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?
Preventing one single entity from having too much control over information to the extent that they can push propaganda and dominate a narrative.
Decentralization leads to better (I didn’t say perfect) democratization of social media.
Lemm.ee is shutting down. The Fediverse still exists.
If Reddit shuts down, welp.
If Reddit shuts down, welp.
nelsonlaugh.gif
Spez isn’t in full control. (Slimy little worm.)
Federated social media is decentralized, so one single jackass can’t control it completely.
Like, maybe Elon Musk buys pawb.social, he now controls pawb.social & can be a tyrant in pawb.social just like he has been with Twitter.
He still can’t control quokk.au, or lemmy.world, or feddit.org, or lemmy.ca, or lemmy.dbzer0.com, or lemmy.blahaj.zone, etc.
And in the extremely unlikely event that if Elon does manage to buy pawb.social, it is extremely likely that many lemmy servers would just defederate from pawb.social & leave pawb.social isolated from the rest of the fediverse.
missing a word in your first sentence
Oops, my bad. Thanks. It’s been corrected.
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’.
The Fediverse is controlled by the people. Mainstream social media is controlled by wannabe kings.
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.
Aside from the theoretical reasons, which are great, it feels like on the federated services there’s less speaking at people, and more actual conversations.
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.
I think that’s basically the whole point. Or if someone would rather use Mastodon - look, the lemmy userbase is there as well!
Piefed, Mbin and Lemmy aren’t necessarily aggressively competing like X and Bluesky are. It’s moreso friendly cooperation. Sure, if the fediverse was a bit more commercialised, you’d have competition. But it would be fairer competition based on how good your Software and ethics are and not on who else is also using the app.
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.
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.
You data isn’t hoarded up and sold by the likes of meta etc.
Is that true though, with threads using activity pub?
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…
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!
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.
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.
control is dispersed and you can flee bs to a better instance. This makes it almost impossible to censor in a targeted way.
It takes power away from the hands of corporations.
Sorry you got suckered into choosing bluesky over Mastodon. Hopefully you’ll learn one day.
I do plan on switching to Mastodon. Once Bluesky gets too enshittified I’m moving, but right now there’s too few people to cater to my specific interests
