this post was submitted on 21 Oct 2024
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There are a large number of unanswered questions about the Fediverse. I don't just mean questions that users may have, but questions for which no suitable answer exists yet. Some are extremely abstract and existential like "will the Fediverse survive the next decade?" Other questions are very concrete like, "What is the copyright status of a federated post?" or "What are the moral implications of federating content that may be harmful or recording a crime?"

I wonder, for those of you who stay up nights thinking about the Fediverse, which question is the most important to you?

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[–] peopleproblems@lemmy.world 1 points 15 minutes ago

If the current leading theory of dark matter being a fundamental particle means that there were "two big bangs" why would the dark big bang have to appear second?

[–] socsa@piefed.social 13 points 2 hours ago (3 children)

Who is actually funding lemmy.ml?

[–] lugal@lemmy.world 6 points 2 hours ago
[–] Track_Shovel@slrpnk.net 1 points 1 hour ago

Why is this a burning question? I see a lot of people complain about ml, but I haven't had any issues with users or their communities; though the latter I've had sparing interactions with.

[–] the_artic_one@programming.dev 1 points 1 hour ago

When will the amount of spam and astroturfing outpace the glacial development of moderation tools and destroy the whole thing?

[–] imaqtpie@sh.itjust.works 27 points 4 hours ago* (last edited 4 hours ago) (4 children)

I'll never stop wondering why this guy was trying to not poop for 3 days.

That mystery still keeps me up at night sometimes. Looks like that account got deleted so it will probably remain unanswered.

[–] Track_Shovel@slrpnk.net 2 points 1 hour ago

I'm going with fuck-tent

[–] Badabinski@kbin.earth 4 points 2 hours ago (1 children)

God, what a wonderful thread that was. I've decided to follow and star @mizu@lemmy.world so I can follow up on their future exploits.

Sadly, it doesn't appear that they've posted in quite some time. Hopefully they'll come out of hiding one day and ask more ridiculous questions.

[–] imaqtpie@sh.itjust.works 1 points 2 hours ago* (last edited 2 hours ago)

It seems they deleted their account. But yeah that thread was really funny, the responses were good too

[–] DmMacniel@feddit.org 5 points 3 hours ago (1 children)

And it coincided with the small scale mutiny by Wagner against Putin.

[–] can@sh.itjust.works 2 points 3 hours ago

Did it also coincide with Hajj?

[–] rimu@piefed.social 7 points 2 hours ago

Scalability. Federation adds overhead that increases as the number of instances increases. It is unclear to me when we will hit a wall but it's probably not far off.

How will we pay the bills. Some instances get enough donations to pay server costs but none get enough to pay for staff or developers.

Both of those are only really problems if the fediverse grows, which it hasn't for a while now. But that could change at any moment.

[–] shinigamiookamiryuu@lemm.ee 3 points 2 hours ago

Can it run Doom?

[–] hendrik@palaver.p3x.de 7 points 4 hours ago* (last edited 4 hours ago) (2 children)

Is it part of the same dynamics as mainstream social media? Meaning, can we make it substancially better than Twitter, Reddit & Co or do we always have some baseline negativity and not so great group dynamics?

[–] JubilantJaguar@lemmy.world 4 points 2 hours ago (1 children)

Conflating Xitter with the R-site seems a bit harsh. One is a bubbling morass of incivility and lying, an infernal radicalization machine, the world's virtual toilet wall. The other is a generally successful community whose control structure is excessively private and centralized. That's the way I see it, anyway.

[–] hendrik@palaver.p3x.de 1 points 2 hours ago* (last edited 2 hours ago)

Sure. X is a toxic mess. And has been for quite some time. Whereas I kinda liked the community on Reddit. Quite some nice people there and good conversations. Unfortunately the company behind it likes to F their moderators and users. Kicked them out for speaking up, made the platform worse and Apps don't work anymore. And they put in a decent amount of effort to specifically F us over, so I left. But I get what you say. That's not the community's fault.

