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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: June 11th, 2023

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  • My guess would be that

    a) building their next social network on an open platform will let antitrust regulators off their back

    and/or b) a Twitter clone sounds less sexy then a web3 / decentralized fediverse play. Meta has chased every other bandwagon (metaverse, ai, etc), it’s entirely possible this is just them always chasing the hot new thing so that they don’t miss out. They certainly aren’t going to let themselves be Blackberry and refuse to change, they’d rather desperately copy every hot new thing and change quickly to always have an offering that appeals to their customers good enough




  • You know what’s irrelevant to the current conversation about how they have so many users they don’t need us?

    How many fediverse accounts are there total? A couple hundred thousand? And how many of those are duplicates across instances?

    Whether or not all those users stick is irrelevant, the user counts for lemmy / kbin also won’t have all of them stick. The point is that they do not need us or our content. They can hit a bill without even supporting activitypub.







  • Now, there are single sign-on (SSO) possibilities, but for them to be universally accessible across the Fediverse, you either need to impose them on 20,000 admins across two dozen software implementations, or you need them all to a) agree to support SSO, and b) agree to support the same SSO options.

    Yeah, this is the real crux of the issue and is a large unsolved problem. We simply have no standardized system for decentralized identity verification.

    SSO works as a way of maintaining identity across the fediverse, but that’s not really federating identity so much as it’s getting all instance to offload identity verification to various central services.

    I believe I heard Microsoft had a research project in the area of decentralized identity verification but I don’t know if it went anywhere or how suitable it would be.





  • Oh wow congrats, like half the world writes software, I also write software for a living, but I don’t confuse the admins running my software and using my admin portals with the primary users of my software who will determine whether or not it will be popular or a success.

    Back up and examine the context of the conversation and then stop with this pointless semantic distinction. In the context of whether or not your social network software will be successful, an admin setting that allows one instance to connect to other is not a user facing feature.

    People do not open Reddit to examine how the Reddit admins configured their kubernetes clusters, so stop with this dumb bullshit pretending like users care about federation. They want somewhere to come have a discussion with everyone else interested in the same thing. That’s it.





  • I’m sorry, but no. The point of the fediverse is not to spin up niche communities, since we already have forums. You want to be part of a niche small forum, go spin up your own bb instance and run a niche small forum.

    The point of the fediverse is to recreate the global social networks that are twitter / Reddit / etc, but to do so using open source servers that are decentralized and anyone can host.

    Again, federation is not a user facing feature, it’s an architecture / implementation detail. Fediverse enthusiasts are like train enthusiasts who love every detail of how they’re built and their history and how much philosophically better they are than cars, but none of that matters and train networks will fail if they don’t provide quick and convenient transportation to their users.



  • I’m already starting to get pretty tired of people in the fediverse saying shit like this:

    What this means to you is when a user within one instance (e.g. Beehaw) that’s chosen to defederate with another (e.g. lemmy.world), they can no longer interact with content on another instance, and vice versa. Other instances can still see the content of both servers as though nothing has happened.

    A user is not limited to how many instances they can join (technically at least - some instance have more stringent requirements for joining than others do)

    A user can interact with Lemmy content without being a user of any Lemmy instance - e.g. Mastodon (UI for doing so is limited, but it is still possible.)

    Considering the above, it is important to understand just how much autonomy we, as users have. For example, as the larger instances are flooded with users and their respective admins and mods try to keep up, many, smaller instances not only thrive, but emerge, regularly (and even single user instances - I have one for just myself!) The act of defederation does not serve to lock individual users out of anything as there are multiple avenues to constantly maintain access to, if you want it, the entirety of the unfiltered fediverse.

    Having “multiple avenues to maintain access to the unfiltered fediverse, if you want it” is the most nightmare user experience sentence I can possibly imagine.

    A user does not want multiple avenues to maintain access to the unfiltered fediverse with it being unclear when their comments will be shadow banned and not. They want to be able to see a post and go in and comment on it.

    Federation is not a feature, it’s an implementation detail.