nicuveo

Friendly neighbourhood queer nerd.


DecayWTF
@DecayWTF

I wrote this over a month ago kind of blasting the Fediverse in its current form and never posted it because I realized I would be better served actually running an instance for a while before posting it. I have done now and... I stand by it.


ireneista
@ireneista

it's a good one. we encourage people to read it because it's important to have shared vocabulary when talking about complex issues.


Kassil
@Kassil

...is for the balance of users to energy to hit the spambot accretion level, when it becomes functionally viable to start mass-creating spam accounts on a given service, and how it'll hold against that. I'll be honest, I don't think the "fediverse" (which is a name I hate for a whole host of reasons) is prepared for the kind of bad actors who can and will spin up entire instances and populate them with faux accounts to leech and spam until they get sufficiently defederated, and then just close it out and spin up a new one, over and over.


ireneista
@ireneista

that, in the absence of a better plan, the "default" answer is going to be more centralization and hierarchy. then we're back where we started, except everyone is burned out.

it is really important to come up with a better plan before then. we would like to encourage anyone who sees this to start thinking about it.


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in reply to @DecayWTF's post:

The whole system of needing to solely trust the moderators running the node you signed up with really turns me off from the fediverse. It would feel a lot safer if you could be part of multiple nodes at the same time, so your entire fediverse existence isn't wiped out just because you pissed off a moderator, or there's infighting and the whole node gets deleted.

It just feels... off to me though, and I don't think I will ever be a heavy user.

I mean... On one hand I get that but in the other that's true of every system. I've been banned from Twitter nine times and at least with a small site you can appeal instead of it just being a summary judgment by an automated system, or some traumatized piece-work contractor in the Global South...

Yeah that kind of thing is totally unacceptable; Being banned by automated systems instead of just being flagged by them, or just being banned in general by some bad moderator for no good reason.

I've never had bad experiences with that sort of thing because I've never said anything controversial, but after hearing about your experience with it I can see how bad these systems are.

I had the assumption that, when people are hired to do moderation on a bigger platform, they would reign in their own beliefs a bit more. But, that was probably wishful thinking.

Risk-aversion and cost. Larger sites will always err on the side of kicking off a user; it's the same as DMCA claims on Youtube, they'll always err on the side of accepting the claim, because it minimizes risk. Anyone powerful or important enough to make trouble in that case can be treated as a special case (Trump not getting banned from Twitter until after the election, for instance) which is cheaper than spending any resources in the regular case.

It would feel a lot safer if you could be part of multiple nodes at the same time

You can very easily do this, and many people do, because being logged into multiple servers means that you can trivially switch between accounts (by, like, switching tabs) and clients like Tusky let you open something you saw on one account, as another account to e.g. boost it from there.

In this sense it mainly means being untruthful (although not necessarily outright lying) with intent to deceive, in this case about the limitations and issues with the Fediverse as it exists. I talk about some of the false claims and implications in this post, like the idea that decentralization necessarily means there are no powerful authorities when we know that the owners of the largest instances are de facto authorities because they can defederate small instances who don't toe the line. Other that come up are that if you don't like any running instances you can just spin up your own (while technically true in the broadest sense, it's not reasonable to do so for most people) or that the fediverse can scale to replace Twitter (again, only true in the broadest technical sense; in the long term, with a lot of engineering effort, it could, but it's not capable of doing so in its current form and realistically never will.

ok, got it

i guess i havent read much discourse regarding your points..

rather i think most of the time when ppl say things like "you can spin your own" they dont really think about what they are actually saying.

like an adult who hadnt had much experience with kids saying to a 5 year old to cut their own slice of bread.

while some 5 yo might be capable to do that, i wouldnt trust mine with a sharp knife just yet. i mean, i get what you mean but i think most often when i heard those points they were uttered not out of malice ("with intent to deceive") but out of pure dumb naiveté

addendum: but again, i say that from the "i read the websites and or documentation of some federated projects like friendica or masstodon" pov, as i havent had much discussions about the fediverse yet

in reply to @ireneista's post:

It's a problem more easily solved with a closed relay network instead of pure p2p, which has loads of other advantages as well. Unrestricted and uncontrollable peering is a choice, and a bad one, and layering another bad technology on top of the current bad technology is highly unnecessary when the correct solution is "make a better choice"