[–] brucethemoose@lemmy.world 7 points 3 hours ago* (last edited 3 hours ago) (1 children)

I'd wager that enshittification is inevitable, but the Fediverse can "live on" between cycles because instances or even entire systems can go down while new Fediverse ones take their place.

[–] AndrewZabar@lemmy.world 4 points 3 hours ago (1 children)

Plus, fediverse clusters can break apart like tectonic plates and become continents if any serious barriers need to happen. It might happen over time if any instances start to specialize. Never know.

[–] hendrik@palaver.p3x.de 2 points 2 hours ago (1 children)

I'd be a shame if it really broke apart. I mean that would be more a De-Fediverse. Like all the Discourse forums where I need to open up every single one of them to read what's new, because they're specialized and not interconnected in practice. I'd advocate for the instances to still interconnect while doing whatever they want. And giving more control to the individual user. Ultimately... it's complicated. We have things like (instance) local timelines in some federated software. And it'd be great to have distinct Lemmy places/instances. One for political debate and news, one dedicated to Free Software... That's kind of what communities are for. But it's the same people in all larger ones. And the instances all look the same, and topics and interests are not part of the onboarding process. So people currently end up on some random instance.

[–] brucethemoose@lemmy.world 1 points 1 hour ago* (last edited 1 hour ago)

What's to stop people from making "tunnel" instances, maybe even with reposts?

That aside, ultimately, we're at the mercy of whoever is paying for the instance, and their interests. So if everything does fragment, it's just kinda the nature of the hosts.

[–] savvywolf@pawb.social 3 points 3 hours ago (3 children)

Will the Fediverse switch away from ActivityPub to ATProto?

[–] imaqtpie@sh.itjust.works 3 points 3 hours ago (1 children)

ATProto is what Bluesky uses, right? It'd be nice if someone could give a quick summary of the features and what differentiates it compared to ActivityPub.

It seems like it would be a pretty big task to switch from ActivityPub, because each fediverse project would have to implement that independently.

[–] savvywolf@pawb.social 3 points 2 hours ago* (last edited 2 hours ago)

There are a number of features that make them different, but the major one that makes me favour ATProto is that it gets around the centralization problems of the Fediverse.

I'm @savvywolf@pawb.social on ActivityPub, this means:

  • My identity is linked to pawb.social. That means that if someone falls out with my admin over something, I get blocked as fallout.
  • Likewise, if my admin falls out with someone else and blocks them, I have to follow those decisions.
  • My data is stored on pawb.social. That means that if the server gets shut down, even with warning, poof! My data is gone.

In addition, there isn't any way to transfer data between ActivityPub instances. Sure you can set up redirects in Mastodon, but there's no way to actually transfer information or history.

There's really no reason these three things all need to be managed by the same entity (pawb.social in my case).

Under ATProto:

  • My identity is handled by DNS. I control my domain name, so I control my identity and reputation.
  • While this isn't battle tested yet, ATProto (or at least Bluesky) has much better support for blocklists. Individual users can create their own blocklist and share them with others. So Bluesky itself doesn't need to ban other instances unless they start doing really illegal things.
  • My data is stored on Bluesky's servers, but I can easily move it to another server if I need to without breaking anything (I think? ATProto nerds, is this true?).

If I don't like the way Bluesky is going I can just... Leave. I can move my data to another platform and log in to another frontend. All without my followers even noticing a difference or losing any content.

It also has some cool features. For example, there's this thing which allows you to just set up pronouns so that they are visible on your own profile to other people that use the list. https://bsky.app/profile/pronouns.adorable.mom All implemented without any protocol extensions.

[–] JubilantJaguar@lemmy.world 1 points 2 hours ago (1 children)

Are there insurmountable technical obstacles to supporting both? Serious question.

[–] savvywolf@pawb.social 1 points 2 hours ago

I don't think so - there's already a project that bridges between AT and AP, so in theory it's possible for that to just be pulled into Mastodon proper.

However, that's not to say it'll be easy. It'll be a years of work with lots of challenges and drama.

[–] 9point6@lemmy.world 1 points 2 hours ago

Both are in the fediverse, perhaps think of them as distant galaxies