okawari

This doesn’t seem entirely accurate to me.

Most public platforms interacting with the Fediverse today does require you to register an email address out of practical considerations but this is not a requirement of the system in itself. It is possible to both post and read an unmoderated fediverse with enough effort.

If you don’t like the moderation of your particular server, you are fully able to create your own or set up an existing solution yourself that gives you 100% control over what kind of content you post, and in turn which content you federate to your server. Of course, you can’t control which servers decide to allow your content on their server, but any user of servers where your content is blocked can do the same and have access to your content again.

As far as privacy goes, you can rent servers and purchase domains with crypto currencies which are not traceable back to you where you can host your own service that interacts with the fediverse, making you 100% able to control the information you post into it.

A federated system is in a decentralized system too, but I reckon you’re asking about the difference between something that is decentralized in the way Bitcoin or similar systems are, versus the federated software of the Fediverse.

This might be an oversimplification, but the main difference comes mostly down to a philosophy on state and statemanagement.
A decentralized system in the style of Bitcoin and such are a single source of truth decided by consensus of many independent actors(servers) where none of them have any more influence than the other.
However it is important that all actors agree on the entire state of the system, you can’t have an actor that only cares about transcations of exactly 420$ for example.
If some servers have a different view which transactions are true; this is a problem for bitcoin as the system requires a single consensus of whats real to work. (I’m no BC expert, but this should be true on a high level, even if there are practical solutions to this)

On the other hand, a federated systems like on Mastodon are a bunch of independent servers which have their own state(ie posts and what not). They are the ultimate owner of said content, in the sense that that they don’t need approval of any other member in the fediverse to post that content. The decentralized part of the fediverse is obviously the fact that fediverse servers shares its posts with all other servers it knows off, but its not expected behavior that all servers in the fediverse has to have all posts, and the system is not degraded should some posts be missing.

I’m not against corporations integrating with the fediverse, but I do think that federating with Meta will be a net negative for the fediverse as a whole, atleast in its current state.

First of all, In a purely practical sense, since we’re still struggling to keep different instances in sync with the amount of content that is here today. We’re going to have a real bad time trying to sync threads content, while they can probably sync the rest of the fediverse without breaking a sweat. I am afraid that we’re going to drastically increase the compute necessary to maintain a cohesive fediverse, and that we’re just going to hand Meta the keys to the castle as they are the only one able to provide this service at that scale. This is probably less of an issue for Mastodon, where you subscribe to users and not communities.

Furthermore, I’ll come out and say that I like that this place is more niche. I’ve found a lot more joy posting here than i did on reddit or twitter, despite the lower user count. I don’t think that access to a large user base is necessarily going to make this a better place for the group that is here now. I think we as a fediverse needs to grow a bit as a community before we can even hope to take in Meta without it warping the entire community to the point that its no longer itself.

I have a big enough house to be able to put this machine somewhere out of the way but there are plenty of cheap server gear on classifieds. I paid ish 300 euros for a 32 core machine with 40gb ram. I can host all the things without it even breaking a sweat.

Probably uses a lot more electricity, but I haven’t really noticed it on my power bill

I’m not sure this is true anymore. Ernest posted about this yesterday, I think. Upvotes are now considered and boosts counts as two upvotes.

Very nice! My favorites are #1 and #4.

I host a bunch of websites for normal small businesses many of them have contact forms and all of them have captcha.
We’ve seen a steady rise in spam that gets through it over the last year or so. I don’t have any concrete numbers at hand, but we’ve heard from customers that they used to get a few spam replies once in a while before but get 10-20 a day over prolonged periods of time now.

I wouldn’t be surprised if we’re aproaching a point where computers are better at solving captchas than human.

I think there is a pull-request in for automatic account deletion, but for now the admins do it manually.

I’dd hop on matrix in the kbin.social channel and ask the admins directly from there. The official room for kbin is https://matrix.to/#/#kbin:matrix.org

If you check the sidebar of a magazine, you will see a link to a log of all moderator actions such as deletions and what not.

I’m genuinely not sure, but since ernest shows up as mod on all external magazines, I wouldn’t be surprised if it blocked everything.

In fact, If you go to https://kbin.social/d/kbin.social today, you do see the external posts.

That is correct, I did downvote your comment!

