The fediverse promises social media without Big Tech – if it can avoid familiar pitfalls.

Good article with some valid concerns.

The ending though.

We’re still bullish on the fediverse, and on Bluesky, if it manages to become a truly federated platform.

Anybody who thinks Bluesky actually wants to give up control of their platform is nuts

Good article, does bring up concerns. But I don't like this argument.

Though this content could flourish in pockets of the fediverse, the scary scenario of prevalent child sexual abuse material is not the case.

It assumes that non-fediverse sites don't have this problem. But the few articles I read about this news, Facebook is usually the way they share this disgusting content. So while yes we need to do something to stop it, it is not like traditional social media has solved it either.

After all, tell them about Nostr

In short, when too many cooks are in charge, it’s hard to make a good meal. Take content moderation, for example.

The take that Fediverse moderation is "not as effective" always makes me smile, because:

1. The moderator-to-user ratio is several orders of magnitude better on the fediverse because volunteer-run instances have zero incentive to grow beyond their ability to self-moderate. But also-

2. Do you really expect that paid employees (or even trained AIs) are going to be more effective at recognizing who/what is disrupting a community than existing members with a personal stake in it's quality?

Also, as aside I am very happy they said "Bluesky, if it manages to become truly federated" and not the "promises to be" or "is federated" language we usually see.

I read the article diagonally but didn't struck me as particularly insightful. I can understand the "too many cooks" thing as it can be daunting to start the journey in the fediverse, but the child abuse part is dumb at best: if a given instance does illegal shit it should be dealt with by the authorities and de-federated by other instances. Do the authors know that harmful material exists on all the mainstream social medias? Like beheadings on instagram, porn on youtube, mass disinformation and manipulation on TT and facebook.

None of these points make any sense to me when I think about the pre-reddit internet. There were all kinds of communities everywhere on various forums across the internet. Some forums discussed specific topics, some very niche, other forums were for more general discussions. But hosting and setting up a forum was not always the easiest thing. So when reddit came, subreddits eventually replaced forums. Easy to set up, easy to discover, everything in one place.

Now the fediverse is to me pretty much like going back to the old forums, but a bit more organized. And all of the points in this article could have been made about forums if you decided to analyze forums as one big thing. But in the end, none of it has been a problem (and there are still some forums around today).

But democratized tech doesn’t guarantee democratic outcomes.

Far from it. We really need a major confrontation of the audience, information warfare needs to be educated to every single person of every age. Continuing education about science and mythology needs to continue, as people continue to flock to fiction and abandon non-fiction in every area of life.

People just can't be serious about democracy and LOL and meme away their nation, the USA (where I live), it's been absolute crisis since 2014.

“Everything in our background has prepared us to know and resist a prison when the gates begin to close around us . . . But what if there are no cries of anguish to be heard? Who is prepared to take arms against a sea of amusements? To whom do we complain, and when, and in what tone of voice, when serious discourse dissolves into giggles? What is the antidote to a culture's being drained by laughter?”
― Neil Postman, Amusing Ourselves to Death: Public Discourse in the Age of Show Business, 1985

Too many cooks: Handwringing. Whataboutism.

The authors misunderstand how to think of the (and even) elements of the fediverse. It's still taking a competitive view/ worldview/ framing, and when that's all you understand, sure. But the right way to understand the fediverse is as protocols, like email, and each branch as a flavor of email, or some other misguided metaphor. And it's it's only a problem when infinite growth or exp. scaling is your goal. However if neither of those things are your goal, it's more of an annoyance.

Commercial capture: More handwringing. Misidentification.

Meta took a crack at capture. It didn't seem to have worked. The fediverse is populated by the leavers, not the takers. The Internet happens at the edge and the normies are always just catching up a few years too late. The point of the fediverse is that it's a extraordinarly easy to vote with your feet. If the fediverse can fall victim to a 51% attack, fine, well just leave and do it again.

Guilty by association: Again, more handwringing. Also, we should do that.

Federated p2p file sharing e2e file sharing for unsavory bits that governments and corporations don't want you to have sounds like a great idea.

It's in the CIA field manual, that when you want to destroy an organization from within, urge caution, and question every unfounded problem.

If the Fediverse can avoid one big problem with other social media platforms and that is having a power-tripping owner destroy it. If any of the Fediverse platforms can avoid that one thing and manage to keep it's values in check, then it's no contest to avoid the other social media platforms.

Really good write-up.

RE: Too many cooks:

And that means people who are more likely to be harassed also end up having to do more of the work to prevent harassment.

This is true and a genuine problem, but also a lot better than the alternative, which is the commercial platforms where nobody gives a shit about them and they are harassed on a daily basis with nothing much they can do about it.

