self host my own instances.
I'm gonna host my own instance, with blackjack, and hookers!
This is the way. Freedom by design.
Most future proof solution, actually.
With blackjack. And hookers. In fact, forget the instance!
classy
Go for it, that's the beauty of this!
Its actually not that expensive especially if it is a small instance from my very small amount of research
Pretty grandiose to refer to discussions with a bit of trolling as a war.
Or, more likely, trolling with a bit of discussion.
You want a war, bruh? I'll fite you right now!!
I have been running a Mastodon instance since like 2016/17 and this has been quietly happening for the entire time I've been on the fediverse. (I can't check the exact date right now as I'm in the middle of upgrading it.)
Do you want to be in the Anime Girl Who Posts Nazi Memes Fediverse? How about the Queer Furry Fediverse? Or maybe you'd rather be in the Mocking Shitposts Fediverse? Perhaps you want the Everyone Has A Photo Of A Human And Thinks Federating With Facebook's Activitypub Is Actually A Good Idea Fediverse? Or how about the TERF/Gender-Critical Fediverse? Or the "Standalone" Social Site That Is Actually A Fediverse Instance With Federation Disabled And The Credits Removed In Violation Of The Source License?
Some of these Fediverses will happily talk with others. Some of them will rapidly defederate from others as soon as they encounter a place that clearly belongs to a Fediverse they are incompatible with. Some of them quickly get defederated from the Fediverses they are incompatible with. Some of them look at the #fediblock tag, some to keep aware of places worth pre-emptively blocking to make a chill place to talk, some to look for fellow people who have been cast out of someone else's chill zones.
It is absolutely already a thing
of course a lemmy.nz user would say that.
Spotted the Aussie
Screw you, you...
...wait. You're on my team. Rock on!
I wish I had responded earlier but my second neuron was on an OE in Australia. What's it been like over there with a whole second neuron?
Isn't it already? Lemmygrad, exploding-heads and other extremist instances have already been defederated. But the main feature is the federation itself, which also creates powerful alliances between instances with common values. Platform-wise, it will be just a matter of difference of use and leaning, but federation alliances will work the same
Instance meme wars.
Each participating instance must choose a "side" from a selection of political systems, religions, world views, etc. whose views it (the instance) has to represent.
The war takes place in a community that is unlocked for all instances, or on a separate instance.
All instances are listed and numbered. The opponent allocation is then done by a /random bot number generator.
The evaluation is then done by a /Poll of all instances.
The loser is kicked out and the new opponent for the winning instance is chosen again by /random bot.
sounds lit. do you all take butter and salt with your popcorn?
Have you tried nutritional yeast?
I'm sorry, but I read that and thought "marmite on popcorn?!"
And I found that idea intriguing.
Not quite the same thing as Marmite. Might be a North American thing?
https://www.amazon.ca/Bragg-Nutritional-Yeast-Seasoning-Premium/dp/B00EHVN1S6
Ah, thanks! I'll be on the look out for this.
It's quite tasty and if one is feeling very generous it could almost but not quite be a substitute for parmesan cheese.
I've also seen it referred to as "nooch" in certain contexts.
hippy
Hah, guilty as charged...
When you play the game of instances, you either get popular or you die. (I don't think that it's going to work that way, but with enough popularity corporations are gonna want to fuck with it for sure.)
Die? What is it with assuming that small instances will inevitably die? There are people out there who want small instances, they will keep them alive.
Somehow, taco bell will win this war, too.
In the year 2027, Tacobell, after buying 137 lemmy instances dedicated to food, coordinated an ideology attack and bought the last fast food franchise in the world, pizza hut, in what is known as the franchise wars.
Taco Bell and Pizza Hut have been under the same corporate ownership for decades, tho. Pepsi spun them out in 1997, fully 30 years before your dystopia.
Taco Bell and Pizza Hut are already owned by the same company, so maybe the wars have already begun
They out pizza'd the hut.
I truly hope this type of hierarchical thinking can stay fun and not create the kind of grating pomposity that pervades every bloody animalistic thing. I want us to grow beyond childish competitiveness.
Lemmy.world or bust
Please do instance wars also on PeerTube, it's noone land right now.
The problem with transitioning from YouTube to PeerTube is that without a critical mass of users it's just not worth it for creators. But without creators the users won't go there, because there's no content.
