atomicthumbs

remote sensing practicioner

gregarious canid. avatar by ISANANIKA.


Website League address
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twitter but hopefully i only post photos there in the future
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Website League (centralized federation social media project)
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88x31 button embed code
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forest.stream (general admission website league instance)
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bluesky (probably just for photos)
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this will be a cohost museum someday
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tef
@tef

Let me preface this by saying: I'm pretty sure mastodon will tick along, much like usenet, myspace, IRC, bebo, orkut, livejournal, or even dreamwidth as long as there's an admin with enough spare cash and time. It obviously works for some people, and I can't deny that.

On the other hand, the illustrious technical aim of a purely federated world being the dominant form of social network just seems a little naive at the best of times, given past examples.

This post is about the social and the technical problems with a federated model.


qualia
@qualia
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in reply to @tef's post:

The nicest thing about posting this on cohost is all of the people who'll get really mad about it won't use this website because it's not free or federated enough

Great post, really well put regarding the perspectives vs reality on autonomy in instances. I'd not thought of the server-load type aspects of federation from a technical standpoint over and above the mods/admin as single points of failure.

Not just the weird fetish for self reliance, but the load bearing obliviousness to power structures

This is such a perfect way to put it.

You have a great point about federation mostly being an ideological cause, and it tracks with the way they all mostly respond the same way whenever someone brings up any problem with the model

Gooood post. I have a nice time on Mastodon, but I am also very aware of the limitations around it.

I am happy with things existing for ideological reasons, mind - ideology is useful! like, Cohost comes from a place of ideology, too. So does <thing I'm working on>. Ideology by itself isn't necessarily bad, although obviously some ideologies are.

But I would also say that I do see people advocating for federation for ideological reasons that are in opposition to the libertarian crypto trust no-one view point - instead focusing on building networks that are human scale and operate according to trust relationships which are formed by interactions between people. Federation does support that model! But I don't think it requires that model, and I think some of the dynamics you outline can push it away from that and make it less viable.

One thing I also think a lot about is the way that running an instance well depends on having two skill sets simultaneously: Linux server admin & community management. I'm not saying that these can't co-occur in the same person... but it's definitely rarer than either one of these existing independently. And a network that's built on volunteer labor from the people who have both at once...

These are all good points.

I do feel like the "mastodon nice interest" servers aren't about "building the federated web", but online spaces for existing communities. Some of them use discord, some use mastodon.

It isn't so much about the ideology of a federated social network.

I guess my point isn't so much "Ideology bad" but "Don't expect people to use things if you don't make better products"

Yeah, and I think the really big trend in social networks rn is the shift away from public forums to smaller communities of trust, this is flowing downhill.

I think the thing specifically that ideology wins for Mastodon is giving all of these server admins/community managers a strong reason to do the work of running instances & fixing stuff with the software. It spreads out the costs to people who want these servers to exist rather than advertising or whatever complicated revenue model Discord has. Mastodon is free if your instance admin's time has no value, etc etc.

I do think federation has one major social advantage here: the ability to localise moderation decisions to a smaller set of people. A big company is always going to be a big tent, and that means things like Twitter suspending people for “threatening” celebrities or Facebook helping perpetuate a genocide.

Mastodon has some serious problems (some mod having a bad day can delete your entire social network!) but I think devolving choices about moderation and culture is a net positive.

Of course, technical federation isn't the only way to do this - reddit's moderation policy scratches a similar itch I think. But at some level a community needs to be small enough to make human-scale decisions.

This is my take too. It's why discord is so popular - anyone can make their own server that serves whatever tight-knit group they have. Fundamentally, I think moderation works best when people responsible for it are embedded with and have rapport with the community. At larger scales, moderation lacks context, isn't on the same wavelength as the people they're moderating, and makes everyone mad through inaction, heavy-handedness, or both.

Oh, sure.

Although the "anyone can rock up to your instance without an account" thing does make moderation harder

and having different moderation policies between instances is really only effective when those instances do not allow crossposting.

Federation is inherently awful at moderation. Because ultimately moderation is an N/M problem where N is the number of users on the entire network and M is the number of moderators on your instance. (This is why no IRC network retains the model where each individual server operator makes their own moderation decisions, because a K-line that is not a G-line is meaningless. All of the "instances" pool together their moderation labor resources, at the 'cost' of having to unify their moderation policies.)

