You cannot censor content. I could make an instance where I post the most vile things and even if 99.99% of lemmy hated my guts and wanted me shutdown I could continue to host my instance and federate with like minded communities. In a non federated platform Admins would delete my instance.
This is a positive to some and a negative to others.
This has been a thing since even before the web existed, with Usenet (the original federated forum) in the 1980s.
Would you really want admins controlling what you can and can’t say online? What if the admins have different political or societal views than you, and delete you / your content just because they disagree with what you’re saying? The world needs fewer power-hungry admins and mods, not more of them.
Also, the the thing with open source software is that you can’t control how people use it - a key feature of open-source is that it’s accessible to everyone.
IMO anyone should have the power to start their own Lemmy instance, but other instances should have the power to block you. I do agree that there’s some instances that 99% of Lemmy would block. For cases like that, an optional global blocklist of awful instances, that any instance could opt-in to blocking, would be useful.
Lack of centralized control.
Until there’s some kind of organizing central committee of servers that could mutually defederate problematic instances, every server is forced to play whack-a-mole to deal with fascists and pedophiles and the like. Every server can not be an island onto themselves, they should be in communication with each other and then collectively decide on the rules of the federation.
I forsee in the future federation boards, like servers that work together to vote on good/bad actors/instances and from those other instances could subscribe to their moderation. Still open moderation, you can still set up an instance that doesn’t adhere to group A or group B’s mod lists, but for the vast majority of people you could have a good experience.
For example, dunno how many saw but had to remove an anti-LGTBQ post in a LGTBQ community today. I’m sure I’m not the only mod who removed that from their instance today, it’d be great if there was a way other instance admins could share that and “team up” with moderation.
Like internet countries. Choose a virtual citizenship, vote for your moderator and wait to be disappointed
Poop poop
less like countries, but I would view that more like the federation UN, with each instance getting a vote and a majority passes. You’re still in charge of your country, but you could say “I like how this group moderates, I’m going to auto apply moderation from them on here”, maybe you could choose which communities are automoderated too. If I ever started disagreeing with that group I could unsubscribe and subscribe to a different group’s.
For example, the post I mentioned was not in a community that I host, but for my users I had to remove it too. Would just be nice to say “whoever gets there first can remove it”
I see that as a pro and a con. If one narcissist manages to get to a position of authority, they can’t derail the whole network. That also means that people can form their own echo chamber islands of like-minded instances. There could be the main island of random interests and then a separate extremist island of all the instances that got defederated from all the big instances. Not an ideal solution, but it’s still better than a fully centralized Reddit.
I really really don’t like the idea of a central committee of liberals that will defed any instances that are more radical that “vote blue no matter who!”
What if instances could “subscribe” to the list of defederated instances of each other?
So for example. Let’s say that Alice and Bob have their own instances, alice.ml and bob.ml. Bob trusts Alice, so he sets up the following rule in bob.ml: “if alice.ml defederates an instance, then bob.ml defederates it too.”
Then Charlie starts charlie.ml. It’s a bad instance. Alice manually defederates alice.ml from charlie.ml. Bob won’t need to do anything - bob.ml would do it automatically.
I feel like this idea would address the issue of playing whack-a-mole, since admins of multiple servers can split the busywork if they so desire, and only with whomever they desire. And there’s no risk of a central control going rogue, since there’s no central control on first place.
It could be even further refined with more complex rules on when to automatically defederate other instances. Such as taking into account if the other instance did it manually or automatically, or how many among X instances defederated it.
What you eventually get is a single global list that the majority of instances use, at which point every new instance must immediately agree to adopt the list lest they themselves are also immediately defederated.
From what I understand, there are already instances who operate this way.
What you eventually get is a single global list that the majority of instances use
Not necessarily. Defederating too many instances means that your own instance will get less content; admins know that, so good admins generally avoid doing it unless necessary for the goals of their instances. Couple that with dissenting points (for example: grotesque but morally acceptable content, porn, dumb/low-quality content…), and the odds of said “single global list” popping up becomes fairly small.
Instead I expect to see a bunch of smaller lists, between instances with similar goals, and plenty unilateral subscribing (e.g. A subscribes to B, but B doesn’t subscribe to A).
From what I understand, there are already instances who operate this way.
That’s good to know. If they do it automatically, this system could be already implemented across Lemmy.
It’s interesting to see the mirror between Fediverse philosophies, and the history of international relations. For every person who believes every physical country should be an autonomous island unto themselves, you’ll find someone else who believes every country should be policed by the standards of another country or group of countries.
The fact that we can have this debate on the internet is interesting…but I also find it interesting that the internet was already federated to begin with. And we all see how that turned out. The Fediverse is just an internet within the internet.
The overhead of duplicated data across the network. Not reposts on different instances, but the software itself on those different instances needing to cache/store this one single post for their users locally
Don’t large services have many duplicates/caches spread across the globe to balance load and reduce latency? Couldn’t this be seen as a positive? It could also be seen as a redundancy layer.
Yes. It’s very common to cache content closer to the user, otherwise the site would be slow. Some services like Netflix and Facebook even provide custom caching servers to internet providers to install in their data centers. These are called Netflix Open Connect and Facebook Network Appliance respectively. They significantly reduces costs for the ISP, as Netflix and Facebook are generally two of the heaviest users of bandwidth on an ISP’s network, and traffic entirely within their own network is effectively “free” for them.
This is a good part of federation IMO - if users join an instance physically close to them, their experience is going to be nice and fast, since everything is cached on their instance. It’s also pretty easy to spin up a new Lemmy instance in your country if one doesn’t exist yet.
As I understand it, there’s a huge downside to federated software in the requirement to be Always Online. Lots of people have slow internet connections, or no connection at all, preventing them from accessing their software. Everyone should be able to use the programs/apps they have without regard to whether they are online or can get online.
What federated software would actually make sense to work offline, though? Everything I’ve seen is literally internet tools like social media (forums, blogs, chats, etc). None of those things would work offline. Is there, like, a federated paint or word processing app or something?
This isn’t really specific to federated software. The client can go offline but the server can’t. Same applies to all centralized services. The only place this really applies is for decentralized (as in, no central points) systems, and those tend to have a lot of special sauce to make other people being offline less painful
Identity theft. Not as serious as the real life version but imagine that I make an account with your username on another instance, maybe under a domain that’s very similar to yours, and start stirring up trouble. If you’re someone people recognize I could hurt your reputation or scam people.
