How is federated social media better?
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No single entity can ruin it. We've seen that happen over and over when someone's political or economic goals conflict with user interests.
BlueSky actually talks about this quite a bit, viewing the company as a potential future adversary of the current developers' goals. I'm not sure their design choices align with that in practice, but they articulate the argument well.
Another cool thing is the broader reach federation provides. Someone with a Wordpress site need only install a plugin and people can follow it with Mastodon and the like. Tag a community in a post and it shows up on Lemmy too. This is underused so far, but I hope to see it continue to grow.
I've only just begun on this, but my next software project is to rewrite my blogging software to use ActivityPub, especially for comments.
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I found myself chatting with my dad and brought up the topic. I couldn't come up with any actual advantages a federated platforms had. The main reason I use any federated platforms is because they're either not as enshittified as the alternatives or run by huge dickwads. Since it mostly fits those criteria, I'm on Bluesky too, but once that goes I'll either switch to another un-shittified platform or Mastodon.
But on its own, what advantage does a federated social media have?
Mostly just the resilience and control. An outage or censorship incident on one node can be contained, isolated, and users can easily go around it.
"Oh no, my preferred instance went down!" switches to another instance with the exact same contentAlso, I think some European governments run Mastodon servers for themselves. Which sounds weird, but makes more sense in an IT security context. Their data, stored on their servers, that they manage. No third party business contractors needed.
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I found myself chatting with my dad and brought up the topic. I couldn't come up with any actual advantages a federated platforms had. The main reason I use any federated platforms is because they're either not as enshittified as the alternatives or run by huge dickwads. Since it mostly fits those criteria, I'm on Bluesky too, but once that goes I'll either switch to another un-shittified platform or Mastodon.
But on its own, what advantage does a federated social media have?
AOL had a social media platform. So did MySpace. They were monolithic. Where are they now?
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I found myself chatting with my dad and brought up the topic. I couldn't come up with any actual advantages a federated platforms had. The main reason I use any federated platforms is because they're either not as enshittified as the alternatives or run by huge dickwads. Since it mostly fits those criteria, I'm on Bluesky too, but once that goes I'll either switch to another un-shittified platform or Mastodon.
But on its own, what advantage does a federated social media have?
The special thing about federated social media is that if you don't like something about one specific instance you can go to another instance or even create your own and still be part of the whole system. You're not stuck with some leadership that you have to endure. Instead you can be your own boss or choose a nice place to stay.
I think all the other things that people like about it, like "no algorithm", come naturally from this fact but are not inherent to the system.
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Of course it is public. But I can be pseudo anonymous. I can have multiple aliases on different instances and I don’t have to register my phone number or other personal information. There’s no trackers tracking every damn thing I look at and correlating it all together. I can use it over Tor or VPN if I need more anonymization…
Sorry, maybe I'm misunderstanding. It's just that none of what you've listed is inherent to the fediverse? There's nothing preventing data collection of that sort by an instance owner, and claiming anonymity on a system explicitly designed around open ledger social media doesn't seem entirely credible. There's nothing preventing someone from including tracking pixels, for example, and your browser can still be fingerprinted and linked to your activity on lemmy by 3rd parties through a number of meta-analytical approaches.
I love the fediverse and there's lots of good reasons for that, but I really just don't think anonymity is a selling point here. Again, might be misunderstanding what you mean, if so I apologize!
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I found myself chatting with my dad and brought up the topic. I couldn't come up with any actual advantages a federated platforms had. The main reason I use any federated platforms is because they're either not as enshittified as the alternatives or run by huge dickwads. Since it mostly fits those criteria, I'm on Bluesky too, but once that goes I'll either switch to another un-shittified platform or Mastodon.
But on its own, what advantage does a federated social media have?
Its more obvious on Mastodon since Mastodon federates with everybody. Imagine, while being on Twitter and without leaving the Twitter app, being able to post and comment on Reddit, watch YouTube videos and leave comments, and also interact with people on Instagram and Facebook. Some blogs also federate too via WordPress. I know you dont have to imagine that since you're here, but when I first started out it blew my mind.
Now, the way I phrase it to people I'm pitching the platforms to is "You get to choose whether you want to be in the hands of either a Corp that wants to turn you into profits for their shareholders, or you can put your data in the hands of some autistic dork who is really, really passionate about either server architecture or infosec. There's pros and cons there. Bluesky and Twitter fundamentally are not on your side, they want money from somewhere, but they can afford to pay people to both keep their servers running efficiently and defend against bad actors. The admins of Lemmy and Mastodon are fundamentally on our side, but the quality you're going to see is on par with a hobby project."
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No fucking algorithm, honestly. I don’t need some rich white pricks trying to constantly show me what they want me to see.
I think you mean that you can choose a project that doesn't have an "algorithm" (in the sense that you're conveying).
Anyone can create a project with ActivityPub that has an algorithm for feeding content to you.
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I found myself chatting with my dad and brought up the topic. I couldn't come up with any actual advantages a federated platforms had. The main reason I use any federated platforms is because they're either not as enshittified as the alternatives or run by huge dickwads. Since it mostly fits those criteria, I'm on Bluesky too, but once that goes I'll either switch to another un-shittified platform or Mastodon.
But on its own, what advantage does a federated social media have?
Resilience. Federated social media is resilient against censoring and corporate takeover.
It.does however not help with eee attacks which I why most of us block threads and a lot will block other fediverse sized (or larger) single instances of eg bluesky etc.
Other, less important (to me) benefits are no algorithms, no profit motive, no ads.
The fediverse is just better in any way.