Damn, I had not considered this angle. I can see that being a problem, wonder why we’ve done it this way with Lemmy/kbin and not just redirect to the host instance like mastodon does. Surely, for instances that don’t want to federate certain kinds of content, this would be the way to bypass this whole issue.

My initial thought that prompted this entire chain is that I think we should try our damnest to ensure that the fediverse as much of a coherent network as possible, it will have problematic communities and servers and surely we are going to have to expel the absolute rotten apples, but accepting the diversity of the system and dealing with it locally.

I am not advocating for tolerating illegal content here, just to be clear. I’m all for moderating them on a community level or server level if needed be, should they not fix the underlying issue.

In essence, the less likely any outside entity can demand we change in order to benefit them, the better. KDE/Mozilla/Meta whoever should do their down due-diligence and decide how they want to approach the fediverse, blemishes and all in order to make the site they want to make.
I don’t think it is unreasonable for the KDE instance to have to redirect profile as an example if they find content in them to be possibly questionable.

Yes, content mirroring is involved but not unprompted, or am i wrong here? In a hypothetical situation where I host my own, single user instance, I would only mirror content that I have subscribed to?

Wouldn’t this then better be considered a problem between an instance and its own native users, more than an issue between instances?

If I am completely wrong in how the Fediverse works, then I rescind my previous comments.

Forgive me if I’m wrong, but external content that gets federated to your server is entirely based on the subscriptions of users native to your server? So as long as no native users of kde subscribes to NSFW content it shouldn’t really end up on their servers. As far as I know, content is not synchronized between servers just because they know of each other.

Assuming paragraph one is correct, then KDE can achieve a NSFW free server by merely limiting who gets accounts on their own server; as they should. This is just like Google not handing out @google.com addresses to every gmail user. Federation would still allow users from any instance to interact with the kde communities without problem. This means no one can make magazines/communities on the KDE server not related to KDE and any content moderation of KDE’s communities would just like any other.

Malicious instances are more likely to be talking about instances abusing the federation apis in order to spam or otherwise cause havoc, not about that instances content policy.

I don’t agree with this.

We should work towards better tools for letting people tailor make their own feeds to show the content they want to see, not call for defederation based on content or ideology.

I say they can, this is kind of what we have seen with Chrome tbh.

Google came in, made an awesome browser got market majority and started just implementing things to the point where its hard to keep up and the various specification bodies kind of just have to ratify things that is already in the browser or become obsolete, afaik this happened with components such as the in browser DRM which by design makes it hard to implement.

I think this can come true as long as we let them insert themselves into the ecosystem. The difference here is that we have the option to keep our part of the fediverse pristine by not federating with these servers, even if we doom ourselves to obscurity by doing it.

This has been a great boon to me. Whenever Apple upgrades Mac OS, I check my regional equivalent to craigslist for cheap music gear that stops working. Has worked twice for me. I got a really nice 24 channel audio interface for 20 bucks.

I think you are right for the most part. I assume that some big servers will take most of the users and that the cost of maintaining the fediverse will become quite high in one way or the other as the network grows and the malicious actors gain incentives to interact with the network.

I think the fediverse is more like the old web. I don’t really consider my data very portable, but my ways of consuming and interacting with the content is. I for one don’t really care if my posts go with me if i move somewhere else. If my home server defederates, then I can move to another kbin instance and my experience remains much the same. The monolithic singular identity that I can take with me wherever I go isn’t something the fediverse delivers on right now, but that is fine.

I feel there will at some point be a “this is why we can’t have nice things” moment with ActivityPub and Federation in general.

Karma is probably pretty easy to farm using fake home servers or botted accounts, and other kinds spam is probably going to be an issue if this platform reaches any level of mainstream popularity.

I think many parallels can be drawn between ActivityPub and E-mail, here. E-mail works, but not without a lot of gatekeeping, blocking and spam. Its really hard not to get blocked as a self hosted email server today, you are probably going to be mostly blocked by default until you build somewhat of a reputation for your server, etc. I foresee similar levels of maintenance being needed in the future in order to keep servers federated.

As far as moving your account, some things are easier than others to deal with. Things such as subscriptions and likes is probably a lot easier to move to a new account than entire post histories and such.

Looks great! I’dd love this!