maegul

Yea, generally fediverse projects have moved slowly. Mastodon has basically the same problems AFAICT despite being bigger and wealthier.

In a way I’ve been wondering if the fediverse is a kind of trial run for modern open source culture and what it can do other than packages for specific languages without the sponsorship of big corps. So far, it’s been really cool and super easy to take for granted. But also revealing I think in how hard it is to get things going when people need to make a living and everyone expects the internet to be free.

The performance implications of the protocol have been an elephant in the room for sure. I’ve never seen anyone do any sort of analysis.

And its quality as a foundation for a federated ecosystem seem definitely questionable. Especially as its main champion, Evan, seems super defensive about it and the idea of upgrading it. Sadly, it seems they’re an older tech person and see the protocol as their life’s work. So any proposal for starting again just runs into resistance. That there’s a weird cult around the protocol doesn’t help either.

As for the lemmy devs being antagonistic to contributions. I’ve heard that too but am suspicious. I’ve certainly seen 3rd party contributions go through. The whole image deletion episode was bad though. They even admitted to it to some extent.

I used to think they were way too “cranky” … but I’ve actually come around to the idea they push about not being too demanding of open source devs. It’s a serious issue with burnout being real and sustainability being vital for the fediverse. I was an early firefish user and saw that whole team, instance and project implode from the inside.

Would the devs be better at community management with proper salaries and community support and donations? Prob not! But some form of community manager could probably go far (even now if anyone is up for it) which seems viable if the support base got bigger.

I’m personally hoping to try to contribute by sometime this year, so I guess I’ll see how it goes and let you know if you like!

With the other group based platforms coming along (piefed and nodebb and maybe sub links) I’m hoping it becomes a richer part of the fediverse.

Ah yes, simply block every user from .ml it doesn’t stop them from influencing the discussions happening in your instance’s communities and the culture of your instance.

I feel like this is problematic ... every user? That's necessary or warranted?? That there are so many of them and that it's hard to do undercuts the idea that it would be warranted. It's just way too likely that there's a diversity of users which makes this unwarranted. Which is exactly why defederation can be abused, especially when it's done by large instances.

Part of the idea of the fediverse is community building and grassroots social media infrastructure. If there truly are problematic users, that's what moderation and reporting is for. If you aren't happy with your instance's or community's moderation, then you likely either need to help or move.

Otherwise, encountering people you don't like ... feels to me like it's part of social media (to an extent of course). It's not like you could block all the subscribers of a sub-reddit over on reddit(am I wrong on that?), and I fear defederation is too often weaponised by the overzealous. Blocking all users of an instance over "they're influencing the culture" just smells off to me.

partly because I’m scared people will start blasting RSS spam everywhere and it will be my fault.

That is fair. Might be worthwhile talking to instance admins and core devs about how best to make use of it? Putting it behind some admin approval or administration might be the best way.

There was an instance a while back that was dedicated to something similar. Their system was to define the feeds themselves without any real user input, and it never really took off.

Maybe a dedicated instance that provides more user control but is also set up to control and limit things could go a long way? One basic control might be limiting usage to user accounts older than a certain threshold. lemm dot ee does this for image uploads (4 weeks minimum age).

But I took from a few conversations that some people like to browse the “All” feed. I still don’t get it.

Yea, I was surprised to learn this too. I don't know the numbers but I'd bet it isn't insignificant. I learned of the practice from a thread of people recommending to others that they use "All" and block all "the bad instances" to "clean it up" ... and I was just kinda shocked at how much of an indifference to the design of the system and all of the community management and moderation all of the mods do not to mention an abuse of the federation mechanics to just block whole instances on a whim.

There have been suggestions and new ideas. But usually they don’t get implemented. Maybe they’re just not that progressive. And a few attempt I read about were really radical in re-defining social media.

If it's not too much to ask ... do you have any descriptions or links or clues to see more of this?

And I think we’ve already learned a few things in the time Lemmy has been around.

Generally, there are quite a few people who feel this way about the fediverse as a whole. The sorts of people who are open to seeing all of this as an opportunity to make some progress on what "big social" did (perhaps like you and I). I've connected with a few in my time here (mostly over on mastodon) and the general feeling I've picked on is that all of this (incl the protocol itself) so far is a good "first step" or "prototype", but that moving on to the next step and taking stock of what lessons have been learned could happen soon-ish.

