this post was submitted on 06 Jul 2023

46 points (94.2% liked)

Programming

17373 readers

173 users here now

Welcome to the main community in programming.dev! Feel free to post anything relating to programming here!

Cross posting is strongly encouraged in the instance. If you feel your post or another person's post makes sense in another community cross post into it.

Hope you enjoy the instance!

Rules

Follow the programming.dev instance rules
Keep content related to programming in some way
If you're posting long videos try to add in some form of tldr for those who don't want to watch videos

Wormhole

Follow the wormhole through a path of communities [email protected]

founded 1 year ago

MODERATORS

[email protected]

How can we keep the fediverse federated? (programming.dev)

submitted 1 year ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

21 comments fedilink hide all child comments

I only partly live under a rock, so I've now heard that the Facebooks is making Threads, and it'll talk to Mastodon.

Any idea how to keep them from taking over? Apparently, you're a weirdo these days if you use Firefox, Brave/Qwant, and trust FLOSS > proprietary.

top 17 comments

sorted by: hot top controversial new old

[–] [email protected] 16 points 1 year ago

The best way is going to constantly remind people that there's alternative ways to see the same content.

Because most people are used to centralization and never ask themselves if there's different ways to access the same content.

Even on Reddit, where third-party apps were wildly popular, most users were still shocked third-party apps were a thing, and many didn't understand why someone would even want that.

It's not gonna work unless there's prominent users with loads of followers around to remind people it works more like email addresses than plain Threads handles.

[–] [email protected] 11 points 1 year ago (2 children)

https://fedipact.online/ for one, but it's important to realize Facebook isn't the only company that tries to pull embrace, extend, extinguish. Even lemmy.ml or mastodon.social (being by far the most popular instances in their networks) are vulnerable to compromise. It's up to the users to distribute themselves across enough instances that one individual instance can't call the shots.

[–] [email protected] 15 points 1 year ago

Also it would seem worthwhile not to create all the communities on just the most popular instances. Distribute the communities around too.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

Edit: this comment changed my mind. In a nutshell, if we can't keep a large instance controlled by "the enemy" from destroying what we've got, then we just have to do better next time.

Threads or whatever Meta might introduce is just a specific example of the problem with a controlling instance.

Bitcoin has to take steps to avoid a 51% attack lest the whole thing come crashing down.

Condo buyers have to make sure they are not buying into something where the developer keeps over half of the units as rentals in order to control the board.

I think the fediverse has to also guard against any one instance hosting too large a fraction of users. I'm not sure that it even takes being as big as half the users. I'm not sure what a critical mass would be, but I'm sure that a large enough instance could "go critical."

[–] [email protected] 9 points 1 year ago

i saw a quote today which said the grass is always greener where you water it; so i suppose, you should keep engaging with the federated communities you want to support. After all, Meta wants engagment so chose not to engage with what you dont believe in

[–] [email protected] 7 points 1 year ago (1 children)

It would help if the onboarding experience was smoother. Perhaps suggesting the ‘best’ instance based on speed, and if there are several randomize between the less popular instances. For normal people having to read about what an instance is and how to choose one will be a another barrier to entry, perhaps a deal breaker.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 1 year ago

Each instance should probably have a 2 to 4 sentence summary (maybe 240 character limit lol) that could be included there so people could easily compare the philosophy of those recommendations if they care to read it.

[–] [email protected] 7 points 1 year ago (2 children)

Mastodon is confusing. Facebook will make an implementation that’s more approachable. If FLOSS wants to win, it needs to be more approachable. Will they?

[–] [email protected] 7 points 1 year ago

I don't think so. FLOSS devs never seem to attract FLOSS designers. I'd love to collab with them, but they all seem to like designing not-FLOSS things.

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

Well the coorporations have always used/misused FOSS tech. Take Chromium and VSCode as an example.

This is exactly what is going to happen, you will not be able to separate proprietary crap from FOSS and it will be applied to fediverse in the same manner.

But there is a silver lining, all this will have a side-effect of normies knowing a lot about fediverse (for better or worse).

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Defederating is something at least. But in reality like all societal problems stemming from late stage capitalism, the only true answers are extremely illegal

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Who said we're in late stage capitalism? If you ask the libertarians, we've been out of any sincere capitalism since WWII.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

Yeah but we should probably ask people who actually know what's going on instead

[–] [email protected] 0 points 1 year ago (1 children)

We don't need to do anything. They simply can't. ActivityPub is designed that way.

[–] [email protected] 13 points 1 year ago (1 children)

This is unfortunately wrong. ActivityPub is designed much like email is. Yet virtually everybody uses Gmail and the standards Gmail enforces apply to everybody else through network effects.

load more comments