Lemmy has that problem to a much lesser extend because this kind of platform is way more focused on the interaction between users. Or put differently, everyone is a creator here.
A tool that uploads and updates videos across multiple platforms while syncing descriptions, tags, etc is something that would be incredibly handy for creators while also being something that PeerTube could piggyback off of. "Why not upload my video to another platform I've never heard of? It can only lead to more exposure."
You are right. Lemmy and Mastodon are user-centric while Funkwhale or Peertube are more on the artist/creator. For this reason I encourage people to use these sites, supporting artists who decide to use these platforms.
I would prefer people to be spread across different forums and form their own identity
This is the way. After seeing how lemmy.world handled the load, I created a new account on another instance with less people.
I would prefer people to be spread across toast.
Because people are my jam.
SA vs Fark vs Ebaums all over again. Can't wait.
Only if the instance wars are described with a star wars screen crawl
E X P O S I T I O N
Does it really matter? So long as they remain federalized you can still access and interact with those instances.
Federated*
Thanks, language confusion
True, but i think that it could as well come to "if you're from this instance you are a bad person" situation. I don't care like you say, but some people will.
I kind of disagree, not totally, i agree in the fact that freedom breeds assholes, but i have to say as well that freedom breeds freedom and better and more intelligent people as well. I don't think that we need witch hunts or bulllying to build safe instances, just intelligence. Now my opinion about your last point is that there's hate speech everywhere, not just from your right, your left is pretty extremist as well, and pretty full of assholes. Assholes are everywhere. As always, the rule of thumb is think for yourself and don't be an asshole. All that said, this is just my opinion man.
I have no objection to freedom itself, I object to that freedom being used to turn vulnerable people into domestic terrorists.
The reality is that this kind of absolutism simply doesn't work. While on paper it would be wonderful if we could scrap every law to maximise personal freedom, we all know that doing so would just hand society to arseholes.
While it's technically possible that it could turn into a witch hunt or bullying, it's more likely to be used as an excuse by the arseholes.
There's no shortage of people on social media claiming "the left just call everyone who disagrees with them nazis" while simultaneously spouting opinions that perfectly align with the opinions neo-nazis have held for 40 years. Only the vocabulary changes, morphing from "undesirables" to "SJWs" to "woke".
Often, it's not a honest mistake either. One of the most popular topics in far-right Discord channels is "how to redpill people", which involves strategies like obfuscating their actual opinions and playing the victim.
Sure, but let's not pretend they're in the same league.
Tankies can be assholes, but they're pushing communism because they believe it would be a better, fairer society for everyone, despite it usually ending in corruption, starvation and executions.
Meanwhile over on the far-right, genocide is the point. They think that society would be better for them if they could kill and enslave minorities and women. That's a level far beyond calling people names.
Sounds good, doesn't work. That's why COVID saw reactionaries pushing conspiracy theories that could have come straight from Elders of Zion and spitting in peoples faces.
The wider net you let them cast, the more vulnerable people they'll catch.
Unfortunately true!
And, centralization of users and communities to any one instance increases the risks of power grabs and attempts to monetize
Now that you mention it, yeah I can see that happening.
I can imagine other instances defederating from each other over minor or uncontrollable reasons. I'd hate to keep switching to new instances if that were to happen.
That's also a fair point, although I hope most serious instances only consider defederating from another instance as a last resort.
so the owners and mods of instances will have to compete to provide a good experience. I don’t see a problem with this
I remember the war between /r/me_irl and /r/meirl back in the day on Reddit
Me_irl gang for life personally 😤
Were there mailserver wars?
Yes. In the mid 90's, anyone with an AOL or Juno email address was a noob. Many people on the internet had .edu email addresses, because it was pretty hard to get internet access unless you were affiliated with a university. The rise of Hotmail and Yahoo mail ended up removing the association between email address and internet service provider, to the point where people who were using ISP-provided email addresses by the early 2000's were seen as unsophisticated and usually older.
And now my parents won't change ISP because they don't want to change email addresses
TIL, thanks for sharing.
As long as there are individuals, groups will be sought after and created based on the need of belonging and the need to different from another group
A lot of comments are assuming a negative outcome but there could be some fun and positive 'wars'. Best Instance Photoshop Battle anyone?
