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One of the biggest issues with the fediverse imo is moderation. People will literally create blacklists of sites, and if you don't follow the blacklist you'll g

One of the biggest issues with the fediverse imo is moderation. People will literally create blacklists of sites, and if you don't follow the blacklist you'll get added to it. You end up in these situations where there are completely separate versions of the fediverse and the largest instances will often not be able to talk to each other. At least before Elon bought Twitter I know the most active (depending on how you count metrics) site was poa.st, and this was on a mastodon.social blacklist, which was one of the other major sites, and every site had their own list. I know people would sometimes have 4 or 5 accounts so that they could talk to everyone they wanted or as insurance in case the current admin got bored and closed the site. I of course support the idea of a federated reddit, but there are a lot of problems that exist in the community

Dalewyn 3y ago
My only takeaway is that the "fediverse" is merely another layer/expression of centralization.
- notRobot 3y ago
  Decentralisation isn't perfect, and has its problems. That doesn't mean it's the same as centralisation.
  - Dalewyn 3y ago
    Decentralization is a loosely connected network of peers not reliant on one or the other. The loss or gain of a peer or peers is of no significant consequence to the peers at large. Centralization is a network of peers all connected to one hub, reliant on the hub to provide spokes to other peers at large. The "fediverse" as far as I can tell is a collection of many separate networks that refuse to speak with other networks (for ideological reasons at that, rather than technical), each network acting as a hub and providing spokes to their peers. It's centralization ("Lemmy", et al.) within a centralization ("fediverse") within a decentralization (internet).
p-e-w 3y ago
> People will literally create blacklists of sites, and if you don't follow the blacklist you'll get added to it. This is why the Fediverse cannot work. More precisely, it can work, but only in the same way as the thing it tries to replace. It's always the same story: The largest communities impose their rules on everyone else, under threat of exclusion from those communities. This creates power structures that are almost indistinguishable from the ones found on commercial networks. In one case, it's business interests that drive culture, in the other, it's the egos and personal ideologies of the most powerful community members. I honestly don't know which one is worse.
- swores 3y ago
  Why would you not expect egos and personal ideologies to affect both admins and mods somewhere like Reddit, they're people just like Fediverse volunteers? Aren't they both the same on that side, meaning the only difference is that one of them also has commercial interests in the mix?
  - planb 3y ago
    The absolutely do. I'm sure there are feuding subreddits about the same topic. But reddit as a platform allows them both (because it's their business interest), so with one account you can see both.
- stevenwliao 3y ago
  When people disagree about the direction of a community, someone has to not get their way. There's no avoiding this in any group.
  - p-e-w 3y ago
    Which is exactly why the Fediverse doesn't solve anything. It's the most powerful trampling over everyone else – just like on Reddit, Facebook, and Twitter. The Fediverse is yet another middleman brokering communication between individuals, with all the associated problems.
fzeroracer 3y ago
That's not an issue, that's the intent of federation. It's IRC/Forums etc but at a larger scale where you can more easily connect to similar channels and forums. You either accept that communities have the right to self-police whom they can talk to or not, or accept that you want a central authority to do that for you.
- iforgotpassword 3y ago
  IRC and forums have nothing to do with federation. Maybe IRC if you look at the channel level, but there's still network-wide rules you need to follow or get banned, just like forums have one or more admins with a final say. The fediverse is just random scattered kingdoms having fragile connections. There have been so many attempts at it for the past 20 years or so, but people just don't want to accept that it cannot ever work. This is not the 90s where most people online were academics and you could get away with everyone building their own Killfile over time.
  - p-e-w 3y ago
    > The fediverse is just random scattered kingdoms having fragile connections. Indeed. And each "kingdom" has the exact same problem with power centralization that the Fediverse supposedly solves. And the more popular an instance becomes, the bigger this problem gets. And the more popular an instance becomes, the more people will join it. And boom, we're back to zero.
    - fzeroracer 3y ago
      Neither of you seem to get it. You're talking about 'power centralization' in a completely different and orthogonal way from how the federation works, which makes me think you have a fundamental misunderstanding of centralization or federation. If you're banned from a popular instance you're not banned from the platform as a whole. Because there is no single authority dictating where you can and cannot post, unlike Reddit. It's similar to being specifically banned from a subreddit. Reddit is a kingdom whose king delegates power to various fiefdoms, but ultimately still controls the land. You are at their whims, as evident by the fact that they're removing mods that disagree with their API policy. Federated instances are multiple kingdoms that share borders which they keep open for the sake of trade. But those borders can close depending on how their neighbors interact. It's like I said, a return to forums or IRC style governing except the authority is the forum or channel itself, and they can link to other forums/channels as they want in a seamless fashion. In order for systems like these to work communities need a way to defederate and control who they connect to, because inevitably bad instances will rise whose sole purpose is spam, harassment etc.
RyEgswuCsn 3y ago
How do people feel about having some of the open-source LLMs offloading some of the moderation burdens? I understand it sounds rather dystopian, but I also feel if the model is developed transparently, it may offer a solution to the moderation problem.
caspianm 3y ago
> People will literally create blacklists of sites, and if you don't follow the blacklist you'll get added to it. I imagine some will, but hopefully that won't be the norm. Beehaw isn't doing it. There's probably been similar stuff on twitter though - blacklists where you get added for following someone else on the blacklist