The RSS not seems cool! Is that open source some where?

The RSS feeds thing feels like a good one.

Additionally, some feature where you can start a community but define it simply as a combination of RSS feeds … essentially a feed aggregator. But one that others can share and subscribe to.

I think a bot could handle most of that.

Hackable front end is interesting. You can already run multiple alternative front ends. Lemmy world offer 5 I think. Then, they just need to be scriptable if that’s what you want.

Restyling the default one seems to be common though

They need to get moved off to proper instances

I mean … why? That’s a lot of work and carving up the network … for what?

How about moving communities off of lemmy world onto proper decentralised instances? Cuz it’s a real problem that world people are happy to defederate and cut plenty of users off from their communities. That maybe they don’t appreciate the value of decentralisation and slowly pushing a federated system into merely a monolithic Reddit alternative. That maybe they’re too happy to shape the network into a reflection of their mainstream politics however much it unconvinced others across the network (which is perhaps a very spec thing to do?)

Which, BTW, lemmy ml has never done … they federate widely, have never called for defederstion from lemmy world (interesting that world would defederate first!) and never wanted to be the biggest instance despite they easily could have been.

Seems like maybe some basic moderation at the community level is all you’d need. Maybe some better tools could help … in which case spell out what that’d look like.

Moving whole communities because you don’t like some people … is a lot … and quite rich for someone on world. Maybe those communities are happy where they are (as I’m sure those on world are) and building and organising a better more flexible network is the answer rather than all of us trying to push it into the shape we want.

Yea … I can’t shake the feeling that there many who have a kinda “echo chamber” instinct with their idea of what a platform like this is for. Which I get. They want it to be a nice doom scroll I guess.

But I wonder if there should be a real counter to that instinct and if it should be given a clearer form and identity. My rant about the value of federation as an ideology for better social media is maybe a possibility.

But the point is that there are many I think who aren’t on board with trigger happy defederstion (the voting on this post is an indication) but don’t get much of an opportunity to make themselves clear.

just want to add some nuance to this.

All good and cheers!

But we just have these blunt tools and lots of fine granular tools that would be able to actually tackle the issues are missing on Lemmy.

Tools could always be better for sure! This is still beta software after all! And the fediverse ecosystem is still finding its feet.

That being said … isn’t subscribing to communities a pretty good tool already? I ask because it strikes me that many here might be talking about the “all” feed. If so, that’d be a case of people just not using the tools given to them (and also an abuse of this system frankly).

And I think we should revamp some other aspects too to foster good behaviour. I don’t see things change substancially, the way it is.

Think I’m totally with you there. The fediverse for me has been a bit of a let down in terms of how much it has just recreated big social platforms without more experimentation. It’s early days and all so I don’t want to be harsh on all the devs. They’ve done great things. But it does feel like some basic revamping could be quite nice.

Tankies are fascists.

From what I’ve seen around here, this just isn’t true and seems more like anything “extreme” and not somewhere closer to the middle is bad.

Defederation might be part of that

As you say, it's a very blunt tool and likely only able to create more civil interactions by creating a fairly strong echo chamber.

My perspective on "defederation" conversations, hinted at in my comment above, is that it's a new "tool", a new phenomenon etc. Nothing like it existed on reddit for example. And so it's natural that there will be "unwise", premature and overzealous calls to use it as though it's the solution to many of our social media problems, when in reality it's a relatively subtle tool best used in concert with active and relatively sophisticated community building and organising.

Which all makes sense to me. But what's a little sad I think is that we have here a pretty good compromise between "absolute free speech is bad" and "censorship is bad" for social media, and instead of embracing it as an ideology we've gotten some loud voices eager to use it as a territorial weapon for drawing boundaries around spaces for everyone else without, AFAICT, much the same in the way of actually building spaces that suit people's needs (though that happens too of course).

If one wants or needs a space that is shut off completely from what one would call "extreme" politics, that's totally fine. Doesn't mean all of lemmy world and half or more of the communities on lemmy should be cut off in a big "us and them" statement. Instead ... you probably need an instance that caters to that world view. You may need to try to start organising it yourself if it doesn't exist. Except, that's harder than posting a "lets defederate" post.