If some random dude comes in and opens a new instance, and then it comes out that this dude willingly associates with white supremacists, is a known creep, and even had a hand in an actual real life genocide, everybody would defederate without a second thought.

But suddenly that dude is Facebook and has a shit ton of money and everybody is just wait and see.

A lot of times. It doesn’t really help to find a problem, but rather when the problem was introduced. It’s a really great tool.

Because nobody has windows user as a core part of their identity.

But why?

My kids are not going to be happy about this…

I have an instance that I created just for testing the software. It’s not being used. In fact, since it’s for testing only, it’s not even federated (federation turned off) because I don’t want to inflict my testing on anyone else. Also, the URL is not published anywhere. Since it’s just for testing, I had it with open registrations. A couple of days ago I woke up to find twenty new accounts. Somehow spammers got to it (again, no federation, URL unpublished anywhere). My theory is that since it was lemmy.<domain> that they were trying that kind of subdomain randomly. Anyway, manually removing 20 accounts from Lemmy is a pain. Moderation tools in Lemmy are severely lacking yet. I mean, it’s alpha software, we know it’s still a work in progress, so some issues like this are to be expected. But my point is that they shouldn’t be removing the very few tools to prevent spammers that instance admins have.

The reason is that Meta is an extremely harmful company. They’ve enabled the worst kind of people in their pursuit of “engagement”. It’s no exaggeration to say that Facebook enabled a genocide. So if people are (correctly) quick to block instances where fascists congregate, why would Meta be treated any differently just because they have a ton of users? They enable fascists, they provide them with a platform. And now they want to bring that platform to the Fediverse, which has been a place that has traditionally been anti fascist.

And that’s just assuming they’ll be good citizens and won’t do an embrace, extend, extinguish thing, which we all know they will do whenever they feel secure enough in their position to do it. So rather than waiting until Meta is already integrated and it’s harder to do it, the idea behind all this is to prevent the issue from coming up in the first place.

Nice, thanks! Subscribed.

That’s a change that I noticed going from Twitter to Mastodon, and it’s that the drama in the Fediverse is just way more fun to look at, because it’s drama between instances and not drama between people. Like, in Twitter you’d see tons of bullying and people being shitty to other people. In Mastodon (and the rest of the Fediverse) the drama is between instances, and that means less personal stuff (less, not none).

It’s my favorite series of his. I read the first couple of Laundryverse books, and while they’re fun, I’m not a fan of the lovecraftian horror thing. But Merchant Princes hooked me right from the start. Tons of politicking, and by the end it gets messy, like really messy. It’s basically The Godfather meets Game of Thrones meets Sliders. And then the followup series (Empire Games) is a Cold War spy thriller with portals. You can just start with Empire games, it’s written to be a separate series, but it does have massive spoilers for the original series.

The Lost Fleet series by John G Hemry

A note on this: the series is written under the Jack Campbell pseudonym. Took me a while to find. The first book is Dauntless

I think Charles Stross does this pretty nicely, although his science part is not very hard science. So he’s basically not predicting anything, his science fiction is more of the “ok I know this is not real but what if it were” variety.

The Laundry Files series is “what if Lovecraft was right and there’s magic math that can summon the old gods”, but then add to it that we do have a way to do tons of math stuff in the form of computers. So of course what happens? Well, there are spy agencies tasked with controlling this, because we can’t get rid of computers, too important, but also, we can’t let that magic math run wildly.

The Merchant Princes series is “what if there was a way to travel to an alternate dimension”. So what happens? The dudes from the alternate dimension, who are the ones that discovered the secret, and come from a medieval-like world, use that to smuggle shit. They can go near the border, jump to the other side where the border doesn’t exist (or at least doesn’t exist right there) walk a couple of miles, and then jump back to our world. They of course build a massive criminal empire on our side. On the other side, they bring our advanced tech gadgets back and they are a hugely powerful merchant family. There’s also all the implications for security. You can jump inside any building as long as you know exactly where it is on the other side. And the shit the US government gets up to when they discover this exists is pretty disturbing (especially when you consider that it makes sense given what was done in the name of the war on terror).

Always a good opportunity to learn something new.

I don’t think the interesting issue is why not centralization. There’s tons of better explanations out there, but seriously, just “Elon Musk” is enough to explain why centralization is bad.

But the post does raise an interesting issue IMHO, and it is the lack of good explanation as to why federation between different platforms with different paradigms. Why federation between different Mastodon servers is obvious. Why federation between Mastodon and Calckey and whatever else is obvious too. Same with federation between different Lemmy instances, or between Lemmy and Kbin. It just makes sense. What is not clear is why we want/need/like federation between Lemmy and Mastodon. Sure, you can post in a Lemmy community from Mastodon, but it sucks. You can follow a Lemmy community from Mastodon, but the experience isn’t great either.

I do think there are good reasons for this, but I haven’t thought enough about it to articulate it properly. My thinking is that while a Mastodon-like service federating with a Lemmy-like service doesn’t seem to make much sense, Mastodon federating with a Facebook-like service does make sense. And I’m not sure if a Facebook-like thing federating with Lemmy makes sense, but I can definitely imagine something sitting somewhere in the middle between those two. And also, perhaps more importantly, we don’t want to erect artificial walls between the different ActivityPub services. Sure, the Mastodon-Lemmy integration sucks, and maybe it shouldn’t exist, but probably nobody will use it much, exactly because it sucks. But if we add a thing saying “no you can’t do it”, then we start needing to define borders between different services. Is microblogging different from blogging? What about a Facebook-like wall? Or a tumblr-like feed? Are those different enough from each other to be different services? Who wants to be the one defining those borders? I think the current solution, where anything is possible and integrations that don’t make sense just don’t happen organically, is the best.

But still, that is a way more itneresting question than just “why federation”.

I don’t even think it’s a difference with Reddit. Reddit also has community duplication. Sure, maybe not as bad, but it’s there. Compare /r/meirl to /r/me_irl. The only difference is that in Fediverse you’ll see the same community name in different instances, but is it really that much more confusing than the meirl case?

There is, yes, a lack of discoverability for communities. Maybe we need a “recommend me a community” community. Like “I’m looking for a Spanish speaking science fiction community”, and people can say “oh, yeah, try this one”.

Other than that, the main advantage Reddit has in this area is that it has had a more or less stable population for a very long time, so which community wins out out of an initial set has already been resolved, while this is younger (yes, it’s been around for a couple of years, but most people here haven’t) and therefore that process is just starting to play out.