Dalewyn 3y ago

My only takeaway is that the "fediverse" is merely another layer/expression of centralization.

notRobot 3y ago
Decentralisation isn't perfect, and has its problems. That doesn't mean it's the same as centralisation.
- Dalewyn 3y ago
  Decentralization is a loosely connected network of peers not reliant on one or the other. The loss or gain of a peer or peers is of no significant consequence to the peers at large. Centralization is a network of peers all connected to one hub, reliant on the hub to provide spokes to other peers at large. The "fediverse" as far as I can tell is a collection of many separate networks that refuse to speak with other networks (for ideological reasons at that, rather than technical), each network acting as a hub and providing spokes to their peers. It's centralization ("Lemmy", et al.) within a centralization ("fediverse") within a decentralization (internet).

p-e-w 3y ago

> People will literally create blacklists of sites, and if you don't follow the blacklist you'll get added to it. This is why the Fediverse cannot work. More precisely, it can work, but only in the same way as the thing it tries to replace. It's always the same story: The largest communities impose their rules on everyone else, under threat of exclusion from those communities. This creates power structures that are almost indistinguishable from the ones found on commercial networks. In one case, it's business interests that drive culture, in the other, it's the egos and personal ideologies of the most powerful community members. I honestly don't know which one is worse.

swores 3y ago
Why would you not expect egos and personal ideologies to affect both admins and mods somewhere like Reddit, they're people just like Fediverse volunteers? Aren't they both the same on that side, meaning the only difference is that one of them also has commercial interests in the mix?
- planb 3y ago
  The absolutely do. I'm sure there are feuding subreddits about the same topic. But reddit as a platform allows them both (because it's their business interest), so with one account you can see both.
stevenwliao 3y ago
When people disagree about the direction of a community, someone has to not get their way. There's no avoiding this in any group.
- p-e-w 3y ago
  Which is exactly why the Fediverse doesn't solve anything. It's the most powerful trampling over everyone else – just like on Reddit, Facebook, and Twitter. The Fediverse is yet another middleman brokering communication between individuals, with all the associated problems.

fzeroracer 3y ago

That's not an issue, that's the intent of federation. It's IRC/Forums etc but at a larger scale where you can more easily connect to similar channels and forums. You either accept that communities have the right to self-police whom they can talk to or not, or accept that you want a central authority to do that for you.

iforgotpassword 3y ago
IRC and forums have nothing to do with federation. Maybe IRC if you look at the channel level, but there's still network-wide rules you need to follow or get banned, just like forums have one or more admins with a final say. The fediverse is just random scattered kingdoms having fragile connections. There have been so many attempts at it for the past 20 years or so, but people just don't want to accept that it cannot ever work. This is not the 90s where most people online were academics and you could get away with everyone building their own Killfile over time.
- p-e-w 3y ago
  > The fediverse is just random scattered kingdoms having fragile connections. Indeed. And each "kingdom" has the exact same problem with power centralization that the Fediverse supposedly solves. And the more popular an instance becomes, the bigger this problem gets. And the more popular an instance becomes, the more people will join it. And boom, we're back to zero.
  - fzeroracer 3y ago
    Neither of you seem to get it. You're talking about 'power centralization' in a completely different and orthogonal way from how the federation works, which makes me think you have a fundamental misunderstanding of centralization or federation. If you're banned from a popular instance you're not banned from the platform as a whole. Because there is no single authority dictating where you can and cannot post, unlike Reddit. It's similar to being specifically banned from a subreddit. Reddit is a kingdom whose king delegates power to various fiefdoms, but ultimately still controls the land. You are at their whims, as evident by the fact that they're removing mods that disagree with their API policy. Federated instances are multiple kingdoms that share borders which they keep open for the sake of trade. But those borders can close depending on how their neighbors interact. It's like I said, a return to forums or IRC style governing except the authority is the forum or channel itself, and they can link to other forums/channels as they want in a seamless fashion. In order for systems like these to work communities need a way to defederate and control who they connect to, because inevitably bad instances will rise whose sole purpose is spam, harassment etc.

RyEgswuCsn 3y ago

How do people feel about having some of the open-source LLMs offloading some of the moderation burdens? I understand it sounds rather dystopian, but I also feel if the model is developed transparently, it may offer a solution to the moderation problem.

caspianm 3y ago

> People will literally create blacklists of sites, and if you don't follow the blacklist you'll get added to it. I imagine some will, but hopefully that won't be the norm. Beehaw isn't doing it. There's probably been similar stuff on twitter though - blacklists where you get added for following someone else on the blacklist