On Twitter, community notes were hailed as a success for giving the Community an entirely toothless form of moderation. On the Fediverse, the community has been given real teeth.

RE: Guilt by association

This has happened with several beneficial alternative technologies in the past, such as peer-to-peer file sharing, the dark web and end-to-end encryption.

Nice reminder to spread the word about the wonders of P2P, Tor, and E2EE. Some people will always believe in the propaganda of the capitalists and the authoritarians seeking to undermine these technologies, but they are all very much alive and well, and I think most people are fine with the ideas of having their nude selfies or whatever protected under E2EE.

Likewise, for sure Elon Musk will try to tell people the fediverse is full of pedos. Coming from him, that puts us in the same club as that diver who saved a bunch of children in a cave in Thailand. So in that sense I guess the point about commercial capture is more relevant: I'm more worried when people like Musk pretend to be our friends. But in all honesty, I'm not very worried about that either. I still rock an entirely independent e-mail provider, even after everything Microsoft and Google has done to undermine that technology.

Everyone else took all the good critiques of this article, so here's mine.

We’re still bullish on the fediverse, and on Bluesky, if it manages to become a truly federated platform.

Bluesky appears to have reached their goal as far as federation. Users can self-host a personal data server (PDS) which federates with Bluesky. If you want an analogy from somebody extremely unqualified to offer it, it's sort of like bringing a bucket of water to a swimming pool. You can't go swimming in the bucket, but you can pour it into Bluesky's pool and swim in there. If the pool closes down or implements segregation and if somebody else opens a swimming pool, you can take your bucket to their pool instead. However, if nobody else wants to open another swimming pool, your bucket is useless. In this analogy, buckets are only useful to very slightly fill somebody else's swimming pool and for no other purpose. It's a very good analogy.

Bryan Newbold, the protocol engineer at Bluesky, said the following about PDSes and federation:

Overall, I think federation isn't the best term for Bluesky to emphasize going forward, though I also don't think it was misleading or factually incorrect to use it to date. An early version of what became atproto actually was peer-to-peer, with data and signing keys on end devices (mobile phones). When that architecture was abandoned and PDS instances were introduced, "federation" was the clearest term to describe the new architecture.

i.e. In Bluesky's terminology, federation is not a future goal they're hoping to achieve, it's what they're already doing right now.

The (ActivityPub) fediverse is different, because ... damn, I really screwed myself with this swimming pool thing ... it's like a bunch of boats in the ocean. There's one-person dinghies and giant cruise ships, all with different owners. You can bring your own boat, or you can hitch a ride with a friend or a generous stranger. If you want to hang out in a different boat from the one you arrived in, that's fine too. Ultimately, we all float on the same ocean which we all have to share. Crucially, nobody is in charge of the water. There's rules on the boats, but the ocean is just the ocean. If your boat crashes into an iceberg and sinks, the ocean will still be there. You might lose some of your stuff, but there's plenty of other boats to pick you up.

The failure state in both cases is better than nothing. With Bluesky, you lose the swimming pool, but keep the bucket. With ActivityPub, you lose the boat, but keep the ocean. If Bluesky dies, ideally you can take your federated identity with you to an alternative service that exists in the future, but you no longer have access to Bluesky, because it's gone. When a Lemmy instance dies, you pretty much have to start over: register a new account, subscribe to all your communities again, etc. But the whole fediverse is still there: all the communities you were subscribed to, the people you followed, all your old comments, they're still out there floating on the ocean.

Is it wrong that I love what this article is doing in the article, is explained in this paragraph?:

While some social media companies might seek to capture the fediverse, others might seek to undermine its reputation by highlighting some of its unsavory uses. This has happened with several beneficial alternative technologies in the past, such as peer-to-peer file sharing, the dark web and end-to-end encryption.

The biggest issue facing the Fediverse IMO, is that one large instance can control what most of the fediverse sees. The user would never know if things were getting pulled, posted much later when no one is on or shadow banned.

I don't know about the "tens of thousands of servers" in the Fediverse. For now, it's pretty easy to keep an overview. I also do not think the number of servers will scale linearly with the user base. Most people may choose a server randomly, but after a while in the Fediverse you will find your instance. Take feddit.org as an example - they have a charitable organization behind then, the "Fediverse foundation". People like that instance because of the terms it operates under, and they do their thing. Server admins are not necessarily random people, and I don't think coordination happens via hash tags.

Capitalist platofrms will always beat small community driven platforms.

"Federated services, otherwise known as 'the fediverse,' have been hailed as a network for public communication, dialogue and debate, where ordinary people, not corporations, shape their social spaces, and where advertisers, hate speech and intrusive algorithms are much easier to avoid."

Haha. Bullshit