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.
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.
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 don’t get how this is insightful… The internet already has 4chan, okbuddyretard, whatever, people will always form communities
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.”
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
imma have undercover alts everywhere for the sole purpose of getting all the cats communities in one page.
A man or sheer will and and an unhealthy amount of love for cat photos on the internet
My man !
Your legend well be carved into the pages of history as the first person to complete the catalog!
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.
Just stay away from Lemmy.nz we…I mean they are VERY southern
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
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.
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.
Begun, the instance wars have.
Too late, it is.
What about the defederation of the wookies?
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.
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.
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.
That’s totally something a kbin user would say.
I’m new… What are Beehaw and kbin?
Beehaw is a large lemmy instance which is notable for defederating from some other large instances recently due to their own admin policy. Kbin is an alternate federated platform similar to Lemmy, and the two can mostly work with each other.
What are instances and federations?
I just thought that it was Reddit, but with a different backend. But people are talking like there’s more to it than that…
There’s so much more to it than that, but I’m too new and generally technically inept to properly explain it
Ok so Lemmy itself isn’t really a single app or service like Reddit, rather it’s a software project that people can run on their own servers. It’s a bit like email in that regard, anyone can run an email server, or you can just join someone else’s like Gmail (think of instances as being like these). Instances can have their own rules and customisations, but they all still talk email (in lemmys case, something called activitypub) and work together, and you can send and receive content from other people even if they’re on a different email provider (lemmy instance). Federating is basically two different instances agreeing to connect and share their content with each other. This generally happens by default. Defederating is the opposite, deciding to stop sending and receiving content from a particular instance.
Email is also a federated platform just like Lemmy. You can have email clients that talk to email servers, but “email” itself isn’t really an app you can just run, it’s a collection of apps and servers that all work together. Lemmy is very similar.
Also worth noting, the language (or protocol, to use the technical term) that Lemmy uses to talk between instances is called ActivityPub, and a whole bunch of different services such as Mastodon and Kbin use this! Together, these services are known as the “Fediverse” and the really cool thing is that they can all talk to each other because they speak the same language! If you want to, you can technically browse and post on Lemmy from Mastodon, and vice versa, even though they’re completely different services. While it’s a bit tricky with Mastodon since its much more like Twitter than Reddit, Kbin works really well with Lemmy and is generally interchangeable. People on Lemmy can join in on Kbin and vice versa. The whole system is really neat and if it sounds interesting, you should absolutely google it some more and learn all about it! It’s a community project so if you like it and want to get involved, you can help create any part of this from contributing to Lemmy’s code to running your own instance.
Thanks for the explanation and the time taken to write it.
I’m starting to figure it out as I stumble my way around it. For example I’ve found that Lemmy.World (my ‘home’ instance) isn’t big on NSFW stuff, so I’ve made an account on another instance and linked the two.
Thanks again!
Is kbin not an instance of Lemmy? As in, using the Lemmy source code?
Kbin and lemmy are different implementations of the activitypub protocol https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/ActivityPub
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.
Thanks God.
It’d be cool if you could make a graph analyzer with this. It’d be a little more complicated, but it may be useful for choosing an instance.
Explain. Like basically order by who has defederated the most and stuff like that? I did wanna add how many users are blocked by each instance and by how many users they are blocked but I forgot and am too busy to even edit the code anymore. Just worked 12 hours today and I’m still so far from completion.
Have each instance be a node on a graph, linked to all other nodes it’s federated with. Basically a way to view federation islands.
The fact that things get divided up by the community itself is a positive, not a negative. The “major” network of instances don’t have to put up with extreme things on any end of the spectrum while those who do want to take part in that get their own bubble and won’t have to cry about censorship.
Tldr:
Bigots are getting shunned, and cops are ignoring crime
Way to completely misread I guess. Bigots are defederating, cops are defederating, pedestrians are defederating, ants are defederating. Everyone and their mom is shunning and getting shunned except like a tiny couple kinda major instances and some of the smaller one that just don’t care and don’t cause any waves. Some of it is ideological. Some of it is personal. Some of it is prejudice. Some of it is about URLs or simple disagreements.
Hey, that’s a really cool tool! Thanks for creating and sharing it!
federation-checker.vercel.app
That is pretty cool, but uhh maybe not user friendly. I entered “lemm.ee” and it says “Not a lemmy instance”.
It would be cool if it could pre-enter the HTTP referrer, then typing might not even be needed.
I know that the url part is fucked. I did it fast and I knew what would happen as I coded it. I 100% know it sucks ass lol. It is what it is until I get help or time to fix it.
lemm.ee crew represent ✊
It’s a buggy thing lol. I made it very fast. I am very busy nowadays. I can’t bother to edit it much. I would appreciate PRs. My github is lemmygod. If you have any knowhow, any help is extremely welcome in these days of dayjob exhaustion. :)
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
deleted by creator
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.
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.
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 have been trying to browse Peertube every night to find a few creators to subscribe too. You are absolutely right. On many instances, it is a ghost town.
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.”
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.
thanks to the federation of communities, nah.
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 are already owned by the same company, so maybe the wars have already begun
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.
They out pizza’d the hut.
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)