You can host your own instance too.
Forgive my ignorance but if you federate an instance, does that instance have to federate you back? In order for you to comment/upvote/see posts etc?
Nope, assuming the default settings - that is, they've not explicitly decided to allowlist selected servers or block yours - there's nothing that instance has to do if you subscribe to a community on it.
They'll push content to you and it just magically works.
TLDR: federation is basically a push from the origin server (the one the community belongs to) to any server that subscribes to that community.
If I made my own instance with only me as a member and I only subscribe to showerthoughts.lemmy.fmhy.lm then that's the only community/push update my instance would get?
Yep, you'll only get content that someone on your instance has subscribed to, so if that's the only subscription that's the only content that'll show up.
Where can I read about this architecture?
I'm not the right person to ask.
Where could I go to learn how to host my own instance? I’d be interested if I could control my own up time and be the only user so I didn’t have to worry about moderating other users.
Go to https://join-lemmy.org/ and click on
Run a ServerI'd start googling.
Absolutely. I don't think that's a bad thing.
What I do worry about somewhat is multiple forks of the codebase that differ so much as to cause bugs when instances try to interoperate.
I just hope that most people will be open-minded and that most instances will federate. But that's probably being optimistic.
No, this is exactly what will happen, though there will be bubbles of similar minded instances, no doubt, but given the federate nature of this all, I don't think someone will make their instance incompatible to the rest, except of course some corpos get their hands on it... looking at meta
I thought they were only temporarily defederating from World because the mass influx of users was fucking up their servers and capacity to moderate
From what I've read you are right, it should be temporary.
Does this mean lemmy gets less totalitarian as it grows, due to the increased cost of trying to cut ties with people?
Or, just make it fun friendly competition and start a quiz show like tournament of teams from each instance, no need for war.
Reminds me of the good ol IRC days.
IRC was fun, then people chose corporate poisoned simplicity (AOL, MSN) and that spelt the doom for protocols, until now.
Because you’ve been down that road, Neo, and I know that’s not where you want to be.
The kids just don't know the struggle
Tbh I’m still confused on the differences and have literally zero attachment to the one I chose
It's mostly political and some about gatekeeping.
Same lol idk what the hell is going on here
I have accounts on 3 instances.
BeeHaw, which I moved because they refused to allow people to make communities.
Lemmy.ml, which seems to always be down now, or throwing a ton of errors.
and now lemmy.world, but I don't see myself staying here because I know some instances already have defederated from .world (like beehaw) and I don't like that I am missing content from "major" instances.
I might just make my own instance so I can see all posts and don't have to worry about the instance being down for days/weeks.
Can we just go back to BBS where you have dial in with your land line to post on a board? The difficulty of use acted like an awesome protection from any community growing too large too fast and was super easy to moderate. I just want to pull my socks up to my knees, yell at the clouds, and dial in to the NG BBS...
Already in it. Where've YOU been? I'm in the trenches here for lemmy.one
I mean there were subreddit wars so i think it is bound to happen.
God, I never thought of that or I would have transitioned here months ago to start prepping.
Start editing those memes and stocking up on beans.
You never know what the other side might weaponize.
Good. This is what free speech looks like contrary what the muskmen think. Anyone can start and share but no one's entitled to be listened to.
Technically Truth and Gab are activitypub compatible right? We can already fight with them
You mean this is built on an open standard that can go beyond lemmy?
How about a red-blue team style hacking tournament, but battle royale?
Eventually? We already had that two weeks ago!
https://lemmy.ca/ Best instance in NA.
I rolled my eyes at the idea of instance wars. Then I saw this post claiming that my instance is the best, and I almost upvoted.
Take this as a stark reminder that a monster lives in each of us.
https://midwest.social can't beat the great lakes.
It's like consolewars (fuck Nintendon't) but more federated.
def prefer small batch instances, keep it wierd
I only use ethically sourced, farm-to-table instances.
Nothing like good doers to make the world go around.
I only consume memes in sub-Dunbar communities where each person has achieved at least a red belt in karate.
Same, i think i'll always be with the weird friends.
This is the way!
Maybe that would be a good community. You know, like 2westernEurope4u but instance-based memes and banter.
I really hope that it'll be something we'll be able to avoid. We're all on the same federated system, we don't need to do this pointless "I would listen to you but you're a instance.lemmy.com user" unless they're from an instance that supports hateful content.
