this post was submitted on 05 Jul 2023
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No Stupid Questions

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So considering there’s a substantial push to get away from places like Reddit and Twitter, as an outsider I’m wondering how the fediverse is going to actually provide solutions to some already bad problems within higher resource platforms:

ADMIN/MOD ABUSE: Redditors are no strangers to mods/admins nuking comments, astroturfing, signal boosting/silencing, and so on. Doesn’t that problem just become worse in a federated system? As an example, a subreddit mod may ban users for whatever reason, but a lemmy instance admin could drag all their communities into their own drama if they choose to defederate, no? Losing access to entire instances instead of just one community/subreddit based on a power-tripping admin seems a big flaw. Am I missing something?

REPOSTING/X-POSTING: Reddit was already just the same tweets posted to like forty different subreddits, recycled weekly. On lemmy, there are now a handful of instances that contain virtually the same communities too. The lemmy.world/c/memes and lemm.ee/c/memes communities will post virtually the same content. And that’s just one. Aren’t feeds going to be overrun by duplicate posts in /All?

PRIVACY: I have no clue about this… are there extra security or privacy issues with something like lemmy?

SERVER ISSUES: This kinda goes without saying, but a small instance will already struggle to host even their own local users as traffic increases. Communicating across more and more instances is going to be extremely taxing. Access issues/desyncs seem like they’ll be inevitable. Doesn’t a federated system have more trouble scaling up than a centralized one because of this? How could small independently run servers keep up with exponential processing costs? Won’t this just squeeze out smaller instances? Add this to issues when instances choose to defederate, and you have two competing incentives: spreading out users to keep server stress low, and centralizing users to keep local engagement high. Isn’t this kind of a big hurdle?

Sorry for the wall of text- excited about lemmy in general but really have no idea about whether these are issues.

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[–] [email protected] 21 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (1 children)

A single "entire" instance being ruined is a much smaller problem than a whole platform.

As for the duplicate community problem, I would love to see either a multi-reddit-like feature or the ability to merge/co-mingle "duplicate" communities across instances.

The solution to tyrannical mods or admins is simple: "take your ball and go home" by starting your own instance, or your own community on a separate instance. That said, instances and communities grow by growing trust between users and mods/admins by a track record of acting in a rational and trustworthy way.

Privacy is definitely a problem for Lemmy. You should assume everything you post or comment is public and in the open, and impossible to fully delete, because it is. Post accordingly. You could theoretically be identified by the sum total of all personally identifying information you freely post over a long enough time or by your writing style if a government considered you a real threat.

That said, many instances do not even require an email address. I don't know whether instances store data like IP addresses, but you could check the lemmy source code to find out.

Edit: But also, who's to say their server source code is unaltered? Federation lives and dies by trust and mutual cooperation, and that cannot be guaranteed.

[–] [email protected] 6 points 1 year ago

Fair enough- losing a whole platform is the reason a lot of us are here.

Though I do think that smaller instances with flightier admins are going to experience this issue more frequently. This leaves exclusive communities in the lurch for discoverability if the admin pulls the plug. I’m no server admin expert so I have no idea if this is even a thing, but it’d be cool if communities could choose to be hosted under multiple instances at once. Even just one “secondary” instance that only retains a portion of the activity would help, both with engagement and keeping reposts low.