A few days ago, Beehaw posted an announcement in their Chat community about the challenges of content moderation and the possibility of leaving Lemmy. That post was eventually locked.
Then, about two days ago, Beehaw posted an announcement in their support community that they aren’t confident about the long-term use of Lemmy, due to so-called concerns about Lemmy.
If you currently use Beehaw and want to stay on the federated Lemmy network, consider migrating your account to another instance like lemm.ee.
Honestly, reading the second post I feel for them. Seems like the main issues are all technical.
The issue about a mod removing an image from the posting server and it not being removed on other servers is very concerning. That means that any instance needs to moderate the same content again on top of the moderation that was already done by the host instance.
That type of duplication of effort is strange and it also means that illegal images could be propagated throughout the instances when they could have been stopped at the front door.
I always felt the fediverse is designed in a very awkward way… the way all the content needs to be mirrored, not only does it make it hard to update / modify / delete content, but also it makes it so other instances have to host content from all the other instances they want their users to access…
Not only is that redundant and requiring a lot more resources from the instances, but it also means that if an instance you federate with is hosting content you don’t want (let’s say… ch*ld pr0n) then your instance might end up HOSTING (ie.activelly propagating) that content… if I hosted my own instance I wouldn’t want to federate at all out of fear of legal implications and I’d be constantly paranoid about possibly facilitating illegal stuff like that without even noticing…
Imho, a decentralized system in which content providers are separate from the user account providers would make more sense in my mind. Then the content providers can have full control over what they are hosting and also control over what user accounts (or whole account providers) are banned from posting / allowed to post. And it still gives users the freedom to navigate across different content providers seamlessly with the same account and interact with multiple content providers, sort of like with the fediverse, without having to login to each content provider.
Yeah. The Reddit migration, small at it was, brought an order of magnitude more people to the platform, and it has shown Lemmy is not ready for prime time. It is also showing that the devs may not be the best at leading this kind of development effort due to inexperience.
Relooking at the idea of the fedeverse may be needed, and the group at Beehaw seem knowledgeable enough on how a Reddit like system should work that they could probably do a better job designing one.
The fediverse model is just pointless because it offers a stupid amount of redundancy and replication of communities. Why should literally anybody be able to come and spin up an instance and flood my feed with a new bevy of 1 subscriber 1 viewer communities? They didn’t like the moderation strategy on the other server? Cool, let’s give them carte blanche to just make another new community with blackjack and hookers and the 10 people who also disagreed with policies of basic decency.
It’s just annoying. One day you’re like “oh I’ve finally purged my feed of the thing I don’t like” and then all of a sudden a new instance spins up and there’s 20 new communities for the exact same shit that they have on literally every other server.
At least reddit is one and done. I don’t have to filter out a football team five times because five different servers have five different communities for the one team.
You won’t see the posts to the small communities on the new instance unless one of your users manually finds them and subscribes to them.
I get why a decentralized model was created; we’ve seen issues pop up with Reddit due to a centralization of power. However, this current implementation of a decentralized system is showing major problems at a fraction of the scale Reddit showed and the devs seem incapable of enacting meaningful change to fix this.
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It is decentralized in that there isn’t one group of admins, but a set of them across the platform who can run their instances as they see fit.
And you can effectively kick off an instance from Lemmy by mass defederation.
I don’t see that as a federation issue, it’s a moderation one. It’s on the admins to bring something new / niche to the table.
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That’s interesting. Does Mobilizon actually not do any mirroring between instances? How does it work when a Mobilizon user accesses a group/community that isn’t in their home instance and posts some content there?
About the Wordpress plugin: my impression is that it only works as a broadcasting activitypub feed, but the blog authors registered in that Wordpress instance do not have any way to use that account to subscribe to any other ActivityPub feed, correct? if so, that piece of the puzzle would still be missing, and it’s there where we typically find mirroring.
As far as I understand it (and I could be wrong), there is no way in the ActivityPub protocol for a user from another instance to actually publish content (eg. a reply or a comment) directly into a different instance (that is, without hosting it in their own instance first), so at the moment the way it works in services like mastodon/lemmy is that the user posts content on their own instance referencing the content from the second instance that they are replying to, and then the second instance mirrors it and displays it as a reply of the original post.
This, as far as I understand it, is the origin for the need of mirroring, and not really any thirst for “censorship resistance” or “faster rendering time”. I feel the problem is still originating from limits in ActivityPub. Or am I wrong? Is there a way to do this in the current protocol without mirroring?
I don’t think the need for faster latency justifies the mirroring. You could still get a fast time by sending the requests directly to the original host, without proxying/mirroring them at all from the service offering the frontend. Just allow for cross-domain requests to call directly the API from the client, without needing server-to-server requests for that. Of course if the host is slow then the request will be slow, but if it’s fast the request will be fast. The responsibility for performance when providing content should fall on the content host. The instance where the user has an account could provide some token for identification as proof of the user belonging to it, and have third party content providers validate that proof and decide on their end whether the user is allowed to access/post content there directly (being subjected to the moderation of the content provider, who is the one hosting the content).
The more troublesome part of this approach would be having to rely on client-side aggregation of the content coming from different providers in order to build a feed. But I think this could still be viable. Or it could be handled by another different type of instance that acts as indexer but doesn’t really mirror the content, just references it. This also would only be necessary if the user really wants an aggregated feed, which might not always be the case, sometimes you just want to directly browse the feed of a particular community or your subscriptions from a particular instance.
I mean, I get that for some use cases mirroring would be a good thing, but that could be entirely a separate layer without requiring it as part of the communication. Making it mandatory places a huge responsibility in the instance host without it being necessarily something that every user needs or even wants. I don’t want to be dependant on what other instances my particular instance decides to mirror so I can access them. What’s the point of the fediverse if in order to access content from two instances I have to create separate accounts just because they don’t like each other’s content policy?
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I agree wholeheartedly. This is actually the exact reason I haven’t tried to stand up an instance. I don’t want to mirror the content.
Isn’t that what world figured out? They seemed to have stopped the crap that was happening here. I feel for them, they seem overwhelmed but at the same time, nowhere is going to be perfect. They seem to be coming from an overworked, fearful place and it’s not fun for them anymore. I’m mostly on world where we don’t see them anyway so it wouldn’t really effect me, but I do wish them well with whatever decision they make.