James R Kirk

“EEE” doesn’t really make sense in this context, and even if there was some way for Meta to affect non Meta-owned instances- ActivityPub is an open protocol and Meta is allowed to use it however they want.

Got it, very interesting! I look forward to it being worked out soon, Wordpress federation is awesome.

Still not fully integrated, but it’s nice to see broader ActiviyPub adoption beyond “follow a handful of users who opted-in”. I never expected Meta to be the company inching towards federation and not bluesky. Makes me wonder if Tumblr will ever follow through with their promises to federate.

edit: To the (sadly predictable) response that “Meta will screw you over in a heartbeat” YES, of COURSE they will, that’s why it’s GOOD to be able to access Threads content safely and privately from a non-Meta controlled platform.

This is great, I just cross-posted it to !fedibridge@lemmy.dbzer0.com hopefully someone can post it to Reddit. It’s really nice to see a intro to the concept of the fediverse that doesn’t get bogged down with technical details.

It got cloudy

Not liking someone is not a good reason to root against decentralized platforms, IMO. The entire point of decentralization is that nobody gets to control the experience and who is/isn’t allowed to participate.

Unless he joins fedia.io you don’t really get a say in what he does… kind of the entire point behind decentralization…

It’s also an avenue for attacks.

When using the official Mastodon app (as suggested in the “guide”) “instances” are not a factor at all (unless the user specifically goes out of their way). A new user could have never even heard of the term “instance” and the above steps would work fine.

You don’t just download the app, create an account, and go.

Actually with Mastodon this is literally how it works.

EDIT: I should say this is how it works now, it didn’t always used to be this way. The official Mastodon app used to ask the user to pick an instance, but for a number of years now it defaults every new account to mastodon.social unless they opt out. There was a big brouhah about centralization but the Mastodon devs felt it made for easier on boarding.

If an instance has a lot of spam, admins tend to notice and block it. In the future it’s likely admins will have more tools too, but for now the system works pretty well.

I agree with your overall sentiment but also literally 100% of BlueSky users are on one instance.

BlueSky is not federated. Also German users have outsized representation on Mastodon but most of the network is outside Germany.

Yes absolutely, and that’s why I don’t think commercial social media will die. But I do think it will come to more be associated with activities gambling or vaping.

There will always be two types of users: people looking to connect and people looking to be entertained. Fedi is better at the former and commercial better at the latter.

People get so weird about Dansup.

If Mastodon/Fedi was at the scale those platforms are we would see more harassment, absolutely. It remains to be proven but I think federation enables a lot more eyes on content which implies harassing material can be removed more quickly.

Federation/decentralization solves a lot of problems over centralized social media, but ultimatley you can’t engineer human nature.

I had a response typed out but have a question, is this feature pulling in comment feeds from every community the instance is federated with? Or only from communities the individual user is subscribed to?

Don’t get me wrong I am a huge fan of Piefed overall. I think you misunderstood my second point a little, I don’t want to be “exposed to new things” in my social media per-se, I want to read my chosen subscriptions (with my chosen social groups) and move on.

I see the “issue” of “divided” communities coming up a lot. But to me, the variety of perspectives and moderation styles on the same topic is a major benefit of the Fediverse (to the point I might describe it as its greatest strength) especially when it come to non-technical or social topics like politics. For example Lemmy.ca users are going to have very different perspectives about US politics than Lemmy.us (hypothetically). I’m not sure that it benefits those users to centralize the discussion (not saying that’s what’s happening exactly but it is something I see come up a lot).

Two reasons:

1. There are many steps between “I never wish to see any unmoderated content ever again” and “I wish to see unmoderated content in my feed every day”. I don’t want to block Lemmy.world communities but I also will go insane if I read those comments every day.

2. I can’t know what those communities are in advance of their being inserted. I don’t want the default option for content in my main feed to be “opt out”.

This may be an unpopular opinion, but I kind of hate this? I think most communities are lazily moderated and I don’t want to have every goon’s unmoderated takes on whatever the topic is forced in front of my eyeballs.