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Pro:
- Interplatform Interaction(Activity Pub): Instances if the same platform and the Instances themselves can communicate (message, post, upvote, etc) with each other if they are federated.
- Decentralized: Community managed instances means no commertial interest, no single point of failure and the option of having your own rules. Intances with bad rules or intentions do not get federated (can't interact with each other).
- Free Open Source Software: Transparency and community contributions, If a project is abandoned it can always come back in the form a fork..
- Privacy: No data collection, no data selling from the platform/intances themselves.
- No advertisements
- No shitty UI
Con:
- Decentralized: People do not expect to have to choose a instance(server), and assume they are missing out on the other servers joining a particular one. And since its community supported the uptime and longevity of instances may be cut short.
- Free Open Source Software: Community volunteers to delevop the platforms on their free time means that sometimes development can be slow or even the project is abandoned.
- Cost on missing out on already established Big Tech platforms
I agree with your comment except that I think you've got the privacy part wrong there. Any company can come in and scrape all the information they want, including upvote and downvote info.
In addition, if you try to delete a comment, it's very likely that it won't be deleted by every instance who federates with yours.
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I agree with your comment except that I think you've got the privacy part wrong there. Any company can come in and scrape all the information they want, including upvote and downvote info.
In addition, if you try to delete a comment, it's very likely that it won't be deleted by every instance who federates with yours.
wrote on last edited by [email protected]Yes, correct. I've should have mentioned that no tracking from the platform/instances themselves. Thank you by the way.
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I've only just begun on this, but my next software project is to rewrite my blogging software to use ActivityPub, especially for comments.
I use a variation of this approach to display fediverse comments on a statically-generated site. It does involve a manual post to Mastodon, but I'm not very inclined to redo the whole site.
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I found myself chatting with my dad and brought up the topic. I couldn't come up with any actual advantages a federated platforms had. The main reason I use any federated platforms is because they're either not as enshittified as the alternatives or run by huge dickwads. Since it mostly fits those criteria, I'm on Bluesky too, but once that goes I'll either switch to another un-shittified platform or Mastodon.
But on its own, what advantage does a federated social media have?
wrote on last edited by [email protected]The only advantage I can see is that is goes back to a more fragmented internet.
The internet of hundreds of forums forming small communities, but this time you don't need to make an account on every single forum.
All the problems I see people complaining about in my opinion they all have in common one thing, too many people in a single place. Either because it gets impossible to manage and moderate or it needs to make money because it is very expensive to run.
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No fucking algorithm, honestly. I don’t need some rich white pricks trying to constantly show me what they want me to see.
Lemmy has an algorithm though (active, hot, and scaled sorting)
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Yes, correct. I've should have mentioned that no tracking from the platform/instances themselves. Thank you by the way.
What stops your instance from fingerprinting its users and selling that data? Even without explicit calls to google analytics or similar tools, you can do a lot with http requests and regular browser headers. I’m not saying that lemmy.zip does this, but lemmy isn’t free of tracking by design, is it?
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I found myself chatting with my dad and brought up the topic. I couldn't come up with any actual advantages a federated platforms had. The main reason I use any federated platforms is because they're either not as enshittified as the alternatives or run by huge dickwads. Since it mostly fits those criteria, I'm on Bluesky too, but once that goes I'll either switch to another un-shittified platform or Mastodon.
But on its own, what advantage does a federated social media have?
There is no single point of failure.
If one instance goes down they don't take the whole thing with it. If one instance gets taken over by corporate interests, it does not take all the other instances with it.
If a community on sweatyballs.social is dogshit, someone can create the same named community on poopfed.io as a replacement. The site administrator of sweatyballs.social can't do anything about that.
This can also be a negative to some degree, but being able to block and defederate allow for mitigating those risks.
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I found myself chatting with my dad and brought up the topic. I couldn't come up with any actual advantages a federated platforms had. The main reason I use any federated platforms is because they're either not as enshittified as the alternatives or run by huge dickwads. Since it mostly fits those criteria, I'm on Bluesky too, but once that goes I'll either switch to another un-shittified platform or Mastodon.
But on its own, what advantage does a federated social media have?
It’s the best.
Social media owned by some billionaire asshole is for idiots.
No billionaire owns any angle of human behavior.
Except maybe blood lust.
They own my blood lust.
I’m thirsty.
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It’s the best.
Social media owned by some billionaire asshole is for idiots.
No billionaire owns any angle of human behavior.
Except maybe blood lust.
They own my blood lust.
I’m thirsty.
must be the pretzels.
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I found myself chatting with my dad and brought up the topic. I couldn't come up with any actual advantages a federated platforms had. The main reason I use any federated platforms is because they're either not as enshittified as the alternatives or run by huge dickwads. Since it mostly fits those criteria, I'm on Bluesky too, but once that goes I'll either switch to another un-shittified platform or Mastodon.
But on its own, what advantage does a federated social media have?
It takes power away from the hands of corporations.
Sorry you got suckered into choosing bluesky over Mastodon. Hopefully you'll learn one day.
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What stops your instance from fingerprinting its users and selling that data? Even without explicit calls to google analytics or similar tools, you can do a lot with http requests and regular browser headers. I’m not saying that lemmy.zip does this, but lemmy isn’t free of tracking by design, is it?
I guess more technical people would notice and expose the instance? Not an expert on any of this but I suppose you are right saying that it would be absolutely free of tracking.
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I think you mean that you can choose a project that doesn't have an "algorithm" (in the sense that you're conveying).
Anyone can create a project with ActivityPub that has an algorithm for feeding content to you.
Yep! This exactly.
