How is federated social media better?
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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?
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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?
You data isn't hoarded up and sold by the likes of meta etc.
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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 Fediverse is controlled by the people. Mainstream social media is controlled by wannabe kings.
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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?
New platforms can set up shop and already have an existing userbase/contentbase to show. The main issue with setting up, let's say, an Instagram competitor, is that nobody uses it, so nobody will use it as it lacks content. ActivityPub removes this problem. If someone wanted to set up their own competitor to Mastodon, they can. People can use it and tap into the existing userbase.
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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?
You can play with moderation tiers. We have societies with Reddit-tier fascist moderators and other societies where the moderation just bans spammers and flooders. That's nice. Of course we're shifting to moderation craziness too, but very slowly and it is impossible to completely kill the freedom because of the federation background.
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You data isn't hoarded up and sold by the likes of meta etc.
Is that true though, with threads using activity pub?
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You can play with moderation tiers. We have societies with Reddit-tier fascist moderators and other societies where the moderation just bans spammers and flooders. That's nice. Of course we're shifting to moderation craziness too, but very slowly and it is impossible to completely kill the freedom because of the federation background.
Social media is a garden that needs to be tended
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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?
No fucking algorithm, honestly. I don’t need some rich white pricks trying to constantly show me what they want me to see.
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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?
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.
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Is that true though, with threads using activity pub?
wrote on last edited by [email protected]Yeah it's absolutely not true, everything done on the fediverse/activitypub is extremely easy to scrape (an unavoidable consequence of the design) and inevitably will be, if it isn't happening already. Though, it's true that it's not being hoarded and since everyone can scrape it, it's probably not being sold either!
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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]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
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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?
More choice, individual and grouped control, while still being - by default - connected between instances and platforms which would otherwise be splitting if people and critical mass.
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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 biggest thing is control and censorship.
On the corporate side if your posts and content are seen as too extreme in one way or another, depending on what government or group ... you can be censored and have you posted either deleted, dismissed or hidden. In extreme cases, your account can also be shut down.
Xitter is already a propaganda hell hole that only pushes right wing content because they pushed out any criticism.
FB actively pushes its own content based on the highest bidder which often just means pushing right wing and conservative content in a regular basis.
Bluesky as open as it's supposed to be has already had problems in Turkey where the government there asked bluesky to restrict access to many accounts.
The Fediverse will have these same problems and people and governments will try to censor people but due to the open non centralized nature of the system, it will be much harder for any one group or government to censor anyone. The only way they could shut it down would be to completely outlaw any platform that uses the protocol everywhere.
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Yeah it's absolutely not true, everything done on the fediverse/activitypub is extremely easy to scrape (an unavoidable consequence of the design) and inevitably will be, if it isn't happening already. Though, it's true that it's not being hoarded and since everyone can scrape it, it's probably not being sold either!
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…
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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 classic example is email; Imagine if you could only email people on Outlook, from another Outlook account. It's intuitive how shitty that would be, but for some reason we give social media a free pass for doing exactly this.
The benefits are (analogously):
- if you notice Yahoo users send you a lot of spam, you just block all of Yahoo. Sure, you might miss something important, but that's their fault for using Yahoo.
- if some dickhead like The Zucc releases a new email service (Threads) then maybe your email service (instance) will do you a favor and block them (defederate).
- pedos and bigots look for instances which is known for hosting shady shit, effectively acting as a containment barrier (most instances defederate these by default). Would never see that happen on Twitter (thank you Elon! /s).
- if an instance crashes, that sucks. But there are many others hosting federated content, so Lemmy will never be 'down'.
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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?
Content is not being actively pushed upon you, rather it's you that decide what you see like Facebook was at the beginning.
It allows you to use the platform to keep up with other people's lives instead of watching ads, news article someone liked and you're not interested in and ragebait.
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New platforms can set up shop and already have an existing userbase/contentbase to show. The main issue with setting up, let's say, an Instagram competitor, is that nobody uses it, so nobody will use it as it lacks content. ActivityPub removes this problem. If someone wanted to set up their own competitor to Mastodon, they can. People can use it and tap into the existing userbase.
Good point: Look at lemmy - kbin - piefed. The guy behind kbin thought "lemmy is nice but I could make something better", and then whoever is behind mbin saw that and said "I can make kbin better" and forked it. But without starting over in terms of connectivity or content! And now we have piefed which is on the edge of being even better and it's still introperable. The power of that can't be undersold.
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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?
