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.
Spez isn’t in full control. (Slimy little worm.)
Lemm.ee is shutting down. The Fediverse still exists.
If Reddit shuts down, welp.
If Reddit shuts down, welp.
nelsonlaugh.gif
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.
Federated social media is decentralized, so one single jackass can 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.
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.
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.
More choice, individual and grouped control, while still being - by default - connected between instances and platforms which would otherwise be splitting if people and critical mass.
I think this video explains it better than I could do https://videos.elenarossini.com/w/64VuNCccZNrP4u9MfgbhkN
You can play with moderation tiers. We have societies with Reddit-tier fascist moderators and other societies where the moderation just bans spammers and flooders. That’s nice. Of course we’re shifting to moderation craziness too, but very slowly and it is impossible to completely kill the freedom because of the federation background.
Social media is a garden that needs to be tended
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.
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 fucking algorithm, honestly. I don’t need some rich white pricks trying to constantly show me what they want me to see.
Lemmy has an algorithm though (active, hot, and scaled sorting)
I think you mean that you can choose a project that doesn’t have an “algorithm” (in the sense that you’re conveying).
Anyone can create a project with ActivityPub that has an algorithm for feeding content to you.
The Fediverse is controlled by the people. Mainstream social media is controlled by wannabe kings.
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.