Twitter suffers from N being too large, but M being too small has exactly the same effect: the solution becomes - must become, as the problem reaches any meaningful scale, blocking entire instances for the crimes of some, or even one, user who is tolerated by that instance's own moderators, because that is the only way to make N smaller in a way that makes it remotely commensurate with M.

Instead of having single-sign-on and a "anyone can post to my service if they're federated" system, i'd rather have a series of smaller forums and social networks I have to sign up for individually, and a client that let me post to any of them—much like how multi-protocol instant messenger clients worked back last millennium.

god, please. pouring one out for trillian, adium, and gaim.

thanks for sharing this, tef. so many other parts i could pull-quote back at you like "yes" but i'll save that for my own notes 😌

I'm... not sure I really agree that small, independent forums aren't an ideological cause that people care about because federation is the new hotness? It's just that those have been completely replaced by large corporate players in the last decade, and any interoperability that was available was killed off when it no longer suited them. Yes, it makes sense to them from a product development perspective, but I don't think it makes the lock-in somehow excusable.

Ultimately I think federation takes that idea of smaller independent communities and tries to reconcile it with the network effects of centralized services, which are clearly more popular for a reason. How successful it is... well, that's another story.

There's a world of difference between the people saying "come join our special interest forum" and "you should move out of the corporate data silos and toil the land" sure

it's funny that you mention things making random additions to the protocol and format because my own mastodon feed occasionally has random markdown shit in it from people using instances that support it, meanwhile it just shows up as garbage elsewhere

similarly with a feature one place added that let you make infinite-length posts, turns out there was no way to view them from other servers if your account wasn't public lmao

You can release new features but you might end up breaking old clients. On the other hand, when you control the server, the client, and the protocol, it's a lot easier to build out your product and release new features.

It's funny, without any bad intentions this keeps happening on Mastodon with the primary instance. Since the same entity controls the main implementation of Mastodon, the instance with 50% of users on it, and the official web and mobile clients, they tend to push out features fast that have major impacts on the rest of the ecosystem. I don't think this requires malice at all, just power structures, and those power structures naturally formed.

I think I was leaning >:| for a bunch of this because I was misreading where it was headed, since I've been arguing for "Protocols not Platforms" for a long time, but I actually agree that end clients that support multiple protocols is the ideal.

I do think this downplays how much capture and capitalism is involved, but I think that it's a more realistic target to hold up as the ideal. Because even if you do have unique networks pop up who want to have their own protocols for whatever reasons, having the expectation be interaction lets social media users get behind pressuring them to make that protocol accessible for the community to interoperate with.

Unfortunately, [a series of smaller forums and social networks I have to sign up for individually, and a client that let me post to any of them] isn't much of an ideological cause, so none of the nerds are that interested in making it happen. Federation is so hot right now.

I don't think this is true.

First off, Twidere does exactly what you're suggesting for Mastodon API servers and Twitter.

In a more general sense, this is exactly how I, and many people, use Mastodon. I have Tusky signed in to four Mastodon instances with different accounts catering to different communities (or audiences, in the case of my more professional account) and following different people. Most Mastodon API clients, even web clients like Pinafore, support this extremely well, including allowing you to do actions as another signed-in account if you see, say, a post that would be great for your aesthetic blog while signed into your professional account (and, without federation, this would be impossible most of the time). A small community admin can run Mastodon or Pleroma or GoToSocial the way you suggest right now, with dozens of clients available, just by turning off federation.

If by "forum" you specifically mean message board, you're still in luck; ActivityPub folks are working on that too. There is an in-progress Lemmy phpBB-like frontend, and since it's a standalone frontend, support for multiple communities with one frontend is very easy (though I stress, this project is quite new). Given that you're okay with people self-hosting their fora, this seems like a pretty good solution.

I think we can have this particular cake and eat it too.

I am uncertain to what your post is trying to accomplish especially with your last line:

I think we can have this particular cake and eat it too.

And then tef saying as much here:

I'm pretty sure mastodon will tick along, much like usenet, myspace, IRC, bebo, orkut, livejournal, or even dreamwidth as long as there's an admin with enough spare cash and time. It obviously works for some people, and I can't deny that.

