Unfortunately the people’s front of Mastodon defederated from the Mastodon People’s front.
This is EXACTLY what will happen. Federation will just mean “fuck you, I’ll go make my own instance since you don’t 100% agree with me” creating splintered echo chambers that accomplish nothing because they fundamentally lack the ability to work with others. Federation will absolutely not lead the rebellion.
Just look how many Lemmy varients there already are. In the first few months we already had Kbin, Mastadon, Lemmy(and all of it’s instance variations) and then Kbin even split and also became Mbin as well(which was literally “I don’t like how they’re running Kbin and they won’t do what I want, so I’m starting my own” by user Melroy). Remember how the first drama was “which instances should we block on our instance?” on pretty much every single location? How everyone quickly set out to make a name for themselves by which communities they filtered out? How we didn’t even make it a month before instances were defederating each other?
Time and time again humans blame the tools they use instead of reflecting and seeing that the tool wasn’t the cause, humanity is. This is how humanity acts. We’re tribal by nature. This is what we do. You’re not gonna just fix that with some new software. It’ll take cultural change on a grand scale.
The federated internet is not an open park where everyone hangs out together. It’s a billion small spaces that link to neighbouring spaces. The idea that defederation is a problem, or that people using different webserver software is an issue, needs to be left at the door.
This isn’t “Reddit but with weirdly more complex subreddit names”, or “Twitter, but everyone’s user name looks like an email address”, but a network of a thousand independent social websites, each doing their own thing.
And that’s a good thing. Expecting it to be centralized, corporate social media, only without the drive towards enshitification will make everything seem uncanny and broken. This isn’t that. This is something new.
And something old.
That’s for perfecting illustrating what I’m describing. You think “this is it, this is the thing that’s gonna allow humanity to become enlightened!”. You’re hung up on the product like a bunch of other people, and not looking at the consumer. Federation won’t do shit to change human nature. That’s it’s own thing. Federation is just another social media tool in an already pretty large toolbox. You gotta teach humanity to work together, not just throw another platform at them and think that’s the fix.
I never said federation was in itself bad. People keep getting hung up on that and nitpicking. Just saying that it’s not the solution to humanities core problems that arise from our own instincts and behaviours. And that it won’t spur any revolution. It might be a tool used by the revolution, but it, in itself, will never be the revolution. People will be the revolution.
The platform splits literally don’t matter.
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That’s the point of open source, being able to make your own fork.
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The backend is AP not Lemmy, Kbin, mastodon, or piefed
The fragmented ecosystem of ideas doesn’t really exist except in a few servers such as beehaw, lemmygrad, and hexbear. Beehaw and hexbear don’t even care about federation.
in even split and also became Mbin as well(which was literally “I don’t like how they’re running Kbin and they won’t do what I want, so I’m starting my own” by user Melroy).
this is objectively bullshit. kbin was run and managed by one guy who could not keep up and had serious personal issues. the mbin fork is just a community developed version, far more resilient to individual dev whims but still open for anyone to contribute
It’s named Mbin after Melroy. Dude filled Lemmy and Kbin with bitching posts for months. First it was the instance he worked on not listening to him so he started his own. Then it was people not joining his instance and only the “popular” ones. Then he got Kbin to agreee to let him work on the project and shit on Lemmy saying Kbin was the real future. But when that didn’t go his way either, he made Mbin while shitting on Kbin. I am well aware of the massive ego behind Mbins creation and it is a PERFECT example of “fuck you, I’ll make my own”.
ETA: oh yeah, and the time when he was supposedly a Lemmy developer too… Who left on bad terms.
Seriously, check the guys resume. He’s been supposedly attached to almost every federation project and has left all of them on bad terms when things didn’t go his way. Each and every time was “it’s not going the direction I want, so I’m starting a new version”. The exact point about splintering communities from my OG comment.
I don’t think the plurality of software is a problem, as long as they inter-operate correctly, but otherwise I agree.
One of the reasons bluesky took off better than mastodon is the lack of friction in signing up.
All the people debating me on Mbins history and various software are not getting the point: PEOPLE couldn’t agree on how to run the fediverse, splintering it into numerous groups(for better or worse). These same people won’t agree on the causes or solutions necessary for a massive cultural revolution as well.
To put it another way: Xkcd comic on standards
The fediverse wasn’t the solution to humanities problems. It was just attempt #284747737 or whatever. It was a bunch of high ideals about “if we give the power back to the people, this time it will be different!” while completely forgetting that reddit mods were just average people too until they became powermods and that whole system got corrupted.
The fediverse will never bring about the revolution. The only thing that can and will is the will of the people.
It’s because people don’t have emotional maturity. They can’t stand someone having a different opinion. They don’t want to see that, they want to be protected from it by a daddy (moderator).
What happened to strong confident men? They are certainly not part of the Lemmy generation here.
Comments get reported for absolutely ridiculous reasons. If there was an actual war where we needed eachother, these men would be absolutely destroyed by not being able to be shielded from the opinions of their fellow humans.
Person is doing worthwhile things but has way too much confidence in the fediverse. Welcome to Lemmy though, if the author makes it here.
@solrize I have accounts on Lemmy, PieFed and Mbin. Wrote about them this summer https://blog.elenarossini.com/the-future-of-social-is-here-a-show-and-tell-part-4-lemmy-piefed-mbin/ 🤗 these days I’m mostly using #Lemmy and I really really enjoy it
This is the way. We can all do our part to build and evangelize the fediverse.
And don’t say things like it’s too complicated or nobody will listen to us. That’s objectively not true.
There are 20 million fediverse users. Stay positive and keep moving forward!
We also have to stop thinking that everything has to grow fast, and lose hope just because it’s not. Change take a really long time. Sometimes decades. Silicon Valley are obsessed with fast growth because it’s all driven by the promise of easy money. No need to adopt their mindset. Look how fast their products turn to shit.
The revolution will not be televised.
The article became better as it went along. At the end I really wanted to increase my own FLOSS skills.
I think what the Fediverse mainly needs is more people with IT skills and money and infrastructure to host this stuff. Mastodon still doesn’t appeal to mainstream users, Lemmy is still having federation issues and missing central features. It will all still take years. Another thing is the problem of hosting all of this stuff, if it should scale.
I also used to write articles like this here, and I’m not completely against them if they don’t actually call for any ridiculous actions against big tech in a “revolution” (not a big butlerian jihad fan; make code not memes). At the end I guess I feel to be on the same page as her: I want to increase my own coding skills to effectively contribute something to the Fediverse (meaning without getting burned out in the process).
