How to Kill a Decentralised Network (such as the Fediverse) écrit par Ploum, Lionel Dricot, ingénieur, écrivain de science-fiction, développeur de logiciels libres.
I feel that the large number of users is a problem, not an asset. What makes a platform good is the engagement level of the users, not the volume. A user who does not want to engage enough to create an account is not likely to be engaged enough to add significant value.
I moved away from Reddit because I don’t want to be part of one monolithic site, I want to be engaged with a smaller group that has more creative energy. There is no exclusivity clause that prevents people from using both sites and accessing all the content, but having them federated will lead to homogonisation and ultimately destroy what makes this site different. To extend the milk metaphor, we are the cream, mixing us in with the milk will make it richer, but destroy us.
I agree with your comments re: engagement and community. But Meta federating doesn’t impact that. Their users/communities will not suddenly become part of your local feed.
It is not my local feed that concerns me, it is the fact that we will become part of theirs. It will be like when a post is popular enough to make it onto the front page of Reddit - suddenly a post that was crafted for a local community, with users that have a shared culture and background, becomes exposed to a random audience including trolls and bullies who take 2 seconds to judge it and have no barrier to putting on their own comment and starting a pile on.
suddenly a post that was crafted for a local community, with users that have a shared culture and background, becomes exposed to a random audience including trolls and bullies
That is a good point, that I’ve not seen raised elsewhere. Though to an extent, it is already true when you consider the size of aussie.zone compared to lemmy.world for example. Threads will of course be orders of magnitude worse.
Besides the human impact of the negative interactions, the technical impact on the server of providing content for umpteen million Threads users is also a non-trivial risk. This alone is making me think defederation is the better option until Meta have a) released details on how they intend to not overload existing instances, and b) as @[email protected] said “Meta can prove they won’t hurt fediverse”.
Having said that, when Threads announce they’ll be federating I’ll put up some sort of poll to solicit feedback from the wider aussie.zone audience. I don’t want to be making such a major change without soliciting feedback in advance.
What does threads federating even mean for Lemmy? They’re a mastodon type platform they can’t see posts, they can’t follow communities can they? I understand mastodon and Lemmy are activity pub in the background and theoretically you can susbscribe each way but how do you actually do that and what does it look like.
How do I follow my mastodon account from here and vice versa?
I think this is a moot argument for now as meta aren’t making a reddit/Lemmy type platform.
I might not understand how federation would work but users from Meta will have to actively choose to follow an aussie.zone community in order for your posts to be visible to them on Meta Threads. Even then only that user will see your posts here. So the chance of your post here on aussie zone being visible to everyone on Meta Threads just won’t happen.
If my understanding of Federation is wrong then I’m happy to be corrected.
That’s not how it works with Federation with other Lemmy instances works, I don’t see how Threads users would have a different system. When I look at the feed with All selected now it gives me a lot of random stuff from other instances I’ve never heard of.
I see what you are saying. I’ve changed the settings to only show my subscribed feeds by default because as you said there is a lot of random stuff.
What you are seeing with “All” on aussie.zone is “All” of the feeds that users on aussie.zone are subscribed to. If no one on aussie zone has subscribed to [email protected] then it will never show up on anyone’s All while in aussie.zone. If one single user subscribes to it then it will start showing up.
So by default in “All” you will only see Meta communities if people here subscribe to them. The same will likely work the other way. Users on Meta won’t see aussie.zone communities unless someone there subscribes.
That said I wouldn’t put it past Meta to have “bot” accounts that subscribe to ALL communities on each instance. That sort of action would put a strain on these instances as all posts would go back to Meta. If they pulled that kind of trick then I’d be all for defederation as it would impact the performance and could indicate Meta are just scraping all content from every instance. They’d be pretty dumb to do that but I wouldn’t put it past them.
Do you think it’s something that they can defederate or block when it becomes a problem? Defederating this early in the game seems to be more about thinking that Meta will somehow control the Mastodon leadership enough that we won’t be able to do that later.
I feel that the large number of users is a problem, not an asset. What makes a platform good is the engagement level of the users, not the volume. A user who does not want to engage enough to create an account is not likely to be engaged enough to add significant value.
I moved away from Reddit because I don’t want to be part of one monolithic site, I want to be engaged with a smaller group that has more creative energy. There is no exclusivity clause that prevents people from using both sites and accessing all the content, but having them federated will lead to homogonisation and ultimately destroy what makes this site different. To extend the milk metaphor, we are the cream, mixing us in with the milk will make it richer, but destroy us.
I agree with your comments re: engagement and community. But Meta federating doesn’t impact that. Their users/communities will not suddenly become part of your local feed.
It is not my local feed that concerns me, it is the fact that we will become part of theirs. It will be like when a post is popular enough to make it onto the front page of Reddit - suddenly a post that was crafted for a local community, with users that have a shared culture and background, becomes exposed to a random audience including trolls and bullies who take 2 seconds to judge it and have no barrier to putting on their own comment and starting a pile on.
That is a good point, that I’ve not seen raised elsewhere. Though to an extent, it is already true when you consider the size of aussie.zone compared to lemmy.world for example. Threads will of course be orders of magnitude worse.
Besides the human impact of the negative interactions, the technical impact on the server of providing content for umpteen million Threads users is also a non-trivial risk. This alone is making me think defederation is the better option until Meta have a) released details on how they intend to not overload existing instances, and b) as @[email protected] said “Meta can prove they won’t hurt fediverse”.
Having said that, when Threads announce they’ll be federating I’ll put up some sort of poll to solicit feedback from the wider aussie.zone audience. I don’t want to be making such a major change without soliciting feedback in advance.
What does threads federating even mean for Lemmy? They’re a mastodon type platform they can’t see posts, they can’t follow communities can they? I understand mastodon and Lemmy are activity pub in the background and theoretically you can susbscribe each way but how do you actually do that and what does it look like.
How do I follow my mastodon account from here and vice versa?
I think this is a moot argument for now as meta aren’t making a reddit/Lemmy type platform.
I might not understand how federation would work but users from Meta will have to actively choose to follow an aussie.zone community in order for your posts to be visible to them on Meta Threads. Even then only that user will see your posts here. So the chance of your post here on aussie zone being visible to everyone on Meta Threads just won’t happen.
If my understanding of Federation is wrong then I’m happy to be corrected.
That’s not how it works with Federation with other Lemmy instances works, I don’t see how Threads users would have a different system. When I look at the feed with All selected now it gives me a lot of random stuff from other instances I’ve never heard of.
I see what you are saying. I’ve changed the settings to only show my subscribed feeds by default because as you said there is a lot of random stuff.
What you are seeing with “All” on aussie.zone is “All” of the feeds that users on aussie.zone are subscribed to. If no one on aussie zone has subscribed to [email protected] then it will never show up on anyone’s All while in aussie.zone. If one single user subscribes to it then it will start showing up.
So by default in “All” you will only see Meta communities if people here subscribe to them. The same will likely work the other way. Users on Meta won’t see aussie.zone communities unless someone there subscribes.
That said I wouldn’t put it past Meta to have “bot” accounts that subscribe to ALL communities on each instance. That sort of action would put a strain on these instances as all posts would go back to Meta. If they pulled that kind of trick then I’d be all for defederation as it would impact the performance and could indicate Meta are just scraping all content from every instance. They’d be pretty dumb to do that but I wouldn’t put it past them.
Do you think it’s something that they can defederate or block when it becomes a problem? Defederating this early in the game seems to be more about thinking that Meta will somehow control the Mastodon leadership enough that we won’t be able to do that later.