I suppose the crux of the matter is what each person thinks hateful content is.
I think the even deeper cruxxity crux of it all is whether a person is willing to handle their own content filtering, which requires themselves to expose themselves to content they don’t want as they evaluate content, or whether they want to be completely protected by some external system which makes those decisions for them.
In the first people must encounter shit they don’t like. In the second they don’t need to, but the system can make them blind to content that might be good for them.
It's so dumb, yet it's so natural that even knowing it's dumb sometimes people end up devolving into tribe wars by complete accident.
And then some do it because it's the easiest way to get people to do what you want to them to do. It's definitely best to try to keep it in the back of your mind as much as possible to avoid falling into the habit.
One of the most enjoyable bits in REAMDE was about how the users of an MMORPG split into two warring factions over whether they preferred the default color palette or a custom version.
Got a linkie? I wanna read details
It really is weird to see the default to tribalism rear its head as it's happening
So I shouldn’t make a post asking which is the best lemmy community under 1k? I am tempted to create like 10 accounts and just hang out in these local “slow” communities.
For the most part, you can browse different instances from any of them. You can make accounts on others if you particularly like the community or interface, but you don't get much of an advantage.
I don't know, but that's what i did my friend. I come from a pretty small instance.
What's the Gentoo equivalent of an instance?
Just some blood for the Blood God, only natural.
Big instances are gonna have the most easy victims you know.
Mastodon is on a decline already. It is different than, say, Lemmy. Mastodon's contents are produced mainly by mainstream content creators, and they do not migrate from Twitter its counterpart.
Friendly discourse. If it gets bad maybe instances might black each other.
I think it would be better if everybody selfhosted a instance of their own. Make it super hard and complicated to find communities but, keep things nice and clean
Yeah we need an opt-in central registry of communities and people.
The instance drama is kinda fun tbh
It's like instead of getting mad at reddit/Twitter, we can talk to the people who run the communities directly (usually)
There will be local culture but there won't be a war, since admins will likely defederate instead.
Then the Highlander games will begin.
"...eventually..."
It's already starting.
Garden Wars, more like
Obviously lemmy.robotra.sh is the best one because it's mine and only people I know can be there ¯\(ツ)/¯
I hope a couple instances are made specifically to go to war with each other.
May the odds be ever in Kbins favor
Who cares, you're still interacting with a Lemmy instance.
I’ll be here like, Dormammu I’ve come to bargain
thanks to the federation of communities, nah.
test reply
Test reply to your reply
Test reply to your reply reply
Test reply to your test reply reply
"instance wars" is more than a little dramatic.
People will have a preference for different instances. No biggie.
I'm counting the days until all of the "Major" servers (sh.itjust.works, beehaw, lemmy.world, etc.) have a struggle session over whether to defederate from "tankie" instances (lemmygrad.ml, and ironically since the devs are MLs the dev instance lemmy.ml).
He's got an instance with a nail in it...
error loading comment
I actually had an idea with instance wars but for like photoshop battles or some other competition where the two versions of the community battle each other to one up each other. Only problem is I am not sure what sort of competition to make.
An embarrassing rap battle
I think we'll gravitate to our own tribes. R/Donald fans will hang out on one instance. BernieBros on another.
Decentralisation means we'll be in our own bubbles more.
What was good about Twitter and Reddit was that it was the Agora, the commons, where you bump into others who really need you to see their cats or Excel art while you browse for your own picadillos.
The difference between the Agora and reddit was that you could be banned from reddit without any major violation.
I’m sure rights were relatively constricted in ancient Greece but nothing like what we find in privately-owned cyberspace.
And reddit is still there, for those who want the Agora. I personally was banned from reddit so I’m very happy to come to a place where it’s harder to ban me just because I don’t conform.
Until someone is willing to build a centralized place that is devoted to free speech, siloing is the price to pay for the architectural decisions necessary to permit all voices to participate.
True, your twitter example exemplifies it for me. When i used it a lot, like 7 years ago, it was for knowing and meeting people in my zone and interest range. Now it feels like tik tok. It's so unpersonal.
Kbin for the win
Lemmy all the way!
Cool, yet another shard
Naah we'll be the referee :)
This is an avengers level threat
@[email protected]