I don't read a disagreement here.

Your examples match up with theirs in spirit. You can have your own garden with its own interoperability and federation capabilities complete with your own rules which can be contrary to other services.

I'm responding to the idea that federation's recent rise in popularity is sucking the air out of the development of these kind of systems. That's why I quoted what I did.

I think that the best implementations of what @tef is talking about, right now, are ActivityPub servers - even if you just want to turn ActivityPub federation off. We can have software that is federated when its operators want that, but with the option to disable federation, and both sides can benefit. That way, these projects don't have to be implemented for both use cases.

Cohost itself is a great example of this! Were I to implement something similar, I would have done so as a frontend atop, say, GoToSocial or Mastodon, and just deployed it without federation. Among other things, it'd mean I would have existing, open source codebases for really good clients on just about every platform, that I could modify with whatever additional features I wanted.

things do not scale that well when every instance has to cache a large chunk of the network in order to function

This is such a big problem in Matrix.. like Matrix is awesome otherwise, it has a lot of polished clients and tons of features like properly multi-device e2e encrypted private messages. But it always has performance issues that no other chat system has ><

Who will this reply to? hmm.

I personally think this is a good critique of the more ideological leanings toward Mastodon / federation. OP is probably correct that their wish list version at the bottom, where everyone's separate forums can have an interop client, would be strictly better. My response to that is: if you want that, go build it? The hard part is really getting "everyone" to agree on the interop standard.

IMO the biggest win of Mastodon, etc. is that people are agreeing on the interop standard, not the federation bit. I think you can run an instance and mostly treat it as your own server that happens to let you follow people on a shit ton of other similarish instances. If that breaks down at some point you might see people sharding the thing out, but is that really so bad?

That being said, to me as a user it's mostly moot to my enjoyment of using the Mastodon server I recently joined: the way I use it basically treats it like its own independent forum that happens to have some weird connection to a twitter-like thing. Hopefully none of the above problems break this enjoyment in the future.

I appreciate this post. I've lived through a lot of this myself and the arguments I hear today for [insert service name here] were the same I heard when I formally entered the tech sector in the 2000s.

XMPP was probably the best we ever had for a recent-ish interoperable and federated service, but when it became reliant on Google as it was the largest elephant of the pack, its days were numbered because the average person doesn't give a shit about what is under the hood. Can you still chat on GChat with other people who have Gmail accounts? That was all that mattered.

Many, many organisations who too used XMPP (Cisco for example) have since abandoned it for general communications because when 95% of the user base evaporated in one single commit, why bother?

Mastodon and everything similar to it will exist for its niche users, but the general population wants a telephone and not a telegraph because it's easier to just dial a number and talk rather than learn a whole new language to use a tool.

Instead of having single-sign-on and a "anyone can post to my service if they're federated" system, i'd rather have a series of smaller forums and social networks I have to sign up for individually, and a client that let me post to any of them

Even with this "federation" I have to do this right now because every single thing the people I care about are moving to except cohost requires me to sign up on them anyhow because all of these various instances are blocked for whatever reason, for something as petty as "this person and I dated and they're on said instance so the whole instance is blocked"

I'm stuck having to choose what circles of friends and folks I care about the most and it's enough to make me throw my hands up and say "fuck it" and just wait it out for maybe a year or two knowing I may never have the opportunity to talk to people I care about ever again, because someone I don't know is mad at someone else I don't know and now someone I care about is locked behind yet another walled garden.

Your post is incredible, and honestly sums up entirely why I don't think federation is a good idea. It sounds incredible in theory but in reality the decentralization just leads to inconsistent experiences for everyone involved, even with a standardized protocol (because, as many engineers do not realize, there's more to the experience than that).

Honestly I feel like the insistence on federation may be harming adoption of certain FOSS services, but I cannot speak as to that. Perhaps someone else could point out if this is really the case, or if it's just my bias?

FWIW, I recently had an idea for a federated network that might actually work, because it's actually limited in knowledge and computation needed at each node. I'm currently calling the idea "The Dungeon", but I may switch to "Dante" if I feel like it, because it's sort of structured like descending into an upside-down, pyramid-shaped Dante's Inferno.

The idea: there is no separate client. You install the client/server, which has no additional dependencies, and it becomes a small pyramid-shaped chatserver with 1 + 4 + 16 rooms and a hard cap of 16 people per room, maybe less if you want to use fewer resources. Each room has 5 exits: four "down" for each cardinal direction, plus one "up". You can link the "up" of your top room to a "down" of someone else's server, but only with their permission (achieved outside of the network). Your server knows and persists shared secrets for all servers it has ever been connected directly to, and each room has three slots for persistent messages ("scrawling notes on the walls to your fellow damned souls"), with each new note beyond 3 overwriting the oldest, and you can ban people from entering your server based on the path from their home server to yours.

(Note that a path is actually just a string of bits, since each level has exactly four "down" links i.e. two bits of data. You don't really need to know which rooms are on which servers when banning, since your path is relative to the top room of your server.)

Beyond those three pieces of information, absolutely nothing is persisted, so the storage requirements are simple and backups are mostly unnecessary except for well-connected instances higher in the pyramid.

If the per-room or per-server limits are exceeded, it triggers an "eruption". Basically, people in the affected server get flung out the server's exits more-or-less at random, with the probability of an eruption going up faster as more people are present, frequently triggering chain reactions if that part of the network was too packed. Rooms toward the bottom of the pyramid would, I imagine, naturally tend toward in-depth conversations on heavy topics with people who know what they're talking about, while rooms higher in the pyramid would naturally tend toward arguments and, perhaps, actual healthy exchanges of ideas. But with a max audience of you, the person you're shouting at, and 14 other people.

TL;DR: kind of a federated MUD/MUSH/MOO thingy, but built on the idea that "hierarchies of communication are good, hierarchies of status are not good, and hierarchies need to have consent via boundaries and banning".

OTOH, this idea came to me while I was outrageously stoned, so maybe it's useless.

I'm unfamiliar with federation and have not used Mastodon myself, so this was mostly educational for me. Galloway coauthored a spiritual successor to Protocol, entitled The Exploit, with Eugene Thacker, and I think it tracks along with the last half of the OP and comments on how these networks grow.

Networks are multiplicities, not because they are constructed of numerous parts but because they are organized around the principle of perpetual inclusion... Perhaps this is what it means to be a network, to be capable of radically heterogenous transformation and reconfiguration...

A network is, in a sense, something that holds a tension within its own form -- a grouping of differences that is unified (distribution versus agglomeration). It is less the nature of the parts in themselves, but more the conditions under which those parts may interact, that is most relevant. (The Exploit, pg. 60-1)

I also think Tung-Hui Hu's A Prehistory of the Cloud is a good book for anyone interested in further discussions on networks and ideology. (Although, it's more focused on state power and subjectivity, and it only brings up what we might call hacktivist libertarianism or whatever.)

Great post. The background here is really helpful as someone who never meaningfully used IRC, although I do think I tried Trillium at one point for AIM maybe? But there's a lot of protocol history that I'm completely oblivious to.

Federation isn't about giving users freedom, it's about giving nerds a sense of control.

This is definitely the feeling I get from Mastodon. The BDFL sysadmin approach makes me increasingly uncomfortable in a way that Twitter, with its regulations and shareholders, never did. I could trust that they were doing something to address e.g. harassment even if it wasn't especially good, because it's bad for the business not to.

I suppose you could say the same about Facebook but there's a reason nobody is talking about Facebook as an alternative to Twitter.

Anyway, forums live and die. Maybe that's why it's uncomfortable to try to replace the social network that's done way more for my career than LinkedIn ever did with a couple of docker containers running on a Linux box under some person's desk. Twitter wasn't some niche forum, it was my home.

I've been hypothesizing recently about a well and truly distributed social network that's basically just "souped up RSS feeds with a webapp that's both your RSS reader and your blog's posting interface", and I really need to think about if it'd actually solve many of the problems that come with federated-but-not-distributed social networks like ActivityPub.

I've recently gotten into RSS feeds and starting a blog for the first time and I think it would be neat if it was all one thing. Though a lot of the appeal to me RN is that feedbin can parse all the established entities like twitter, Tumblr, reddit, and YouTube.